The Great Screen Debate

Well, maybe not even a debate. More like a holding action.

Because the Chief Marital Officer (CMO) teaches elementary school and I spent decades teaching high school, we were clear from Day One that the Board of Directors would grow up with minimal screen exposure. They have always gotten a little bit of tv time (about 45 minutes a day, now that they're older) and always with a grownup watching along. A weekly family movie. No personal devices. Lots of reading, lots of books, lots of play (including being left to suffer the kind of boredom that births improvisational self-entertainment). 

Then it was time for school. And like the parents in Jackie Mader's Hechinger piece about ed tech pushback, we had to deal with new heavy exposure of the boys to screens. 

It was probably less of a shock to us because of our professional background. My high school went one-to-one with mini-laptops back in 2010, plunging us immediately into the many problems that come with such an ed tech initiative.

Ed tech is like every other kind of tech-- some of it is magnificently useful, some of it is a waste of time and money, some of it is crap, and some of it is dangerous crap. And being selective really matters. My high school used a program to gamify math for struggling students, and it was awful, particularly in the way that it would only accept a correct answer if it was typed in exactly the way the program wanted it (imagine a program that tells a student that 2x5=10 is correct, but 5x2=10 is incorrect). The Board of Directors have gotten much of their math instruction via a computer program (Reflex Math), and as much as it pains me, they seem to have actually learned well from it, buoyed up by the way the program lets them move on to the next thing the instant they are ready to go. 

I was a yearbook advisor who lived through the transition from paper layouts and photos to all-computerized desktop publishing and digital photography, and you could not have paid me a zillion dollars to step backwards. 

Too many districts have been unwilling or unable to ask the most basic questions when adopting ed tech ("Is this program junk?") and so students spend a lot of time in front of screens that are wasting time and providing zero educational benefit. That and the possibility of screen "addiction," with students hooked on the same sort of rushes that bring grown-ups back on line too often. 

And screens in school inevitably have a "leakage" problem. Students with a few extra minutes of screen time use it to surf Youtube or whatever else the school's filters won't stop. Cheap districts that use lower-level subscriptions expose students to resources that "leak" ads onto student eyeballs. The Board of Directors had never seen a video advertisement until they went to school, which seems... backwards somehow. 

Meanwhile, the ed tech is an ad. When it turned out that Google's education products are about "creating a pipeline of future users," no educators were surprised.

The last twenty-or-so years of ed tech were sold with the same sort of pitches that are now employed for new AI baloney. Don't let your students be left behind! This is the inevitable face of tomorrow and you want your students to be prepared! This tech will provide miraculous leaps in learning (just don't ask us for proof). 

Richard Culatta, CEO of ISTE+ASCD (motto: "Let us jam ed tech directly into your veins!") is in Mader's piece with the usual baloney

When kids hate learning because it’s boring, it will have far more damaging consequences than if they are playing a game that is helping them find learning more interesting

Sigh. No. First, you know who doesn't find something interesting just because it's pixels on a screen? People who have grown up in a world stuffed full of pixels on screens. Second, when you spend years around teenagers with phones, one thing you notice quickly is that a fascinating new app generally has a half-life of about four weeks. Culatta also trots out this old chestnut

We do have to be really careful that we don’t actually end up harming kids by taking away tools that are really helpful for them for their future

Nope. No student is going to lose ground in reading or math or history or art or music because she didn't have access to EduBlart3000 on her screen. 

And I myself once bought the idea that students could benefit from exposure to tech tools so that they were better able to use those tools in the future. I have changed my mind. First, the tools schools teach them to use now will be long gone in the future and second, we are well into the stage in which tech tools can be learned quickly. 

Lawmakers across the country are scaring the crap out of tech companies by contemplating restrictions on screens in schools. That new wave yielded this hilarious quote to NBC from Kieth Kruger, CEO of the Consortium for School Networking, an ed tech trade organization. 

I think some well-intentioned policymakers trying to do something are rushing so quickly that they haven’t thought through the implications.

Ironic, given that the ed tech industry's motto has always been "Buy our stuff RIGHT NOW and don't pause to think through the implications."

Well, the implications of years of screens in classrooms are starting to catch up with us. Check out Jared Cooney Horvath's set of graphs showing that the much-lamented dip in test scores seems to line up with digital adoption. Endless teacher anecdotes of students having trouble focusing, paying attention, just plain sticking with something for more than five minutes. Increasing numbers of studies suggesting that screens have hurt learning-- and (horrors) news that ed tech companies aren't making mountains of money! 

And yet, as Jennifer Berkshire points out, absolute amnesia about how we got here. Folks who cheerfully burbled about the promise of ed tech are now shocked-- shocked!!-- that screens have been allowed to dominate classrooms. Not a surprise-- as Audrey Watters has repeatedly pointed out over the years, the story of ed tech is the story of enthusiastic promises, joyous press coverage, and expensive failure, all wrapped in a blanket of sweet, sweet forgetfulness.

The amnesia would be funny if we weren't already being dragged into the next wave of ed tech, the one powered by "Artificial Intelligence," a marketing term designed to put a pretty, inevitable face on a morally bankrupt industry. "Come take a kick at this hot new ed tech idea! It's inevitable! It's awesome! This time it really will change everything!" 

We're still getting back up from the last faked kickoff. Here's hoping we think twice before we fall for this again.