By Guy Denton
Thursday, August 20, 2026
When Anya Meksin began searching for a kindergarten for
her child, she was excited by the wealth of options in the Los Angeles Unified
School District (LAUSD). As she toured various public elementary schools,
however, her enthusiasm was swiftly overtaken by distress.
“I was completely shocked to see, in eight of the ten
schools, the kindergartners and first-graders sitting on devices during the
school tour with headphones on in a darkened room,” Meksin tells me. Most of
them, she added, seemed to be mindlessly browsing YouTube. “I was just like,
what is this dystopia?”
Seeking other concerned parents, Meksin discovered
Schools Beyond Screens, an advocacy group founded in Los Angeles in 2025. The
organization, which began as a small collective of local parents and teachers,
now has members in more than 100 school districts throughout the United States.
In June, its activism helped encourage LAUSD to place strict limits on screen
time for children in the second grade and above, and to ban the use of screens
outright for younger pupils.
Meksin says that the group has found such success because
“parents across the country share this urgent concern of, Are my children
being harmed by excessive device use in school? ” Educational technology, or “EdTech,” has
become increasingly prevalent in American education since the turn of the
century. In 2010, more than 3 million laptops, tablets, Chromebooks, and other
tools were shipped to K–12 schools. That number had increased to nearly 14 million
by 2017. Today, 88 percent of public schools provide every student with a
laptop or tablet for online learning in class and at home. This new reality,
Meksin believes, is a “public health crisis” of our own creation.
The rise of EdTech was hastened by the Covid-19 pandemic
and its attendant lockdown measures, which forced Americans to adopt almost
entirely virtual lives. To navigate the crisis, schools embraced online
education, and devices that were already commonplace in classrooms became
ubiquitous. Even as the pandemic eased, remote learning endured as new variants
of the virus emerged. When the Covid era finally ended, schools remained
dependent on digital tools.
Many parents and teachers with whom I spoke believe that
schools rushed to adopt EdTech without implementing appropriate guardrails or
considering its potential for harm. By every standard metric of educational
success, America’s children are falling behind. Students of all ages
increasingly struggle to read proficiently or perform basic mathematical tasks.
Test scores are declining. A recent report by the Education Scorecard — a group
of education researchers at elite universities — concluded that America is
firmly in the grip of a “learning recession”: Today’s students are performing
significantly worse than students did in 2013, as Nat Malkus discusses
elsewhere in this issue.
Jared Cooney Horvath, an educator and neuroscientist
whose work focuses on the relationship between technology and learning,
recognizes that multiple factors are to blame, including the advent of
smartphones and social media and the decay of the nuclear family. He is
certain, however, that EdTech is the primary culprit.
“One of the weirdest or hardest facts that I’ve had to
contend with as a psychologist is Gen Z is cognitively less developed than
their parents,” Horvath says. “The more schools started to embrace tech, that’s
when you could almost start to watch scores and development start to drop.”
Horvath argues that the correlation became unmistakable
in 2015 as schools slowly abandoned physical textbooks, handwritten essays, and
pen-and-paper exams — a trend that accelerated during the pandemic. Digital
tests and assignments are now so pervasive that even the SAT can be taken
online. Yet screens and devices are not designed to encourage the kind of deep
concentration that learning requires.
“Anytime people are asked to do analog versus digital
when it comes to learning, 90 percent of the time they will do worse on the
digital,” Horvath tells me. When we read from screens, we are less likely to
maintain focus or grasp complex details. In physical books, words and
paragraphs are placed in fixed locations on a page, and this spatial quality
helps the brain comprehend and retain information. “Space is a huge aspect of
our memories,” Horvath said. “When you read on a screen and you’re scrolling,
there is no three-dimensional location. . . . An entire aspect of human memory
just gets dumped.”
