Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice

If readers check email or ask questions of Google far more than they would ever admit, brain researchers have not yet helped us exolain these common obsessions.

On the one hand, neuroscientists and journalists have argued that unrestrained access to information and communication have rewired the brain. The brain is plastic altering itself  in response to the environment and creating new neural pathways that ancestors lacked. So multi-tasking has become the norm and, better yet, we are more productive and connected to people as never before.

On the other hand, there are those neuroscientists who concur that the brain is plastic but it has hardly been rewired. Instead, complete access to information and people–friends, like-minded enthusiasts, and strangers–unleashes brain chemicals that give us pleasure. Or as one psychologist put it:

What the Internet does is stimulate our reward systems over and over with tiny bursts of information (tweets, status updates, e-mails) that … can be delivered in more varied and less predictable sequences. These are experiences our brains did not evolve to prefer, but [they are] like drugs of abuse….

To these researchers and journalist, the Internet and social media are addictive.

So these are competing views emerging from current brain research. Most studies producing these results, however, come from experiments on selected humans and animals. They are hardly definitive and offer parents and educators little about the impact on children and youth from watching multiple screens hours on end.

And nothing is mentioned about the  issue that both neuroscientists and philosophers persistently stumble over. Is the brain the same as the mind? Is consciousness–our sense of self–the product of neural impulses or is it a combination of memories, perceptions, and beliefs apart from brain activity picked up in MRIs? On one side are those who equate the brain with the mind (David Dennett) and on the other side are those who call such equivalency, “neurotrash.”

Yet even with the unknowns about the brain, its plasticity, and the mind, much less about what effects the Internet has upon young children, youth, and adults–“Is Google Making Us Stupid?” asked one writer–many school reformers have run with brain research with nary a look backward.

Consider those school reformers including technology enthusiasts who hate current school structures with such a passion that they call for bricks-and-mortar schools to go the way of  gas-lit street lights and be replaced by online instruction or other forms of remote schooling that embrace high-tech fully. Cathy Davidson, Duke University professor, to cite one example, makes such a case.

[T]he roots of our twenty-first-century educational philosophy go back to the machine age and its model of linear, specialized, assembly-line efficiency, everyone on the same page, everyone striving for the same answer to a question that both offers uniformity and suffers from it. If the multiple-choice test is the Model T of knowledge assessment, we need to ask: What is the purpose of a Model T in an Internet age?

Others call for blended learning, a combination of face-to-face (F2F in the lingo) and online lessons.

There’s this myth in the brick and mortar schools that somehow the onset of online K-12 learning will be the death of face-to-face … interaction. However this isn’t so — or at least in the interest of the future of rigor in education, it shouldn’t be. In fact, without a heaping dose of F2F [face-to-face] time plus real-time communication, online learning would become a desolate road for the educational system to travel.

The fact is that there is a purpose in protecting a level of F2F and real-time interaction even in an online program…. The power is in a Blended Learning equation:

Face-to-Face + Synchronous Conversations + Asynchronous Interactions = Strong Online Learning Environment

Then there are those who embrace brain research with lusty (and uncritical) abandon.

Students’ digitally conditioned brains are 21st century brains, and teachers must encourage these brains to operate fully in our classrooms…. If we can help students balance the gifts technology brings with these human gifts, they will have everything they need.

So where are we? Listen to cognitive psychologist Daniel Willingham and frequent blogger. He has offered three bullet-point facts for those educators caught up in brain-based research:

#The brain is always changing

#The connection between the brain and behavior is not obvious.

#Deriving useful information for teachers from neuroscience is slow, painstaking work.

Willingham ended his piece by asking a key question:

“How can you tell the difference between bonafide research and schlock? That’s an ongoing problem and for the moment, the best advice may be that suggested by David Daniel, a researcher at James Madison University: ‘If you see the words ‘brain-based,’ run.’ “

While teaching at Stanford University between 1981-2001, I had also returned twice to high school teaching. Having worked with many superintendents while at Stanford through sponsoring Superintendent Roundtables at the Graduate School of Education, I asked two district leaders who I knew well whether I could teach a U.S. History class for a semester in one of their high schools. Both district leaders agreed and asked two of their high school principals to make that happen.

Each principal found a social studies teacher who was willing to let me teach their first period class for a semester. After teaching the early morning high school U.S. History class, I would drive to the Stanford campus and teach my graduate courses there and meet with students. While my Stanford teaching load was far from onerous, going from high school to university made for a long day. But very worthwhile.

Why did I do this? Then and now, the answers remain the same. First, I found teaching high school juniors very satisfying when I had taught years earlier. Second, I wanted to find out whether my teaching had changed in the years I was absent from the high school classroom. Third, because I had taught for 14 years in urban high schools and after seven years as a superintendent and fifteen years as a university professor, I wanted to see how much, if at all, high school had changed.

The final reason was personal. I wanted to be credible to my Stanford graduate students on their path to becoming certified teachers in California who were taking my social studies methods course .

Here is what I remember about teaching in one of those two Bay area high schools.

As I was leaving my first period U.S. History class, the teacher who used the room after me called me back. “Larry, it would help me start my class….” She paused and then rushed on, “if you could erase your boards–I need the space, and we do that for one another here.”

I blushed and mumbled an apology. I erased the chalkboards for the rest of the semester. A lesson learned in my first week of school after an absence of 16 years from teaching high school students.

What was I doing? Every day between 8 and 8:50 A.M. for one semester, I taught an 11th grade U.S. History class in a Santa Clara County high school. After teaching the class, I returned to Stanford University to teach and advise students.

The high school enrolled 1,600 students, of whom over one-third were minority. More that 90% of the graduating class chose higher education. I taught a “skills” class, however. It was intended to be small in size and limited to students who had performed poorly in academic subjects or had major difficulties in reading and writing. In the first few weeks, I had 17 students, all but two of whom were Hispanic or Black.

What did I learn after this extended absence from teaching high school students? Three lessons: those students in my “skills” class still varied greatly in their performance; the “right-answer” syndrome dominated the class; and my students had a dim view of their intellectual ability.

Administrators in this high school created “skills” class by grouping students based on achievement and teachers’ recommendations. Yet reading test scores for my students ranged from 4th to 11th grade. If the purpose of bringing such students together in one class was to make it easier to teach similar students, it failed.

