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How Tech Companies Hooked Kids in School on Social Media

By dianeravitch
June 5, 2026 //
2

The New York Times broke a story about how tech companies have quietly pushed kids to be dependent on social media. The link takes you to a gift article, which you can open and read for free.

The article was written by Jennifer Valentino-DeVries, an investigative reporter who covers technology.

The Times opened the article with this overview: Internal documents show how tech giants grabbed children’s attention throughout the day, a strategy that schools say has undermined education.

The article begins:

Snapchat sent phone alerts to adolescents during school hours, urging them to share what was going on in their classrooms.

Meta paid “teen ambassadors” to promote Instagram and hand out swag to their friends at school.

TikTok gave the National PTA millions of dollars, in part to throw school events about online safety and provide favorable comments to journalists.

Again and again, the world’s leading social media companies have targeted students, even as complaints have mounted that they are hurting teenagers’ mental health and academic performance, according to a New York Times review of internal documents that lay bare for the first time these tactics to hook young users.

The documents emerged from lawsuits filed by more than 1,400 school districts against Meta, Snap, TikTok and YouTube amid a rising backlash against social media, with parent movements and best-selling books blaming the platforms for loneliness, bullying, eating disorders and sexual exploitation.

The outcry, long focused on social media’s harm to mental health, has now shifted to its upending of the classroom. Many school districts are banning smartphones, and some are re-evaluating their reliance on devices like Chromebooks, the inexpensive laptops made by YouTube’s parent company, Google.

The companies’ push to keep children glued to their screens has overshadowed concerns from parents, teachers and even their own trust and safety teams about interfering with school, according to the documents and interviews with dozens of parents, teachers and former tech company employees.

TikTok’s leaders decided not to disable notifications during school hours, rejecting a change that its safety teams had pushed for years. A Snapchat strategy document referred to classroom phone use as “under the desk” time. Google managers knew YouTube was recommending videos to students during the school day that had nothing to do with their lessons.

The school districts contend that the apps’ addictive designs made teachers’ jobs more difficult. “It is so constantly tempting to these kids to be on a platform that promises endless, infinite, varied entertainment rather than actually focusing on what they should be at school to do,” said Previn Warren, one of the lead lawyers for the schools.

The companies argue that the Covid pandemic and other factors have harmed adolescents’ mental health, and that parents, schools and cellphone makers bear responsibility for children’s phone habits. They also say that they have made their platforms safer with parental-control features and account restrictions for minors.

All four companies recently settled with Breathitt County Schools, a small district in rural Kentucky that served as a test case for the litigation nationwide. The district, which has about 1,500 students, had sought $3 million in damages and about $60 million that it had planned to put toward a long-term education and mental health plan. The companies agreed to pay Breathitt $27 million: $9 million from Meta, $8 million each from Snap and TikTok and $2 million from Google, according to documents released on Friday and first reported by Bloomberg.

While it’s hard to say how the ongoing litigation might ultimately affect classrooms, it poses a substantial financial risk to the companies, possibly costing billions of dollars, said Alexandra Lahav, a civil litigation professor at Cornell Law School. She noted that the companies were also facing a barrage of claims from families and state attorneys general.

Message to Big Tech: Leave our kids alone!

Categories Ethics, Evil, For-Profit, Students, Technology

Timothy Snyder on “Superpower Suicide”

By dianeravitch
June 3, 2026 //
2

Timothy Snyder is an expert on European history. He taught for many years at Yale University and held a prestigious chair in European history. In 2025, he accepted a chair at the University of Toronto. His Substack blog is titled “Thinking About…” This important essay appeared in May 9. Nothing Snyder says here has changed.

He wrote:

The United States has just spent billions of dollars to lose a war that enriches its oligarchs, impoverishes the citizenry, sabotages its alliances, and strengthens its enemies. As justification for the self-destructive mindlessness, the White House gestures towards Jesus and genocide.

On April 20th I was asked to speak in New York about ethics and power. My thinking, which I expressed in a conversation at the Council on Foreign Relations, on this little video, and in the media, was that our utterly unethical war was also utterly self-destructive. The war, a catastrophe in itself, suggests the guiding principle of Trump foreign policy: superpower suicide. The term was since come into more general use, and readers have been asking me to spell it out.

Empires have risen and failed before, but to my knowledge no state has ever chosen to kill its own power, and succeeded with such rapidity.

It is hard to see this clearly. Even as we oppose individual Trump adventures, we hope that in some way they are based on some understanding of the national interest. They are not. To get the perspective we need to see the nature of this anti-strategic self-slaughter, it will help to consider thirteen traditional bases of state power.

1. Statehood. A superpower must, at a minimum, be a modern state. This means that it must be an arrangement that includes, via law and other institutions, a larger body of citizens within a common endeavor. There is no sign that the Trump administration regards the United States of America as a state. It treats the existence of the United States as a commercial opportunity for a select few people, American and otherwise.

2. National interest. Another minimal requirement of superpower would be a sense of why that power must be used. The Trump administration exhibits no interest in the good of the people. Theorists of international relations have differed as to how leaders understand national interests; we are intellectually unprepared, however, for a situation in which the leader simply does not care about either the state or the nation.

3. Succession. Again, for a state to maintain itself as a superpower, it must maintain itself over time. The basic requirement of such continuity is a succession principle, a means by which authority is transferred from some people to other people while institutions continue to function. In the United States, democracy enables succession. Historically, there are means of succession, for example by dynasty (or dynastic adoption, as in second-century Rome) or by the decision of a politburo, as in China or the USSR (in the US this would be a capitalist politburo, the sort of oligarchical coven that got us JD Vance). Getting from democracy to such different arrangements would end the American republic. Trump aspires to stay in power indefinitely, and says so. By putting the vote in question, he puts America in question, and thus American power.

4. Elites. For states to thrive and to accumulate and maintain power, the right people have to be in charge. There is no perfect means to achieve this, and there is the inevitable tension, as the Roman Stoics and others have noted, between the skills needed to rise to the top and those suited to serving some general interest. And those who rise to a position of authority will try to pass it on to their children; the Roman Catholic Church went to the extreme of insisting on priestly celibacy to block this tendency. Historically, powerful states seek ways to enable qualified people to serve in positions of authority, regardless of birth. Ancient China had an examination system. Napoleon established the principle of merit in both civilian and military life. The United States had a civil service that was the envy of the world as well as a military that was its most meritocratic institution. The Trump administration has chosen to disable the civil service and to purge the military command of people of quality. This process has been carried out by people who are themselves wildly unqualified to hold any sort of office, let along cabinet positions. To see where we are, we must understand that people such as Tulsi Gabbard, Kash Patel, and Pete Hegseth, about whom one might raise other objections, had no business accepting their nominations, since they lack any qualifications. The fact that such people could be considered, let alone appointed, is a marker of superpower suicide.

5. Education. In a deeper sense, a superpower must have a mechanism to refresh its society, and thus its politics and administration, by preparing its population to understand the challenges of the world. This administration has done the contrary. University students are forbidden to gather and to speak their minds; university administrations are threatened with retaliation if they allow their faculty to teach freely; libraries around the country, including in military academies, are purged of useful books; public education generally is replaced with scams whereby tax money is transferred from the poorer to the richer while schools themselves are starved; an unregulated internet is allowed and indeed encouraged to transform the public sphere into a realm of emotions and recriminations.

6. Science. The rise of great powers often involves an alliance between politics and science. The ancient Mesopotamians were astronomers whose systems of describing the heavens still mark our ways of thought; so were the Mayans. The Romans managed to operationalize Greek science to build, defend, and cure. The Renaissance was, by no coincidence, also the age of exploration. Modern imperial powers built state institutions to fund science and attract scientists; the United States from the 1940s was the outstanding example of this trend, and science (often as practiced by immigrants) was the most important basis of American superpower. Current American policy is to fund science on the basis of primitive ideological taboos, and to discourage young scientists from immigrating to the United States. Senior scientists are also leaving; a colleague in a central position in US science just told me that he is leaving the country in part because the overall environment is better in other places. It is also US policy to cast doubt on basic scientific observations, such as that of human-caused climate change.

7. Energy. Human groups that pioneer new forms of energy technology rise; those that do not fall. This might be the most profound truth of our history; a magnificent forthcoming bookdemonstrates the significance of energy transitions at the most profound level, that of the history of life on earth itself. Humans who mastered fire could consume more energy themselves. Humans who domesticated dogs could use their energy to hunt mammoths. Humans who domesticated plants could turn solar energy to their own purposes. Humans who understood weather and climate could turn wind energy to the purpose of exploration and conquest, as did the Vikings. The United States was established on the cusp of a transition to hydrocarbon energy: coal, oil, natural gas. These forms of energy are now becoming obsolete, not only in ecological but also in economic terms. And yet this administration has chosen to cancel America’s energy transition and subsidize technologies that have no future. This is superpower suicide in perhaps the most basic form. And nothing could benefit America’s chief rival, China, more than this choice.

8. Technology. It requires little effort to associate technology with the rise of great powers. Military achievement is associated intimately with innovation; from the spur to the machine gun, the causal relationship is not really contestable. While the United States spends gigantic amounts of money on weaponry, the Trump administration has chosen to focus on weapons from the past rather than of the future. Trump’s idea is battleships named after himself based on what he remembers of a movie. The plans for “Trump-class” battleships are a mixture of the fictional and the vulnerable, which does reflect the man. The notion is to invest untold amounts of money into a kind of weapon has been understood to be obsolete since 1943, and which if somehow built would be highly vulnerable to weapons other countries now have. This strategic atavism draws the United States away from national security in its most basic sense. The shape of modern warfare is revealed by the high-tech war between Russia and Ukraine, especially in Ukraine’s successful self-defense. The Trump administration chose to ignore the lessons of that war and to demean and defund America’s Ukrainian ally, to the detriment of American interests and American warfighting.

