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 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. We are having trouble retrieving the article content. Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.
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