What We Lost When Big Tech Took Over the Classroom
September 17, 2026
Over Labor Day weekend, Springfield Public Schools, a district in western Massachusetts that serves twenty-three thousand students across some sixty schools, fell prey to a cyberattack that shuttered classes for four days. Staff members lost access to students’ contact information, transcripts, and medical records; internal phone lines, security-camera systems, and even copy machines went down. Teachers and students couldn’t use their school-issued laptops or log into their e-mail or other school applications from home devices. Springfield’s schools use the Microsoft 365 Education and PowerSchool software platforms to house most of the stuff of everyday learning—schedules, assignments, slide decks, readings, handouts, quizzes—but everything stored there was now out of reach. In the midst of the crisis, the district circulated an F.A.Q. with a rather exotic recommendation: “Students and teachers may use books, notebooks and paper while technology teaching tools are restored.”
Meg Magrath-Smith is an instructional leader for English language arts and social studies at one of Springfield’s schools. On the second day of the outage, she sent some colleagues a text message warning that, whenever they did return to their classrooms, they’d likely “be teaching like it’s 1999,” she told me. “Except not, because in 1999 we had copy machines and transparency machines” (overhead projectors). The teachers and students of the twentieth century also had textbooks. Magrath-Smith’s school, like many in the United States, does not.