9. Diplomacy. This art, celebrated by great powers, has been trashed by the United States. It cannot be practiced without understanding other countries, as the most focused American diplomats have stressed (for example, Henry Kissinger, who can hardly be excused of softheartedness). It has rested, in the American and other cases, on the deliberate construction of a diplomatic corps where people train in languages and trade in knowledge. Under the Trump administration, the foreign service has been trashed. The principle of diplomacy, such as it is, is that other countries will do what we want because we are big and bad. This has not worked. The bizarre notion that the president can himself “make deals” is the sign of a religious cult; like most cults, its activity is the generation of ever more creative excuses for the lack of performance. There is no evidence that Trump knows how to negotiate, and abundant evidence that he does not: for example, defeat in trade wars with China; personal vulnerability to the preferences of Russian leaders, and the disaster of Iranian nuclear enrichment, of which Trump himself is the chief sponsor. In practice, critical negotiations, with Iran and elsewhere, have been put in the hands of two people, Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, with close personal relationships with the president and obvious economic stakes in the relevant conflicts. The diplomacy of the Huns was far more sophisticated than this. It is hard to overstate how primitive the current American approach is, and how much joy it brings to America’s enemies.

10. Alliances. Great powers have allies. To be sure, they might change these alliances rapidly for reasons of interest, as the East Roman (Byzantine) Empire famously did. The whole history of the Roman Empire, for that matter, was one of active diplomacy with neighboring barbarians (as the Romans saw matters); archaeology bears witness to the arrangements that were made. The history of modern European empires was also one considered alliances, as the architects of American superpower understood. Under the Trump administration, useful allies are mocked and marginalized for no reason other than personal whimsy and a sense of grievance. Because there is no sense of state or national interest, there can be no understanding that alliances are of service. Trump feels annoyed because he is losing a war and removes US troops from Germany; those troops are there to enable the United States to win wars. I personally cannot think of any other example in which the leaders of a great power behaved in this way, presumably because these kinds of choices are inconsistent with the maintenance of power. The United States now seems to be treating as “allies” middle eastern countries that have nothing to offer except their own interests in the use of American armed forces in their own region, permanent engagement in the disastrous politics of oil, and financial opportunities for people personally close to Trump.

11. The international system. Postwar America did something far more impressive than build a system of alliances; it essentially created a set of laws, rules, and norms that allowed American power to maintain itself and to expand. The European Union and NATO, so abused by the Trump people today, were indirect and direct results of American policies intelligently designed to maximize American trade and security interests. But the achievement was far broader than that, and indeed historically unprecedented: the construction of laws and conventions that kept one country in the center of the world. Today, the Trump people make themselves at the World Economic Forum, the Munich Security Conference and similar gatherings and complaining that the rules are against them — the exact opposite was the case, because America made the rules. In deliberately destroying its own international system, this American government is improving the position of its rivals China and Russia, who have been calling for exactly this to happen, but who lacked the ability to make it happen.

12. The idea of victory. A superpower wins in confrontations, at least some of the time. This administration loses again and again, and is seen to lose by others. Trump announced that his main weapon of influence would be tariffs, but then lost his trade war with China, leaving Beijing more powerful and more emboldened. The Russo-Ukrainian war is a curious case. It would serve the interests of the United States in prosperity and stability for Ukraine to win; but under Trump the United States has switched its policy to one of support for Ukraine to support for Russia. So it has lost in that way. But since the United States has made that pivot, Ukraine has performed ever better in the war, and Russia has performed worse. And so the United States, amazingly, has managed to be the loser in the same war a double sense: by failing to see its own interests, and then by failing to fail. The Iranian war is an obvious strategic defeat in every traditional sense; insofar as there were any American objectives, they were not achieved. Trump’s policies have left Iran with more enriched uranium in the hands of a more radical regime which holds new sources of economic power in the world. In the current situation, in which military options have been self-humiliatingly exhausted, the useful instruments would be those that involved communicating with the Iranian people or influencing Iranian society. Those institutions existed until very recently; they were willfully demolished, to great fanfare, in early 2026.

The United States is now governed by people who celebrate defeat in symbolic terms characteristic of states in disastrous decline. Consider Defense Secretary Hegseth’s description of the rescue of a US pilot as the resurrection of Jesus. The screaming blasphemy of this might distract us from its strategic helplessness. Christological images of this sort are used as propaganda to transform defeat in the real world into victory in some imaginary one. The US lost the war in Iran. Among other things it was not able to sustain an air campaign. The downing of a US fighter meant than an individual mission failed. It is happy news, of course, that the pilot survived. But the notion that this was a “literal miracle,” as Hegseth claimed, brings the United States, sadly, into the tradition of losers who use Jesus to claim to be winners. An historical example of this was Polish Romanticism, with its idea that the collapse of a republic (chiefly due to wealth inequality) made of Poland the “Christ of Nations.” Donald Trump’s own self-deification has to be seen in similar terms: a president who could assert power in this world would not have to claim that his real authority comes from another one. His fantasies of the total destruction of Iranian civilization are part of an apocalyptic panorama that is inconsistent with decent politics.

13. Finances. Though not the most interesting historical subject, budget disaster stands behind many of the most notable collapses of state power, ancient and modern. Under Trump our national debt now approaches $40 trillion. National debt is higher than GDP of the country for the first time since the end of the Second World War. That is a notable point of comparison: it is normal to run big deficits when facing the challenge of the scale of a world war. We are running huge deficits for an entirely different reason: because we decline to tax wealthy individuals and corporations. That is not an approach that is consistent with fighting and winning wars, nor with maintaining the social services that allow a modern society to function. More profoundly: it reflects an approach to politics — government as customer service to the very wealthy — that leads us from power to ethics.

The war can lead us to a diagnosis of superpower suicide. Wars cannot be won by people who have no idea what they are doing, because they have no frame of reference (such as the nation or the state) beyond their own feelings. They cannot be fought well when the wrong people are making the daily decisions and the wrong weapons are being deployed. They cannot be reasonably brought to an end when there is no practice of diplomacy and no notion of the value of alliances and no concern about corruption.

But even a strict focus on power will lead us back to justice. But just as the war is only a symptom of superpower suicide, so superpower suicide is only a symptom of a still deeper condition, the one that must be addressed.

Even if all we cared about were American power, we would have to ask ourselves how to undo the distortions of democracy and the drastic inequalities of that enabled world-historical levels of strategic buffoonery. After a year of Trump, we face a situation where reform and repair are not the relevant categories. And, in a certain sense, this is useful. The fact that we reached this point, the fact that just a year of Trump could bring superpower suicide, shows us that the prior status quo was unsustainable.

The systems that made the United States a superpower cannot be rebuilt as they were, nor should they be: they involved structural injustices that made the present attempt at self-annihilation possible. From where we stand now there are two ways forward: one is the self-induced downfall of the American republic; the other is to reconsider American ideals and to restructure American politics so as to bring the people greater power over a more just future.

*****

PS. If you would like to help Ukrainians defend themselves from Russia’s criminal war of aggression, please consider contributing to the Sky Defense campaign. For worse but also for better, as the Ukrainians have shown us, this is a time when civil society campaigns can contribute to general security.

Categories Accountability, Censorship, Corruption, Cruelty, Democracy, Elections, Environment, Ethics, Evil, Extremism, Failure, Fraud, Freedom, Freedom of Speech, Freedom of the Press, International, Lies, Science, Stupid, Technology, Trump, Tyranny

Paul Waldman: Go Ahead, Ridicule the Oligarchs!

By dianeravitch
May 29, 2026 //
5

Paul Waldman was a top journalist at The Washington Post who left after Post publisher Jeff Bezos changed the newspaper’s political orientation and initiated staff cuts. Waldman now writes a blog called “The Cross Section,” where this post appeared.

Waldman writes:

Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt is not just an incredibly rich guy, with a net worth standing at a tidy $43.6 billion. He also fancies himself a thought leader, eager to share his insights on the critical challenges of our age. In particular, he worries about the negative effects of Americans’ skepticism about artificial intelligence. As he wrote in a recent New York Times op-ed, “It’s paramount that more people outside Silicon Valley feel the beneficial impact of A.I. on their lives.”

So when he was invited to give the commencement address at the University of Arizona this year, he probably thought this was a great opportunity to explain to young people how important it is for them to be ready to navigate this brave new world, in which nothing they do will be untouched by the technological revolution that has already begun. “That really made me think,” they’d say to each other afterward. “I will take Eric Schmidt’s wise words with me as I embark on my career.”

But that’s not what happened. Instead, the students greeted his rather banal comments on AI with a round of lusty jeers. The same thing happened at other universities when commencement speakers from the business world delivered similar messages about how we’re embarking on “the next Industrial Revolution” and the kids had better adapt whether they like it or not:

I want to congratulate the students at these universities for showing what they actually think about this message, and it’s not because the business titans are completely wrong. There will be dramatic changes because of AI, and people working in a wide variety of industries will have to adapt. But sometimes, when you find yourself in the company of extremely rich and powerful people, there’s a great deal of value in taking a big breath, cupping your hands around your mouth, and shouting “YOU SUCK!”

One thing social media is good for

While social media is a virus that spread across the globe and made our entire existence worse in a remarkably short amount of time, it also allows ordinary people to tell those with great power that they suck. Unfortunately, doing so often has the effect of cooking the brains of those powerful people to an even greater degree than their isolated existences already do.

Take Mark Andreessen, one of the most important figures in Silicon Valley and leader of the firm Andreessen Horowitz, also known as a16z. A year ago, Andreessen shared with podcaster Lex Fridman why dinner parties and text chats among Valley power brokers are so liberating:

“At least in the last decade, those are like the happiest moments of everybody’s lives,” Andreessen said. “Everybody’s just ecstatic, because they’re just like, ‘I don’t have to worry about getting yelled at and shamed for every third sentence that comes out of my mouth.’”

