By Emily Cherkin, MEd.

Recently, my daughter, grade 6, had to turn in an illustrated graph for Science. She was proud of the beautiful colored pencil work she did and I loved the fact that she actually had a paper-based assignment. As is typical of my creatively-brained child, however, she realized the morning it was due that she was also supposed to type an “artist’s statement.”

With just ten minutes left before she needed to leave, she ran to get her school-issued laptop. Shoveling bites of cereal in her mouth while she booted up the low-quality computer, her stress level increased with every minute the machine whirred and hummed. 

I am not exaggerating when I say it took five minutes to start. 

By this point, her anxiety was palpable: “I’m not going to be able to get this done! This is so frustrating!” 

I offered paper and pencil– “You can write it down and hand it in this way!” 

No.

I offered to have her dictate the statement to me to type on my computer– “I can email it to the teacher!” 

No.

“I’m supposed to do it on my computer!” she moaned. 

Finally, the machine started, and she logged in to her Schoology account, went to the Science class “page,” and started typing. 

At least she was typing with more than her two index fingers, I observed wryly.

But the futility of this experience was clear: Proud of her illustrated graph and ready to turn it in, she was flummoxed by the completely unnecessary and additional challenge of a sluggish school computer on which she should type a few sentences to consider her homework officially “done.”

What madness is this, you might ask, that a child, actually excited about a school assignment, loses all enthusiasm because she is stymied by the low-quality, tech-at-all-costs requirement to actually complete it?

It is the madness that is modern-day education and the absurdity of an all-or-nothing choice. 

Halfway into 2024, most parents have some awareness that “technology use in school” is pretty different from our own childhoods. Before the pandemic, 60% of school administrators in the U.S. provided 1:1 digital devices for every middle and high school student. For elementary schools, it was about 40%. 

In 2021, a year into the pandemic, the rates for middle and high school 1:1 programs rose to 90% and for elementary schools, it was 84%.

And three years later, these numbers have gone up, not down. In fact, when a parent recently emailed me to ask, “Do you know of any middle or high school in America where there is no 1:1 or tech-based curriculum?” (with the exception of perhaps some Waldorf schools), I knew of no other options.

This is kind of insane, when you think about it. Even just a decade ago, elementary schools used tech minimally, perhaps via classroom computers or labs to teach skills like typing and research. But somehow, in part thanks to remote learning, today it’s very difficult to find schools still operating under the “less is more” approach to technology in schools.

The rapid adoption of EdTech (which includes 1:1 programs like one laptop or tablet for each student as well as digital curricula and learning management systems) has meant that schools have quickly shifted to primarily tech-based teaching and learning. And it’s a highly lucrative industry (for tech companies, at least). Estimates suggest that K-12 schools in the U.S. spent between $26 and $41 billion annually on EdTech in 2019. Projections for post-pandemic EdTech spending estimates schools could spend in excess of $50 billion.  

A decade ago, parents worried about “after-school screentime.” Today, when we talk about daily consumption, we have to include the hours spent on screens at school too. One study found that half of teachers report that their students spend 1 to 4 hours per day using EdTech products during the school day. Four out of ten high school teachers and one-third of middle school teachers report their students spend more than five hours a day on EdTech platforms or tools. Five hours!? In a school day that lasts less than 7!?

Madness.

Throw in the emergency that was remote learning (and as I’ve said before, remote learning was the lifeboat we needed to keep kids connected to their teachers at the end of the 2020 school year, but a lifeboat is not a long-term solution) and we are now looking at kindergarteners on iPads, elementary school students earning “tablet time” for Free Choice and doing math work on gamified apps, and middle school students uploading a written artist statement to a digital platform after waiting five minutes for a computer to load. 

It is time to ask: Does this make sense?

Of course it doesn’t. Anyone who knows anything about teaching, learning, or child development would say that this doesn’t make sense, that it isn’t best practices, and is far from equitable. 

But it’s like the emperor with no clothes– when we ask questions, we’re told, “This is the future, accept it”; when we push back, we’re met with, “We’re not equipped for paper”; and when we ask to opt out, we’re informed, “That’s not an option.”

Madness.

Despite what schools or administrators tell parents, opting out is actually an option. Some parents are able to get IEPs that exempt their children from using the internet or tech-based tools in the classroom. Some districts have Internet Opt-Out forms online (they’re usually hidden and often outdated). One friend I know has a doctor’s note saying that no tech is to be given to a child who is currently healthy because it will cause harm. But no school or administrator is advertising opt-out options, because they now rely so heavily on tech-based platforms that any non-tech alternatives require burdening teachers (yet again), which is also madness.

Worse, children who’ve encountered predators or porn on their school-issued devices are told by administrators, “Don’t be a pervert” (yes, this has happened); “The parents are responsible” (yes, even on school computers); “The child broke the rules” (yes, even though children are given these problematic devices by the schools in the first place and they are children). Yes, all real-world examples. 

The sad irony of all this is that any potential good is lost with all the bad. I do see an important role for technology skill-building in schools– in addition to critical thinking and executive function skills. Children do need to know how to navigate mis- and dis-information, cite sources, detect false imagery and words, and, at a bare minimum, type. But nearly all of that will come from instruction by a skilled educator, not an app or a digital platform. 

And as things currently stand, such a school does not exist. 

The good news is: Tech-intentional schools are the future of education. This is what parents will seek out in the years to come, as more schools implement phone-free policies, the curtain gets pulled back further on the uses and abuses of EdTech, teachers demand to be made relevant and valued again, and children prefer humans to machines.   

Right now, parents are left with two extreme choices:

1. ALL: Opting in completely to all the tech a school requires, or
2. NOTHING: Opting out completely, via a no-internet or no-1:1 policy.

Even if parents are aware that there are options, they are afraid to Opt Out entirely. I can understand that fear. Retaliation is real. 

But as I write about in the Epilogue of my book, in order for a school (ha) of fish to change directions while swimming, one fish needs to pull away first…and then a second and third fish, to get the entire school (ha) to change direction.

I’m a first fish. I bet many of you reading this are first fish too. 

Which is why next year, as a first fish, I am opting my daughter out of her 1:1 laptop and the internet for 7th grade. I don’t know how this is going to go– both the Math and Science curriculum are 100% digital. And I’ve been told that her English class will have 40 students in it (madness, again). But if I don’t test this, try this, push for this, nothing will change.

I’m a first fish, but I need a few other first and second and a third fishes to join me. 

Is that you?

References

Bushweller,K. (2022, May 17), What the Massive Shift to 1-to1 Computing Means for Schools, in Charts. Education Week, Retrieved from https://www.edweek.org/technology/what-the-massive-shift-to-1-to-1-computing-means-for-schools-in-charts/2022/05.

EdTech Evidence Exchange. Note: these estimates do not include spending on safety and security technology, or transportation-related technology, which would likely make these estimates even higher.

Fittes, E.K. (2022, March 01). How Much Time Are Students Spending Using Ed Tech? Education Week. Retrieved from https://marketbrief.edweek.org/meeting-district-needs/how-much-time-are…

Emily Cherkin is a nationally recognized consultant, a former middle school teacher, and The Screentime Consultant, whose work has been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Today Show (twice), Good Morning America, Australia Weekend Today, the BBC, NPR, Sirius XM Radio, and various parenting websites, blogs, and podcasts. Emily is also the cofounder of the Student Data Privacy Project, an advocay group focused on protecting school children’s data.

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