The Screen That Ate Your Child’s Education

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11/16/2025 09:53

Subject: The Screen That Ate Your Child’s Education

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Anonymous

Am article in the NY Times today (gift article) but here is a summary of why one-to-one devices in schools has been an abject failure and we need to cancel this program as quickly as possible. It is unfair to our children to give them and their classmates these distracting devices that undermine education and make it much, much harder to learn. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/16/opinion/laptop-classroom-test-scores.html?unlocked_article_code=1.1k8.l-xD.xQrv50czzAPn&smid=url-share

1. Test scores started falling in 2012 (around the time iphones became widely available.) But now that we have banned phones from school, they are just being replaced by school issued Ipads and Chrome books. "Sylvie McNamara, a parent of a ninth grader in Washington, D.C., wrote in Washingtonian magazine that her son was spending every class period watching TV shows and playing games on his school-issued laptop. He often had no idea what topics his classes were covering. When she asked school administrators to restrict her son’s use of the laptop, they resisted, saying the device was integral to the curriculum."

2. School devices don't prevent kids from accessing the entire internet. In a survey of American teenagers by the nonprofit Common Sense Media, one-fourth admitted they had seen pornographic content during the school day. Not your kid watching movies and/or porn during the day? If your kid is sitting behind a child watching naked bodies having sex, it is very hard not to see it too.

3. Laptops are a huge waste of time at school. One study found that students spent nearly 40 percent of class time scrolling social media, checking email or watching videos on their laptops — anything but their classwork.

4. School laptops are distracting at home. The author's daughter watches YouTube and Disney + on her school-issued laptop because the school doesn't block these sites and there are always workarounds.

5. The school says this is a parent-responsibility issue but then undermine all attempts by parents to control how much time the kids spend on school-issued devices.

6. Studies show that laptops are really, extremely bad for learning. One study of nearly 300,000 fourth and eighth graders in the United States found that students who spent more time using digital devices in language arts classes performed worse on reading tests. A 2018 meta-analysis found that reading on paper, compared with reading digitally, led to significantly better comprehension among students, from elementary school to college. Across 24 studies, college students who took handwritten notes were 58 percent more likely to get A’s in their courses than those who typed notes on laptops. In contrast, students who typed notes were 75 percent more likely to fail the course than those who wrote them by hand.

7. In Vermont, there is a bill to allow parents to opt out of school-issued devices - although peer pressure and school pressure might make this hard to implement.

8. Districts can and should eliminate school electronic devices entirely and create completely device-free schools with rare exceptions for students with special needs.

The author concludes that, "Many adults struggle to concentrate on work when social media, shopping and movies are just a click away. Imagine how much more difficult it is for a 16-year-old, much less an 11-year-old, to focus in the same situation. Asking students to drill down on their schoolwork amid an array of digital distractions isn’t just bad for test scores; it is inimical to learning. And it is fundamentally unfair to our children."