Who precisely is yelling at Marc Andreessen? Someone on his household staff? His employees at a16z? The aspiring tech bros desperate for him to fund their startups? A server at the Michelin-starred restaurant where he ate dinner last night?

The answer is that there is no one in Andreessen’s actual life who would dare treat him with anything but obsequious deference. No, it’s online where Andreessen is hounded and oppressed. 

Under the totalitarian regime that prevailed before Elon Musk bought Twitter, Andreessen explained, group chats were “the equivalent of samizdat,” where for a brief fleeting moment, billionaires could whisper to one another in hushed tones. True, the punishment for being caught uttering forbidden truths in more public forums was not execution or banishment to the gulag, but having a bunch of peasants on social media call you an asshole. Isn’t that just as bad, though? Surely if one of those poor dissidents starving in a Siberian prison camp in 1952 could have looked into the future, they would have said, “My suffering is great, but at least I don’t have to endure getting ratioed on Twitter.”

The horror of being called an asshole pushed Andreessen to become an even more enthusiastic ally of President Trump than he was already becoming. This year, a16z is sinking more money into the midterm elections than any other organization or person, $115 million so farto support Republican candidates who will advocate minimal regulation of AI and crypto (in which the firm is heavily invested).

Even in Silicon Valley, most of the elite don’t spend their time tweeting and going on podcasts. But enough of them do that we have a good window into the culture and thinking of the wealthiest and most powerful business leaders of our day. And what comes through loud and clear is that they’re appalled that we aren’t more thankful for the technologies they are bestowing upon us. They take our money and mine our lives for data, but don’t we realize how glorious the future they’re creating for us will be? Where’s the gratitude?

What they don’t seem to appreciate is that most of the ways people are currently experiencing AI are invasive, threatening, or just stupid and frustrating. For instance, Taco Bell is experimenting with an AI-driven menu board that will “dynamically change the layout, content, and visuals on a car-by-car basis.” You thought you just wanted a menu that was easy to read and understand, but have you considered how great it would be if the AI made judgments about what kind of person you are based on the car you’re driving, then slapped a bunch of crappy graphics on the menu based on some stereotypes it picked up from trawling the internet? Awesome!

When oligarchs like Eric Schmidt tell young people that their lives are going to be shaped by AI whether they like it or not, it’s that kind of crap the young people think of, not the possibility that one day AI will devise a cure for cancer. Perhaps the utopian version of AI will come to pass, but right now that AI future is hypothetical, while the slop is our reality today.

Nobody likes being criticized, and the more highly you think of yourself the less you like it — and while Silicon Valley billionaires are not allnarcissistic sociopaths, lots of them are. We have many means of pushing back at them — electing leaders who approach technology with a healthy skepticism and are willing to regulate it to protect the public, organizing in our communities (as people are doing against data center construction), choosing not to patronize companies that try to jam AI down our throats when we don’t want it. But when you have the chance, it doesn’t hurt to shout “YOU SUCK!” at the wealthy and powerful. They’ve certainly earned it.

Categories Billionaires, Media, Technology

Randi Weingarten: Devices Down, Eyes Up, Hands On

By dianeravitch
May 29, 2026 //
4

Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, delivered a speech about the role of technology in schooling on Wednesday.

She urged the teaching profession to set limits on technology in the classroom. She understands that some technology propagandists would like to replace the need for teachers. But she recognized that learning is driven by human interactions and that technology has negative effects on children’s attention span and interest in learning.

Randi has given many speeches. This is one of her best. And most important, although I think she’s wrong about “the science of reading,” for reasons I have explained here many times.

This is the full text of her speech:

We are in an era of massive disruption.

Artificial intelligence is triggering seismic shifts in virtually every aspect of society. The affordability crisis is squeezing working- and middle-class families and pushing those living in poverty over the edge. Addictive technology and social media platforms are deepening anxiety and depression—especially among our youth. People with enormous resources and power are stoking division. And the democracy we have built over 250 years is being assaulted from within.

Teachers are no strangers to disruption; we’re often the first responders to it. Time and again, teachers provide stability amid chaos, and the human connection which is at the heart of the student-teacher relationship. We help our students navigate a changing world. But this turbulent moment requires a concerted national response to prepare our young people for life’s opportunities and challenges.

Public education in the United States has always been a state and local responsibility. But the federal government has a unique and vital role to play. When the federal government is doing its job, it helps level the playing field by providing funding and support for low-income students and those with disabilities; it enforces civil rights laws, supports college- and career-readiness programs, and oversees research into the best education practices. But the Trump administration is walking away from those core responsibilities. And by slashing funds children rely on for food, healthcare, housing and mental health services, it is not only undermining students’ well-being: It is threatening the survival of untold thousands.

This administration is actively undermining public education—from its massive new federal school tax credit, to its constant attempts to gut education funding and civil rights, to pushing private school voucher programs that hollow out public schools. It is more focused on erasing history, punishing people with student debt and stripping the Department of Education for parts, than on helping every child thrive. It is certainly not articulating a vision for how to prepare students to succeed in this new world.

It’s not just the president and his fellow Republicans who are to blame. While Democrats are still among the strongest advocates of strengthening public education, too few Democratic leaders speak clearly about the fundamental importance of public education as a national priority. And too many want to resurrect the failures of high-stakes testing, are pushing privatization or are frankly AWOL from efforts to make public schools, which 90 percent of American children attend, the very best they can be.

A Strong Foundation for Students in a Changing World

So today, I present a vision for America’s public schools to provide a strong foundation for our children in this changing world. It’s informed by listening to and learning from parents, educators, students, researchers, and business and community leaders, and by countless school visits here and abroad. It’s one I hope both Democrats and Republicans will adopt.

Whatever the future holds for students, they need:

* A broad base of foundational knowledge, starting with literacy and numeracy skills.

* Curriculum that is relevant, engaging and fosters curiosity, including subjects like the arts, athletics and civics.

* An emphasis on active learning through meaningful projects and opportunities to apply knowledge in ways that connect learning to real life.

* Safe and welcoming classrooms and campuses where young people feel seen, supported and ready to learn. That includes promoting well-being and protecting students from gun violence, immigration raids and bullying.

These basics equip students for the deeper learning and problem-solving that will be crucial throughout their lives. They help make students more confident and more engaged learners. It’s how we promote curiosity and critical thinking and ensure all our students have the agency and persistence they need to confront challenges.

I want to underscore why laying this foundation is urgently needed.

Our students are already feeling the impacts of this disruption. Young people are resilient, but too often, the kids are not all right. A major reason is that they are drowning in tech.

When I started teaching in the ’90s, education technology was just being introduced. School computers were glorified typewriters with no internet connection. Students had to go to the office to make a phone call. In the 2010s, many schools began providing laptops to students; in this decade, the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the tech takeover. Today, many school systems provide every student—some as young as 5—with a device. More than half of 11-year-olds have a smartphone ever-ready at their fingertips, soaring to 95 percent of 13- to 17-year-olds. Four in 10 teens say they are online “almost constantly.” The pace of this tech revolution has been blisteringly fast—and kids are getting burned.

As professor and author of “The Anxious Generation,” Jonathan Haidt, says, cellphones and social media are making our kids sedentary, solitary, anxious and depressed. On top of that, there are growing concerns about the adverse effects of all this tech on students’ cognition, attention and achievement.

Jared Cooney Horvath, a leading neuroscientist, recently analyzed how reading and math trends shifted after state-by-state expansion of education technology. Prior to large-scale digital adoption, fourth and eighth graders’ scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress had been rising steadily for years. After adoption, the trajectory shifted, often sharply, toward decline.

Correlation is not causation, but Horvath cites research indicating that this pattern appears across states, countries, grade levels, subjects and years. The recently released Education Scorecard, which draws on a huge amount of student data, identifies the same correlation.

And in this era of TikTok and YouTube, which drive rapid shifts of attention, there is growing concern about students’ ability to sustain focus and to persist through challenging learning tasks. In one survey of 3,000 teachers, 88 percent reported that their students’ attention spans were getting shorter.

Cognitive scientist Dan Willingham notes that it’s not that students can’t pay attention, but likely that they are less willing to pay attention. They are so accustomed to the immediate rewards they get online that they find schoolwork comparatively boring. Fortunately, that’s a problem we can deal with.

But before we turn to solutions, we need to talk about artificial intelligence. We are at a crossroads that will define the future of work and society. Without proper oversight and strong guardrails, there will be real dangers to our safety and privacy, to the climate and the very fabric of society.

One thing the AI revolution does not change is the essential purpose of education: teaching students how to think, how to connect, and giving them enough knowledge to do both well.

In fact, the ubiquity of AI makes critical thinking and applying knowledge even more important.

Students need to go beyond memorizing facts and learn how to verify them, challenge them and synthesize them into new ideas. Some of the most valuable skills in the AI age—like problem- solving, communication, collaboration, adaptability and ethical judgment—depend on the ability to apply knowledge. But AI is increasing so-called cognitive offloading; rather than working through a challenge, students can turn to an AI chatbot for an effortless answer.

Research has established that less tech can produce better outcomes. For example, people learn more from hard-copy than digital text and by taking notes on paper. And learning is a deeply human endeavor; the student-teacher relationship produces one of the largest effects in educational research. Yet best practices in education, brain research and the science of learning too often take a backseat to market forces and political influence. The global education technology market was estimated at $187 billion in 2025, and the industry is seeking more. And that’s just ed tech, not all tech.

