Can Historians Help School Reformers?

Historians are divided over what can be learned from history. Some find that knowing the past can inform the present. Others say that the past has no lessons to teach those living now but it is nonetheless worthwhile to recapture what occurred and their consequences.

But when policymakers, practitioners, parents, and public school students ask about the usefulness of history they want guidance from the past to avoid making mistakes now. And some even want predictions.

Historians who believe that the past can inform policy argue that even if “lessons” cannot be extracted from the past, policymakers can surely profit from looking backward. They say scholars can aid contemporary policymakers by pointing out similarities and differences between previous and current situations.

Or, of even more help to policymakers, historians can redefine existing problems and solutions by observing how similar situations were viewed by a previous generation. Finally, without stooping to offer “lessons,” historians can alert policymakers to what did not work, what might be preferable and what to avoid under certain conditions.

Other historians reject the notion that history can, or even should, serve the present. These historians point to their obligations as professionals to be disinterested in contemporary policies. Scholars must bring to bear their knowledge of the past and their craft in handling documents without paying attention to the present moment. Not to do so can corrupt their professional impartiality. Moreover, these historians point to the uniqueness of a past event—say, the war in Vietnam–that is seldom identical or even sufficiently similar for policy makers to compare with explosive situations such as the invasion of Iraq or nearly two decades of war in Afghanistan.

More specifically, there are contemporary situations for which no historical analogy can be drawn: To what, for example, can the collapse of Soviet communism in the early 1990s be compared?

Historians bothered about reading the present into the past also argue that policy-driven colleagues ask questions that are too tightly tethered to contemporary issues and heavily influenced by the scholars’ values and experiences. Some policy-oriented historians, for example, ask: Why do public schools seemingly fail to improve student achievement? They then search the past for answers to a question that few educators, parents, or policymakers ever asked in 1880, 1920, and 1950,

Historians uninterested in connecting the past to current policy issues call scholars who seek to influence reformers presentists, researchers who read the present into the past, and, in doing so, distort history to fit contemporary situations. Historians should write history for history’s sake.

At times, I have leaned toward those who claim that scholars must disengage from contemporary policy issues when investigating the past because history seldom teaches explicit lessons. Still, more often than not, I find myself in the camp of policy-relevant historians. As a teacher, superintendent, and policymaker for a quarter-century before becoming a professor, my values and experiences shaped the questions that I have asked over the last two decades–many of which connect policy to practice.

The path I have chosen, however, has been troublesome. The tug of reading the present into the past is strong and unyielding even when I scrutinize high school yearbooks from the 1920s in the dank basement of a district office building. Resisting the temptation to select only those historical records and incidents that fit the contemporary scene or bolster a bias is a constant struggle. I have to constantly remind myself to take the past on its own terms, to welcome the document that challenges my beliefs or to spend more time investigating an event that undermines thoroughly what I had found. Juggling professional duties to the craft and discipline with insistent impulses to shape stories that fit particular contemporary policies consistent with my values is–in a trite phrase–hard work.

None of this would surprise colleagues deeply committed to both scholarship and improving schools. It is unsurprising because the public school, a core institution in a market-driven democratic society, has had a checkered history of being drafted again and again to uplift the lives of individual students and improve a society blessed by prosperity and freedom yet wracked by social ills and inequities. Historians of education, perhaps more so than other historians, particularly if their formative experiences included working in schools, have had to contend with this dilemma of hewing to scholarly obligations while seeking improved schools.

The compromise I have worked out draws from historian David Tyack’s conclusion that contemporary decision-makers already have a picture in their minds of what the past was like. Accurate or not, they will formulate policy based on those blurred images of the past.*

Like Tyack, I believe that more accurate renderings of the past than currently exist can inform the present not by prescribing particular policies but in helping educational decision makers and reformers, again in Tyack’s words: “not only to use a sense of the past (which they do willy-nilly) but also to make sense of it.” And that is how I believe historians can help school reformers. **

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*David Tyack was my doctoral adviser at Stanford University (1972-1974).  He was also a close friend after I joined the faculty in 1981. Besides team teaching courses, I also joined him in his passion for biking up mountains and riding to the ocean for over three decades. David Tyack died in 2016.

**David Tyack, “The High School as a Social Service Agency: Historical Perspectives on Current Policy Issues,” Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, vol. 1 (no.5), p. 56, 1979.

Every Tech Tool in Classrooms Needs Ruthless Scrutiny (Jessica Grose)

Just as school boards and administrators evaluate carefully every item placed in classrooms from the size of windows to furniture to whiteboards to textbooks, so too should the ubiquitous technologies used daily–nay, hourly–such as cell phones and laptops (including software) be rigorouly assessed. New York Times reporter Jessica Grose makes just that point in this article.

Educational technology in schools is sometimes described as a wicked problem — a term coined by a design and planning professor, Horst Rittel, in the 1960s, meaning a problem for which even defining the scope of the dilemma is a struggle, because it has so many interconnected parts that never stop moving.

When you have a wicked problem, solutions have to be holistic, flexible and developmentally appropriate. Which is to say that appropriate tech use for elementary schoolers in rural Oklahoma isn’t going to be the same as appropriate tech use in a Chicago high school.

I spent the past few weeks speaking with parents, teachers, public school administrators and academics who study educational technology. And while there are certainly benefits to using tech as a classroom tool, I’m convinced that when it comes to the proliferation of tech in K-12 education, we need “a hard reset,” as Julia Freeland Fisher of the Christensen Institute put it, concurring with Jonathan Haidt in his call for rolling back the “phone-based childhood.” When we recently spoke, Fisher stressed that when we weigh the benefits of ed tech, we’re often not asking, “What’s happening when it comes to connectedness and well-being?”

Well said. We need a complete rethink of the ways that we’re evaluating and using tech in classrooms; the overall change that I want to see is that tech use in schools — devices and apps — should be driven by educators, not tech companies.

In recent years, tech companies have provided their products to schools either free or cheap, and then schools have tried to figure out how to use those products. Wherever that dynamic exists, it should be reversed: Districts and individual schools should first figure out what tech would be most useful to their students, and their bar for “useful” should be set by available data and teacher experience. Only then should they acquire laptops, tablets and educational software.

As Mesut Duran — a professor of educational technology at the University of Michigan, Dearborn, and the author of “Learning Technologies: Research, Trends and Issues in the U.S. Education System” — told me, a lot of the technology that’s used in classrooms wasn’t developed with students in mind. “Most of the technologies are initially created for commercial purposes,” he said, “and then we decide how to use them in schools.”

