You CAN Say No to Tech in Seattle Schools (But It'll Take Some Doing)

 From today's Seattle Times:

As a seventh grader at Hazel Wolf K-8 in Northeast Seattle, Maxwell Adams didn’t have a laptop or a cellphone at school. 

During science class, he sometimes looked at his classmate’s screen if he needed to see a problem in color, because the black-and-white printout his teacher gave him wasn’t sufficient. In history class, when assigned to create a PowerPoint presentation, he made a poster board instead. At lunch, he played football or basketball while some of his peers played computer games.

Maxwell’s parents opted him out of technology at school — including state standardized testing, which is administered on computers. They are OK with him taking an incomplete if his teachers can’t manage to provide an activity in physical form. Grades are less important, they say, than retaining Maxwell’s ability to focus, shielding him from harmful content and protecting his privacy. His parents also don’t want him unsupervised on a device for hours per day, risking addiction to the internet and games. 

And he isn’t the only one. Despite Seattle Public Schools’ district policy to issue devices to each of its nearly 50,000 students, some highly vocal parents are successfully opting their students out of technology altogether.

What is fascinating is that this opt-out idea is becoming a national trend. From the New York Times:

In Backlash Against Tech in Schools, Parents Are Winning Rollbacks

From Salt Lake City to New York City, parents are demanding 

more sway over the digital tools that schools give children.

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 resolutionrequiring 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.

I do want to interject here and say that parents should ALSO be limiting screen time at home as well. I recall several years back a superintendent in Maryland saying that school screen time should NOT be considered as part of overall daily screen time. Meaning, school screen time comes first, parents.

Continuing from the Seattle Times:

Mounting scientific evidence suggests that excessive screen time in a child’s life can contribute to anxiety and depression, delayed social and emotional skills and decreased ability to focus. It is less clear how much ed tech — the devices, digital curricula and apps purchased and administered by schools — is responsible for declining test scores nationwide, though a growing consensus among parents, educators and some lawmakers points toward the wholesale embrace of ed tech as a significant contributing factor.

Washington state is behind many others when it comes to implementing statewide policies regulating technology use in schools. The governor and state superintendent both recently asked lawmakers to ban cellphones altogether during the school day.

What does SPS say?

In Seattle, more than 50 ed-tech apps and other products are used on students’ district-issued devices, and much of the curriculum requires a digital component. The district spends about $21 million each year on its digital efforts, out of an annual budget of about $1.3 billion.

SPS issues every student a laptop or tablet “because digital tools are an integrated part of teaching and learning,” and “device access helps ensure students can fully participate in core instruction and learning opportunities,” a district spokesperson wrote in an email. “Device use is expected as part of classroom instruction, completing assessments and assignments, and building digital literacy skills.”

The district’s youngest learners use the least technology as part of instruction, the SPS spokesperson added, but confirmed students are given an iPad starting in kindergarten. There is some flexibility in how each classroom uses technology, and learning at SPS includes both digital and nondigital experiences, but a full opt-out isn’t consistent with district policy, the spokesperson said.

Maxwell's parents even homeschooled him to keep screen time out but wanted him back in school with other kids. What did Hazel Wolf K-8 say?

At first, the administration told her he had to use one. But after voicing concerns about Maxwell’s private information being collected by for-profit ed-tech companies and how SPS consents on behalf of all parents to allow that data collection, school leaders eventually agreed to make an exception for Maxwell.

I hate to tell Hazel Wolf and SPS but if you open that door, everyone gets to come through.

But here's an interesting twist:

Emilie Mosko, a science teacher at Eckstein Middle School in Seattle’s Wedgwood neighborhood, has about five out of 170 students per year who opt to not use a laptop.

It used to be difficult when it came to tests, because all tests were administered online through Amplify, the district-selected digital science curriculum. The formatting made it hard to print, so she had to reformat each test into a Microsoft Word document before printing.

But when Mosko realized the students’ laptops had Gemini — Google’s AI chatbot — popping up and allowing students to get test answers, Eckstein’s science department decided to create all their own tests on paper.

Back to pencil and paper. I do love that.

More on Amplify

When the district first adopted Amplify in 2019, Mosko and fellow teachers tried to teach the online curriculum as designed, but felt it didn’t include enough hands-on experiments for students. It was also hard to monitor students when they were on their laptops.

When students are on the computer, they can “go anywhere on anything,” Mosko said. A teacher has to sit at their own computer, watching an app called GoGuardian to monitor students’ screens and make sure they’re not doing something off-task like watching YouTube or playing Minecraft, Mosko said.

