by Susan Van Gelder

The April 21 unanimous vote by the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) Board on a resolution to implement major limits on educational technology (Ed-Tech) in L.A. public schools is a major achievement, testifying to the power of organized parents and educators to demand quality education. Besides limiting screen times for each grade, younger students’ access to devices will be prohibited during lunch and recess.

The LAUSD must review all technology contracts, a signal that parents, educators and students are dismayed by the feeding frenzy of companies selling technology to schools. LAUSD Board Member Nick Melvoin, who sponsored the resolution, emphasized the urgency of contract oversight, as some popular companies now include AI tools in their “products” for student use.

In 2025 Los Angeles parents had formed Schools Beyond Screens which fought for the changes under the slogan “Safe and Intentional Educational Tech.” There are now chapters across the country, joining, along with Screen Time Action Network, coalitions like Fairplay for Kids.

IMPORTANCE OF PARENT AND STUDENT ACTIVISM

Parent and student activism is not new—or easy. In 2016, seven Detroit Public School students sued the State of Michigan for failure to teach them to read. The federal case, Gary B. v. Whitmer, was settled in 2020 for $94.4 million. But fund release was delayed until 2024 while Republicans controlled the Michigan legislature.

In the “right to read” lawsuit, the high school plaintiffs described conditions under state emergency managers since 2009: poor building conditions; a shortage of textbooks and other learning materials; poorly qualified teachers; classes of 50 or more; inadequate education for English language learners; mold, rodents and cockroaches in classrooms. Though the settlement was nowhere near enough for the billion-plus necessary building repairs, the district hired reading specialists to support struggling students.

In a New York Times article, Natasha Singer described nationwide parent and educator efforts since COVID-19 to limit schoolwork on screens and return to “old-school” methods. Meanwhile, standardized test scores on math and reading continue to plummet. Beyond the narrow test measures, observations of learning outcomes and behaviors tell the same story: attention spans have shrunk, and reading books is a lost art.

Reader comments on the article reveal fear and anger at the explosion of commodified education:

Middle schoolers are constantly hacking whatever firewalls exist. Even if you block YouTube and specific games, there are third party apps that allow them to play games outside of the browser. It doesn’t look like schools have any ability to block these. At the very least it is a game of Whack-A-Mole. I also hear that it is extremely common for kids to use AI to do their homework for them. Education is suffering but what’s even worse is that we may be raising a generation of kids who are comfortable with lying and cheating. Because if everyone is doing it, they don’t see it as a problem.

Kids can and will read even such seemingly unapproachable things like The Scarlet Letter, Richard III, and yes, even poetry. We have sold them short with the allure of technology as some panacea for the challenges of teaching and this has been in no small part due to the lack of respect our society has for teachers.

There are critically important neurological differences between typing/tapping on a screen versus handwriting on paper and scrolling on a screen to read versus looking at print on paper and turning pages. We have been depriving entire generations of elementary aged children the opportunity to appropriately develop foundational skills by treating classrooms like workplaces or airport lounges.

At four my child explained exactly what they were doing and why. They even understood the consequence but didn’t care….The fatal flaw I found with the program was understanding my child’s motivation. My child’s top goals were keeping it easy and moving through it quickly so they could go do something else. Nothing else other than get done and gone motivated them. The result was even when they could easily do the math (which I made them do because I sat next to them) they found tapping and guessing faster (it was and they proved it to me). This achieved two things. It ensured the questions stayed easy AND it allowed them to finish faster. They weren’t learning anything from this other than improving their tapping (speed and accuracy) skills.

THE FIGHT OVER THE FUTURE OF EDUCATION

For the past 30 years educators have believed that computers were the future and scrambled to become familiar with fast-evolving technology, for how and what to teach. AI changes the model even more drastically than did the Internet. Corporations have been generating huge profits since the days of selling ever-newer textbooks as their content was revised under pressure from hard-fought freedom struggles. 

The Trump Administration’s drive to dismantle the Department of Education, as a pathway to privatizing schools, gives a giant boost to the commodification of U.S. education. Corporations are slated to own more and more schools along with owning their content, the curriculum. Project 2025 projects model schools where AI replaces the teacher, and (presumably non-certified, non-union) “coaches” assist—a complete inversion of necessary human relationships.

Support for pausing the use of AI, demanding safe firewalls on data collection, respecting educators’ experience with the harm from AI and robust research to collect and interpret data on students’ experience and outcomes, well beyond standard test scores, is urgently needed. Parents, teachers and especially teachers’ unions must be in the forefront of determining quality education.