In many cases, there’s little or no evidence that the products actually work, and “work” can have various meanings here: It’s not conclusive that tech, as opposed to hard-copy materials, improves educational outcomes. And sometimes devices or programs simply don’t function the way they’re supposed to. For example, artificial intelligence in education is all the rage, but then we get headlines like this one, in February, from The Wall Street Journal: “We Tested an A.I. Tutor for Kids. It Struggled With Basic Math.”

Alex Molnar, one of the directors of the National Educational Policy Center at the University of Colorado, Boulder, said that every school should be asking if the tech it’s using is both necessary and good. “The tech industry’s ethos is: If it’s doable, it is necessary. But for educators, that has to be an actual question: Is this necessary?” Even after you’ve cleared the bar of necessary, he said, educators should be asking, “Is doing it this way good, or could we do it another way that would be better? Better in the ethical sense and the pedagogical sense.”

With that necessary and good standard in mind, here are some specific recommendations that I’ve taken away from several discussions and a lot of reading. It’s unrealistic — and considering that we’re in a tech-saturated world, not ideal — to get rid of every last bit of educational technology. But we’re currently failing too many children by letting it run rampant.

At the State and Federal Levels: Privacy Protections and Better Evaluation

A complaint I heard from many public school parents who responded to my March 27 questionnaire and wanted a lower-tech environment for their kids is that they’re concerned about their children’s privacy. They couldn’t opt out of things like Google Classroom, they said, because in many cases, all of their children’s homework assignments were posted there. Molnar has a radical but elegant solution for this problem: “All data gathered must be destroyed after its intended purpose has been accomplished.” So if the intended purpose of a platform or application is grading, for example, the data would be destroyed at the end of the school year; it couldn’t be sold to a third party or used to further enhance the product or as a training ground for artificial intelligence.

Another recommendation — from a recent paper by the University of Edinburgh’s Ben Williamson, Molnar and the University of Colorado, Boulder’s Faith Boninger outlining the risks of A.I. in the classroom — is for the creation of an “independent government entity charged with ensuring the quality of digital educational products used in schools” that would evaluate tech before it is put into schools and “periodically thereafter.” Because the technology

is always evolving, our oversight of it needs to be, as well.

At the District Level: Centralize the Tech-Vetting Process

Stephanie Sheron is the chief of strategic initiatives for the Montgomery County Public Schools, the largest district in Maryland, and all the district’s technology departments report to her. She likened the tech landscape, coming out of the Covid-19 pandemic remote school period, to the “Wild West.” School districts were flooded with different kinds of ed tech in an emergency situation in which teachers were desperately trying to engage their students, and a lot of relief money was pouring in from the federal government. When the dust settled, she said, the question was, “Now what do we do? How do we control this? How do we make sure that we’re in alignment with FERPA and COPPA and all of those other student data privacy components?”

To address this, Sheron said, her district has secured grant funding to hire a director of information security, who will function as the hub for all the educational technology vending and evaluate new tech. Part of the standardization that the district has been undergoing is a requirement that to be considered, curriculum vendors must offer both digital and hard-copy resources. She said her district tried to look at tech as a tool, adding: “A pencil is a tool for learning, but it’s not the only modality. Same thing with technology. We look at it as a tool, not as the main driver of the educational experience.

At the Classroom Level: Ruthlessly Evaluate Every Tool

In my conversations with teachers, I’ve been struck by their descriptions of the cascade of tech use — that more tech is often offered as a solution to problems created by tech. For example, paid software like GoGuardian, which allows teachers to monitor every child’s screen, has been introduced to solve the problem of students goofing off on their laptops. But there’s a simple, free, low-tech solution to this problem that Doug Showley, a high school English teacher in Indiana I spoke to, employs: He makes all his students face their computer screens in his direction.

Every teacher who is concerned about tech use in his or her classroom should do a tech audit. There are several frameworks; I like the worksheet created by Beth Pandolpho and Katie Cubano, the authors of “Choose Your Own Master Class: Urgent Ideas to Invigorate Your Professional Learning.” In the chapter “Balancing Technology Use in the Classroom,” they suggest that teachers list every tech tool they are using and evaluate its specific functions, asking, “Are these novel or duplicative?” They also encourage teachers to write out a defense of the tool and the frequency of use.

I like these questions because they make clear that the solutions are not going to be one size fits all.

Students Deserve Authentic Connection

As I close out this series, I want to return to what Fisher said about the importance of student connection and well-being. Of course academic outcomes matter. I want our kids to learn as much about as many different topics as they can. I care about falling test scores and think they’re an important piece of data.

But test scores are only one kind of information. A key lesson we should have learned from 2020 and ’21 is that school is about so much more than just academics. It’s about socialization, critical thinking, community and learning how to coexist with people who are different from you. I don’t know that all of these are things that can be tracked in a scientific way, which brings me back to the idea of tech in schools as a wicked problem: These aren’t easily measurable outcomes.

Jeff Frank, a professor of education at St. Lawrence University, expresses a sense that I’ve had very well in a paper, “Sounding the Call to Teach in a Social Media Age: Renewing the Importance of Philosophy in Teacher Education.” He says students are “hungry for experiences that make them feel alive and authentically connected to other people and to deeper sources of value. Though filtering and managing life through technologies offers safety, predictability and a sense of control, it also leads to life that can feel extremely small, constraining and lonely. Teaching can offer a powerful way to pierce this bubble.”

Ultimately, I believe the only way kids will be able to find that deeper meaning is through human relationships with their peers and teachers, no matter how shiny an A.I. tutor appears to be at first blush.

Facts about the State of School Reform in the U.S.

In this post, I will do what lawyers often do when arguing a case. I will stipulate certain statements as facts. These statements may not sound like facts to some readers or even accepted by contemporary school reformers but as a high school teacher for 13 years, central office administrator for two years, district superintendent for seven years, and an historian of school reform for four decades, my experiences and research tell me they are. Readers can judge for themselves whether these statements are facts.

FACT 1

Historically, school reformers have both overstated flaws in tax-supported public schools predicting disaster and understated difficulties in changing the system by proposing rosy solutions.

Consider what has occurred since the mid-1980s.

Market-inspired school reformers, endorsed by policy elites, media and parents, using low U.S. scores on international tests time and again, have blamed chronically low-performing public schools for hampering national economic growth, innovation, and productivity by  producing graduates mismatched to the job skills employers needed to compete in a constantly changing global marketplace.

To solve this serious problem of low academic performance and inadequately prepared graduates since the mid-1980s, federal, state, and local officials have gradually enacted a jerry-built national reform agenda containing the following items:

*New Common Core K-12 academic standards,

*State and national tests to determine if students meet those standards,

*Test scores as the primary measure of policy success,

*Accountability regulations holding districts, schools, teachers and students responsible for results,

*More parental choice of schools mainly through publicly financed charters,

*New technologies to get students to learn more, faster, and better.