“It’s a real problem because now I’m not teaching anymore. I’m a lifeguard sitting at my station redirecting people when they aren’t doing what they are supposed to,” Mosko said. “It is really just a waste of time.”

Now, most of Mosko’s class is without the laptops. She only has students use them to access the online curriculum about once a month. Students who are tech-free can look at their neighbor’s computer.

Man, spending all that money only to not want to use it because it's not hands on enough.

The part on kindergarteners in SPS in the Seattle Times story is startling and includes:

One day, when choice time came around, 19 of 20 students chose to use their iPads.

“It gave me the shivers,” Dash said. “It was a very dystopian feel.”

“It felt like we had 19 little plugged-in robots and one child still over there playing with dolls by herself,” Dash added. “It made me really sad.”

I just saw Toy Story 5 and that's the throughline for that film. (I'd give the film a B because it seemed slow in places but that last 30 minutes are quite good. It's not a funny as previous ones.)

But it's not always easy to go tech-free in a classroom:

Emily Cherkin, a screen time consultant, former middle school teacher and SPS parent, is feeling forced to allow her daughter to have her own laptop in high school.

Cherkin’s daughter was almost entirely tech-free for most of middle school, but as last school year came to a close — and with it, a host of projects and presentations had to be submitted online — accessing the loaner laptop, which was kept at school behind a locked door, became a hurdle.

“She had to find someone to unlock the door; she had to run all over the school to try to borrow it and then return it. It was so stressful on top of already the stress of the end of the school year,” Cherkin said.

She met with the guidance counselor at her daughter’s incoming high school this summer to weigh the options. Cherkin valued her daughter not having an SPS laptop, but was grappling with the fact that she couldn’t expect her daughter to be “the guinea pig” for navigating high school tech-free while also acclimating to a new, larger school and student body.

One interesting comment to the story:

As a 6th grade teacher in another district, I’m familiar with Amplify Science. I couldn’t do it anymore. It was such a disservice to the students and parents. Nobody learns science staring at a screen with “online experiments.” I had a curriculum director tell me I needed step it up because that’s what we used. Nope. I held out. I still taught to the state standards, but built my own lessons centered on paper and hands on experiments. You should have seen the reactions of parents during conferences when I said I refused to teach science via Chromebook and Amplify. They were 100 percent in support of me.

Two years ago we went back to a text book, hands on centered curriculum with some tech components embedded in the book as support. It has been well received by myself, parents, and kids.


Another good comment:

Recently retired 30+ year SPS teacher here. Digital curriculum has taken over in many districts including SPS because it can be funded with your tech levy dollars instead of from operations money. Want less tech? Get the legislature to address the curriculum issue, with the state via OSPI providing basic curriculum options at no cost to individual districts. Bonus: updated curriculum even for the have-not areas of Washington.

Meanwhile, SPS pushes hard on alignment; it takes a supportive principal, experience, and a fair amount of "make me" to avoid the tech. But many of my colleagues and I did. 

Some of our biggest users were, sadly, primary teachers who felt compelled to use the Ipads for literacy instruction. Some teachers like that it will score multiple choice math tests, but if I couldn't see their work, what was the point? I see much of this elementary tech as an also a - tempted to say "lazy" but perhaps "shortsighted" would be kinder - way for teachers to deal with varied student needs. 

My answer to "Laptop?" was either "no" or "why?" So much better for kids to be reading, doing puzzles, brain-teaser work, or better yet moving to other ongoing work and projects. They ALWAYS had something that needed doing.

Big tech yesses: computers for research on selected sites, which actually enables more interesting and locally focused topics; occasionally preparing presentations or writing (from handwritten notes.) And whole-class science and history lessons, because video is a great tool when supported by discussion. Always, always intentional. Kids had zero complaints. They love hands on projects and hand on experiments.


Also:
This is correct- also in tech. SPS has subscriptions to what amounts to fast food in lieu of education.

Ouch!


So what else is happening in other states (this via the NY Times' story):

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.”

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

This stands out to me:

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.”

Well, if you can't vet and manage your tech, you should REALLY use less of it.

And what is NUMBER ONE to me (and always has been)?

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.

Yup. I want to remind parents that FERPA was written in 1978. Hmm, what has changed in our world from that time to this? FERPA is a toothless tiger.

But learning should be "like a game;"

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

“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.

Up next - AI in the classroom.