***
Such concerns about EdTech are supported by an abundance
of research. One 2022 study, for instance, determined that “even small daily
amounts of use of digital devices” in classrooms were negatively related to
reading comprehension. A 2020 analysis of more than 900,000 fourth-graders,
meanwhile, found that school computer use was negatively associated with test
scores. Parents and researchers have been especially vocal about these issues,
and the movement to limit EdTech is taking hold among teachers. “Almost every
educator I have talked to has sounded the alarm about students’ social and
emotional development, attention spans, all of these concerns,” says Meredith
Coffey, a teacher turned senior policy associate at the Thomas B. Fordham
Institute, an education-policy think tank.
Beyond the mental effects of screens, Coffey, who
witnessed the rapid expansion of EdTech firsthand while teaching English during
the pandemic, believes that efforts to streamline learning through technology
have instead introduced new complications. Before the digital era, teachers
typically relied on physical textbooks and handouts for assigned readings and
homework. Now, however, readings are “coming through in all these different
formats. Maybe it’s a photocopied chapter from a book, maybe it’s an online
textbook, maybe it’s a reading literally pasted on lecture slides,” Coffey
tells me. “And they’re all in these different places within the learning
management system.” For students, keeping track of these sources can be
overwhelming. Coffey “talked to a school psychologist who says that this is an
added skill set that we need to teach students — how to combine that
information and synthesize it.” But “that’s something that schools have just
not thought about.”
Technology can also contribute to bullying and antisocial
behavior. Popular classroom tools such as Google Docs and Google Slides can be
used to share hurtful messages and otherwise distract from lessons. These
problems are magnified in schools with permissive smartphone policies. If
phones are accessible during the school day, students can use text messages to
harass or exclude one another. Even among close-knit friend groups, “I find it
still comes with a lot of anxiety, because things are always being reported and
recorded or pictures are being posted,” a teacher based in western Pennsylvania
tells me. “And people are judging them and they’re laughing and it’s being
passed around. . . . I saw a lot of just general anxiety about, What’s going
on? Who’s posting what? ”
Indeed, numerous studies have demonstrated that reducing screen time can
improve children’s happiness while lessening behavioral problems.
Anderson Jay, a middle school student in Maryland, has
been familiar with EdTech since kindergarten, when he learned the alphabet on a
laptop. Some of his classes employ devices infrequently, but others, such as
math, rely heavily on computers and digital learning platforms. Smartphones are
permitted in his school as long as they are kept out of sight throughout the
day. Not surprisingly, his peers often find ways to circumvent that rule. He
tells me he’s seen “countless times” when “drama” was caught on video and
shared online. “Any fights that happen are usually recorded and then posted on
Snapchat, TikTok, and it spreads really fast.” Teachers seldom discuss the
problem, and much of the bullying confined to social media escapes their
notice.
While Jay believes that a certain amount of technology is
necessary in schools, he is concerned about its effects on memory and
attention. If he could transform his school, he would make sure that teachers,
rather than devices, were responsible for guiding lessons. “Humans can relate
to humans,” he says, and teachers can offer a far richer understanding of life
than any technological program. He would also introduce a blanket smartphone
ban and strike a balance of “75/25” between traditional and digital learning
methods.
Many of the teachers and experts with whom I spoke agreed
that finding such a balance could reverse much of the damage done to K–12
education. One popular suggestion is that schools should restrict the use of
devices to computer labs. “A computer lab is great,” says the teacher in
western Pennsylvania. “You go in with a purpose. You’re learning certain
skills. You’re all in there together working on something.” Although a broad
return to face-to-face learning and physical materials would be desirable, the
teacher recognizes that a certain degree of exposure to technology, and how to
use it, is essential.
The prospect of widespread change seems increasingly
likely. This year, six states have passed legislation to restrict screen time
and digital instruction in schools. Lawmakers across the country are attempting
to follow suit. A groundswell of activism among concerned parents and teachers
has helped influence these policies, and the movement for reform is gaining
momentum. Advocacy groups are attracting members at an impressive pace, and
their leaders are optimistic that school districts will take notice. “We have
the science and the research on our side,” says Kristen Beddard, co-leader of
PA Unplugged, a statewide coalition of parents, educators, and medical
professionals. And though change may come only gradually, day by day the case
for reform grows stronger.
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