I know that books aren’t the whole story (I teach computational journalism). Students also need spacious, well-lit classrooms with working internet connections. They need safe schools with bathrooms that work and are cleaned regularly. They need unleaded water in school buildings with roofs that don’t leak and grow mold. In too many cases, these basic needs are not met in Philadelphia’s public schools, nor in other major American cities.

A few more items at the top of my let’s-improve-democracy wish list: We should pay public school teachers more, and hire more of them so class sizes are smaller. Teachers aren’t paid enough, and yet they are so dedicated that they spend their own money on supplies. (Thank you, teachers.)

We need to fix the copiers and printers in every school and keep them stocked with plenty of paper. If you are a school district that doesn’t buy books and workbooks, and instead you make teachers teach using random stuff they find on the Internet, then you don’t even provide a copier and printer that work—well, you’ve just created major obstacles to your students becoming educated citizens. If the copier doesn’t work, the teacher is stranded. Broken technology hurts democracy.

I truly wish there were a single technological solution that would fix every problem in every classroom. Then, I could wave a magic wand and declare, “Make it so!” But public school is a complex system that doesn’t really work without humans in the loop.

We’ve certainly tried replacing teachers with computer-based training. It has not gone well. Have you attempted any of the online learning modules that kids get assigned? I have. Most are deathly boring. Or there are the modules that claim to be “fun,” where the creators package up a mundane, repetitive arithmetic task as some kind of animal flying around the screen or navigating some kind of ridiculous maze. Kids recognize this. This is the kind of “fun” that your mom means when she says it’s going to be fun to learn how to do laundry, or to clean the smelly, rotten leaves out of the gutters.

We need technology to run our schools. Not glamorous cutting-edge technology, but workhorse technology: databases, and staff to enter the data into the databases, and database administrators to keep everything running and do the load-balancing at the beginning and end of the semester when hundreds of schools are trying to enter in their updated inventory data simultaneously. We need more accurate budgeting that factors in everything a school needs, from pencils to laptops to tater tots. We could use artificial intelligence if that makes it seem more exciting. To investigate the book situation (and offer a solution) in Philadelphia, I built A.I. software. It’s open source, and it’s available online, for free. School districts have not yet come knocking on my door, begging me to implement it so they can update their budgeting and inventory management processes—but hope springs eternal.