Is Tech in Classrooms All That Bad?
Movieguide® Contributor
New York Times journalist Jessica Grose is exploring the troubles with tech in schools — in many cases, it harms grades and focus instead of helping.
“Jaime Lewis noticed that her eighth-grade son’s grades were slipping several months ago,” Grose said. “She suspected it was because he was watching YouTube during class on his school-issued laptop, and her suspicions were validated. ‘I heard this from two of his teachers and confirmed with my son: Yes, he watches YouTube during class, and no, he doesn’t think he can stop. In fact, he opted out of retaking a math test he’d failed, just so he could watch YouTube,’ she said.”
Lewis decided to take matters into her own hands. She teamed up with other parents to ask the San Luis Coastal Unified School District in California to block YouTube from students’ devices. They collected clips from videos that elementary and middle school-aged kids had watched on YouTube that slipped through the district’s content blockers.
“Their video opens on images of nooses being fitted around the necks of the terrified women in the TV adaptation of ‘The Handmaid’s Tale.’ It ends with the notoriously violent ‘Singin’ in the Rain’ sequence from A CLOCKWORK ORANGE. Several versions of this scene are available on YouTube. The one she pointed me to included ‘rape scene’ in the title,” Grose recalled. “Their video was part of a PowerPoint presentation filled with statements from other parents and school staff members, including one from a middle school assistant principal, who said, ‘I don’t know how often teachers are using YouTube in their curriculum.’”
Teachers and staff in the district didn’t seem to know how much time kids spend on screens at school. “No one seemed to be keeping track,” Grose said.
One superintendent, Eric Prater, was alarmed to learn of the content that got through the district’s filters and was grateful to be made aware of it.
“Our tech department, as I found out from the meeting, spends quite a lot of time blocking certain websites,” he said. “It’s a quite time-consuming situation that I personally was not aware of.”
“One way or another, we’ve allowed Big Tech’s tentacles into absolutely every aspect of our children’s education, with very little oversight and no real proof that their devices or programs improve educational outcomes,” Grose says.
She continued, “It’s not just waste, very likely, of taxpayer money that’s at issue. After reading many of the over 900 responses from parents and educators to my questionnaire about tech in schools and from the many conversations I had over the past few weeks with readers, I’m convinced that the downsides of tech in schools far outweigh the benefits.”
Google and YouTube are both owned by Alphabet. Many schools use affordable Google Chromebooks for their students. But Google may have a bigger scheme than just making its laptops a good option for schools.
“’Google makes $30 per device by selling management services for the millions of Chromebooks that ship to schools. But by habituating students to its offerings at a young age, Google obtains something much more valuable:’ potential lifetime customers,” Grose said.
“The issue goes beyond access to age-inappropriate clips or general distraction during school hours,” Grose continued. “Several parents related stories of even kindergartners reading almost exclusively on iPads because their school districts had phased out hard-copy books and writing materials after shifting to digital-only curriculums. There’s evidence that this is harmful: A 2019 analysis of the literature concluded that ‘readers may be more efficient and aware of their performance when reading from paper compared to screens.’”
Teachers like Nicole Post, who teaches at an elementary school in Missouri, are worn out by technology and are tired of seeing how it negatively affects their young students.
“It seems to be a constant battle between fighting for the students’ active attention (because their brains are now hard-wired for the instant gratification of TikTok and YouTube videos) and making sure they aren’t going to sites outside of the dozens they should be,” said Post. “It took months for students to listen to me tell a story or engage in a read-aloud. I’m distressed at the level of technology we’ve socialized them to believe is normal. I would give anything for a math or social studies textbook.”
Grose adds, “I’ve heard about kids disregarding teachers who tried to limit tech use, fine motor skills atrophying because students rarely used pencils and children whose learning was ultimately stymied by the tech that initially helped them — for example, students learning English as a second language becoming too reliant on translation apps rather than becoming fluent.”
Antero Garcia, associate professor at the Stanford Graduate School of Education, said, “I’ve explored how digital tools might network powerful civic learning and dialogue for classrooms across the country — elements of education that are crucial for sustaining our democracy today….So I want to tell you that I think technologies are changing education for the better and that we need to invest more in them — but I just can’t.”
After Garcia saw how technology shaped his students, he couldn’t stay on board the technology train.
He continued, “Given the substantial amount of scholarly time I’ve invested in documenting the life-changing possibilities of digital technologies, it gives me no pleasure to suggest that these tools might be slowly poisoning us. Despite their purported and transformational value, I’ve been wondering if our investment in educational technology might in fact be making our schools worse.”
Even with some teachers adding additional software to filter the content kids have on their screens, they still struggle to manage their classrooms. Their job is to teach, not to constantly assess who is on a device and what they are doing on it.
“Resources are finite. Software costs money. Replacing defunct or outdated laptops costs money. When it comes to I.T., many schools are understaffed. More of the money being spent on tech and the maintenance and training around the use of that tech could be spent on other things, like actual books. And badly monitored and used tech has the most potential for harm,” Grose said.
“I’ve considered the counterarguments: Kids who’d be distracted by tech would find something else to distract them; K-12 students need to gain familiarity with tech to instill some vague workforce readiness,” Grose wrote.
But Grose thinks other forms of distraction are much healthier — engaging socially with other students, doodling or getting lost in a daydream are all better than becoming addicted to YouTube or games.
A district in Iowa recently decided to ban phones in its schools, and the students have thrived since the decision passed. Movieguide® reported:
The high school now requires students to lock their phones in a cabinet while on campus during school hours, and the kids are already feeling the benefits of the new policy.
“I think my attention has kind of skyrocketed if that’s the word,” high school senior Madison Shoop told Breitbart. “I was more focused on, like, my phone, and, ‘Oh, my gosh, is that going to go off?’”
Shoop continued, “I just think I was so addicted to it that it was hard for me to look away personally, for me to look away like I would just be scrolling and scrolling and scrolling scrolling. At points in time when my mom talked to me, like, I couldn’t hear because I had my headphones in, I was scrolling through my phone, and I wasn’t paying attention.”
California is also on the road to improving students’ behavior and focus in class. Last month, a bill passed that requires all public schools to ban or limit phone use at school.
“The Phone-Free Schools Act, introduced by Assemblyman Josh Hoover, would give the state’s public schools until July 2026 to come up with a plan to implement a ban or other limits on smart phones…,” ABC 7 reported last month. “Some schools and districts in Southern California have already taken steps to implement their own phone bans. The Los Angeles Unified School District approved a ban for its campuses in June.”
