The Los Angeles Unified School District, the second-largest in the country, passed a sweeping resolution last month that will end the distribution of digital devices to students before second grade and impose daily and weekly screen limits for all higher grades. The policy also blocks YouTube on school devices and bans device use during lunch and recess in elementary and middle schools. The district will audit its education technology contracts, which the teachers union estimates amount to $1.6 billion.
“The Chromebook is just a world of distraction,” said Anna Soffer, a sixth-grade English and history teacher in Los Angeles who favors pen-and-paper assignments but is required to use laptops and online apps for certain activities. “Every day, I’m battling, ’Who would you rather listen to, Ms. Soffer or Minecraft?’”
The Los Angeles crackdown is adding momentum to calls for reform emerging around the country. The campaign for change is becoming a public policy issue. At least 14 states have proposed laws to limit screen time in schools, according to Ballotpedia. The federal government issued an advisory last week warning that excessive screen use among youth is becoming a growing public health concern.
Parents say school-issued devices undermine screen limits at home. In Los Angeles, concerned parents last year formed a group, Schools Beyond Screens, and pressured the district by speaking out at school board meetings, on social media and in private talks with administrators. Katie Pace, a mother of three and a member of the group, said her eighth-grade daughter Clementine spends hours a day streaming music, making Spotify playlists, and watching makeup tutorials and cat videos on YouTube despite tight home screen rules. “It makes me furious,” Pace said. “My daughter went to middle school and was sent home with a screen addiction in her backpack.”
The pandemic supercharged student access to devices. When the 2021-2022 school year started, 96% of U.S. public schools reported they had given digital devices to students who needed them, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. Many schools switched funding away from textbooks, workbooks and paper printouts to digital alternatives. Educational technology exploded into a multibillion-dollar industry.
Nick Melvoin, the LAUSD school board member who drafted the new resolution, said it’s time for a reset. He estimates that few Los Angeles classrooms are using screens effectively in ways that benefit learning. Too often, he said, teachers are replacing instruction with online apps and using screens “as a crutch.”
Some schools are introducing new limits. In the affluent Philadelphia suburb of Lower Merion, parents launched a petition campaign for the right to opt their children out of digital devices during school, citing questions about edtech’s benefits. The district has said that opting out is not possible. “If there’s really no evidence that it helps, and in fact there’s evidence that it’s harmful, what are we doing? Test scores are at their lowest point,” said Alex Bird Becker, one of the founders of the group PA Unplugged.
Other districts are making changes for financial reasons. Fresno Unified School District, the third-largest in California, is spending $4 million a year to repair and replace laptops. Partly to cut costs, the district has told its 40,000 elementary school students to return their take-home laptops and will shift computer access to in-class only in the fall, spokesman A.J. Kato said. The Simi Valley Unified School District, near Los Angeles, stopped sending devices home for its younger students this year, partly because of costly repairs but also because they were being used for “inappropriate Google searches” and video games, according to a memo to parents.
A group of parents in Arlington, Virginia, gathered recently to share their children’s struggles with screen addictions and other side effects of school-issued devices. “None of us are Luddites. I know that technology adds value, but I also don’t want my son on YouTube all the time,” said LuAnn Oliver, who hosted the group in her living room. Her sixth-grade son struggles to resist the temptation the iPad offers for video games. Another mother, Jenny Sullivan, said she has noticed her fourth-grade son capitalizing random letters and not getting corrected because there is so little work on paper. She also worries about social implications: Her sixth grader doesn’t want to go to the after-school program because everyone is on their iPad.
After a three-hour gathering, the parents made a plan to approach the school in the fall with a unified request to “opt out of technology and opt in to textbooks and paper.” “Ten years from now, I can’t imagine us looking back with any other reaction than: How could we have been so naive that we just handed these devices to our kids,” said one of the mothers, Kristina Jackson.