The Ed-Tech Fight At My School That No One Is Winning
Last night’s PTA meeting got so heated I spent the last 40 minutes hiding by the snack table, picking at stale chocolate chip cookies and brushing crumbs off my teacher lanyard. I’m a 7th grade math teacher on this campus, and I also have a 3rd grader in the elementary wing, so I’m technically on both sides of the petition going around. The petition that wants all ed-tech—Chromebooks, interactive learning apps, Zoom lectures, everything—banned from K-8 classrooms. Parents have gathered 200 signatures strong, and the district’s teacher leadership just put out a statement saying a full ban is an insane idea. And I’m over here by the cookies, agreeing with parts of both, and too tired to yell at anyone.
I get why parents are furious. Let me say that first. Last week I got an email from a mom whose son is in my first period. She attached a screenshot of his screen time report: 5 and a half hours of Chromebook use during a regular school day, not counting what he does at home for homework. Her son has ADHD, and she said he’s up until 11 most nights because the blue light wires him, and he’s figured out how to open a new tab to play Roblox during independent work so fast I never catch it. That’s not made up, that’s my classroom. I do catch it sometimes, but with 32 kids in a room, you can’t stare at every screen every second. Last month a parent pulled me aside after pickup to show me a pop-up ad for a weight loss pill that popped up when her 5th grader was doing a reading assignment on a supposed “educational” website. My own son came home last week complaining his head hurt after 2 hours of mandatory iReady testing, and when I took his glasses they were so smudged with fingerprints I could barely see through the lenses. I’ve yelled at him a dozen times for sneaking TikTok on his school Chromebook after he’s supposed to be done with homework. If I wasn’t on the staff here, I’d probably be signing that petition too.
But the other teachers are right when they say a full out ban is insane. Not because we love tech, not because we’re getting kickbacks from Google or whatever the parent rumor mill says. Because we don’t have the money to do things the old way anymore. Our district only buys one math textbook per student, and they have to leave it in the classroom. If we didn’t have Google Classroom, how do kids get their homework assignment when they forget to write it down? How do the kids who can’t afford a tutor get access to extra practice problems? Last semester, one of my top students had to miss three weeks of school for cancer treatment. If I couldn’t have him join my class via Zoom and turn in assignments through Canvas, he would’ve had to repeat the whole grade. We don’t have enough staff to print and send home three weeks of custom packets for every kid who gets sick. The copy room is out of paper by 10 AM most days, for God’s sake. I used that adaptive quiz app last week that tells me instantly which kids still don’t get how to calculate slope. I was able to pull four kids into a small group before the end of class and re-teach it, instead of waiting three days to grade all their exit tickets and find out half the class missed it. That’s not some fancy corporate gimmick, that’s me being able to help kids who are falling behind before it’s too late.
I got caught in the middle after the meeting, it was so awkward. One of the lead petition organizers, Sarah, came over to me and asked why I hadn’t signed. I mumbled that I work here, it’s complicated, and she gave me this cold little smile and said “I thought you cared about kids, not the district’s money.” Then five minutes later, the district tech coordinator pulled me aside and said I needed to be careful about entertaining “parent misinformation” because if the ban passes, our building loses a big tech grant that pays for our new art supplies and the after-school program. I just nodded and went to my car and ate a bad gas station burrito on the drive home because I was too keyed up to cook.
The thing no one is saying out loud is that most teachers don’t love all this ed-tech any more than parents do. Last month our whole building lost Wi-Fi for three hours mid-morning. I had a whole day of lessons planned on the Chromebooks, and I ended up scribbling problems on the whiteboard for 45 minutes while half my kids messed around because they’re so used to screens they don’t know what to do with just a piece of paper for that long. It was a mess. I agree with parents that kids don’t get enough pen and paper practice anymore—half my 7th graders can’t read the cursive I write on the board, can’t write more than three sentences without typos because they rely on spell check. That’s a real problem.
But a full ban? It’s not that simple. We don’t have the budget to go back. I don’t have the time to grade 32 papers by hand every night when the app can grade them in 2 minutes and give me data on who needs help. There’s no perfect answer here. This morning I walked my son to class, and he was swinging his neon dinosaur Chromebook case and said “I wish we could do more coloring and less iReady every day.” I told him I got that, I really did. Then this afternoon, one of my struggling students got 8 out of 10 on his adaptive quiz, the first time he’s ever passed a math quiz all semester, and he ran over to show me, grinning so wide his dimples showed. That quiz was on the Chromebook. That win wouldn’t have happened the way it did if we didn’t have the program that meets him where he is instead of making him do the same work as the kids who are way ahead.
I don’t have a clean conclusion here. I don’t think banning all ed-tech is the answer, but I also don’t think calling parents crazy for wanting less screen time is okay either. Everyone’s yelling about all or nothing, and no one’s asking the people in the classroom every day what we actually need: just a little bit of both, and more money for more staff so we can actually monitor screens when we use them, and enough paper and textbooks for when the Wi-Fi dies. But no one’s asking me that. I’m just the lady hiding by the cookie table, agreeing with both sides, and tired of the fight. (1128 words)
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