*Teacher and administrator evaluations and compensation tied to student test scores.

Business and civic leaders, public polls, and  bipartisan policymakers have endorsed much of this school reform agenda as ways of making U.S. schools better than they were before the mid-1980s. The evidence, however, showing that this multi-faceted strategy has improved schooling for U.S. students or that skilled human capital has, indeed, led to national economic growth and an improved market position—remains, at best, uncertain in 2024.

FACT 2

Of the multiple purposes for public schools in a democracy (e.g., civic, social, and economic), the aim of preparing students for a market-driven democracy continues to dominate public schools in 2024.

In the early years of the 20^th century, a business and civic coalition of educational progressives lobbied state and federal governments to create vocational schools and curricula  to prepare youth for industrial jobs. The federal government began subsidizing vocational courses during World War I. Progressive reformers created the comprehensive high school in the 1920s with multi-tracked curricula, including vocational education, that sorted students by their probable destination upon graduation into blue- and white-collar jobs.

By the 1970s, however, reformers were dismantling separate vocational curricula (renamed Career Education). While the comprehensive high school still exists, career education courses have largely migrated to community colleges and other venues.

Currently, the four-decade long concentration on schools as instruments for national economic growth has created a college prep curriculum for all students. Nearly everyone in high school is expected to go to college. A two- or four-year college education has become the new vocational schooling. The over-riding aim for public schools remains to produce graduates who are productive employees and consumers of products. The present market-inspired reform agenda, like earlier movements promoting work-force education, has gained supremacy among multiple purposes that have driven U.S schools since the 19^th century.

More specifically, preparing youth for the labor market has competed with the public’s expectation to prepare children to participate politically in the community, offer equal educational opportunity, and, at the same time, help individuals climb the social ladder to economic success. This last purpose of schools as a vehicle for social mobility has meant that parents see schools as an individually acquired consumer good to help their sons and daughters achieve success in life.

The economic purpose for tax-supported schooling—a public good–has dominated policy debates for well over a century and in the past three decades has joined social mobility, a private good, to suck out all the oxygen in any discussion of civic or other purposes for public schools.*

FACT 3

Understanding past and present changes in U.S. public schools requires reformers to distinguish between policy talk, policy action, and policy implementation. Not too many reformers make such distinctions.

Policy talk refers to reformers’ cyclical rhetoric of gloomy assessments of schooling problems married to  over-confident solutions. Hyper-excited policy talk occurred over national defense during the Cold War with the Soviet Union in the 1950s; we hear echoes of it now with fears of Chinese economic and military hegemony in Asia. Ditto for policy talk about online instruction transforming U.S. schools and colleges in the 1960s, 1990s, and 2020s. Pronouncements from federal officials and for-profit companies promise a brave new high-tech world of individually tailored online learning, blending of face-to-face learning with online and the Nirvana of schooling: “personalized learning.”

In short, policy talk (either of the sort that says schooling has failed or its reverse side, a utopian, high-tech solution) is hyperventilating rhetoric that we have heard repeatedly over the decades.

Policy action refers to the decisions governors, mayors, superintendents, and legislators make in adopting actual policies to solve school problems. Examples range from school boards buying iPads for kindergartners to superintendents establishing new math programs to the U.S. Congress and President approving No Child Left Behind (2001) and Every Student Succeeds Act (2015). Like policy talk, there have been cycles of adopting similar policies in teaching phonics, reducing dropouts, and adopting new technologies.

Policy implementation, however, is not cyclical. It is linear and contextual. Schools as institutions have structures, cultures, budgets, and histories. Regularities in structures, cultures, and budgets change slowly, incrementally, and anchored in the particular setting so that over time. Yet, trend lines do become noticeable.

Putting new school programs into practice often stretch out over three-to-five years. When researchers, for example, observe classrooms in a school to see how teachers and students use computers in activities, they find great variation and even across schools in the same district. Some principals embrace the program wholeheartedly, some pick and choose which teachers to sell the program to, and other principals do the barest minimum. Ditto for teachers. Teachers sort out those elements of a new program they like; others change policy by redesigning activities and lessons. Because of school culture and organizational realities such as budgets, change is gradual and episodic. But trends do appear over time. What happens in schools and classrooms, then, is a world apart from the hyperbole and gloom accompanying cyclical policy talk and action.

These three statements about historical patterns in school reform in 2024 and distinctions in the vocabulary of policy-making that I stipulate as facts help me answer the question of where U.S. school reform is now.

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*Thanks to David Labaree, historian of education, for these distinctions.

Teaching Isn’t Rocket Science but It Is Surely Harder (Ryan Fuller)

Ryan Fuller describes his career as follows:

“Throughout my career, I have sought meaningful work that made good use of my skills at organizations that aligned with my values and helped me grow. This pursuit has taken me from aerospace engineering to teaching to education leadership and now to data science. I completed a MicroMasters in Data Science to continue to pursue people-focused work using my analytical skills. My experiences have given me the innovative, analytical, and communication skills necessary to be successful in a wide variety of data positions. I enjoy collaborating with others to develop innovative ways to use data that leads to better outcomes for people.”

In 2007, when I was 22, I took a position as an aerospace engineer working on the design of NASA’s next-generation spacecraft. It was my dream job. I had just received a degree in mechanical engineering, and the only career ambition I could articulate was to work on something space-related. On my first days of work, I was awestruck by the drawings of Apollo-like spacecraft structures, by the conversations about how the heat shield would deflect when the craft landed in water and how much g-force astronauts could withstand. I couldn’t believe I wasn’t just watching a documentary on the space industry—I was inside it.

I was extremely motivated during my first year of work. I got in earlier and stayed later than most, and I tried to learn everything I could from my more experienced colleagues. The work wasn’t easy. Our team was trying to re-engineer, with modern technology, something that was designed in the ’60s. As a design engineer, I had to integrate the efforts of several different groups that often didn’t talk to each other or even get along very well. My deadlines haunted me like a thousand nightmares. Over the course of the next few years, though, I received awards and exceptional performance reviews, and I gained the respect of my colleagues, some of whom had been in the business for about as long as I had been alive.

Because I’ve worked as an aerospace engineer and later as a teacher through Teach for America—this is my second year of teaching 11^th grade math and robotics at Sierra High School in Colorado Springs—I find the public perception of both careers to be fascinating. When I tell people that I worked on the design of a NASA spacecraft, their mouths drop and their eyes pop, and their minds are no doubt filled with images of men in white lab coats running between rocket engines and blackboards filled with equations of untold complexity. Most people will give aerospace engineers tremendous respect, without having any idea what they actually do.