And they have friends at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. The Trump administration has given Big Tech carte blanche. And Melania Trump’s White House stroll with the humanoid robot to tout using robots to replace teachers spoke volumes. So did the responses from teachers wondering how a robot was going to build trust with students or know when someone was having a bad day. There’s no algorithm for that. Students need their teachers—real human beings, not robots and not chatbots.

Remember Michelle Rhee? She couldn’t reduce teachers to algorithms, and Melania Trump will not replace teachers with robots.

I’m not calling for an AI ban or a Chromebook bonfire. What I am calling for is getting the balance right to harness the benefits of technology while mitigating the harms. I’m wary of the dangers of AI, but it is here to stay. We need enforceable guardrails and help to cushion the disruption to people’s lives. But that’s not enough. It is equally essential to make sure educators understand AI and have a say in its use in education and our profession.

That’s why the AFT created the National Academy for AI Instruction last year, to help teachers master AI so that AI doesn’t master them. It’s a training hub designed and run by educators, grounded in trust, safety and people-first technology. It builds on the work our members did starting after ChatGPT was first announced to develop and continuously update the AFT’s “Commonsense Guardrails for Using Advanced Technology in Schools.”

Parents must have a real say, as well. They know firsthand the impacts of social media and other technology on their children. Together with parent groups, we released our “Likes vs. Learning” report with clear principles to keep children safe on social media and protect their privacy. And we continue to work with these groups for policy changes to protect children.

A New Vision to Boost Teaching and Learning in the AI Era

Today I am proposing a 10-point plan addressing all of this, to boost student learning and success in the age of AI:

1. No screens (including online assessments) for students in prekindergarten through second grade, unless there is a compelling reason, such as to most effectively support a student with special needs.

2. No student-facing AI in elementary schools—not only to prevent harm, but to build children’s skills like relationship-building and persistence. All other student-facing AI, including digital literacy efforts, must be supervised by educators. And until at least age 16, there should be a total ban on so-called “social companion” chatbots, computer programs that simulate human relationships.

3. Redesign schooling so active learning, including project-based, experiential and career-connected learning, is the norm across all grade levels. That means redesigning accountability as well.

4. Ensure students have a solid foundation in literacy, numeracy and civic engagement.

5. Focus on well-being, so that students and their families have their basic needs met and students are prepared to learn, as community schools do so successfully.

6. Protect intellectual property and academic freedom, and support educators to understand, effectively use and make classroom-based decisions about technology integration.

7. Establish a new gold standard for safety and privacy for the use of AI in schools. Providers that cannot meet these requirements should not be eligible to serve K-12 education.

8. Establish an independent research consortium to build a strong knowledge base for effective education practices that can be sustained and scaled. The research should include the effects of AI, screens and technology on students, and should not be paid for by the industries whose products are being researched.

9. Ensure adequate funding of education by states and the federal government. This means reversing the trend of disinvestment since the Great Recession and targeting funding to level the playing field and promote opportunity for all students—and not letting AI and vouchers further defund public education.

10. A “tech tax” on Big Tech’s earnings and on some business operations, to ensure they pay their fair share for the adverse and disruptive consequences of this technology on American families, such as workers being displaced by AI.

Ten points. To ensure our students are prepared for the future, we need a “devices-down, eyes-up, hands-on” strategy.

John Dewey was a pioneering advocate of learning by doing. He believed the most effective

We are on the threshold of a staggering shake-up of society. Who will pay for this massive AI disruption? The 16,000 workers estimated to lose their jobs each month? Retirees whose spiking energy bills eat up more of their fixed incomes? Who will pay for the harms to the environment—from toxic waste to greenhouse gas emissions to grid strain to water shortages that threaten to make our taps run dry? A tech tax would ensure that Big Tech companies pay their fair share for the adverse consequences of AI. The tax could be on earnings, some business operations, hardware or data processing.

Artificial intelligence is accelerating the steepest upward transfer of wealth in modern history. Tech titans are amassing mind-blowing wealth, while ordinary people are paying enormous costs for living in the AI age. Tech kingpins and corporations can afford to pay a fair tech tax; workers, communities and the earth can’t afford for them not to.

The guardrails and other protections that can help cushion the disruption are vital. The safety and privacy concerns are obvious, as is (or should be) the need to protect intellectual property and academic freedom for faculty and so many others. The federal government must update intellectual property laws to protect human-generated work, and employers must protect workers’ intellectual property in contracts they negotiate with AI companies.

The AFL-CIO has proposed a bold AI agenda to harness the benefits of technological change while preventing the annihilation of countless workers’ jobs. We support our federation’s recommendations.

No less an authority than Pope Leo this week warned that AI must serve humanity, not the powerful few. Leo condemned the use of AI in warfare, and he underscored that teaching and learning are human endeavors. He wrote that schools offer what “the digital sphere by itself cannot provide, namely a shared time for learning and developing trustworthy relationships.”

That vision underscores key aspects of our devices-down, eyes-up, hands-on 10-point plan. Some of what I’ve laid out is already starting to take hold.

Take the bans on phones during the school day, which we support and which 31 states have implemented. What are educators seeing? That kids are noticeably more engaged, and hallways and lunchrooms bustle with chatter and laughter again now that students aren’t heads-down, eyes on their phones.

One year into its bell-to-bell cellphone ban, Dallas schools are seeing a 24 percent increase in library book checkouts. Imagine if kids started reading whole books again.

After years of promoting classroom technology, last month the Los Angeles Unified School District initiated a sharp reversal. Screens are prohibited for students in kindergarten and first grade, and usage is capped for older students.

Several countries that pioneered the shift to ed tech are reversing course after precipitous drops in student achievement. Sweden is shifting back to printed textbooks and limiting screens. In Estonia, research showed that higher screen time for young children was associated with diminished language skills; they’re calling for more human-to-human interaction. And Italy has returned to emphasizing handwriting, paper materials and traditional teaching methods.

And now at least some Trump officials, like the acting surgeon general, are issuing warnings that too much screen time for children is a public health concern.

Intentional or not, all this tech has been a huge experiment on kids, and experiments can go wrong.

We need to take stock so we can do what we know is right. But teachers, parents and school districts cannot manage the tech juggernaut on our own.

And yet, with this administration, we are on our own. I’m not a detective, but I see some clues that there’s a connection between the Trump administration’s laissez-faire approach to addressing the harms of technology and the tech titans who are funding the president’s ballroom, presidential library and political action committees.

Laissez-faire doesn’t cut it, given the shockwaves AI is setting off. That is why, in the absence of federal legislation, we are working through our AI Academy to negotiate a gold standard that sets out industry best practices for safety and privacy in the use of AI in schools. We are seeking a binding agreement between America’s K-12 schools and any provider that offers AI-driven services to educators or students. Companies that refuse to abide by such a standard must be prohibited from working in our schools.

Microsoft, OpenAI and Anthropic—our partners in the AI Academy—have agreed in principle to our overarching tenets and standards. But as any negotiator knows, it’s not done until it’s done.

Our 10-point plan also calls for a research consortium. It simply does not make any sense for the 50 states, or the 13,000 school districts in the U.S., to each research the most effective reading strategies, or how much and what type of screen time is appropriate for children at various ages.

It does make sense for the federal government to do this—as our country has done historically in healthcare, science and, at times, education—but the Trump administration refuses. It has decimated the research arm of the Education Department. It has even refused to distribute $289 million appropriated by Congress for education research.

We need deep research to guide us to scalable and sustainable solutions. So why not launch a research consortium, independent from politics and industry? Maybe it’s a brand-new entity with pooled public and philanthropic funding. Or maybe it’s the Institute for Education Sciences, as President George W. Bush originally conceived, giving contracts to high-quality researchers and projects. I’d put the impact of screens, tech and AI at the top of that list.

Research already attests to the value of engaged and active learning. It’s a pedagogy we know works, especially when students are solving real-world problems and receiving meaningful feedback.

And in the AI era, it is more important than ever.

John Dewey was a pioneering advocate of learning by doing. He believed the most effective education was about not just imparting information to students but also actively engaging students with their environments and real-world situations.

Today this learning goes by many names: active, project-based or experiential. Whatever we call it, it works. And it needs to be the way every student can learn, in an age-appropriate way in every grade.

This does not replace the need for a broad foundation of knowledge starting with literacy and numeracy. But today, students need a new set of basics built on the ability to think critically, communicate, collaborate and apply knowledge.

When so much information is only a prompt away, acquiring trustworthy knowledge is just the first step. To be useful, that knowledge must be applied. Still, successful application of knowledge is just the second step. To really prepare young people for complex challenges, our true goal is to have students who can work together and problem solve. They must be able to pool their collective knowledge, strengths and perspectives, because today’s problems are greater than each of us, but they are not greater than the sum of us.

So the crux of this 10-point plan is what this will look like at the school level. What happens when we put devices down? What does “eyes up, hands-on” really mean?

It means prioritizing active learning through meaningful projects—which can range from students creating an eco-friendly garden, to planning and budgeting for a school event, to developing a policy solution to a local issue and presenting it to town officials, to keeping a diary from the perspective of a historical figure. From play for our littlest ones, to debate for older kids, to music and art for all—this is meaningful learning.

When I was a civics teacher at Clara Barton High School in Brooklyn, N.Y., my students and I delved into all sorts of lessons—about the Bill of Rights, efforts to change the Constitution such as the women’s suffrage movement, and lessons about street law. They memorized plenty of important information. But where they really shined was in applying their knowledge and in collaborating with each other, like in “We the People” debate competitions.

This kind of learning is the opposite of drill-and-kill, of students memorizing and regurgitating content. And active learning is the antidote to cognitive offloading—that is, outsourcing thinking to AI.