Meanwhile, there was the “right-answer” syndrome. Students believed that questions had correct answers either from the textbook or the teacher. And they had learned survival rules in elementary school: keep silent or say as little as possible without appearing stupid.

Any teacher who is interested in getting students to reason aloud–which requires giving answers in front of classmates that may not be “correct”–must change the rules.

But changing rules was tough to do. We had intense, almost hostile, discussions about questions that had no correct answer such as: In the Civil War, “Why did southern poor white farmers who didn’t own a single slave end up volunteering to fight for wealthy planters who owned all the slaves?” To answer such questions, students had to distinguish between facts and opinions, decide what qualified as evidence, cite their sources, and discover that history is interpreting facts. It was a struggle.

The “right answer” syndrome, of course, prevails across most high school subjects but they are far more pronounced in “skills” classes. Giving right answers to teachers’ questions and doing worksheets is “normal” especially when multiple-choice tests are given repeatedly. “How can this class be called U.S. History,” students asked me “if we cannot be sure of which answers are wrong?” And, the most basic question of all that went unasked: “If I cannot count on there being correct answers, how can I ever get out of high school?”

Just as evident as the “right answer” syndrome was the students’ low intellectual self-confidence. At least half of the class knew one another from other “skills” classes or special education programs. What was evidence of low self-regard? When I asked a student to read her paragraph comparing early 20th century immigrants’ dreams of a better life with her own dreams, she refused. “It’s stupid,” she said. “I never do these things right.” Often, when I asked students for their opinions on issues raised in class, they gave one-word responses–seldom a full sentence, never a paragraph. For those whose native language was not English, the reluctance was understandable. But when I pressed other students to enlarge their answers, they would say, “I don’t know nothing,” or “What I have is dumb.”

Establishing a mood in the class that encouraged students to take intellectual risks, to give opinions backed by evidence, and to follow up their responses without fear of being put down took the entire semester. For six of the 17 students, I failed. They would seldom speak in class. Another six students showed modest improvement by speaking at length without apologizing for what they were about to say. And five students blossomed. They gained confidence in stating answers and punched back at my counter-arguments by asking me for my evidence and which sources I had used.

My experience with this class drove home a point I had first learned as a teacher in the 1950s and 1960s: I was not simply fighting the usual battles to get students to think and participate in class; I was also engaged in a losing struggle to lift students’ intellectual confidence after being labeled and segregated earlier in their school career.

A New York Times journalist, Natasha Singer covers technology access and use. This article appeared January 2, 2026.

In early November, Microsoft said it would supply artificial intelligence tools and training to more than 200,000 students and educators in the United Arab Emirates.

Days later, a financial services company in Kazakhstan announced an agreement with OpenAI to provide ChatGPT Edu, a service for schools and universities, for 165,000 educators in Kazakhstan.

Last month, xAI, Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company, announced an even bigger project with El Salvador: developing an A.I. tutoring system, using the company’s Grok chatbot, for more than a million students in thousands of schools there.

Fueled partly by American tech companies, governments around the globe are racing to deploy generative A.I. systems and training in schools and universities.

Some U.S. tech leaders say A.I. chatbots — which can generate humanlike emails, create class quizzes, analyze data and produce computer code — can be a boon for learning. The tools, they argue, can save teachers time, customize student learning and help prepare young people for an “A.I.-driven” economy.

But the rapid spread of the new A.I. products could also pose risks to young people’s development and well-being, some children’s and health groups warn.

A recent study from Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon University found that popular A.I. chatbots may diminish critical thinking. A.I. bots can produce authoritative-sounding errors and misinformation, and some teachers are grappling with widespread A.I.-assisted student cheating.

Silicon Valley for years has pushed tech tools like laptops and learning apps into classrooms, with promises of improving education access and revolutionizing learning.

Still, a global effort to expand school computer access — a program known as “One Laptop per Child” — did not improve students’ cognitive skills or academic outcomes, according to studies by professors and economists of hundreds of schools in Peru. Now, as some tech boosters make similar education access and fairness arguments for A.I., children’s agencies like UNICEF are urging caution and calling for more guidance for schools.

“With One Laptop per Child, the fallouts included wasted expenditure and poor learning outcomes,” Steven Vosloo, a digital policy specialist at UNICEF, wrote in a recent post. “Unguided use of A.I. systems may actively de-skill students and teachers.”

Education systems across the globe are increasingly working with tech companies on A.I. tools and training programs.

In the United States, where states and school districts typically decide what to teach, some prominent school systems recently introduced popular chatbots for teaching and learning. In Florida alone, Miami-Dade County Public Schools, the nation’s third-largest school system, rolled out Google’s Gemini chatbot for more than 100,000 high school students. And Broward County Public Schools, the nation’s sixth-biggest school district, introduced Microsoft’s Copilot chatbot for thousands of teachers and staff members.

Outside the United States, Microsoft in June announced a partnership with the Ministry of Education in Thailand to provide free online A.I. skills lessons for hundreds of thousands of students. Several months later, Microsoft said it would also provide A.I. training for 150,000 teachers in Thailand. OpenAI has pledged to make ChatGPT available to teachers in government schools across India.

The Baltic nation of Estonia is trying a different approach, with a broad new national A.I. education initiative called “A.I. Leap.”

The program was prompted partly by a recent poll showing that more than 90 percent of the nation’s high schoolers were already using popular chatbots like ChatGPT for schoolwork, leading to worries that some students were beginning to delegate school assignments to A.I.

Estonia then pressed U.S. tech giants to adapt their A.I. to local educational needs and priorities. Researchers at the University of Tartu worked with OpenAI to modify the company’s Estonian-language service for schools so it would respond to students’ queries with questions rather than produce direct answers.

Introduced this school year, the “A.I. Leap” program aims to teach educators and students about the uses, limits, biases and risks of A.I. tools. In its pilot phase, teachers in Estonia received training on OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini chatbots.

“It’s critical A.I. literacy,” said Ivo Visak, the chief executive of the A.I. Leap Foundation, an Estonian nonprofit that is helping to manage the national education program. “It’s having a very clear understanding that these tools can be useful — but at the same time these tools can do a lot of harm.”

Estonia also recently held a national training day for students in some high schools. Some of those students are now using the bots for tasks like generating questions to help them prepare for school tests, Mr. Visak said.