But no one can fully understand how difficult teaching in America’s highest-need communities is until he or she personally experiences it. When I solved engineering problems, I had to use my brain. When I solve teaching problems, I use my entire being—everything I have. A typical engineering task involves sending an email to a colleague about a potential design solution. A typical teacher task involves explaining for the fourth time how to get the variable out of the exponent while two students put their heads down, three students start texting, two girls in the back start talking, and one student provokes another from across the classroom.

As a teacher, I must prioritize the problems of getting the distracted students refocused and stabilizing the cross-classroom conflict before it escalates into a shouting match or worse, all the while making sure the learning of the other 25 students in the room doesn’t come to a complete halt. I also must address these problems in a consistent, respectful way that best serves the needs of the students, because if I don’t, the problems will increase in number and become more difficult to solve.

As an engineer, I dealt with very complex design problems, but before I decided how to solve them, I had a chance to think, research, and reflect for hours, days, or even weeks. I also had many opportunities to consult colleagues for advice before making any decisions. As a teacher, I have seconds to decide how to solve several problems at once, for hours at a time, without any real break, and with no other adults in the room to support them. There are days of teaching that make a day in the office seem like a vacation.

One of the biggest misconceptions about teaching is that it is a single job. Teaching is actually two jobs. The first job is the one that teachers are familiar with; people who have not taught can pretend it doesn’t exist. The tasks involved in this first job include lesson planning, grading, calling parents, writing emails, filling out paperwork, going to meetings, attending training, tutoring, and occasionally sponsoring a club or coaching a sport. The time allotted to teachers for this work is usually one hour per workday. But these tasks alone could easily fill a traditional 40-hour work week.

The second job is the teaching part of teaching, which would more aptly be called the performance. Every day, a teacher takes the stage to conduct a symphony of human development. A teacher must simultaneously explain the content correctly, make the material interesting, ensure that students are staying on task and understanding the material, and be ready to deal with the curve balls that will be thrown at her every 15 seconds—without flinching—for five hours. If, for some reason, she is not able to inspire, educate, and relate to 30 students at once, she has to be ready to get them back on track, because no matter what students say or do to detract from the lesson, they want structure, they want to learn, and they want to be prepared for life.

I experience more failure every five minutes of teaching than I experienced in an entire week as an engineer. Giving a presentation to NASA about how the thermal protection system of a spacecraft is connected to its primary structure is a cakewalk compared to getting 30 teenagers excited about logarithms. A difficult moment in engineering involves a customer in a big meeting pointing out a design problem that I hadn’t considered. The customer’s concerns can be eased with a carefully crafted statement along the lines of, “You’re right. We’ll look into it.” A difficult moment in teaching involves a student—one who has a history of being bullied and having suicidal thoughts—telling me that she is pregnant 30 seconds before class starts. What carefully crafted statement will help her?

Moments of success seem to come less often as a teacher, but when they do arrive, they can make up for all the failures: the excitement on a student’s face when she understands a concept after lots of struggle; the feeling of exhilaration when all the energy in the room is directed toward the day’s lesson; the shared laughter between teacher and student at a joke that only they understand. Sometimes successes doesn’t strike until later, as when I found out that a two-minute presentation I gave on petroleum engineering changed the areer path of one of my students. In each second of her chaotic day, a teacher has a chance to transform the lives of young people for the better. How many aerospace engineers can say that?

In teaching, a person can be extremely competent, work relentlessly, and still fail miserably. Especially in the first year or two on the job, success can seem impossible. For people who have been so successful up to that point in their lives—failure is a difficult thing to face, especially when that failure involves young people not being able to realize their full potential in life.

Because of all this, sometimes teachers in high-need communities think about leaving for other professions. As someone who quit his job designing a NASA spacecraft during a severe recession without any clear plan, I understand the power of doing what feels right to you—you have that choice, that privilege.

Just don’t forget about the ones who don’t have much in the way of choices and privileges. Don’t forget about the ones that don’t get to choose what school they go to. Who don’t get to choose who their teachers are. Who don’t get to choose how the students around them act. Who don’t get to choose what kind of environment they were born into. Don’t forget about them. They’ll be there Monday morning.

Real Schools Need Books, Not Laptops or Cell Phones (James Traub)

“James Traub is a journalist and scholar specializing in international affairs. He is a columnist and contributor to the website foreignpolicy.com. He worked as a staff writer for The New Yorker from 1993 to 1998 and as a contributing writer to The New York Times Magazine from 1998 to 2011. He has also written extensively about national politics, urban affairs, and education. His books include What Was Liberalism? The Past, Present and Promise of  Noble Idea; John Quincy Adams: Militant Spirit; The Freedom Agenda, on the American policy of democracy promotion; and The Best Intentions, on the United Nations under Kofi Annan. He teaches classes on American foreign policy and on the history of liberalism at NYU Abu Dhabi and at NYU. He is a fellow of the Center on International Cooperation and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.” This article appeared on April 18, 2024

A few weeks ago, I was sitting in an eleventh-grade history class at a high school in the suburbs west of Chicago. Mr. DiTella was firing off questions about the civil rights movement and getting precious little in return, despite the fact that he had assigned a reading on the subject. When we spoke afterwards, Mr. DiTella complained about how little reading the kids were prepared to do, and how brazenly nonchalant many of them were about handing in written assignments. That’s an immemorial lament; what has changed the conversation is the all-consuming presence of social media. Mr. DiTella recalled watching his daughter, a student so diligent that she was considered practically freakish by her friends, scroll through her TikTok or perhaps Instagram feed. Her rapid-fire reaction had gone something like this: laugh-pause-laugh-laugh-pause-pause-laugh. “Each one is a dopamine hit,” Mr. DiTella recalled thinking. How can school compete with that?

The general answer is: Schools don’t try. Almost all the schools I’ve seen have learned to accommodate students’ ever-dwindling attention span with ever-shorter assignments, with video rather than text, with one paragraph of writing rather than a page. The response is equal parts abject surrender and progressive doctrine; if, as educators have believed since the time of John Dewey, successful learning rests upon student interest and student preference, then schools need to work with, rather than push back against, the cognitive habits imposed by social media. So they do.

Here, I have come to think, is the real battle line. Those of us who think about civic education are mesmerized by the shiny bauble of politics. Florida demands patriotism; Minnesota demands respect for diversity; purple states hold pitched battles between the woke and the anti-woke. It’s highly entertaining. But the deepest crisis in the school is not ideological; it’s cognitive. Kids who spend their entire lives on their phone are losing the skills required for reflective citizenship, no matter their point of view. If we care about preparing young people for democratic citizenship, that is the fight we need to wage.