Where active learning is the norm is career and technical education. CTE is learning by doing. It prepares high school students for both higher education and in-demand career pathways. They do this in places like Thomas A. Edison CTE High School and the Harbor School in New York, RioTECH in New Mexico, the New Lexington School District in Ohio, and the countless other great career-connected learning programs I have visited. Students engage in programs from skilled trades to healthcare to advanced manufacturing. They take part in internships and work-based learning, they receive industry certification in their areas of study, and many earn college credits.

I recently had an incredible full-circle moment. In 2016, Westinghouse Academy in Pittsburgh was threatened with closure. The AFT, through our Innovation Fund, gave the Pittsburgh Federation of Teachers a grant to work with the district to start an emergency medical services program at Westinghouse. I recently returned to Westinghouse; today it’s thriving and offering students pathways into firefighting, law enforcement and EMS.

CTE students build things. They troubleshoot and fix things. They work in teams. They can explain what they’re doing and why they’re doing it. No wonder they have great job prospects, whether or not they go to college.

This is why the AFT is such an evangelist for career-connected learning. More than 90 percent of students who concentrate in CTE graduate, and about three-quarters of them continue their education after high school. This pedagogy prepares students as much for college as it does for career. Let’s make it the norm for all students.

The rethinking of teaching and learning I have described today must be accompanied by a rethinking of the accountability systems we use to measure our students’ progress.

Career-connected education and other types of active learning are suited to assessment by doing—via portfolios, capstone projects or performances, or by living civics the way I taught my students.

But for schools to integrate active learning, accountability systems have to be designed to assess such learning—and to incentivize it. No Child Left Behind’s best legacy was to highlight systemic disparities in our extremely diverse country. But the standardized, narrow content assessments it relied on don’t help with this challenge. On their own, standardized tests are of little use for school improvement, much less for the teaching and learning of individual students.

For more than 25 years, the New York Performance Standards Consortium has been a shining example of rigorous, relevant assessment at the school level. More recently, the School Superintendents Association has been working to help districts measure what matters. The bipartisan reauthorization of federal education laws led by Sens. Lamar Alexander and Patty Murray was a good first step in giving states the freedom to pursue this. And now, more than 20 states haveframeworks for their graduates to measure something meaningful beyond test scores. But there is much more to be done if we are to have assessment and accountability systems that measure and support the active learning I think we all want for our young people.

Addressing Student Well-Being and Investing in Students and Schools

Well-being and readiness to learn go hand in hand with active learning, starting with creating an environment that is safe and welcoming.

Brain science tells us that kids can’t learn unless they feel safe, and unless school is a welcoming environment where they feel they belong. Students can’t learn if they are hungry, or copingwith stress from home, or don’t have a home. One way to support student and family needs is through community schools, which connect services and activities to the school itself. Like the Oyler Community Learning Center in Cincinnati, a long-established community school that has continuously evolved to meet the needs of its community. The nearby Oyler House community center has tackled the local housing crisis by working with banks, developers and Habitat for Humanity to get families into homes. It has an onsite health center that provides students and the community with mental and physical health services. The school’s graduation readiness program has helped it achieve among the best graduation and college acceptance rates in Ohio.

This is why I keep repeating the same proposal I made in my first speech as AFT president, 18 years ago—a vast expansion of community schools. Since then, the AFT has supported more than 1,000 community schools.

The results speak for themselves. Multiple studies show that community schools reduce chronic absenteeism, improve discipline rates and increase academic achievement—including robust outcomes for students of color and English language learners. And community schools produce among the best returns on investment in the research record—an average of $7 to $15 for every $1 spent. And they are places that students, educators and families want to be.

Speaking of investment, over the past 20 years, study after study has shown that money matters in education, and it matters a lot; investment in schools improves student outcomes, while funding cuts hurt those outcomes. Yet 42 states devote a smaller share of their economies to their K-12 public schools than they did in 2006, representing a loss of hundreds of billions of dollars. This disinvestment is particularly acute in states such as Arizona, Florida and Texas, where recent voucher expansions will exacerbate the cycle of underfunding and underachievement. And it’s worse in higher education.

We must stop the runaway train that private school vouchers are becoming. Vouchers have produced some of the largest declines in student learning in the research record. They take vital funding away from students in public schools. And they divert taxpayer dollars to wealthy families and familieswhose children never attended public schools. These facts are well-established by independent research. But voucher proponents are not deterred.

Florida’s voucher program, for example, diverts $5 billion in public tax dollars from kids in public schools each year. The state already ranks among the bottom 10 for per-student spending. Our Florida affiliate recently filed a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the state’s voucher program, including the fact that the state has not held nonpublic schools to the same standards and oversight.

At the federal level, Trump’s school tax credit could cost taxpayers more than $50 billion a year.

That’s double what the federal government spends on helping poor kids and students with disabilities.

I’ve covered a lot of priorities today. But these aren’t the only things we should be doing.

This should go without saying, but we need to follow best educational practices everywhere, such as the science of reading. That includes learning from consistent top performers like Massachusetts and New Jersey, and from the more recent successes in Mississippi and Louisiana.

Another given is that we must increase educators’ salaries, which remain woefully low. That includes the assistants and aides who are the backbone of helping students with disabilities. And we must reduce class sizes, which remain incredibly high.

Supporting the public schools that 90 percent of America’s students attend should be a bipartisan priority. We have tried to engage President Trump and his secretary of education. Last December, I sent the president a letter suggesting that we work together on an area I believed we both prioritized—CTE. He didn’t bother to respond.

The Urgent Need to Revitalize and Reimagine Public Schools to Help All Students Thrive

I wish this administration cared about this crucial moment for our children, but it doesn’t, and we can’t wait. The vision I’ve laid out today still can be realized in every district in every state across our country. And the AFT—and America’s educators, healthcare workers and public employees— will be willing partners with anyone who will join us in helping our students thrive during this transformational moment.

As we celebrate the 250th anniversary of our nation, public schools remain—as the founders argued—essential to forging a pluralistic, unified nation that is stronger tomorrow than today. Indeed, I just wrote a book about this. By bringing together children of different races, religions, languages and cultures, public school classrooms are laboratories of democracy that forge bonds and bridgeour differences—if we support and nourish them.

The 10-point plan I laid out today is grounded in what I’ve witnessed firsthand over the last three decades. The plan addresses the enormity of the tech earthquake, dealing with screens and student-facing AI; creating an enforceable privacy standard for the use of AI in schools; calling for deep,classroom-relevant research in education; insisting on protections for intellectual property andacademic freedom; and demanding a tech tax to compensate the country for the consequences.

We need a relentless, intentional focus on what our young people need: greater literacy, numeracy and civic engagement, and active learning that excites and engages them—all while ensuring theirsocial and mental well-being and ability to form healthy relationships. Devices down, eyes up, hands-on.

Parents want their kids to be engaged and well-prepared. Young people want school to be relevant and interesting. Employers are desperate for talent. And America is crying out for a unifying vision.

America’s teachers—as they always have—are doing noble work; they’re showing up every day to helpyoung people realize their potential and build our collective future.

Today’s students will be the ones who heal, help and lead us. They will be the environmental stewards, the innovators, the artists, the first responders and the teachers of tomorrow. The other side is trying to exploit the current crisis to destroy public education and pluralism as we know it. We have a different vision: to revitalize and reimagine public schools so every one of our students can harness their future and build the country they dream of.

Categories Education Reform, Real Education, Technology

John Merrow: AI Didn’t Kill Writing. The Testing Regime is the Culprit!

By dianeravitch
May 12, 2026 //
6

John Merrow was the education correspondent for the PBS Newshour for many years. Some people never forgave him for his many episodes lionizing Michelle Rhee. I forgave him when he filmed a final episode thoroughly exposing her cruel methods and her indifference to allegations of cheating.

John’s latest post seeks to correct the record, with reference to Dana Goldstein’s article in The New York Times blaming AI (artificial intelligence) for killing the teaching of writing.

No, says John, AI didn’t do it. Our hyper-focus on standardized testing and standardized writing and standardized thinking did it.

He writes:

This week the New York Times turned over a significant portion of its front page to a long piece headlined “How A.I. Killed Student Writing (And Revived It).”

In the piece, the usually reliable Dana Goldstein puts forth sweeping generalizations based on what about 400 teachers volunteered. This, in a nation with nearly 4 million public school teachers and another 1.5 million college faculty! Granted, most of these 5.5 million teachers probably aren’t teaching writing, but relying on self-selected sources seems dubious, especially for the front page. What we learn is that a few creative and dedicated teachers, frustrated by their students’ reliance on A.I., are having the kids write in class, on paper, with pens or pencils. That’s not really news, although Goldstein, a very good writer, brings their stories to life…and may make you wish you could be in their classes.

More than a year earlier Ben Cohen reported about the dramatic rise in the sale of ‘blue books’ on college campuses: Sales of blue books this school year were up more than 30% at Texas A&M University and nearly 50% at the University of Florida. The improbable growth was even more impressive at the University of California, Berkeley. Over the past two academic years, blue-book sales at the Cal Student Store were up 80%.

Both of these news reports hang on the same premise: Student writing is dead, and A.I. is the killer. I think that’s flat out false. Our obsession with test scores and our prioritizing quantity over quality are the culprits. Most education systems stopped trying to teach writing back when Artificial Intelligence was the stuff of science fiction, unfortunately. Playing up to politicians, the education bureaucrats (who generally don’t trust teachers) decided to ‘raise standards,’ which to them meant having students write more papers and read more books and plays. Any suggestion that writing one outstanding paper would be better than six or a dozen so-so papers fell on deaf ears.

And because writing skills can’t be tested by a machine, why bother? Since we don’t trust teachers, it would be foolish to rely on their evaluation of their students’ writing skills.

Happily, I know in my bones that lots of teachers have not given up. A quick Google search turns up a treasure trove of ideas for improving student writing, starting in the elementary years. Writing thank you notes, keeping a journal, and so on. Here’s one I think you will enjoy (and might want to share with teachers in your world).