“If these companies would put their effort not only in pushing A.I. products, but also doing the products together with the educational systems of the world, then some of these products could be really useful,” Mr. Visak added.

This school year, Iceland started its own national A.I. pilot in schools. Now several hundred teachers across the country are experimenting with Google’s Gemini chatbot or Anthropic’s Claude for tasks like lesson planning, as they aim to find helpful uses and to pinpoint drawbacks.

Researchers at the University of Iceland will then study how educators used the chatbots.

Students won’t use the chatbots for now, partly out of concern that relying on classroom bots could diminish important elements of teaching and learning.

“If you are using less of your brain power or critical thinking — or whatever makes us more human — it is definitely not what we want,” said Thordis Sigurdardottir, the director of Iceland’s Directorate of Education and School Services.

Tinna Arnardottir and Frida Gylfadottir, two teachers participating in the pilot at a high school outside Reykjavik, say the A.I. tools have helped them create engaging lessons more quickly.

Ms. Arnardottir, a business and entrepreneurship teacher, recently used Claude to make a career exploration game to help her students figure out whether they were more suited to jobs in sales, marketing or management. Ms. Gylfadottir, who teaches English, said she had uploaded some vocabulary lists and then used the chatbot to help create exercises for her students.

“I have fill-in-the-blank word games, matching word games and speed challenge games,” Ms. Gylfadottir said. “So before they take the exam, I feel like they’re better prepared.”

Ms. Gylfadottir added that she was concerned about chatbots producing misinformation, so she vetted the A.I.-created games and lessons for accuracy before asking her students to try them. Ms. Gylfadottir and Ms. Arnardottir said they also worried that some students might already be growing dependent on — or overly trusting of — A.I. tools outside school.

That has made the Icelandic teachers all the more determined, they said, to help students learn to critically assess and use chatbots.

“They are trusting A.I. blindly,” Ms. Arnardottir said. “They are maybe losing motivation to do the hard work of learning, but we have to teach them how to learn with A.I.”

Teachers currently have few rigorous studies to guide generative A.I. use in schools. Researchers are just beginning to follow the long-term effects of A.I. chatbots on teenagers and schoolchildren.

“Lots of institutions are trying A.I.,” said Drew Bent, the education lead at Anthropic. “We’re at a point now where we need to make sure that these things are backed by outcomes and figure out what’s working and what’s not working.”

I have written in the past of my experiences as the Arlington County (VA) Superintendent and how the job affected my life and family during and after the workday. In this post, I describe how my wife Barbara and my daughters Sondra and Janice who went to public schools in the County experienced what it was like to be in the family of the district’s school chief. All of what follows occurred during the seven years I served as Superintendent (1974-1981).

The superintendency was both exhilarating and exhausting. As a line from a John Denver song put it: “Some days were diamonds; some days were stones.” What values I prized about public service and helping people were enacted daily; what skills I had were tapped frequently, and the superintendency pushed me into learning new skills and plumbing hidden reserves of energy. In short, being superintendent stretched me in ways I keenly felt were worthwhile. I enjoyed the job immensely. But–there has to be a but–there were a number of job-related issues that arose over the years, softening my rosy assessment, forcing me to face the inevitable trade-offs that accompany the top post in a school district.

What initially turned our lives topsy-turvy was the time I had to spend on the job after two years that I spent as a university graduate student and, before that, working as a teacher for nearly a decade.

As Superintendent, my day began at 8:00 A.M. in the office and for two to three nights a week (and even more nights out during budget season) ended around 10-11PM. On those long days, I would race home for dinner at 5:00 P.M. and leave two hours later for a board meeting, work session, or some other community event.

During the week, I saw my family in the mornings and at dinner-time. Fatigue tracked me relentlessly the first few years; at home I’d fall asleep watching the evening news and take long afternoon naps on weekends. Adjusting to new time demands proved difficult for all of us.

While we had not given too much thought to the issue of privacy, Barbara and I had made a few decisions about our family time. We had agreed that Friday evening dinners to celebrate the Sabbath were a high priority. I had asked the school board to be excused from obligations on Friday evenings, and they honored my request for the seven years I served, except for those few instances when I decided that I had to attend a meeting or community event. Apart from critical County Supervisors’ Board meetings on Saturdays, my bosses made few demands upon me during the week-ends, apart from phone calls.

A listed telephone number proved to be less of an issue than we had anticipated. I rarely received more than a half-dozen calls a week from parents, students, or citizens, except during snow storms or when I made a controversial recommendation to the School Board. Surprisingly, we received few crank or obscene phone calls.

Buffering the family from the job was tough enough. Deciding what to do about those social invitations where much business was transacted informally, without reducing time spent with my family troubled me. The first week on the job, for example, a principal who then headed the administrators’ union invited me to join a poker game with a number of principals and district office administrators that met twice a month. My predecessor, he said, had been a regular player for the five years that he was superintendent. Moreover, it would offer me a splendid chance to meet some of the veteran staff away from the office in relaxed surroundings. Aware of the advantage in joining and the costs in time with my family, I thanked the principal for the generous invitation but said no. It had also occurred to me that I would be making personnel changes and a certain amount of social distance from people I supervised might be best.

Dinner invitations also proved troublesome as well. Invariably at these affairs, conversations would center on school matters and juicy political gossip. These evenings became work for me and difficult for Barbara who was immersed in completing her undergraduate degree. The last thing both of us wanted to hear on a Saturday night out was more about the Arlington schools. Except for socializing with the few friends that we had made in the County whom we could relax with and not be concerned about what we said, mainly members of the School Board, we turned down most invitations after our second year in Arlington.

We remained, however, part of the ceremonial life in Arlington. I ate chicken at boy scout dinners, sampled hors d’oeurves at Chamber of Commerce affairs (until I dropped out from the organization because of its persistent attacks upon school budgets), spoke at church suppers; and represented the school board at civic meetings.

We were fortunate to have had a network of close friends in Washington, D.C. since 1963 where I had worked as a teacher and administrator for nearly a decade. I could see now, in ways that I could not have seen earlier, that by entering the Arlington community as an outsider and remaining separate from existing social networks, that there would be certain costs. That was, I believe, one price we paid for being outsiders and for trying to prevent the superintendency from completely taking over our lives.

