학교 기술에 대한 반발 속에서 학부모들이 정책 변화를 이끌어내고 있다

From Salt Lake City to New York City, parents are demanding more sway over the digital tools that schools give children.

Sandra Martinez Roe, with her son, is a leader of a Los Angeles parents’ group pushing the district to audit its technology contracts and limit the use of tech in schools.Credit...Mark Abramson for The New York Times

By Natasha Singer

Natasha Singer interviewed 20 school officials, parents, educators, students, policymakers and nonprofit leaders in six states and sat in on Zoom meetings held by local and national parents’ groups.

Los Angeles parents are fed up with schools loading up students with laptops and tablets, and assigning schoolwork on a slew of apps.

Some families, who had decided against giving their children screens at home, told school board members that they were appalled to find young students using school-issued devices — even in kindergarten. Some parents complained that their children were able to play video games or watch social media videos during school. Others reported that an A.I. app, which fourth graders were assigned to use to create portraits of the fictional Swedish schoolgirl Pippi Longstocking, generated sexualized imagery.

Such concerns prompted parents last year to form a group called Schools Beyond Screens to push for increased technology oversight in the Los Angeles Unified School District, the nation’s second-largest public school system.

Last week, the Los Angeles school board passed a resolution requiring the district to restrict student access to YouTube, eliminate digital devices entirely through first grade and develop screen time limits for higher grades — becoming the first major U.S. school system to do so.

The parents’ successful campaign points to an escalating national reckoning for the powerful classroom technology industry. Encouraged by the fast spread of school cellphone bans, parents, teachers and legislators across the United States have banded together to ensure that technology use in schools is beneficial for learning.

In New York City, hundreds of parents have urged the mayor to postpone the introduction of artificial intelligence chatbots like ChatGPT in schools. Last month, the governor of Utah signed a law that will allow parents to see how much time their child spent on a school device and review the websites their child visited.

In Oregon this month, parents successfully pressed the Bend-La Pine school board to pass a resolution requiring a district review of all school-issued devices and apps for educational effectiveness. The resolution also requires the district to remove apps that don’t prove effective.

In Los Angeles, parents urged school board members to back the new tech restrictions.

“For over a year, our members have been advocating for a safe and science-backed approach to classroom technology,” said Anya Meksin, the deputy director of Schools Beyond Screens. “Enough to Big Tech encroaching into our public schools.”

For years, tech giants like Google and Apple, along with companies that make school software, have marketed their technologies to schools. The tech industry promised that the devices and apps would customize learning, improve students’ academic results and widen job opportunities. Many districts rushed to adopt the tools, fueling a booming, multibillion-dollar school tech market.

But some researchers have found that digital devices failed to boost students’ test scores and graduation rates, and that they can significantly detract from learning.

Current and former school district officials say the fast-growing parents’ crusade reflects a longstanding reality: Many public schools lack the resources to adequately vet classroom tech.

“The burden on school districts to manage these systems is enormous,” said Hal Friedlander, a former chief information officer of New York City Public Schools who has also helped other school districts evaluate technology. “Unfortunately, most districts are small and they don’t have the resources or the expertise.”

Some children’s educational organizations have similar concerns. This year, two United Nations agencies, UNICEF and UNESCO, issued online learning guidelines warning that public schools had largely ceded digital education to private tech companies.

Online learning tools had introduced important innovations, the U.N. agencies said. But they also warned that digital learning platforms could treat schoolchildren “like consumers”; expose students to health, safety and privacy risks; and threaten school “autonomy.” Instead, “public needs and public purposes must steer” digital learning, UNESCO and UNICEF recommended.

Some tech companies and school tech organizations note that using school laptops and apps can teach students important digital skills. And they argue that parent groups are conflating children’s social media use — like students scrolling through streaming videos during class — with useful learning tools specifically designed for education. Some math and reading apps, for instance, can customize lessons to each child, allowing teachers to chart the student’s progress.

