If you were thinking that the folks behind the backlash against school technology were going to seem unhinged or radical, Schools Beyond Screens’ national director Jodi Carreon is going to be a big disappointment.
In this new interview, Carreon takes the reasonable-sounding position that technology companies have basically taken over education in our school system, selling things to educators that aren’t helpful to learning.
“In a lot of ways, our school districts have ceded local control to big tech companies,” says Carreon, who’s also the parent of a school-aged child. And for a long time, “there was just sort of this resignation that this is just the way that school is now.”
Watch the interview or read the transcript above or on YouTube.
Listen to the conversation on Spotify or Apple.
In response, Schools Beyond Screens — with chapters in 165 school districts across 33 states — is advocating for a more intentional use of technology in our school systems — meaning “evidence-based, developmentally appropriate, and transparent.”
Even now, schools are not always able to make changes that they might want to make, says Carreon, such as turning off Google AI. “A school district does not have the enterprise solution in order to turn that off. And so these products have become so deeply enmeshed in our school systems that now school districts don’t necessarily have a choice.”
“What’s happened over the past decade is that we we sort of made this assumption that access is gonna be enough to build digital skills — or that students are gonna sort of pick up these digital skills through osmosis. But what we’re seeing is that has certainly not happened. There’s a lot of students graduating who don’t know how to type. They don’t know basic file structure. So what we would love to see is a more dedicated and it’s an explicit teaching of digital skills and digital literacy, and not trying to shoehorn it into every discipline where it doesn’t necessarily belong.”
What does Carreon want? She wants personal devices prohibited in schools through high school, and YouTube turned off for students. She wants a prohibition on the use of personal one-to-one devices in transitional kindergarten through second grade, a shared device or a cart or a laboratory model from grades three through eight, along with more intentional, limited use of one-to-one devices in high school.
What about social media? “No, there’s there’s really no reason for it.”
Resources: Here’s SBS’s library of podcasts, research, and media coverage, which is kind enough to include The Grade’s edtech series. Here’s a sample petition for parents concerned about school tech.
Asked after the video conversation about concerns about device bans leading to excessive discipline and that age restrictions reduce student privacy, Carreon responded by email that “restricting device access in schools should never be used as a punishment, and it’s the job of our public school districts and government agencies to protect all of our students, regardless of age.”
Asked about situations in which districts have balked at parents’ requests for information and/or some sort of rollback, Carreon writes “our coalition is working hard to create and provide publicly accessible resources so parents feel confident in their conversations with resistant district leaders. Ultimately, parents and students have the right to feel seen and heard, and our public school systems must protect all students under their care.”