But, of course, the shadow of the superintendency, with all of its pluses and minuses, fell over the family nonetheless. For example, our daughters (ages ten and twelve in 1974) were not only singled out, both positively and negatively by Arlington teachers, they also had to deal with all of the complications of becoming teenagers, losing old friends and gaining new ones, and coping with schoolwork and family issues. Their desire to be accepted and just be like others their age put a constant strain on both girls; from early on they were singled out as being different because of their father’s position in the community and their religion. Active, smart, independent, and friendly, Sondra and Janice both enjoyed and hated the attention. While some teachers were especially sensitive to the awkward position the girls were in, others were callous. Principals of the schools they attended were very understanding and tried to help, but little could be done with the occasionally insensitive teacher.

When salary negotiations heated up, for example, two of their teachers made caustic remarks to each girl about their father’s lack of concern for teachers’ economic welfare. The pressures were such that our eldest daughter wanted to try another school. It proved to be the hardest decision that Barbara and I made while I was superintendent. For us, her welfare was more important than concerns over what others might think of a superintendent pulling his daughter out of the public schools.

We transferred her to a private school in Washington, D.C., where she began to thrive academically and socially. Of course, the local newspaper carried an article about it. Our other daughter went to a private school for one year but wanted very much to return to the Arlington schools and did so for her high school years.

Barbara was clear on what she wanted. She did not wish to be “the superintendent’s wife.” She wanted to complete her undergraduate degree and enter a profession. In seven years, she finished her degree at George Washington University and earned a masters in social work from Catholic University while completing the necessary internships for a career in clinical social work. Between caring for a family, doing coursework, research papers, tests, and coping with a tired husband, Barbara had little time or concern for meeting others’ expectations of how a superintendent’s wife should act.

Yet, try as we might, it was difficult to insulate ourselves from the fact that I was the superintendent. My efforts, for example, to keep my family and my job separate when serious decisions had to be made often did not work. Firing a teacher, determining the size of a pay raise, recommending which low enrollment schools to close, and dozens of other decisions had to be made. After listening to many individuals and groups, receiving advice from my staff, and hearing all the pros and cons from my closest advisers, I still had to make the recommendation to close a school to the School Board. At such times, I might discuss the situation with Barbara. Often, however, there were family concerns that required our attention instead.

Yet I would still come home with the arguments ricocheting in my mind; and I would carry on an internal dialogue while I was eating dinner, raking leaves, playing with the girls, or on weekend trips with the family. I was home, but I was distant.

Over the years with the help of my wife, I became more skilled at telling my family that something from the job was bothering me and that if I seemed distracted it had nothing to do with them. But I never acquired the knack of leaving serious Issues on the doorstep when I came home. Some-times, escaping the job was impossible. Newspaper articles or the 11:00 p.m. television news about Arlington County schools entered our home whether we liked it or not.

What did stun me, however, was the lengths that some people would go for political advantage, including destroying someone’s reputation. Elected officials, accustomed to the political in-fighting, might find such back-biting trivial. It jolted me and my family.

I’ll give one example. Shortly before the school board reappointed me for another four years, a Board member called to ask if I had ever been arrested in Washington, D.C., on a drug charge. No, I hadn’t, I told her. She said that there was a story that would appear in the next day’s local newspaper stating that I had been arrested and put in jail for possession of heroin. Within the next hour, I received a dozen calls from county officials, parents, friends of School Board members, and the head of the teachers’ union asking me if the newspaper story were true and if there was anything they could do to help. Finally, a newspaper reporter called to say that they were printing the story and did I have any comments to make. I told the reporter that there was no basis for the allegation and that before printing such a lie they would do well to get a record of the alleged arrest and other documentation. The newspaper did not print the story.

What shocked me most was the fragility of a professional reputation, the willingness of people to believe the worst (this occurred a few years after the Watergate scandal led to President Nixon’s resignation), and the lengths some people would go to destroy someone they disliked politically.

The seven years as superintendent taught me a great deal about the mixing of public and private lives for officials like myself. More prosaic than corrupt governors or U.S. Senators who party and then resign for disclosure of sexual jaunts, our experiences mapped an unfamiliar terrain for a novice superintendent and family who tried hard to maintain their privacy.

Reducing classroom distractions during a lesson is essential to any definition of effective teaching, much less student learning. With cell phones ubiquitous among students, distractions multiply. What, for example, do some teachers do before or during a lesson to manage cell phone use?

Veteran math teacher Tony Riehl wrote a post on this subject. It appeared May 22, 2017 . He has taught high school math courses in Montana for 35 years. I added math teaching blogger Dan Meyer’s comments on Riehl’s post.

I learned early on with cell phones, that when you ask a student to hand you their phone, it very often becomes confrontational. A cell phone is a very personal item for some people.

To avoid the confrontation I created a “distraction box” and lumped cell phones in with the many other distraction that students bring to class. These items have changed over time, but include “fast food” toys, bouncy balls, Rubics cubes, bobble heads, magic cards, and the hot item now are the fidget cubes and fidget spinners.

A distraction could be a distraction to the individual student, the other students or even a distraction to me. On the first day of the year I explain to my students that if I make eye contact with them and point to the distraction box, they have a choice to make. If they smile and put the item in the box, they can take the item out of the box on the way out of the room. If they throw a fit and put the distraction in the box, they can have it back at the end of the day. If they refuse to put the distraction in the box, they go to the office with the distraction.

On the first day of the year we even practice smiling while we put an item in the box. The interaction is always kept very light and the students really are cooperative. It has been a few years since an interaction actually became confrontational, because I am not asking them to put the item in my hand. I even have students sometimes put their cell phone in the box on the way in the door because they know they are going to have trouble staying focused.

This distraction box concept really has changed the atmosphere of my room. Students understand what a distraction is and why we need to limit distractions….

This Is My Favorite Cell Phone Policy

By Dan Meyer • May 24, 2017

Schools around the world are struggling to integrate modern technology like cell phones into existing instructional routines. Their stances towards that technology range from total proscription – no cell phones allowed from first bell to last – to unlimited usage. Both of those policies seem misguided to me for the same reason: they don’t offer students help, coaching, or feedback in the complex skills of focus and self-regulation.

Enter Tony Riehl’s cell phone policy, which I love for many reasons, not least of which because it isn’t exclusively a cell phone policy. It’s a distractions policy.