In an excerpt in The Atlantic from his book The Anxious Generation, Jonathan Haidt writes that the world changed about a decade ago when smartphones began delivering curated feeds of social media to young people’s pockets. Haidt, too, describes the dopamine hit, though his chief focus is mental health. “When the child is not engaged in digital activity,” he writes, “the brain doesn’t have enough dopamine, and the child experiences withdrawal symptoms,” including anxiety and insomnia. That’s bad enough; but Haidt also notes that social media undermines acts of sustained attention with incessant ping notifications and an endless stream of “high-pleasure, low-effort digital experiences.”

All schools recognize the deleterious effects of smartphones, but many are reluctant to simply prohibit something so central to children’s lives. Classrooms in Mr. DiTella’s school have what’s called a “phone tree,” a kind of hanging shoe bag in which teachers may, if they wish, ask students to place their phones at the beginning of class. Most of the trees I saw were empty. A study by a mental health organization found that 97 percent of students use their phones during the school day, with the most popular functions being social media, YouTube, and gaming.

Florida, which leads the nation in banning things like “critical-race theory” that oughtn’t be banned, has also banned the use of phones in schools and access to social media on school Wi-Fi. Haidt favors such rules; I do, too. But prohibiting the use of bad things does not ensure that good things will take their place. Social media has killed off sustained acts of reading. A study by the American Psychological Association found that while in the late 1970s, 60 percent of twelfth-graders reported reading a book or a magazine every day, the figure had plummeted to 16 percent by 2016. It’s almost certainly fallen further since then. I asked twelfth-graders in an elective sociology class at the suburban high school—middle-class kids in a group self-selected for intellectual curiosity—how many read books at home. Five or six out of thirty raised their hands. One kid was reading Stephen King. But of the two others who volunteered, one shuffled through mystery books whose titles she couldn’t remember and the other was reading what she called a “slice-of-life” book, by which she meant a book about an unhappy teenage girl like herself.

A truly counter-cultural school today is not one that teaches that the Pilgrims were settler colonialists or, on the contrary, that we should idolize Thomas Jefferson; it is one that restores books to the center of children’s experience. And by “book” I do not mean any sheaf of paper glued together and bound between covers; nor do I mean “great books.” Stephen King will do. Students need to have experiences that will both demand sustained attention and repay sustained attention. Slice-of-life books don’t demand it, and Hamlet, at least for many students, won’t repay it. Nor does it matter whether students read books on paper or on a screen, just so long as the experience makes them ignore the ping.

What does this have to do with civic education, and thus with democracy? Many of the students I talk to go to TikTok or Instagram to learn about serious things like the war in Gaza, as well as about inane ephemera. But they learn about real things without history, context, or balance. Social media reinforces kids’ natural tendency to seek simple and self-reinforcing answers to hard questions. If it can’t be explained in thirty seconds, it’s not worth knowing; worse still, it’s not knowable, since kids stop paying attention. These children are being perfectly prepared to join a society already aflame with self-righteous certainty.

Our world of algorithmically curated dopamine hits is not going away. In fact, Tiktok and Instagram will seem positively quaint once we fully enter the world of artificial intelligence. The New York Times just revealed that officials at Meta contemplated buying Simon & Schuster just to have more stuff to load into their AI’s maw. AI aspires to reduce all knowledge to data. The only way to prevent this monstrous flattening is to thicken the walls of the institutions charged with shaping our minds, above all our public schools and colleges; that is, to ensure that what happens inside them is genuinely different from what goes on outside them. Social media may rule outside; books, and the depth experience that comes with them, must rule inside.

I am convinced that the growing popularity of so-called “classical schools” is evidence of the deep discomfort many parents feel with their kids’ peer culture. Whatever else they do, classical schools, very much including public charter schools, revere books and disdain technology. The average public school seems to do the opposite. Of course public schools by their nature reflect the community in which they are situated. But doctrine matters, too; and the progressive deference to the student prevents schools from seeing how very destructive her culture has become. Most kids seem to want to be liberated from the technological forces that have increasingly taken over their lives and their minds. Schools must take their side.

Advice for Teachers, Policymakers, and Donors

Well over a decade ago, Larry Ferlazzo, a Sacramento (CA) high school English/social studies teacher and avid blogger, interviewed me asking what advice I have for teachers, policymakers, and philanthropists. The advice I offered then came largely from my 14 years as a high school history teacher in Cleveland (OH) and Washington, D.C. public schools, seven years I spent as a district superintendent in Arlington (VA), 20 years of teaching, research, and writing at Stanford University. Since 2001, I have been an emeritus professor teaching occasional university seminars (until 2013) while becoming a full-time writer and blogger.

I have updated and expanded that earlier post. The advice I gave then to Larry Ferlazzo is, in my opinion, still apt for teachers, policymakers, and donors in 2024.

Larry Ferlazzo: If you were going to offer teachers three key pieces of advice that you think might help them to stay in the profession longer and be more effective educators, what would they be?

1. Re-pot yourself every few years.

Teaching is both energizing and exhausting work. When teaching you spend the rich intellectual, physical, and emotional capital that you have accumulated over the years on your students. And because teaching over time is also draining, you need to re-invest in yourself and your future students by doing what expert gardeners do with favorite potted plants.

Because plants can become pot bound, that is, the roots of the plant become cramped and form a tightly packed mass that inhibits growth they need to be re-potted into different soil and larger pots so they can flourish. Yes, re-potting entails risks and often causes stress but staying potted in the same place means little growth, even death.

For teachers, re-potting may mean shifting to another grade, tossing out old lessons, introducing new ones, taking a short break from the classroom or doing something else that engages one’s passions. For educational policymakers, re-potting may mean a return to teaching for a school year or seeking a similar post in another district, or even taking a short paid or unpaid leave of absence.

Effectiveness in every helping profession requires developing relationships with those served, be they clients, patients, parishioners, or students. In teaching, the building and sustaining of relationships with children and youth prepare the soil for learning. Such work, over time, exhausts one’s energies and commitment. Renewal—re-potting—is essential.

2. Take intellectual risks.

Because teaching is repetitive work—as is doctoring, lawyering, and engineering—a certain monotony creeps in over time. Sure, each year students differ and they add the spice of unpredictability to what occurs in classrooms but inevitably, daily routines become, well, routine. Altering predictable classroom practices, introducing new subject matter, experimenting with different time schedules for activities, trying out new technologies to enhance student learning—all are instances of taking risks and avoiding getting buried intellectually in a deep rut that you have created.

Yes, failures do occur–after all, taking risks means facing possible failure but teaching effectively means accepting that from time to time falling on one’s face is not a tragedy but—you guessed it—an opportunity to learn how to do the task better next time around. Losing the courage to take intellectual risks is a telltale sign that teaching fatigue has set in and that the routines of teaching have triumphed.

