Whenever I have been asked how I got interested in classroom uses of technology, I answered that in my forty-plus years as a high school teacher, district administrator, and professor, I was neither an early adopter nor a laggard when it came to using new technologies. I took my time to see how the new device and software helped me do better or more efficiently what I was already doing as a teacher, administrator, and academic.

I then point out to the questioner that as an historian who has studied many reform-driven efforts to improve schooling over the past century in U.S. classrooms, schools, and districts, I had examined how teachers have taught since the 1890s. I investigated policymakers’ constant changes in curriculum since the 1880s. I analyzed the origins of the age-graded school and the spread of this innovation through the 19^th century. And I parsed the utopian dreams of reformers who believed that new machine technologies (e.g., film, radio, instructional television, desktop computer, chatbots) would alter how teachers teach and students learn. I then finish my answer with examples of new technologies such as AI-driven chatbots that are part of this historical stream of classroom reforms aimed at improving how teachers teach and how students learn.

What often surprises me is that these questioners had not viewed high-tech innovations as having either a history in schools or as kissing cousins to ever-constant efforts to improve schools. Instead, they saw (and see) brand-new high-tech devices as singular, even exceptional, ways of transforming teaching and learning completely divorced from previous instances seeking improved classroom practice. They either do not know or ignore previous curricular reforms (e.g., math, social studies, science), earlier instructional innovations (e.g., overhead projectors, film strip machines, project-based learning) and prior organizational changes (e.g., converting junior high schools into middle schools, creating charter schools, mayoral responsibility for public schools). Technological innovations, I stress, are kissing cousins to past and current curricular, instructional, and organizational reforms.

In viewing technological innovations as a sub-set of curricular, instructional, and organizational reforms, teachers, principals, parents, policymakers, and researchers can see patterns in adoption of a new technology, track its journey as it goes from policy to classroom practice, and document certain outcomes while remaining open to unanticipated consequences.

Too many policymakers, practitioners, and parents see technological innovations as unique initiatives unrelated to historic patterns in school reforms. They err. My experiences as both a practitioner, policymaker, and researcher have taught me to see technological devices as part of the river of reform that has flowed constantly through U.S. schools for nearly two centuries.