What Tony’s “distraction box” does very well:

• It makes the positive statement that “we’re in class to work with as few distractions as possible.” It isn’t a negative statement about any particular distraction. Great mission statement.
• Specifically, it doesn’t single out cell phones. The reality is that cell phones are only one kind of technology students will bring to school, and digital technology is only one distractor out of many. Tony notes that “these items have changed over time, but include fast food toys, bouncy balls, Rubik’s cubes, bobble heads, magic cards, and the hot items now are the fidget cubes and fidget spinners.”
• It acknowledges differences between students. What distracts you might not distract me. My cell phone distracts my learning so it goes in the box. Your cell phone helps you learn so it stays on your desk.
• It builds rather than erodes the relationship between teachers and students. Cell phone policies often encourage teachers to become detectives and students to learn to evade them. None of this does any good for the working relationship between teachers and students. Meanwhile, Tony describes a policy that has “changed the atmosphere of my room,” a policy in which students and teachers are mutually respected and mutually invested.

The weekly “Marshall Memo” curates research articles from many journals that Kim Marshall believes teachers, administrators, and parents will find useful.

I have known Kim for decades when he was a teacher in the Boston public schools, served as a district principal for 15 years and then worked in the central office with various superintendents.

I trust his judgment on what he thinks are important articles for teachers and administrators to read and ponder. Moreover, he is a graceful writer.

In this issue of the “Marshall Memo,” he has taken a scholarly article from the Review of Educational Research about teachers resisting mandated curriculum and materials. He summarizes the piece crisply, making it accessible to a wider audience than would usually read this academic journal.

That some teachers push back against a required curriculum is not news to veterans of the classroom. Why they do and how they adapt mandated lessons, however, offers important insights into classroom lessons particularly teacher flexibility and resilience.

In this Review of Educational Research article, Andrew Huddleston (Abilene Christian University) and four colleagues report on their study of the ways that some teachers engage in “principled resistance” to implementing mandated materials. An example: a teacher believed the highly scripted Open Court curriculum didn’t meet her students’ cultural and individual needs and implemented a creative literature-based curriculum with extensive student writing. Despite her kids scoring well on state tests, the teacher’s contract was not renewed because she wasn’t a team player; she left the profession.

            “Although we greatly empathize with the teachers in this review who engaged in acts of principled resistance,” say Huddleston et al., “we are not advocates for an anarchical approach in which teachers do whatever they want for any reason. We recognize that even within a student-centered classroom, direct instruction still has a place, and a provided curriculum can be helpful, especially for new teachers.” Indeed, research has shown that a “guaranteed and viable curriculum” correlates with student achievement, and aligning curriculum across classrooms and grades can be part of an effective strategy for equitable student learning. On the other hand, test prep and rigid curriculum mandates can actually make test scores go down.

            With those caveats, the researchers explore the literature on principled resistance and identify three reasons some teachers resist curriculum mandates, with an example for each:

• Social justice – Three bilingual teachers felt that monolingual instruction wasn’t meeting the needs of their emerging bilingual students and advocated with their colleagues on the importance of a 50/50 biliteracy approach. In another instance, high-school social studies teachers advocated for a justice-oriented ethnic studies curriculum focused on the surrounding community. 

• Students’ needs not being met – A teacher implementing the Lucy Calkins Units of Study curriculum believed the writing prompts were contrived and artificial, and she found ways to spark students’ writing ideas through conversations with each other. 

• Culturally responsive pedagogy – Two urban fifth-grade teachers objected to the test prep toolkit they were required to use and implemented a culturally responsive interdisciplinary unit that made connections to students’ lived experience. 

From their review of numerous studies, Huddleston and his co-authors describe these “models of resistance” used by teachers who have issues with curriculum materials:

–   Strategic compliance – they go along while believing their students aren’t served well.

–   Compliance with frustration – teachers are deeply unhappy but feel powerless to resist.

–   Compliance with complaint – they voice their concerns but aren’t listened to.

–   Resisting covertly – behind closed doors, teachers supplement or alter the material.

–   Strategic compromise – they use parts of the required curriculum but not others.

–   Adjusting pacing – teachers make changes in how time is allotted.

–   Rearranging – they change the sequence and substance to align with their beliefs. 

–   Supplementing – teachers add materials and techniques they believe are necessary.

–   Omitting – they skip certain elements and substitute their own ideas.

–   Hybridizing – teachers blend their own ideas with the required curriculum.

–   Persuading – they make the case for different materials to colleagues and leaders.

–   Going public – teachers use social media to try to influence parents and policymakers.

–   Collective action – they rally others to opt out of curriculum or testing.

–   Overt and outright rejection – teachers refuse to implement test prep or materials.

–   Forced to leave – as in the case above, a contract is not renewed or the teacher is fired.

–   Transferring – teachers move to a school with a more-sympatico curriculum. 

–   Leaving teaching – they decide the struggle is not worth it and change profession.

Did these forms of teacher pushback – from grudging compliance to putting their jobs on the line – result in better student outcomes? Unfortunately, say Huddleston et al., “none of the studies we located compared the student performance of teachers who resisted curricular mandates with those who did not.” It’s possible, they say, that some of the changes teachers made did more harm than good. Clearly more research is needed because in some cases, the opposite occurs: teachers persuade school leaders to make changes that improve student achievement. 

In the meantime, what are the implications of this study for school leaders? One guiding principle, say Huddleston et al., is watching for situations where teachers make the case for adaptations that are within the spirit and intent of a curriculum. “Being faithful to the purpose of a program,” they say, “addresses the need for a schoolwide focus and cohesion while at the same time carving out space for teacher discretion, decision-making, and necessary modification.” 

            The big questions raised by this study: what’s best for students, how that’s measured, and who gets to decide. “Principled resistance,” say Huddleston et al., “is not laziness, stubbornness, or resistance to change,” but teachers who believe a mandated curriculum is harmful won’t help their students by suffering in silence or quitting. They’re most likely to improve things for students when they join with colleagues and make the case for curriculum changes that improve not only test scores but also students’ deeper learning and future well-being. 