It’s not semantics to assert that the goal is to develop writers, not “teach writing.” That’s an important distinction.

So what can teachers who want to develop writers in their classes do in 2026? First of all, take a deep breath because we’ve been through this before–back when the internet emerged. Soon some students discovered that they could download papers and submit them as their own. Next came profit-making companies offering papers written to order. While small-minded bureaucrats thought they could win that struggle by spending millions on technology that supposedly could scan papers and detect plagiarism, thoughtful teachers won that struggle by 1) reducing the number of papers assigned, and 2 )working with individual students as they developed their ideas and wrote drafts. It’s harder to cheat when the teacher is overseeing the process and when kids are writing about something they genuinely care about.

What’s called for now is emulating what my high school English teacher, William Sullivan, did nearly 70 years ago. Two or three times every week he would tell us to clear our desks of everything except for a single sheet of paper and a pencil. What followed was what he called a “2-8-2,” meaning that we had two minutes to think–no writing allowed–followed by eight minutes to write, and then two more minutes to read what we had written and correct any errors. He would put our writing assignment on the blackboard. Sometimes we would have to include a certain sentence, such as “I wish I had missed that train.” Or “I still wish I hadn’t missed that flight.”

Even today I still remember one particular assignment: “Turn out the light; I don’t want to go home in the dark,” which Mr. Sullivan told us were the dying words of William Sydney Porter and challenged us to explain the contradiction. After we turned in our papers, Mr. Sullivan told us that we knew William Sydney Porter as the writer O. Henry.

(Fun fact: Some forty or fifty years later I discovered that Porter actually did not contradict himself. His dying words were “Turn up the lights. I don’t want to go home in the dark.” Apparently Mr. Sullivan changed his words to create a challenging paradox for us to try to explain.)

Although I went to a private school with small classes and privileged students, Mr. Sullivan’s approach can work at all levels. I know this to be true because I taught working-class kids in a public high school, first generation African American college students in an HBCU, and young men serving sentences in a federal prison.

I used Mr. Sullivan’s “2-8-2” all the time. I got to know my students’ writing, and I’m convinced that their writing skills improved. They became writers, confident in their voices.

Frequent in-class writing worked then, and it should work in the age of Artificial Intelligence and with all the other ‘advances’ in our future.

However, policymakers and administrators have to behave sensibly and understand that ‘less is more.’ That means smaller classes, fewer students per teacher, and heightened trust in teachers. Those shouldn’t be a bridge too far, if we really want our young people to be thoughtful and capable citizens.

You can stop here if you wish. What follows is the story of my own dabbling in A.I., printed in my blog in April 2023, more than three years ago.

If you’re at all like me, you’re curious about Artificial Intelligence and new applications like ChatGPT and Bard. The brilliant Thomas Friedman of the New York Times says the world will never be the same again, but my interest is narrower: If students can simply ask Bard or ChatGPT to write their papers for them, how can teachers prevent this?

So, naturally, I turned to Bard, which told me (within seconds) that, while it can help students generate ideas, do research, improve their writing, and learn about different writing genres, it’s not supposed to be a substitute for original research and writing. Then it warned me to “Monitor students’ use of Bard to make sure that they are not plagiarizing or engaging in other forms of academic misconduct.”

Yeah, right. If I’m teaching English in a public high school, I probably have between 100 and 125 students! There aren’t enough hours in the day….

Second question: Can Bard help identify cheaters and plagiarists? Within seconds, I received an answer:

“There are a few things you can look for to tell the difference between original writing and prose provided by Bard.

  • Original writing is typically more creative and original than prose provided by Bard. Bard is trained on a massive dataset of text, so it can be very good at generating text that is grammatically correct and factually accurate. However, it is not always able to generate text that is creative or original.
  • Original writing is typically more personal and engaging than prose provided by Bard. Bard is a machine learning model, so it does not have the same level of understanding of human emotions and experiences as a human writer. As a result, its writing can be dry and impersonal.
  • Original writing is typically more nuanced and complex than prose provided by Bard. Bard is a large language model, but it is still under development. As a result, it can sometimes struggle to understand the nuances of human language. This can lead to writing that is simplistic or even nonsensical.

……

  • Ask yourself if the writing sounds like it was written by a human. Bard-generated text can sometimes sound robotic or unnatural. Original writing should sound like it was written by a human.

To put this the test, I gave Bard the following task:

I am one of six children, the second oldest and the first-born son. We grew up on a small farm with chickens, a few cows, a few pigs, and one goat. I’m now 81. Please write a short memoir of no more than 200 words about my childhood.

Within seconds, Bard spit out this:

“I was born in 1942, the second oldest of six children. We grew up on a small farm in the Midwest. My father worked hard to provide for our family, and my mother took care of the house and the children. We didn’t have much money, but we were happy.

I loved growing up on the farm. I spent my days playing with my siblings, helping my father with the chores, and exploring the woods behind our house. We had chickens, a few cows, a few pigs, and one goat. I loved taking care of the animals, and I learned a lot about hard work and responsibility.

I also learned a lot about nature on the farm. I spent hours watching the birds and the animals, and I learned to identify all the different plants. I loved being surrounded by nature, and it helped me to appreciate the beauty of the world.

I had a wonderful childhood on the farm. It was a time of innocence and discovery, and I will always cherish those memories.

Now that I am 81 years old, I still look back on my childhood with fondness. I am grateful for the opportunities I had, and I am proud of the person I have become. I know that my experiences on the farm helped to shape me into the man I am today.

Boring, and also wrong, and so I responded:

This is inaccurate. I was born in 1941, and our farm was in Connecticut. Worse, however, it does not capture either the small pleasures of collecting the eggs every morning or learning to milk cows, and it also does not capture the deep pain of watching a pig or steer that I raised being slaughtered. Please rewrite.

In just a few seconds, Bard responded by adding a few paragraphs, highlighted below to make it easier for you to read: “Sure, here is a more accurate and detailed memoir:

I was born in 1941, the second oldest of six children. We grew up on a small farm in Connecticut. My father worked hard to provide for our family, and my mother took care of the house and the children. We didn’t have much money, but we were happy.

I loved growing up on the farm. I spent my days playing with my siblings, helping my father with the chores, and exploring the woods behind our house. We had chickens, a few cows, a few pigs, and one goat. I loved taking care of the animals, and I learned a lot about hard work and responsibility.

I also learned a lot about nature on the farm. I spent hours watching the birds and the animals, and I learned to identify all the different plants. I loved being surrounded by nature, and it helped me to appreciate the beauty of the world.

One of my favorite things to do was collect the eggs every morning. I would wake up early and go to the chicken coop, where I would find a dozen or so eggs waiting for me. I would carefully collect the eggs and put them in a basket, then bring them back to the house. My mother would use the eggs to make breakfast, and I would always get to eat one of the freshest eggs in the world.

Another thing I loved to do was milk the cows. I would go to the barn in the evening and bring the cows into the milking parlor. I would sit on a stool and milk each cow in turn, collecting the milk in a bucket. The milk would then be used to make butter, cheese, and ice cream.

Of course, there were also some challenges growing up on a farm. One of the hardest things was watching the animals being slaughtered. I knew that it was necessary to eat meat, but I still felt bad for the animals. I would often cry when I saw them being killed.

Overall, though, I had a wonderful childhood on the farm. It was a time of innocence and discovery, and I will always cherish those memories. I am grateful for the opportunities I had, and I am proud of the person I have become. I know that my experiences on the farm helped to shape me into the man I am today.

OK, but even with this information, the writing remains pedestrian and without emotion. Human writers would know not to begin with their birthday, for one thing. They might lead with a sentence designed to keep the reader’s interest. Something like, “70 years later, at age 81, I can still hear the terrified squealing of the hog as it was strung up by its hind feet to be slaughtered….”

John Merrow

former Education Correspondent, PBS NewsHour

My blog: themerrowreport.com

“I don’t want to BE old when I am old.”  Jack LaLanne

Categories Literacy, Teachers and Teaching, Technology

John Thompson: Can We Control AI or Will It Control Us?

By dianeravitch
May 8, 2026 //
9

John Thompson, retired teacher and historian, knows that we are at a fork in the road with artificial intelligence: Will it control us or will we control it? The evolution and implementation of AI is driven by corpirations making huge investments and seeking huge profits. The well-being of children is not their uppermost goal.

He writes:

My head has been spinning since I attended the University of Oklahoma’s “Applied A.I. in the Workplace seminar.”

The session began with O.U.’s Dr. Shishir Shah who provided a detailed history of machine learning, starting with the 1940’s. Dr. Shah went into the nuances of the phases of A.I.  It culminated in today’s period of “Human Alignment” with its exploding data bases. He says that we’re entering an era where we don’t ask whether machines “think,” but what will A.I.  learn next.

In conversations with Dr. Shah, I was especially impressed with his insights into public education, and what we would need to do to prepare students for the 21st century. He also said:

As both Dr. Ali and Dr. Jones indicated, we all have to engage in open and transparent discussions about AI and its uses.  This will help improve our understanding of its potential impacts, which then can help shape appropriate guidelines, standards, and policies.  Engagement is important.

Then Dr. Kyle Jones, who leads field engineering for “Databricks,” warned that anything you think you know about A.I. changes in 6 months. Dr. Jones described a number of ways that A.I. provides useful results. But, he added that A.I. is making things easier for robots, and then asked, “What about human beings?”

Dr. Jones also questioned the role of corporate profits in rapidly expanding A.I.   

Then, Dr. Asim Ali, from Auburn University, explained that private investment in A.I. is dominated by the U.S., but we need international solutions, and more regulations. He focused on the recent history of A.I increasing, declining, and returning to growth as it approaches long-term growth. For instance, he used Anthropic’s “Claude” chatbot for an example of what’s possible, as well as its major shortcomings.