3. Speak out.

There are so many reasons why teachers and policymakers do not speak out about teaching, student learning, school procedures and district policies. From fear of retaliation to sheer exhaustion at the end of the day to working at another job or taking graduate courses to caring for family and friends to inexperience in writing or speaking publicly—all are reasons teachers and district administrators give for letting others speak for them.

What many teachers forget or underestimate is the credibility that they have with parents, voters, and students when they do speak out about teaching, learning, district policies, and school leadership. I read many teacher blogs and applaud them for taking this avenue to express themselves. More teachers and policymakers need to speak out on the issues and the life that they experience daily. Even if they are members of a union. Being a union member is, of course, important but no teacher or policymaker can depend upon a union or professional association to speak for each and every teacher on every issue that arises.

So voicing publicly one’s thoughts about teaching, learning, school routines, policy struggles, and, yes, even school politics is a way of re-potting one’s self and taking intellectual risks.

Larry Ferlazzo: What advice would you offer philanthropic foundations seeking improved schooling?

*Before recommending any reform policy or making a grant aimed at altering teacher behavior in classrooms or district policies, include an historical impact statement (no longer than two single-spaced pages) of earlier similar reforms similar to what is being proposed (e.g., what conditions were in place or missing? What happened to those reforms? Why did they succeed? Fail?).

*Funders publicly describe the theory of change (or action) embedded in any policy for which they are willing to give dollars to schools. Both donors and school staffs must be clear on how school and classroom changes that they propose to put into practice will lead directly or indirectly to improved instruction and student learning.

*Recommend funding only those policies and programs aimed at changing teacher behavior and classroom practices that you, as reformers, would want for those teachers of your own children and grand-children.

*Dial back hyped policy talk about what a new policy will achieve for teachers, students, and the larger society (e.g., online instruction for K-12, new curriculum standards, authentic assessment, charter schools). Over-promising results while under-estimating tough actions superintendents, principals, and teachers must take to put proposed changes into practice is the dominant pattern that reformers have followed for over a century. Speaking honestly, directly, and publicly about what a new policy aimed at teachers and district policymakers can and cannot do would not only be refreshing but give credibility, if not respect, for proposed changes.

More Cartoons on Tests in School

I scour the web for new cartoons about teaching, curriculum, administrators, teachers, and, yes, the inescapable practice of students taking tests. Here is this month’s collection of cartoons on what many students (and teachers) dread–taking tests. Enjoy!

Teaching Is a Grind Peppered with Joyful Moments (Bill Ferriter)

This post appeared in Bill Ferriter’s blog, “The Tempered Radical.” In his blog, he describes himself as follows: “Bill Ferriter has about a dozen titles—Solution Tree author and professional development associate, noted edublogger, senior fellow of the Teacher Leaders Network—but he checks them all at the door each morning when he walks into his sixth- grade classroom in Raleigh, North Carolina.”

After 29 years in North Carolina public school classrooms, Ferriter retired and now consults with schools and districts.

Teaching is a Grind.

I’m sitting in a dirty McDonald’s restaurant right now.  It’s the same dirty McDonald’s restaurant that I’ve spent the better part of the past 15 years sitting in.  Stop by and you are almost guaranteed to find me in a booth near the back — next to the filthy bathrooms and just inside the door where the sketchy teens are chain-smoking Marlboro Reds.

I come here after school and on the weekends to crank out writing for part time projects.  Sometimes I’m blogging.  Sometimes I’m putting together #edtech or #ccss lessons that I’ll use in my classroom AND in professional development workshops that I deliver during  those legendary “vacations” that teachers get.  Sometimes I’m answering emails sent by school leaders who need a bit of advice on how to move their buildings forward.

Always I’m tired.  Finding energy AFTER a full day at school ain’t easy.  

I walk into my classroom at 6 AM every morning and spend the first two hours planning, grading and answering email.  From 8:00-1:30, I work with 140 of the most engaging eleven year olds you’ve ever met.  They are simultaneously beautiful and demanding, though.  Meeting needs, answering questions, calming worries, celebrating successes and soothing hurt feelings are all wrapped around delivering the content in my curriculum.

The whirlwind

I spend the last two hours of my day in meetings — with parents, with peers, with special educators, with principals, and with professional developers.  On good days, I might even get a few more minutes of planning before picking my daughter up from school.

As soon as my wife gets home at 4:30, however, I head to McDonald’s to start my second job.  Most nights, I work until 7:30.  Most Saturdays and Sundays, I work from 6:30 until noon.

Always, I’m worried about making ends meet because my family literally relies on my part time income to pay our bills.

Living in a state that ranks 46th in the nation for teacher pay — a full $10,000 behind the national average — means I’ve GOT to generate part time revenue in order to financially survive.  If the content that I create on nights and weekends doesn’t resonate — if I can’t convince SOMEONE to buy my ideas or my time — we’d be flat broke.

The hacks that harp on the horrors of the public education system would probably revel in this reality, wouldn’t they?  They’d argue that the stress of my poor salary has pushed me to be a better teacher. “Competition blah-blah-blah.  Pay for performance blah-blah-blah.  Cushy teaching jobs blah-blah.  Wasting our tax dollars blah-blah.”

And in a way, they’d be right:  While a part of me is constantly improving my practice because I know that improving my practice means improving the lives of my students, I’m ashamed to admit that I’m also constantly improving my practice because I’m hoping that someone will see me as an expert and hire me as a consultant so that I can cover next month’s day care bill for my four-year old daughter.

Long story short:  Teaching is a grind.  

On a good day, the grind feels like a noble sacrifice because I know that my work has made a difference for the kids in my class and the families in my community.  On a bad day, the grind feels like professional masochism.  I guess that’s the uncomfortable truth for those of us who have chosen a career that has always been undervalued and — more recently — been unappreciated.

The question is how long can I keep on grinding?

Six weeks later, Ferriter posted the following on his blog: It’s no secret to regular Radical readers that I often get worn down by the grind of teaching.  Wrap the public criticism piled on teachers at every turn up with the crappy policies that have stripped the joy out of the public school classroom and you have a profession that leaves me wondering more and more every year.But there IS joy in teaching — and this week, it came in the form of a pile of birthday cards from my students:

Such a small thing, right?  But to me, it meant everything.  

The kids thanked me and teased me and joked about my hairline and the fact that I’m apparently older than dirt.  Some snuck the cards into my room and left them for me to discover on my desk.  Others came in groups of two or three to share creations that they had worked on together.

They worked on their cards during homeroom, during our school wide enrichment block and during their classes.  My guess is that they missed a ton of content, distracted by the simple act of celebrating one of their teachers.

I missed a ton of content, too:  At the end of the day, I ignored the four thousand email messages sitting in my inbox and smiled my way through a pile of special memories from a group of kids that I care about.

How Blame for Low Student Achievement Shifted from Family to School

The shame that many teachers and principals feel at being blamed for a school’s low academic performance is a recent phenomenon.