The article closes with a quote from Margaret Mead: “Never doubt that a small group of concerned citizens can make a difference. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”

_____________________________

“Teachers’ Principled Resistance to Curricular Control: A Theoretical Literature Review” by Andrew Huddleston, Stephanie Talley, Sara Edgington, Emily Colwell, and Allison Dale in Review of Educational Research, December 2025 (Vol. 95, #6, pp. 1213-1250); Huddleston can be reached at [email protected]. 

Tiffany Hsu [is] “a technology reporter covering the information ecosystem, including foreign influence, political speech and disinformation.” This article appeared in The New York Times, December 25, 2025.

Most teenagers know that baseless conspiracy theories, partisan propaganda and artificially generated deepfakes lurk on social media. Valerie Ziegler’s students know how to spot them.

At Abraham Lincoln High School in San Francisco, she trains her government, economy and history students to consult a variety of sources, recognize rage-baiting content and consider influencers’ motivations. They brainstorm ways to distinguish deepfakes from real footage.

Ms. Ziegler, 50, is part of a vanguard of California educators racing to prepare students in a rapidly changing online world. Content moderation policies have withered at many social media platforms, making it easier to lie and harder to trust. Artificial intelligence is evolving so quickly, and generating such persuasive content, that even professionals who specialize in detecting its presence are being stumped.

California is ahead of many other states in pushing schools to teach digital literacy, but even there, education officials are not expected to set specific standards until later in 2026. So Ms. Ziegler and a growing group of her peers are forging ahead, cobbling together lesson plans from nonprofit groups and updating older coursework to address new technologies, such as the artificial intelligence that powers video apps like Sora. Their methods are hands-on, including classroom exercises that fact-check posts about history on TikTok and explore how badges that appear to signal verification on social media can often be bought rather than earned.

Teachers and librarians around the country have long tried to prepare students for the pitfalls of being online, but the past few years have underscored for educators just how much of their work increasingly involves playing catch-up with a moving target.

Ms. Ziegler’s efforts showcase the difficulties of keeping pace with new social media platforms, apps and advances in A.I.

“We’re sending these kids out into the world, and we’re supposed to have provided them skills,” Ms. Ziegler, a former California teacher of the year, said. “The tricky part is that we adults are learning this skill at the same time the kids are.”

Social media literacy is a tough subject for schools to try to teach, especially now. Federal funding for education is precarious, and the Trump administration has politicized and penalized the study of disinformation and misinformation. A.I. is becoming pervasive in the educational system, available to younger and younger children, even as its dangers to students and educators become increasingly clear.

The News Literacy Project, a media education nonprofit, surveyed 1,110 teenagers in May last year and found that four in 10 said they had any media literacy instruction in class that year. Eight in 10 said they had come across a conspiracy theory on social media — including false claims that the 2020 election was rigged — and many said they were inclined to believe at least one of the narratives.

Ms. Ziegler teaches the self-described “screenagers” in her classes that their social media feeds are populated using highly responsive algorithms, and that large followings do not make accounts trustworthy. In one case, the students learned to distinguish between a reputable historians group on Instagram and a historical satire account with a similar name. Now, they default to double-checking information that interests them online.

“That’s the starting point,” said Xavier Malizia, 17.

Ms. Ziegler first tried to teach A.I. literacy last year by testing out a new module from the Digital Inquiry Group, a nonprofit literacy organization. She relies heavily on collaborations, often consulting with her school’s librarian or using free resources from CRAFT, an A.I. literacy project from Stanford University.

Riley Huang, 17, said she had recently been nearly, but not quite, duped by artificially generated clips that portrayed Jake Paul, a popular boxer and influencer, as a gay man applying cosmetics. Elisha Tuerk-Levy, 18, said it was “jarring” to watch a realistic A.I. video of someone falling off Mount Everest, but added that the visuals in such videos were often too smooth — a useful “tell” that helps identify them as fake.

Zion Sharpe, 17, noted that A.I.-generated videos often seem to originate from accounts where all the posts feature the same person wearing the same clothes and speaking in the same intonation and cadence.

“It’s kind of scary, because we still have a lot more to see,” Zion said. “I feel like this is just the beginning.”

Policymakers are paying more attention to the issue. Dr. Vivek Murthy, the surgeon general under President Joseph R. Biden Jr., urged schools in 2023 to set up digital literacy instruction. At least 25 states have approved related legislation, according to an upcoming report from Media Literacy Now, a nonprofit group. This summer, for example, North Carolina passed a law requiring social media literacy coursework starting in the 2026-27 school year, covering topics such as mental health, misinformation and cyberbullying.

Many of those new rules, however, are voluntary, toothless or slow to take effect or do not acknowledge the growing presence of artificial intelligence.

“I absolutely wish we could make things happen faster,” said Assemblyman Marc Berman of California, a Democrat who wrote two media literacy bills passed in 2023 and 2024. The bills nudged the state to incorporate lessons about media literacy and responsible A.I. use at each grade level, but California education officials have yet to decide on a formal course of action.

“It’s about really strengthening those foundational skills so that no matter what tech pops up between now and then, young people have the ability to handle it,” Mr. Berman said.

Ms. Ziegler tries to teach her students how to be critical consumers of online information.Credit…Minh Connors for The New York Times

Ms. Ziegler and her peers across California and the country are scrambling to make sense of A.I. The San Diego Unified School District held A.I. expos for its teachers over the past two summers, with each drawing more than 150 educators. At the Elk Grove Unified School District in Sacramento County, teachers have turned to Code.org, MIT Media Lab and others for resources focused on A.I.

Educators are grappling with A.I. literacy even beyond high school. Augsburg University in Minneapolis offered a class this year called “Defense Against the Dark Arts,” focused on how “disinformation, alternate facts, propaganda, deepfakes” and more saturate social media and daily life. Adam Berinsky, a political science professor at M.I.T., has taught a class about misinformation on social media since 2019 but added lessons on the challenges and benefits of A.I. in the spring.

“A.I. is everywhere these days,” he said. “I adjusted teaching accordingly.”

Ms. Ziegler’s students at Abraham Lincoln High School include, clockwise from top left, Zion Sharpe, Riley Huang, Elisha Tuerk-Levy and Xavier Malizia. Credit…Minh Connors for The New York Times

Ms. Ziegler’s students are a savvy bunch, though the volume of junk online can feel overwhelming.

