The Ed-Tech Fight I Watched Unfold At My Kid’s School Last Week
I went to my third grader’s parent-teacher conference last Tuesday, got there 10 minutes early because I cut out of work early to beat the after-work traffic, ended up hovering in the hallway outside the classroom while the previous parent wrapped up. The whole hallway still smells like that citrus floor wax they use every fall and the buttered popcorn the 5th grade sold for a field trip fundraiser that afternoon. I didn’t expect to walk straight into a yelling match about banning all ed-tech from the building by the time my own conference was done.
My meeting was fine, same as always—my kid talks too much during group work, he’s ahead in reading, needs to stop doodling on his desk. I was grabbing my coat off the back of the plastic chair when I saw a crowd of about 8 or 9 parents clustered by the principal’s open door, all talking over each other. I knew one of the moms from our playground carpool, so I wandered over to see what the fuss was about.
The complaints were all specific, and I nodded along to most of them. A dad leading the charge said his 10 year old came home with a headache every single night for two weeks, and his eye doctor said it was from all the screen time he’s getting at school. Another mom pulled out a crumpled, blurry worksheet out of her tote, said when the district’s ed-tech system went down for three days last month, this is what all the kids got—teacher projected the lesson on the board and copied handouts that were impossible to read. She said her son forgot his tablet at home once last month, and the teacher didn’t keep any extra paper copies on hand, so he just sat around all day feeling stupid and got a zero for his work. Another mom brought up data privacy, said no one can tell her exactly what companies are doing with all the kids’ information they collect through these apps, and that gave me a chill too—last week my son showed me that his math app pops up little ads for kid’s dinosaur subscription boxes mid-lesson. Why is that even there?
Then this awkward little pause happened. Ms. Lopez, the art teacher, was carrying a stack of watercolor sketchbooks down the hall, stopped to listen for a minute, and said, “Y’all know we do a whole digital art unit every spring? Half the kids won’t even touch physical canvas anymore because they can experiment and undo mistakes without wasting 10 sheets of expensive paper. If you ban all ed-tech, that whole unit just goes away.” The dad leading the charge just crossed his arms and huffed, said “Well art can go back to how it used to be, that’s the whole point” and Ms. Lopez just raised her eyebrows and kept walking. No one said anything for 10 whole seconds after that, just shifted their feet and looked at their phones. The principal came out to calm everyone down, leaned back against the old cracked smart board by the office, accidentally hit the screen, and it popped up her screensaver—a photo of her golden retriever covered in mud at the lake. Everyone snort laughed, she fumbled to turn it off bright red, and the whole tension deflated a little, but no one changed their mind.
That night I went over to my sister’s place for taco dinner, and she teaches 7th grade math at the middle school 10 minutes away. When I told her about the meeting, she put down her taco and just went off, said a full ban is the most insane idea she’s ever heard, and I couldn’t even argue with most of what she said.
She has 29 kids in her first period class, four of them with formal learning accommodations. One kid has dyslexia so bad he can’t read a physical textbook faster than a page every 10 minutes, but the text-to-speech tool on his tablet lets him keep up with the whole class. Before they had that ed-tech tool, she had to spend two extra hours every single night adapting every lesson just for him, and even then, most kids that far behind never caught up. She also showed me once how those quick 3-question exit tickets work—she gets an instant read on how many kids got the day’s lesson, and if half of them missed the slope formula, she can re-teach it the next morning, instead of waiting three weeks until the test to find out half the class failed. Before ed-tech, she’d grade tests over the weekend, realize everyone was lost, and by then they’d already moved on to the next unit. That’s a huge difference for the kids.
She also said what no one was talking about at the parent meeting: all the admin work is already tied to the ed-tech system. If they ban it from classrooms, she still has to enter attendance and grades into the district’s computer. She’ll just have to do everything twice—take attendance on paper, then type it in. Grade papers on paper, then input every score into the computer. That’s an extra hour of work every single night, on top of the grading and lesson planning she already does until 9pm most nights. She doesn’t have an extra hour. She’s already exhausted.
I get both sides, though. Last month my son had strep throat and had to stay home for a week, and he could log into the classroom from the couch, watch the lessons, turn in his work, and didn’t fall behind at all. That was a lifesaver, I didn’t have to take a whole week off work to catch him up later. But last week he came home rubbing his wrist and complaining it hurt, and I checked his daily schedule—he had four straight hours of tablet time that day, even the reward for good behavior that week was a 20 minute app game during recess. That’s too much. No wonder parents are fed up.
The school board is voting on the full ban next month, and there’s a public comment night next week. I still don’t know what I’m going to say if I go. Right now it’s just all or nothing: parents want every bit of it gone, teachers are terrified of losing the tools that actually help their kids learn. No one’s talking about just cutting the garbage—ban the silly ad-ridden apps, limit screen time to two hours a day, keep the accessibility tools that kids with disabilities rely on, keep the quick assessment tools that help teachers adjust. But I don’t know if anyone’s listening right now. I pulled a crumpled paper math worksheet out of my son’s backpack this morning, he wrote his name all crooked at the top, and I just thought, why does this have to be a fight to the death? No one’s winning here. The kids just get shifted around while all the adults argue. I don’t have a neat little ending for this. I’m just going to show up next week, I guess, and say that much.
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