Digital Technologies in Schools Hype Cycle

I’ve been thinking about something I posted recently. In the post I said that our young learners should not be used as ‘guinea pigs’ in this generative AI classroom experiment and that we should firstly have academic proof that whatever technology is introduced actually does improve learner standards. Looking back over my 30 year career there has been so many examples of this happening with the introduction of new digital technologies and we just don’t seem to learn. We just keep on repeating the cycle:

From my perspective it’s been a cycle of governments and schools rushing to deploy unproven tools, leaving teachers with the practical fallout of trying their best to implement these new technologies. We then wait several years for academics to confirm what many teachers already knew, that this ‘new shiny thing’ didn’t actually improve learning standards at all.

Is this a fair take on what has happened? Why do we keep repeating this cycle? Is there something that can be done to stop repeating this cycle?