Dr. Ali advocates for engaging conversations about A.I. and its uses; if we are “passive about A.I., the future with AI will not be one we like.”  

He also reported on “the low likelihood that we will have [A.I.] Superintelligence anytime soon, but that there’s value in discussing a future with Superintelligence because it challenges us to determine our values when using AI and wrestle with the potential negative outcomes for human society.”

That brings me from the various, nuanced history and possible futures they explained to the more complicated paths towards minimizing the harms of A.I.  They offered complex appraisals of multiple paths forward. Perhaps we could refine technocratic skills to program A.I. so it doesn’t turn on humans. Or should we try to launch A.I. so that it then learns how to protect and make a better world for humans?

And, yes, companies want us to use more data, despite the environmental damage that results.   But shouldn’t we ask whether our rampant use of digital tools and social media is meaningful enough to justify the harms done by data centers? 

And, shouldn’t we do a better job of teaching critical thinking?

So, when I drove home from those sessions, my plan was to first reread my notes and to deepen my understanding of their research.  But, the first thing I found in my mailbox was Jill Lepore’s “We, The Robots.”

And Lepore’s opening sentence was a quote from Geoffrey Hinton, a “Nobel Prize-winning godfather of A.I.” “’Unless you can be very sure that it’s not going to kill you when you grow up, you should worry.’”

Lepore asks Daniel Roher, the director of the documentary “The A.I. Doc,” which quotes an A.I. insider who says, “I know people who work on A.I. risk who don’t expect their children to make it to high school.”

Roher further explains that the government has “abdicated the regulation of artificial Intelligence, just as it failed to pass any meaningful legislation regarding social media.” 

Lepore uses  Anthropic’s “Claude’s,” effort to create an A.I. “Constitution” as a “trying” example of the problems with A.I,  during a time when President Donald Trump is attacking the American Constitution. 

And, she asks whether Anthropic’s efforts are designed to “move toward human participation and democratic governance instead of relying on what appears to be technocratic automatism.” 

Lepore recalled reasons for hope when OpenAI formed a “Superalignment team” and President Joe Biden issued an executive order “calling for Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence.  But “In Trumpworld, this was the equivalent of DEI for computers.”

And that brings me back to the O.U. seminar. I don’t know enough to compare and contrast its experts’ detailed findings on A.I. with those of the experts Jill Lepore drew upon. I heard them as being less pessimistic, emphasizing the long histories of challenges that humans have overcome. But, I believe the biggest difference between them is the tone of their analyses. 

For instance, Dr. Jones told me, “There is no single inevitable path that A.I. will follow. As humans we have free will and we get to choose.  So, his “response is to engage with this, rather than ignore it and hope for the best. After all, hope is not a strategy.” 

Categories Ethics, For-Profit, Technology

UNESCO Report on the Dangers of Ed-Tech: “An Ed-Tech Tragedy?”

By dianeravitch
May 5, 2026 //
9

I posted about this very important international study when it was first released in 2023. It is as relevant now as ever. Can we recognize failure and learn from it? Some European countries have. With some exceptions, we have not.

Ed-Tech is a major industry. Its profits are huge. We have allowed the hype and propaganda of the industry to remake schooling. Part of the marketing is the claim that “our public schools are failing.” The answer: buy more of what impairs learning. Or endorse school choice, charters, vouchers, and home schooling, even though there is zero evidence that these privately run schools are as effective as public schools.

Read the report. Reach your own conclusion. Did we dive into screens and laptops because they increased student motivation and effort? Or because we were swept along by the industry propaganda?

Three years ago, UNESCO released a major blockbuster report warning about the dangers of relying too much on education technology. The author of the report was Mark West. The title of the report is An Ed-Tech Tragedy? Educational Technologies and School Closures in the Time of COVID-19.

An alternate link: https://teachertaskforce.org/sites/default/files/2023-09/2023_UNESCO_An-ed-tech-tragedy_Educational-technologies-and-school-closures-in-the-time-of-COVID19_EN_.pdf

The puzzle at the heart of the document is the clash between learned experience and the imperatives of greed. We learned during the pandemic about the risks of becoming dependent on ed-technology as the main driver of instruction. As we reflect on the period from March 2020 to now, we can discern the damage that occurred to students when their teachers were replaced by virtual instruction: boredom, learning loss, mental health issues, loneliness, lack of socialization with their peers, lack of personal interaction with teachers. 

Yet with most people believing that the pandemic (or the worst of it) lies in the past, ed-tech corporations are focused on selling more of what has already failed. Why would we want to expand what has demonstrably proved inadequate and harmful to students?

You probably will take a long while to read the full report, but do read the summary and conclusions to whet your appetite. The overview concludes that the global reliance on ed-tech was necessary in the circumstances, but was a tragedy. Children need human teachers. They need people who look them in the eye and encourage them. Education is not a mechanical process; people are not widgets. 

The UNESCO report reviews the global evidence of the harm caused by dependence on ed-tech: 

[The report] exposes the ways unprecedented educational dependence on technology often resulted in unchecked exclusion, staggering inequality, inadvertent harm and the elevation of learning models that place machines and profit before people.

The summary says:

An Ed-Tech Tragedy? documents how widespread school closures and the hard pivot to remote learning with connected technology during the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in numerous unintended and undesirable consequences. 

Although connected technology supported the continuation of education for many learners, many more were left behind. Exclusion soared and inequities widened. Achievement levels fell, even for those with access to distance learning. Educational experiences narrowed. Physical and mental health declined. Privatization accelerated, threatening education’s unique standing as a public good and human right. Invasive surveillance endangered the free and open exchange of ideas and undermined trust. Automation replaced human interactions with machine-mediated experiences. And technology production and disposal placed new strains on the environment. 

Visions that technology could form the backbone of education and supplant school-based learning – in wide circulation at the outset of the health crisis – had promised better outcomes. Ed-tech proponents held that the immense challenges of school closures could be met with technology and that deeper technology integration would transform education for the better. But these high hopes and expectations unraveled when ed-tech was hurriedly deployed to maintain formal education as COVID-19 tore across countries. 

An Ed-Tech Tragedy? recounts this tumultuous period, documenting the actions and decisions taken by governments, schools and technology companies. The publication contrasts the promises of ed-tech with the realities of what ed-tech delivered as a response to school closures that impacted over 1.6 billion learners and stretched intermittently from the beginning of 2020 to the end of 2022. The evidence and analysis highlight trends observed across countries and zoom in on the specificities of local experiences, creating a global mosaic of what students, teachers and families experienced when connected technology was elevated as a singular portal to teaching and learning. 

Aimed at general and specialist audiences alike, this publication shows how the abrupt and deep changes brought about by the recourse to remote digital learning during the pandemic continue to ripple through the education sector even as schools have fully reopened. It questions whether more and faster integration of technology is desirable for learners, teachers and schools and if ed-tech is, as it is often billed, a key ingredient of educational resilience.

An Ed-Tech Tragedy? posits that new principles are needed to forge more humanistic directions for ed-tech development and use. In-person schooling and teaching should be guaranteed even as technologies improve and connectivity becomes more ubiquitous. Governments need to anchor this guarantee in the legal architecture upholding the right to education, especially for young learners. Moreover, future applications of ed-tech must show greater concern for holistic student well-being. While academic learning is central to education, it is not the only component. Ed-tech needs to support the multiple individual and collective purposes of education, from socio-emotional and personal development, to learning to live together, with the planet, as well as with technology. 

In detailing what happened when ed-tech was deployed in response to pandemic school closures, as well as questioning why ed-tech was often elevated as a singular solution, this publication clarifies how the education community can move beyond merely reacting to technological change and instead play a more assertive role steering the digitalization of education towards the more holistic goals of education to shape inclusive, just and sustainable futures. 

The future of education needs to be a humanistic one. The lessons extracted from what is premised here as an ed-tech tragedy illuminate the ways technology can better foster education that teaches and revitalizes human values, strengthens human relationships and upholds human rights.…

Ed-tech was supposed to solve a problem but it created other problems.

An Ed-Tech Tragedy? examines the many ways that the hurried embrace of technology solutionism steered responses to a global education challenge directly towards ed-tech. Along the way, the logic of technology solutionism changed understandings of educational problems to be solved. The analysis presented here helps reveal, for example, how technological solutions deployed during school closures took a narrow view of education and focused almost exclusively on furthering the academic progress of students in pared-down curricular subjects. This meant that little attention was paid to other education goals, such as fostering curiosity and inquiry and supporting physical health, mental well-being and social and emotional learning. This analysis also shows how ed-tech, originally cast as a solution to maintain learning continuity in the face of widespread disruptions to schooling, has more recently been positioned as a tool to help reverse learning loss. This ‘loss’, however, grew out of the deficiencies of technology-dependent remote learning to preserve the pace of academic learning that would have been typical without school closures stemming from the pandemic. The problem that ed-tech initially set out to solve morphed from assuring the continuity of learning to remedying lost learning. The way the problem was reframed while maintaining connected technology as the centrepiece of the solution is an example of technology solutionism at work.…

Recognizing the chaotic pivot from in-school learning to technology-facilitated distance learning as having a tragic arc provides a forceful rebuttal to a growing consensus that the education sector somehow ‘advanced’, ‘leapfrogged’, ‘catapulted’ or ‘disrupted’ itself to a better future when it deployed technology on a massive scale as an interim measure to confront a crisis. The evidence overwhelmingly points in the opposite direction: education became less accessible, less effective and less engaging when it pivoted away from physical schools and teachers and towards technology exclusively. ‘Tragedy’ in this sense signals regression – a denigration of the status quo,rather than a desired evolution. The narrative that ed-tech should be or must be a central component of ‘building education back better’ warrants new scrutiny after a careful examination of the experiences during the pandemic.