In November, her classes chatted about the flood of social media content featuring Zohran Mamdani, the first Muslim to be elected New York City’s mayor. During the election, authority figures once considered trustworthy sources — including a sitting member of Congress and the former governor of New York running against Mr. Mamdani — shared artificially generated content showing the Statue of Liberty wearing a burqa and Mr. Mamdani being praised by criminals. (The latter included a small, brief disclosure that it was generated by A.I.) Posts spreading disinformation about his policy plans received hundreds of thousands of views, dwarfing those of fact-check posts.

At one point in the discussion, a student piped up with a common refrain: “Don’t trust anything you see.”

That sentiment worries Ms. Ziegler. Fact-checkers and disinformation analysts have cautioned for years about a creeping sense of nihilism toward reality.

“There’s almost this mind-set now with young people that everything’s fake,” she said. “They have heard so much about things being fake online, but they don’t know how to necessarily tell.”

Whether teachers are new or experienced, male or female, white, Black, Latino, first-generation college graduate or come from a long line of educated forebears, they inevitably face a core dilemma in their classrooms. To thrive as teachers, they must learn to manage two basic but competing roles in teaching students: academic (e.g., knowing the subject that you teach) and emotional (knowing your students individually and as a group, be they five-year olds or teenagers).

What are dilemmas?

Let me unpack first what I mean by  dilemmas. I mean situations where a teacher, principal, superintendent, or school board member has to choose between two or more prized values. The choice is often hard because choosing one value ends up sacrificing to a degree another prized value. In short, one learns to compromise in negotiating between two things they want very much. Economists call these “tradeoffs.” Other social scientists label the compromise as “satisficing.”

An example of “satisficing” that each of us often does, might help. Consider the common personal/professional dilemma. You value highly your work and you value highly your family and friends. Those values compete for your attention. You want to spend your time and energy doing both but both are limited. Because you have limited time, you have to calculate the trade-offs between spending more time with one and less with the other. You have to choose; you have to “satisfice.”.

You map out options: Put in fewer hours at work and more time at home. Or the reverse. Take more vacations and maybe give up thoughts of career advancement. These and other options, each with its particular trade-offs, become candidates for compromises that include both satisfaction and sacrifice (a portmanteau of satisfy and sacrifice). If you do nothing–another option–you risk losing time with family and friends or at your job.

This is not a problem that one neatly solves and moves on to the next one. It is a dilemma that won’t go away. It is literally built into your daily routines. There is no tidy solution; it has to be managed because the compromise you work out now may unravel over time and there you are again, facing those unattractive choices.

Managing both academic and emotional roles in the classroom

Within U.S. age-graded schools, whether they are high schools or elementary schools, whether schools are in neighborhoods where wealthy, middle class, or poor families send their children, two imperatives face all U.S. teachers: know your subject (the academic role) and know your students (the emotional role). Teachers value both roles. Yet these two roles, valued highly by teachers, place huge demands upon them. The academic role requires teachers to maintain a certain social distance from students because all teachers judge the work of students while the emotional role requires teachers to get close to students. And here is the dilemma.

In the academic role, teachers teach first graders to read while upper-grade teachers teach Algebra or Biology. They convey knowledge and cultivate cognitive skills of students. Then these teachers have to evaluate which students achieve mastery of the required knowledge and skills. Judging achievement requires evidence of performance and social distance in treating all students the same when applying criteria –even if a teacher admires a hard-working, serious student who keeps failing key tests. Emotion is not supposed to sway a teacher’s judgment of students’ academic performance.

But U.S. teachers are also expected to get close to students. Professors, mentors, and principals urge teachers to know their students as individuals, their background, interests, shortcomings and strengths.

Why?

Because that personal knowledge will help teachers draw individual students into learning the content and skills that teachers teach. In displaying sincere interest in students, bonds of affection grow.  The relationship, the emotional ties between a teacher and her students, then, becomes the foundation for learning.

Balancing these competing roles and the values they represent, however, is hard to do. Many teachers only embrace the academic role: “My job is to teach science; my job is not to befriend my students.” Other teachers clasp the emotional role to their heart wanting so much to be closer to their students that they whisper to themselves: “if you like me, then you will like what I teach.” Finding just the right mix between academic and emotional roles is no easy task but teachers have to do precisely that and continually do so over an entire school year.

There are, of course, teachers who figure out how to balance these competing roles by developing a classroom persona artfully mixing both values. Their voices, gestures, clothes, verbal tics–all are part of their daily performance. They blend the academic and emotional roles appealing to students yet simultaneously prodding them to work hard.

Such teachers give genuine, heartfelt performances. Students, who can easily smell a fake, come to appreciate such teachers who manage this inherent dilemma in balancing emotional and academic roles giving their students bravura performances.

But it ain’t easy.

Much passionate rhetoric about professors’ reliance on lecturing has been published over the decades. Reformers have called for reducing the lecture method and increasing student participation and active learning. Yet the fact remains that most professors and instructors in higher education continue to lecture. The most recent figures I have seen are from a 2018 survey of professors reporting that 55 percent of their class time was spent lecturing while “[A]nother 27 percent of classes … also had some interactivity, such as students answering multiple-choice questions during class via clickers. Only 18 percent of classes could be classified as emphasizing “a student-centered style heavy on group work and discussions.”

After years of criticism of professors’ dependence upon this way of teaching, reform-minded pedagogues such as Jeremy Murphy continue to plead with their colleagues to diversify their teaching methods. Yet across the U.S., lecturing remains the dominant teaching practice in higher education.

“Jeremy [Murphy’s] interest in education is rooted in his former work as a middle and high school English teacher. Prior to pursuing his doctorate, Jeremy taught at the Nativity Preparatory School of New Bedford, Massachusetts, as well as in the Worcester Public Schools and the Baltimore City Public Schools.…

[Murphy] is passionate about improving teaching in higher education. Before coming to Holy Cross in 2022, he worked as Lead Pedagogy Fellow on the Instructional Moves (IM) project at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. This work with grew into a book, Instructional Moves for Powerful Teaching in Higher Education, which he co-wrote with Meira Levinson and published with Harvard Education Press in 2023....”

This article appeared in The Chronicle of Higher Education, July 18, 2023.

My course evaluations are in. They are mostly encouraging — except for the ones that say I should lecture more.