“Educational technology allows teachers to differentiate instruction and assess student understanding in real time,” said Keith Krueger, the chief executive of the Consortium for School Networking, a nonprofit organization for school technology leaders. (The school networking group’s corporate sponsors include Amazon, Google, Lenovo and Microsoft.)

In recent interviews and Zoom meetings, parents in more than a dozen states raised concerns about the safety, privacy and effectiveness of student devices, classroom software and learning apps. Some parents pointed to well-known school software companies that have recently faced complaints about poor data security and the collection of sensitive student data. Other parents said their districts struggled to limit student access to video games and video-streaming platforms on school-issued devices.

Over the last year, Los Angeles has become a center of parent-led efforts to rein in school tech.

In a recent Zoom presentation for Los Angeles parents, Alisha Mernick described how she had started a campaign at her son’s elementary school to help families opt their children out of i-Ready, a math and reading app with gamelike features.

Ms. Mernick, 40, and other parents said they were concerned that the app used video-gamelike techniques, including cute animation and reward points, to hook youngsters.

“If I’m giving my 5-year-old a game-ified version of a worksheet, it will hijack the development of her intrinsic motivation and jeopardize her ability to learn,” said Ms. Mernick, who teaches art education at California State University, Northridge.

In a statement, Curriculum Associates, the company behind i-Ready, said its online learning assessments and lessons “help teachers act on student needs faster and more precisely.” The company added that i-Ready’s student-engagement techniques “mirror classroom reward systems.”

Parents say their concerns escalated after recent scandals related to student tech.

In 2023, the Los Angeles Unified School District approved a $6.2 million deal with a little-known A.I. start-up to develop a chatbot for student use. The next year, federal prosecutors charged the founder of the start-up with defrauding investors.

The A.I. chatbot fiasco prompted Schools Beyond Screens this year to start a petition, called “Get Big Tech Off Kids’ Desks.” It urged the Los Angeles school system to audit recent tech contracts to make sure the digital tools for students were “safe, legal and effective.” More than 1,000 people have signed on.

Among the concerned parents is Sandra Martinez Roe, 50, a children’s book author whose son attends a Los Angeles elementary school. She said she had chosen not to buy him an iPad or a laptop for home use. At the start of second grade, however, her son came home with a school-issued Chromebook for his schoolwork.

She worried about the kinds of websites the school device might enable him to view. She was also concerned that some online learning software seemed to lack rigorous proof of educational effectiveness.

“They’re just selling it and pushing it through the school system,” said Ms. Roe, who is a member of the Schools Beyond Screens leadership team. “Our children are the guinea pigs.”

In a statement, the Los Angeles Unified School District said it had thorough processes for evaluating technology tools to ensure that “any platform used with students meets rigorous standards for privacy, cybersecurity and educational effectiveness.”

After the Pippi Longstocking incident, the district said, it reviewed how the A.I. tool was used in classrooms and worked with the software company on “strengthening content controls.” As for i-Ready, the district said the math and reading app helped inform teachers’ instructional decisions and improve student learning.

“We will continue to apply and strengthen our review processes to ensure that all approved tools meet the high standards our students and families deserve,” the district statement said.

Now, Los Angeles school board members like Nick Melvoin are pushing for increased tech oversight in schools. In 2024, he championed a board resolution that barred student cellphone use during school. This year, after working with Schools Beyond Screens, Mr. Melvoin introduced the recent resolution curbing school technology.

In addition to new screen time limits for each grade, the policy will require elementary and middle schools to prohibit student device use during lunch and recess. The district must also compile a report on all current school technology contracts.

“I think of it as a recalibration, a policy that tries to strike the right balance for our kids,” Mr. Melvoin said in an interview. Additional oversight seems especially urgent, he added, now that some popular school tech products have enabled new A.I. tools for students.

“I do think parents should know: Your kids have access to these tools at school,” he added.

Natasha Singer is a reporter for The Times who writes about how tech companies, digital devices and apps are reshaping childhood, education and job opportunities.