For over a century and a half, policymakers, citizens, and educators explained students’ poor academic performance by pointing to their lack of effort and family deficits. By the 1970s, however, other explanations had come into vogue such as ethnic and racial discrimination, poverty, and immigrants lack of schooling. Policymakers would say that they could hardly be blamed for reversing conditions over which they had little control. Not until the 1970s, however, did demography as destiny fade as an explanation and, instead, the school and its teachers became an explanation for unequal student outcomes.

A half-century ago, then, other explanations for low academic performance among different groups of students gained traction: The school and its teachers—not racism, poverty, family, culture, or even language differences–caused students’ low academic performance. Blame shifted from home to school (and its teachers ) when research studies of largely minority urban elementary schools scoring well on national tests appeared.

These high-achieving ghetto and barrio schools had common features: staff’s belief that all urban children could learn; the principal of the school was an instructional leader; staff’s establishing high academic standards with tough classroom lessons, frequent testing, and an orderly school (PDF el_197910_edmonds-2).  Such “effective schools” proved to many skeptics that high poverty urban schools didn’t automatically fail; they could produce high scores on standardized tests.

Therefore, students’ race, ethnicity, and social class did not doom a school to failure. And most important, when committed and experienced staff worked closely together, they could make a decided academic difference in the lives of impoverished children of color. No longer could teachers and administrators blame students and their families for failing. Now, it was the responsibility of school staff to insure student success.

By the early 2000s, this fundamental swift in blaming the school rather than race, ethnicity, or family income for the causes of low academic achievement turned up in the words of national leaders who admonished teachers and administrators to avoid the “soft bigotry of low expectations.” This reversal of responsibility for inequitable outcomes has shifted the burden for academic success from students’ and families’ shoulders to those of their teachers, principals, and superintendents.

While most of us cherish the egalitarian thought—enshrined in the federal law of No Child Left Behind (2001) that all students will achieve and subsequent legislation, Every Students Succeeds Act (2016)–research studies and the facts of daily experience should give us pause before nodding in agreement. Perhaps total equality in results may occur in heaven but with wide variability in families’ income, students’ motivation, per-pupil spending across states, and teachers’ skills–such an outcome won’t happen on earth.

Nonetheless, within a few decades, a 180-degree shift in responsibility for chronic academic failure has occurred. Neither extreme of blame-and-shame of children and families or no professional responsibility for schools’ academic outcomes, however, squares with the facts. Responsibility rests with both community and district, both school and family, and, of course, both teachers and students.

Blaming others may be momentarily satisfying but ultimately unhelpful in either improving schools or motivating teachers and students to do their best. On the one hand, expecting a school staff to have the full responsibility for students’ academic achievement neglects the long history of research and daily experience of those students who come to school unready to learn. Family income, parental education, individual health, immediate neighborhood, and other factors surely influence (but not determine) what happens to growing children even before they enter kindergarten, much less as they go from grade-to-grade. If there is one fact researchers have established repeatedly it is that family income and education play a large role in children’s behavioral and academic performance in schools (see here and here).

Striking a balance between documented facts of inequities among students when they appear at the schoolhouse door and a large body of evidence that other educators have turned failing, largely minority schools into high-fliers is essential. But it is hard to strike this balance in the current unforgiving climate of state and federal accountability rules that name, blame, and shame districts, schools, and teachers for gaps in achievement, high drop out rates, and low graduation numbers. Consider that in 2019, 34 states used test scores to judge teacher performance.

Currently, state and federal penalties for low performance and concern for what students bring to school including both their strengths and weaknesses are seldom mentioned publicly because of policymakers’ and educators’ fears of being called racist, excuse-makers, or having low expectations of their students (or all three). The dominant one-liner repeated again and again is that efficient, well-managed schools and districts must be held accountable for students’ academic success.

This back-and-forth rhetoric and policies over the past half-century sharply limits those policymakers and reformers who want to address larger socioeconomic structures in the U.S. that contribute to economic inequalities and students’ disadvantages. After all, it is no secret that tax policies favor the wealthy, that residential segregation reigns in most cities, and discriminatory employment practices persist. But reform-minded policymakers find addressing larger political and social structures in the nation very difficult to do in a climate where well-intentioned but misguided school reformers censure teachers and schools while continuing policies that link district test scores to academic performance.

Blame and shame do work.

Get Tech Out of Classrooms–Some Parents Say (Jessica Grose)

Jessica Grose is an Opinion writer for The New York Times. She covers family, religion, education, and culture.

Jaime Lewis noticed that her eighth-grade son’s grades were slipping several months ago. She suspected it was because he was watching YouTube during class on his school-issued laptop, and her suspicions were validated. “I heard this from two of his teachers and confirmed with my son: Yes, he watches YouTube during class, and no, he doesn’t think he can stop. In fact, he opted out of retaking a math test he’d failed, just so he could watch YouTube,” she said.

She decided to do something about it. Lewis told me that she got together with other parents who were concerned about the unfettered use of school-sanctioned technology in San Luis Coastal Unified School District, their district in San Luis Obispo, Calif. Because they knew that it wasn’t realistic to ask for the removal of the laptops entirely, they went for what they saw as an achievable win: blocking YouTube from students’ devices. A few weeks ago, they had a meeting with the district superintendent and several other administrators, including the tech director.

To bolster their case, Lewis and her allies put together a video compilation of clips that elementary and middle school children had gotten past the district’s content filters.

Their video opens on images of nooses being fitted around the necks of the terrified women in the TV adaptation of “The Handmaid’s Tale.” It ends with the notoriously violent “Singin’ in the Rain” sequence from “A Clockwork Orange.” (Several versions of this scene are available on YouTube. The one she pointed me to included “rape scene” in the title.) Their video was part of a PowerPoint presentation filled with statements from other parents and school staff members, including one from a middle school assistant principal, who said, “I don’t know how often teachers are using YouTube in their curriculum.”

That acknowledgment gets to the heart of the problem with screens in schools. I heard from many parents who said that even when they asked district leaders how much time kids were spending on their screens, they couldn’t get straight answers; no one seemed to know, and no one seemed to be keeping track.

Eric Prater, the superintendent of the San Luis Coastal Unified School District, told me that he didn’t realize how much was getting through the schools’ content filters until Lewis and her fellow parents raised concerns. “Our tech department, as I found out from the meeting, spends quite a lot of time blocking certain websites,” he said. “It’s a quite time-consuming situation that I personally was not aware of.” He added that he’s grateful this was brought to his attention.

I don’t think educators are the bad guys here. Neither does Lewis. In general, educators want the best for students. The bad guys, as I see it, are tech companies.

