The Ed-Tech Ban Fight At My Kid’s School Got Me Thinking No One’s Actually Listening
I went to my first PTA meeting of the year last Tuesday, and I left with a crumb of chocolate chip cookie on my jeans, a lukewarm styrofoam cup of lemonade I forgot to throw away, and a really sharp headache. The whole meeting was just about one thing: a group of parents pushing to ban all ed-tech from our elementary school, K through 5.
The lead organizer was Sarah, who lives two houses down from me, her oldest is in second grade. She brought folded printouts of some study about screen time shrinking kids’ attention spans, talked about how her kid comes home with a headache every other day from staring at the tablet all morning, said he’d rather play the stupid reward games on his math app than read the actual picture books they have on his shelf. Another mom stood up and said her 7 year old got a pop-up ad for a violent shooting game in the middle of a reading quiz last month, because the free app the school uses doesn’t pay for good ad blockers. I nodded along to that one, actually. Just last week my 3rd grader, Milo, had to do a 10 question social studies quiz on this thing Quizlet, and I sat next to him while three different ads for toy robots popped up, one with that loud sudden music that made us both jump. Half the time I can’t remember his login info, the app crashes on my beat up old iPhone, and we end up fighting for 20 minutes over homework that was supposed to take 10. I’ve definitely thought “what’s the point of all this” more than once. I get where the parents are coming from, I really do.
Before the open mic ended, though, Ms. Lopez, who teaches 4th grade and has been at the school for 18 years, stood up, and her face was all pink, like she was trying not to yell. She said banning all ed-tech entirely is an insane idea, full stop. Then she talked about Javi, the kid in her class with severe dyslexia. Before the school got the text-to-speech tools two years ago, Javi had to pull out of regular class for an hour every day to do one-on-one reading, and he told Ms. Lopez he felt stupid, like he wasn’t really part of the class. Now he can just pull up any reading assignment on his tablet, have it read to him, answer the questions right there, and stay with his peers. His reading scores went up 30% in a year. She said that if you take ed-tech away, you take that away from him, and from a dozen other kids in the school with learning differences. Then the special ed teacher, Ms. Henderson, spoke up, and her voice was all wobbly. She talked about Leo, the nonverbal 1st grader who uses an ed-tech app to type out what he wants to say, so he can participate in circle time, answer questions, even tell his mom what he had for lunch when she picks him up. If we ban all ed-tech, what’s Leo supposed to do? Sit there quiet all day?
I volunteer in Milo’s class once a week, so I get to see all of this up close, not just the hot takes at the PTA meeting. Last month I was helping with reading rotations, and we had that whole 20 minute Wi-Fi outage that took down every device in the room. There was a little girl, Mia, who was 3 points away from unlocking a silly virtual unicorn sticker on her phonics app, and she burst into tears because all her progress was gone. Ms. Riley, the teacher, spent 15 minutes rebooting tablets and trying to get the system back up, and that’s 15 minutes she could have spent sitting with the three kids who were stuck on vowel teams, that I couldn’t help because I was already busy with another group. So I’ve seen the waste, the chaos, the way it can derail a whole lesson if something goes wrong. I’ve also seen teachers just use it as a glorified babysitter when they need to get something done—last semester when the art teacher was out sick, the sub just put on a half hour “educational” video on the tablets and sat at the desk scrolling on her phone, half the kids weren’t even watching, they were clicking around to other apps behind her back.
But I also saw that thing with Leo a couple weeks ago, at the fall festival. He was playing the bean bag toss, got three in the hole, and he held up his little tablet to show his grandma, typed out “I WON” in big letters, and she cried right there by the cotton candy stand. That’s not some fancy corporate tool that doesn’t help anyone. That’s a kid getting to share a win with his grandma. That matters.
I think the problem is everyone’s running to extremes right now. The parents pushing the ban don’t talk about the kids that actually need this stuff. They just see their own kid’s eye strain and their own homework hassle, which is totally valid, but they’re throwing the baby out with the bath water. Banning all of it hurts the kids who have the least, the kids who need the accessibility tools most. On the other side, the teachers are so defensive that they don’t admit that half the ed-tech the district forced on the school is useless garbage. The district got a great grant deal on some math program last year that all the kids hate, that doesn’t actually teach them anything, it just gives them points for clicking the right answer. No one talks about just cutting the junk, limiting screen time to only when it actually helps, keeping the accessibility tools and the auto-grading that cuts down a teacher’s endless after-hours work.
Teachers are already working 12 hour days as it is. If you take away all the ed-tech that cuts down their grading time, they’re just going to have even less time for the kids that need extra help after class. That’s a practical thing no one’s really talking about.
The school board’s voting on this next month, and I still don’t know what I’m going to say when they open public comment. I get why parents are fed up enough to want it all gone. I get why teachers say banning all of it is insane. I just wish everyone would stop yelling long enough to look at the actual kids in the actual building, not the stats or the viral hot takes. I left the meeting that night, threw the lemonade cup out in the driveway, wiped the cookie crumbs off my jeans, and I still don’t have a neat little answer. That’s just how it is, I guess. No one’s right, no one’s completely wrong, and nobody’s really listening right now.
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