The invocation of tragedy also facilitates awareness that connected technologies, despite their growing reach, power and potential, remain tools in a repertoire of many others to construct stronger, more agile and more flexible education systems that can respond and adapt to disruption. Other tools include strengthened teacher training and support; enhanced school leadership and pedagogical management of schools; curricular renewal; smaller class sizes; and improved physical resources and infrastructure for schools and classrooms. Crises that necessitate the prolonged closure of schools and demand heavy or total reliance on technology have been exceedingly rare historically. Future crises may present entirely different challenges. The trauma of the pandemic has, in many circles, functioned to elevate technology as an almost singular solution to assure educational resilience by providing flexibility in times of disruption. Investments to protect education wrongly shifted away from people and towards machines, digital connections and platforms. This elevation of the technical over the human is contradictory to education’s aim to further human development and cultivate humanistic values. It is human capacity, rather than technological capacity, that is central to ensuring greater resilience of education systems to withstand shocks and manage crises.

Overall, the pandemic is a case study in how technology in its current iterations is not yet a suitable foundation for actualizing the diverse goals that communities assign to education. Expectations that technology may, in time, help further increase the reach, improve the quality and strengthen the agility of education are valid. For now, though, the experiences since early 2020 have shown it to be an alarmingly brittle solution – one incapable of effectively responding to widespread and extended school shutdowns. For far too many students, it was a solution that either never started in earnest or quickly broke down. The sudden shift to ed-tech also accelerated a concerning transfer of authority away from teachers, schools and communities and towards private, for-profit interests. Additionally, the censorship, data extraction, advertising, top-down control, intimidation and surveillance that so often characterize current models of digital transformation have made education less free and, arguably, less capable of facilitating critiques of and positive changes to the status quo. [emphasis added by DR.]

Countries made massive investments to digitalize education through much of the COVID-19 pandemic. But it remains far from clear whether these investments will improve education over the longer term and make it an engine of just, inclusive and sustainable development, especially when compared with conventional school-based and teacher-facilitated education. The digital transformation of education may yet be a force for beneficial change. But the logic of technological solutionism and its associated business models currently steering this transformation, led largely by the commercial technology entities that are remaking so many aspects of society, tend to treat education and knowledge as private commodities and not as global public goods that provide collective as well as individual benefits.

It is hoped that this analysis and its use of tragedy as a metaphor might moderate the discourse and popular view that the pandemic has ‘unshackled’ education systems and ‘launched’ them into desirable futures characterized by greater technology use. Documenting the severity and scope of the many negative consequences of ed-tech responses during the health crisis inverts the triumphalist narratives that accompany many descriptions of technology deployments to address the educational disruption caused by school closures. A critical examination of the assumptions of technology solutionism and a review of the existing evidence provide a corrective and a counterargument to notions that more, deeper and accelerated use of technology is uniformly positive for education…

Throughout the review that follows, considerable evidence illustrates how the rush to distance and remote learning with ed-tech accelerated the privatization of education in many contexts. While some countries and localities managed a shift to digital learning with limited privatization of the educational experience, a defining characteristic of the technology-centric response to the educational disruptions of the pandemic tended to be the elevation of for-profit, private ed-tech companies. In addition to considering the ways reliance on ed-tech impacted educational inclusion, equity and quality, this publication also explores the complex and often symbiotic links between ed-tech and the privatization of education during the pandemic.The rush to distance and remote learning with ed-tech accelerated the privatization of education.

Most such reports tend to summarize the status quo. This one challenges it. It’s time to take stock before the Ed-tech industry takes control of our most precious asset: our children.

Categories Ethics, Failure, For-Profit, International, Technology

NYC Parents and Activists Block “AI-themed” High School

By dianeravitch
May 5, 2026 //
2

Parents and activists banded together to persuade the New York City Board of Education (aka the Panel on Educational Policy) to reject a proposal to open an AI-themed high school.

Matthew Haag wrote in The New York Times:

In Brooklyn, an artificial intelligence program helps public school students pronounce words. In Queens, high school students ask Google Gemini how to improve their essays. And in the Bronx, students in a robotics lab consult an A.I. tool before building parts on a 3-D printer.

As teachers and students in New York City and across the United States have increasingly embraced artificial intelligence in the classroom, school leaders in the nation’s largest school system were set to make one of their biggest splashes yet — the opening of an A.I.-focused high school in Manhattan next school year.

But on Monday, the new schools chancellor, Kamar Samuels, abruptly halted the creation of the school amid a groundswell of opposition to the rapid adoption of the technology and its potential harms.

In an interview, Mr. Samuels said that he understood the concerns and questions parents have about artificial intelligence in the classroom and its safety and impact on critical thinking. “I want to be able to think about the technology in a very thoughtful way,” Mr. Samuels said.

Despite the decision not to proceed, school leaders in New York City and beyond remain bullish on the future of artificial intelligence in education and its potential benefits. They argue that it could transform teaching and learning, a claim also promoted by companies that sell the tools, and that it would be irresponsible to ignore or restrict the technology.

But New York parents have expressed concern about the artificial intelligence programs used in schools or accessible on students’ computers, as well as the lack of information about the applications and data they collect. Some families recently delivered to Mayor Zohran Mamdani a petition with thousands of signatures calling for a two-year moratorium on generative A.I., such as chatbots.

“The intense outrage among parents in New York City is as great as I’ve seen it on any education issue that I’ve been working on for 25 years,” said Leonie Haimson, an education advocate in New York City and member of the Coalition for an A.I. Moratorium.

Leonie Haimson, a member of the Coalition for an A.I. Moratorium, said that she has witnessed “intense outrage” among New York City parents over A.I. use in schools. Credit…Madison Swart for The New York Times

Under Mr. Samuels’s leadership, the city’s Education Department has started to develop guidelines for how teachers and students should use artificial intelligence. Last month, the school system published its first playbook for A.I., developed in consultation with educators and education technology companies.

The creation of the new high school, known as Next Generation Technology High School and located in the financial district of Manhattan, was expected to be another major step toward the embrace of artificial intelligence in a school system whose decisions, because of its size, often influence other districts. A vote on the creation of the high school by a 22-member education oversight panel was scheduled for Wednesday.

The group’s chairman, Gregory Faulkner, said that he did not believe a single member would have voted in favor of it. Mr. Faulkner said that out of the many emails he received and conversations he had with parents, just a handful of comments were supportive of the school.

“If there’s anything that even has a hint of A.I., there’s strong opposition to it,” Mr. Faulkner said. “People are very nervous about the technology and how it is going to be used.”

Since this is a gift article, feel free to open and finish reading.

Categories Curriculum, Education Industry, Failure, New York City, Parents, Technology

Jared Cooney Horvath Tells Congressional Committee How Screen Time Impairs Learning

By dianeravitch
May 4, 2026 //
15

Jared Cooney Horvath is highly critical of digital tools in the classroom. Horvath is a neuroscientist who studies learning, memory, and cognition. His most recent book is The Digital Delusion.

On January 15, 2026, he testified before a Senate Committee, where he linked the use of technology to declining academic performance, not just in the U.S. but in other countries.

Here is his written testimony with graphs, footnotes, and other evidence to support his thesis.

Take five minutes and watch.

What do you think?

Categories Curriculum, Ethics, Online Education, Real Education, Technology

Sweden Cuts Back on Digital Learning, Emphasizes Books and Writing on Paper

By dianeravitch
May 4, 2026 //
4

The BBC reports that that Sweden has joined Norway in ousting electronics from its classrooms and reviving the use of books. The Swedish government, like Norway’s, concluded that electronic tools were causing a decline in literacy rates.

Sweden’s government is championing a renewed focus on physical books, paper and pens in classrooms, designed to reverse falling literacy levels.

Another publication, Undark, reports that the government is investing in textbooks, nonfiction books, and fiction books.

And again in the BBC:

Schools in Sweden are returning to more traditional learning methods – such as reading from physical books – after seeing their reading standards drop while ipads and laptops were used.

There is now a focus on using more printed textbooks, handwriting and less screen time in early education. Experts say reading levels are getting better because of this.

Some teachers have said students are asking for more books and paper based learning in schools, saying they learn more quickly and retain information better than using a laptop. 

This isn’t a total ban on technology in the classroom and digital devices are still used, but the government is spending millions buying physical textbooks, and library books.

During the 2000s and 2010s, books were sidelined in Swedish classrooms and replaced with laptops and ipads.

The idea was to prepare students for life in a digital world.

But it seems to have backfired.

Sweden’s reading standards, which were among the best in Europe in 2000, began to fall.

In 2012, after years of getting worse, its Pisa scores — a worldwide test that measures reading, maths and science literacy among 15-year-olds — hit their lowest point.

Now, by popular demand, the books are back in the classroom and things are improving again.

The state has launched a national reading challenge for ten-year-olds and the classes that read the most books win prizes.

Sweden had intended to be a leader in the field of digital learning, but eventually concluded that the heavy use of Ed-tech was harming student learning. Increased screen time was leading to distraction, inability to concentrate, and lessened ability to do deep reading. “Studies have linked heavy digital use to reduced comprehension and memory retention as well as eye strain.”

The U.S. spends billions every year for Ed-tech. But the pushback is growing.

Jonathan Haidt of NYU, a critic of Ed-tech and social media for children, has kept a running tab on his Twitter account of cities and school districts in the U.S. that ban social media for children. where students spend less time on cell phones and social media, libraries report an increase in books checked out.

To those who are not on the payroll of Big Tech are likely to recognize that the frenzied spending of billions of dollars on Ed-tech had more to do with profits than with student learning.

Categories Curriculum, Democracy, International, Technology
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