One way or another, we’ve allowed Big Tech’s tentacles into absolutely every aspect of our children’s education, with very little oversight and no real proof that their devices or programs improve educational outcomes. Last year Collin Binkley at The Associated Press analyzed public records and found that “many of the largest school systems spent tens of millions of dollars in pandemic money on software and services from tech companies, including licenses for apps, games and tutoring websites.” However, he continued, schools “have little or no evidence the programs helped students.”

It’s not just waste, very likely, of taxpayer money that’s at issue. After reading many of the over 900 responses from parents and educators to my questionnaire about tech in schools and from the many conversations I had over the past few weeks with readers, I’m convinced that the downsides of tech in schools far outweigh the benefits.

Though tech’s incursion into America’s public schools — particularly our overreliance on devices — hyperaccelerated in 2020, it started well before the Covid-19 pandemic. Google, which provides the operating system for lower-cost Chromebooks and is owned by the same parent company as YouTube, is a big player in the school laptop space, though I also heard from many parents and teachers whose schools supply students with other types and brands of devices.

As my newsroom colleague Natasha Singer reported in 2017 (by which point “half the nation’s primary- and secondary-school students” were, according to Google, using its education apps), “Google makes $30 per device by selling management services for the millions of Chromebooks that ship to schools. But by habituating students to its offerings at a young age, Google obtains something much more valuable”: potential lifetime customers.

The issue goes beyond access to age-inappropriate clips or general distraction during school hours. Several parents related stories of even kindergartners reading almost exclusively on iPads because their school districts had phased out hard-copy books and writing materials after shifting to digital-only curriculums. There’s evidence that this is harmful: A 2019 analysis of the literature concluded that “readers may be more efficient and aware of their performance when reading from paper compared to screens.”

“It seems to be a constant battle between fighting for the students’ active attention (because their brains are now hard-wired for the instant gratification of TikTok and YouTube videos) and making sure they aren’t going to sites outside of the dozens they should be,” Nicole Post, who teaches at a public elementary school in Missouri, wrote to me. “It took months for students to listen to me tell a story or engage in a read-aloud. I’m distressed at the level of technology we’ve socialized them to believe is normal. I would give anything for a math or social studies textbook.”

I’ve heard about kids disregarding teachers who tried to limit tech use, fine motor skills atrophying because students rarely used pencils and children whose learning was ultimately stymied by the tech that initially helped them — for example, students learning English as a second language becoming too reliant on translation apps rather than becoming fluent.

Some teachers said they have programs that block certain sites and games, but those programs can be cumbersome. Some said they have software, like GoGuardian, that allows them to see the screens of all the students in their classes at once. But classroom time is zero sum: Teachers are either teaching or acting like prison wardens; they can’t do both at the same time.

Resources are finite. Software costs money. Replacing defunct or outdated laptops costs money. When it comes to I.T., many schools are understaffed. More of the money being spent on tech and the maintenance and training around the use of that tech could be spent on other things, like actual books. And badly monitored and used tech has the most potential for harm.

I’ve considered the counterarguments: Kids who’d be distracted by tech would find something else to distract them; K-12 students need to gain familiarity with tech to instill some vague work force readiness.

But on the first point, I think other forms of distraction — like talking to friends, doodling and daydreaming — are better than playing video games or watching YouTube because they at least involve children engaging with other children or their own minds. And there’s research that suggests laptops are uniquely distracting. One 2013 study found that even being next to a student who is multitasking on a computer can hurt a student’s test scores.

On the second point, you can have designated classes to teach children how to keyboard, code or use software that don’t require them to have laptops in their hands throughout the school day. And considering that various tech companies are developing artificial intelligence that, we’re meant to understand, will upend work as we know it, whatever tech skills we’re currently teaching will probably be obsolete by the time students enter the work force anyway. By then, it’ll be too late to claw back the brain space of our nation’s children that we’ve already ceded. And for what? So today’s grade schoolers can be really, really good at making PowerPoint presentations like the ones they might one day make as white-collar adults?

That’s the part that I can’t shake: We’ve let tech companies and their products set the terms of the argument about what education should be, and too many people, myself included, didn’t initially realize it. Companies never had to prove that devices or software, broadly speaking, helped students learn before those devices had wormed their way into America’s public schools. And now the onus is on parents to marshal arguments about the detriments of tech in schools.

Holly Coleman, a parent of two who lives in Kansas and is a substitute teacher in her district, describes what students are losing:

They can type quickly but struggle to write legibly. They can find info about any topic on the internet but can’t discuss that topic using recall, creativity or critical thinking. They can make a beautiful PowerPoint or Keynote in 20 minutes but can’t write a three-page paper or hand-make a poster board. Their textbooks are all online, which is great for the seams on their backpack, but tangible pages under your fingers literally connect you to the material you’re reading and learning. These kids do not know how to move through their day without a device in their hand and under their fingertips. They never even get the chance to disconnect from their tech and reconnect with one another through eye contact and conversation.

Jonathan Haidt’s new book, “The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness,” prescribes phone-free schools as a way to remedy some of the challenges facing America’s children. I agree that there’s no place for smartphones on a K-12 campus. But if you take away the phones and the kids still have near-constant internet connectivity on devices they have with them in every class, the problem won’t go away.

When Covid hit and screens became the only way for millions of kids to “attend” school, not having a personal device became an equity issue. But we’re getting to a point where the opposite may be true. According to the responses to my questionnaire, during the remote-school era, private schools seemed to rely far less on screens than public schools, and many educators said that they deliberately chose lower-tech school environments for their own children — much the same way that some tech workers intentionally send their kids to screen-free schools.

We need to reframe the entire conversation around tech in schools because it’s far from clear that we’re getting the results we want as a society and because parents are in a defensive crouch, afraid to appear anti-progress or unwilling to prepare the next generation for the future. “I feel like a baby boomer attacking like this,” said Lewis.

But the drawbacks of constant screen time in schools go beyond data privacy, job security and whether a specific app increases math performance by a standard deviation. As Lewis put it, using tech in the classroom makes students “so passive, and it requires so little agency and initiative.” She added, “I’m very concerned about the species’ ability to survive and the ability to think critically and the importance of critical thinking outside of getting a job.”

If we don’t hit pause now and try to roll back some of the excesses, we’ll be doing our children — and society — a profound disservice.

The good news is that sometimes when the stakes become clear, educators respond: In May, Dr. Prater said, “we’re going to remove access to YouTube from our district devices for students.” He added that teachers will still be able to get access to YouTube if they want to show instructional videos. The district is also rethinking its phone policy to cut down on personal device use in the classroom. “For me,” he said, “it’s all about how do you find the common-sense approach, going forward, and match that up with good old-fashioned hands-on learning?” He knows technology can cause “a great deal of harm if we’re not careful.”