Although computer ownership and use increased substantially, we find no effects on any educational outcomes

From Study of the Week: Computers in the Home by Freddie deBoer.  It's an old blog post (2017) about an even older (2013) study.  Worth resurrecting as the underlying hope/myth remains resilient.  Actually it is a handful of interconnected convictions.

Differences in life outcomes are due to resource constraints available to individuals.

Provision of material deficits solves the problem of differences in life outcomes.

The more we can make people seem materially like the middle class, the more we should expect to see middle class outcomes.  

None of which is true.  Well, more properly, they are only occasionally true under very limited circumstances.  They are not generalizable nor are they usefully true.  

This is the resource constraint myth.  In select circumstances, it is true that resource access is determinative.  Usually it is not.

Years ago, early in my consulting career, when I was conducting team problem solving projects, working with client teams to address operational issues, I frequently conducted root cause analysis sessions.  I found that every team would always default to absence of resources as the root cause.  I learned to instruct the teams to reject any root cause which explained poor performance by absence of resource.

It made the projects far more effective.  Without the excuse, they more quickly focused on real root causes and more quickly developed creative solutions which could be implemented and did in fact dramatically improve outcomes.  

I would guess that were you ask the general public whether provision of a computer to students in the bottom two quintiles of household income would make a measurable positive difference in education outcomes, I would guess that 70-80% would agree.  Among education professionals, the answer would likely be 95% or greater.

Big tech companies have been pushing computers in the classroom and the student bedroom as a solution at least since the Apple II near fifty years ago.  We should know by now whether it works.  De Boer:

The study is large (n = 1,123) and high quality. In particular, it offers the rare advantage of being a genuine controlled randomized experiment. That is, the researchers identified research subjects who, at baseline, did not own computers, assigned them randomly to control (no computer) and test (given a computer). This is really not common in educational research. Typically, you'd have to do an observational/correlational study. That is, you'd try to identify research subjects, find which of them already have computers and which didn't, and look for differences in the groups. These studies are often very useful and the best we have to go on given the nature of the questions we are likely to ask. You can't, for example, assign poverty as a condition to some kids and not to others. (And, obviously, it would be unethical if you could.) But experiments, where researchers actually cause the difference between experimental and control groups - some methodologists say that there must be, in some sense, a physical intervention to manipulate independent variables - are the gold standard because they are the studies where we can most carefully assess cause and effect. Giving one set of kids computers certainly qualifies as a physical intervention.

The study is Experimental Evidence on the Effects of Home Computers on Academic Achievement among Schoolchildren by Robert W. Fairlie & Jonathan Robinson.  The results of this high quality study?  From the Abstract:

Computers are an important part of modern education, yet many schoolchildren lack access to a computer at home. We test whether this impedes educational achievement by conducting the largest-ever field experiment that randomly provides free home computers to students. Although computer ownership and use increased substantially, we find no effects on any educational outcomes, including grades, test scores, credits earned, attendance and disciplinary actions. Our estimates are precise enough to rule out even modestly-sized positive or negative impacts. The estimated null effect is consistent with survey evidence showing no change in homework time or other "intermediate" inputs in education.

Access to computers does not make a difference in educational outcomes!  What does usefully and reliably predict educational outcomes?  IQ, value systems and behavioral traits - Human capital.  It is an answer resolutely resisted because it gores too many ideological convictions and too many commercial interests, but there it is, those old Gods of the Copybook Headings.