A half hour west of downtown Providence, Rhode Island, past potholed highways lined with maple, ash, and pine trees, is the town of Foster, population forty-seven hundred. Its residents live on small farms and in aging, widely spaced homes; the closest grocery store is in Johnston, twenty miles away. Down Route 6, not far from the Shady Acres Restaurant and Dairy, is Captain Isaac Paine Elementary School. Kristen Danusis, a former school psychologist who became the principal in 2013, tells me that many of her students live “off the grid,” in households that earn little regular income.

Yet, inside Isaac Paine, tech abounds. Teachers project lesson plans onto interactive screens, and little hands reach for black Chromebook laptops, which are stacked like cafeteria trays in a large box called a Chromecart. In one class, Danusis introduces me to a lanky child in rain boots, who clicks through an online math program while chatting about a baby goat that’s being weaned in her back yard. In another room, children rotate through learning stations, sometimes at screens, sometimes putting pencils to paper. Kids work alone and in small groups; they sit at tiny desks and on beanbags and sofas scattered around the classroom. It looks unlike any school I ever attended. The ratio of children to Chromebooks, in grades three through five, is one to one.

Danusis and her teaching staff practice personalized learning, an individual-comes-first approach, usually aided by laptops, that has become a reformist calling card in education. Two years ago, Isaac Paine Elementary won a competitive grant from the Rhode Island Office of Innovation to become a showcase “lighthouse school,” part of a statewide push to bring tech into education. That push officially began in 2014, when Deborah Gist, who was then the state’s commissioner of education, announced a public-private “innovation partnership” to merge traditional and computerized pedagogy. It was the latest big-fix trend in K-12 education, and Gist, a favored daughter of Silicon Valley philanthropists, offered up the nation’s smallest state as a laboratory mouse.

Personalized learning argues that the entrepreneurial nature of the knowledge economy and the gaping need, diversity, and unmanageable size of a typical public-school classroom are ill-served by the usual arrangement of a teacher lecturing at a blackboard. Some kids are English learners, and others have disabilities; some read well above grade level, and others lag behind in math. If every child had a computer or iPad, she could log into a customized cyber classroom and learn at her own pace.

Anxiety over the influence of technology in schools, as in our lives, is an old story—but one made painfully acute by the glowing smartphone on which you’re likely reading this article. Advocates of personalized learning say that the approach has been unfairly conflated with teacherless, online-only education. They invoke Dewey and Freire and Montessori as guiding lights and take pains to emphasize, in almost liturgical unison, that personalized learning is not about tech—and that “tech is just a tool.” But skeptics warn that underneath the language of “student-centered” pedagogy is a tech-intensive model that undermines communal values, accelerates privatization, and turns public schools into big-data siphons. Rhode Island’s experiment with personalized learning reveals a still more complicated picture: of overworked, undervalued public-school teachers who embrace reforms in order to get what they need.

Nearly two decades ago, the reporter Todd Oppenheimer documented the aggressive rise of emerging Silicon Valley technologies—personal computers and the Internet—in the nation’s public schools. In a dense, polemical book called “The Flickering Mind,” he warned of the industry’s tentacular reach into schools, steered by futurists such as Seymour Papert, the co-creator of the Logo programming language, who had a habit of proclaiming, every twenty years or so, that schools had twenty years left to either adapt or die. Some parts of Oppenheimer’s book (see: nightmare visions of Apple iMacs and CD-ROMs) have not aged well. His larger argument, though—that the alliance between education policymakers and billionaire technologists could undermine the role of teachers and the public sphere—has only become more relevant.

This story was published in partnership with The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit independent news organization focussed on inequality and innovation in education.

For decades, nonprofit advocacy groups and corporate donors have targeted K-12 education for intervention. The allure of helping disadvantaged children has combined with an openness, on the part of government actors, to private partnerships and technocratic fixes, especially those aimed at disciplining teachers. The George W. Bush and Obama Administrations, with initiatives such as No Child Left Behind (2001) and Race to the Top (2009), spurred what’s been called a “nationalization of education politics” and, many teachers say, a relentless cycle of shiny fads promising to revolutionize the field. States and districts grew accustomed to applying for federal funds and foundation grants that eased the impact of budget cuts and promoted experimentation.

Charter schools are the bluntest incarnation of education reform and have long enjoyed bipartisan support. Last year’s wave of teachers’ strikes, though, popularized the critique that charters divert funding from traditional public schools and undercut union standards. Personalized learning, meanwhile, is as ascendant a reform as ever, boosted by many of the same philanthropic entities that have promoted charters: the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation, and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. (The Gates and Hewlett Foundations and Chan Zuckerberg Initiative are among the many funders of The Hechinger Report.) Intermediary funders and education-policy groups that depend on their grant dollars—including iNACOL, Excel in Ed, the Learning Accelerator, Big Picture Learning, and Jobs for the Future—have, in turn, made personalized learning a priority. Karla Phillips, a policy director at Excel in Ed, told me that both personalized learning and charter schools have “flexibility” as their aim.

In 2010, Rhode Island won a four-year, seventy-five-million-dollar grant from Race to the Top. State education officials promised to spend these funds on new curricula, teacher coaching, and building improvements, but they initially made no explicit mention of personalized learning. This would soon change. They began to highlight “virtual learning,” and approved the creation of a virtual charter high school; they tapped private organizations to help implement tech-heavy personalized learning. Rhode Island couldn’t afford to equip every student with a Chromebook or iPad, but successive education commissioners and Governor Gina Raimondo, a Democrat and a former hedge-fund manager, encouraged superintendents and principals to find money in local coffers and apply to local and national charities for ed-tech grants. Angélica Infante-Green, who became the education commissioner in May, told me that she intends to expand personalized learning to more schools. The state’s largest district, in Providence, has dramatically increased its spending on Web-based instructional programs, from a hundred and fifty-eight thousand dollars in the 2011-12 school year to nine hundred and twenty-eight thousand in 2015-16, the latest data available. Four years ago, only one school out of thirty-nine in Providence used personalized learning; the model has since spread to twenty-five schools. A similar dynamic continues to play out across the country.

When I started to interview Rhode Islanders, I wondered how well personalized learning could serve younger students, given its close association with technology. But, at elementary schools like Isaac Paine and Orlo Avenue, in the East Providence School District, the basics of the method seemed well adapted to short attention spans: kids could bounce from desk to cushy floor, or from a small-group tutorial with a teacher to a Chromebook game. I kept thinking how much the physical setup of the classrooms resembled a Silicon Valley workspace—or is it that Amazon, Google, and Facebook have tried to replicate grammar-school life?