Why Schools are Changing Their Tune on Screens

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Mina Kim (1:31)

Welcome to Forum. I'm Mina Kim. Los Angeles Unified, the nation's second largest school district, has adopted a moratorium on student use of generative AI. This comes as LA students were already beginning the school year with new limits on screen time, and as New York City schools banned the use of AI tools in preschool through eighth grade.

The Times' Natasha Singer has been following this shift away from initial enthusiasm for tech in classrooms, and she has looked at how the tech industry came to have an outsized presence to begin with in a new book called Coding Kids, Big Tech's Battle to Remake Public Schools. Natasha, welcome to Forum.

Natasha Singer (2:08)

Thanks so much for having me.

Mina Kim (2:09)

I'm really glad to have you. First, tell us about these changes that have been happening in Los Angeles at LAUSD.

Natasha Singer (2:16)

It's really incredible. I've been covering tech in schools for The New York Times for more than a decade, and we've never seen this kind of parent pushback against school tech happening across the country.

LAUSD is one of the places where it began. Parents got concerned about tech, and they pushed the school district to act. We saw this spring that the school board in Los Angeles voted to eliminate devices like iPads and Chromebooks for pre-K, kindergarten, and first grade. They're cutting back on the amount of time that elementary and middle school students can spend on devices with a number of minutes per day guidelines. They have barred things like YouTube. They have also said students can no longer use their school-issued devices during lunch or recess for entertainment purposes. We're really seeing a move away from, you can use your device all the time, or we're in elementary school and we're going to be doing lots of stuff on an iPad, including reading apps, math apps, research, to they're going to be specific times when kids can use specific tools, especially in elementary, and that they're moving toward a more human-centered education as opposed to device-centered classrooms.

Mina Kim (3:35)

Then we just heard last week about this announcement of a moratorium on generative AI use for LAUSD students, which sounds pretty momentous.

Natasha Singer (3:45)

So, it's not really clear yet what LAUSD is doing because it came out in a meeting in which LAUSD employees were describing that they had turned off student access to AI tools and features.

So we know that they've turned off this access for students. We don't have a lot of concrete details about what it means and how long it's going to be in place, but the parents who had pushed for restrictions on school tech had then come back with a petition, more than a thousand parents signed, to ask the district to restrict AI or to actually put a moratorium on AI. And so we see that parents are having enormous power in some major school districts to say like, tech has had runaway power in schools and parents now want more control.

Mina Kim (4:38)

What have been these parents' main concerns about these school-issued devices?

Natasha Singer (4:43)

Well, I think one of the things is, it's helpful to look at the progression of what happened, that first parents were concerned about social media in schools, and so were teachers and administrators, they were a distraction. Parents across the country were concerned about cell phones in schools, and we've seen dozens of states pass new laws or put in new policies to either bar student cell phone use during school or to restrict it during class.