“Lessen the amount of reading per week and just lecture more,” reads one comment. Another student laments that there isn’t enough note-taking in class. Still other students want more “key terms” and “slides.” And another reports that, while they learned a great deal in my course, they wish there had been “less discussion and more instruction.”

The traditional lecture endures as the default instructional mode of many postsecondary classrooms. That remains the case despite evidence that exhaustive exposition from instructors tends only to benefit a particular type of student. It’s true despite an ever-growing research base that showcases the payoff of active learning. That term refers to ambitious instructional practices that prioritize collaboration, discussion, and problem-solving in college teaching. By authentically applying what they have learned, students in an active-learning classroom are not mere recipients of knowledge but engaged participants.

Why does the traditional lecture persist? For one thing, faculty members seldom enter the college classroom having had serious instructional training. Many of us have had few sustained opportunities to broaden our instructional designs. In the absence of such training, we rely on memories of our own past instructors. We teach as we were taught, goes the adage. If lectures dominated our classroom experiences as students — and chances are, they did — we, too, may retreat to our lecterns and hold forth.

But that is only half the story. The course evaluations I highlighted above add a plot twist: Plenty of students are Team Lecture. And such students help reinforce the idea that the traditional lecture should reign supreme in the college classroom.

A case in point is a 2019 study led by Louis Deslauriers, director of science teaching and learning in arts and sciences at Harvard University. Researchers randomly assigned college students in a physics course to either an active-learning classroom or a passive-learning one relying on lectures. Instructors in both taught the same material. The study found that students in the lecture classroom believed that they had learned more than those in the active one, but the active-learning students actually demonstrated higher mastery on an assessment given to both groups.

Those astonishing findings highlight how deeply ingrained undergraduate perceptions about college learning can be — and how difficult the resistance from students can be for a faculty member who wants to lecture less and use active learning more in the classroom.

Other research adds to this picture. A 2011 study of community-college students, for example, found that they widely “interpreted the absence of a lecture as the absence of instruction.” Other studies provide further evidence of student resistance to active-learning pedagogies — and evidence that pushback from undergraduates can prompt instructors to abandon such practices altogether. Maybe the puzzling appraisals I received on my course evaluations are not so puzzling after all.

What can we do? Here are five considerations I’ll be following this coming fall in response to that nagging “less discussion, more instruction” evaluation.

Lecture … sparingly. This column shouldn’t be read as a call to throw out the lecture altogether. Lectures have value. Lectures can efficiently convey a set of ideas to students. Lectures allow us to model curiosity, showcase our original work, or grab students’ interest through a clear and captivating narrative.

But classrooms are especially unique because they are, by nature, crowded places. They are a wonderful jumble of personalities, lived experiences, and different forms of expertise. By valuing monologue over dialogue, continuous lecturing fails to capitalize on this core aspect of classroom life.

Moreover, it overlooks the fact that students are constantly processing, and they can make better use of lecture material when given focused opportunities to apply it. By lecturing sparingly, you can hold on to the benefits of traditional lectures, satisfy some learners’ preference for exposition from an instructor, and, at the same time, make room for active learning.

Routinely ask how the course is going. Keep a pulse on how students are experiencing active-learning practices as they unfold in real time. By establishing a feedback loop, you can collect evidence regularly, spot patterns, and weigh their answers in your planning. Hearing students out over the course of a semester offers you an evolving read of whether particular activities or teaching strategies are effective (or not). Immediate feedback allows you to respond to concerns and confusions before it’s too late.

To be sure, students may be less apt to offer candid feedback during the semester (when they’re worried about their grades) than after a course has formally concluded. But the stronger and more frequent your feedback loop, the more willing students may be to tell you how they really feel, and the better able you’ll be to explain why you’re taking this approach and bring students on board with it, or adjust if you hear that it’s just not working.

Be transparent. Faculty members sometimes operate in an aura of mystique. We have the knowledge; students don’t. We impart that knowledge in a particular way, and we think our methods require no introduction. But if students do not understand how a particular learning design helps them arrive at a particular outcome, they tend to be less invested in a course.

Why not pull back the curtain and make your pedagogical choices known? Take a few minutes to share directly with students the research that has influenced your teaching practices. Explain your thought processes for specific activities or assignments.

In my own teaching, I engage students in a variety of discussion configurations that I leverage to reach specific objectives. Had I been more transparent about my approach last spring, at least some of my students might have better understood its purpose and value. They might have also seen how class discussion is, in fact, an evidence-based form of instruction.

Manage student anxieties. Active learning flattens the teacher-student hierarchy that is characteristic of so many college classrooms. The resulting environment affords students more power and ownership over their learning, but that newfound control can be anxiety-inducing. A student-centered classroom may ultimately offer more educational benefits than a teacher-centered one; nevertheless, students may prefer the latter precisely because it poses fewer risks and demands less of them.

If you position students at the center of your course design — with activities that require their active participation, not just listening and note-taking — then you must be willing to manage their anxieties on this front. By that I mean:

• Meet with students one on one to discuss their concerns and guide them in understanding how to participate.
• Scaffold assignments. Start small and, over the semester, progressively build toward more demanding learning experiences.
• For activities that emphasize group work, consider having students convene with the same sets of peers for extended periods, so they get comfortable working together through challenging tasks.
• On a larger scale, take steps to foster a classroom environment in which students feel safe going out on a limb and know you will support them when they do.

Unlearn. By the time students enter college they have spent thousands of hours in classrooms. Some of those hours may have prepared them well for ambitious learning designs, but decades of research in K-12 settings has also demonstrated that the road to active learning has been a rocky one. Too often, the most familiar classroom is one with desks in rows and eyes on the teacher. Many students come to us having mastered that arrangement.

You may have to help your students unlearn some of the schooling practices into which they have been long socialized. They may have to unlearn that the instructor is an all-knowing authority, that a peer is no authority at all, that feeling uncomfortable or frustrated means they aren’t learning.

Recall the physics experiment that I described earlier. Compared with students in the lecture classroom, students in the active-learning one believed they had learned less. The assessment, however, told a different story. Deslauriers and his colleagues hypothesized that students felt that way because they struggled more in the active-learning classroom: “The cognitive effort involved in this type of instruction may make students frustrated and painfully aware of their lack of understanding, in contrast with fluent lectures that may serve to confirm students’ inaccurately inflated perceptions of their own abilities.”

To help students unlearn, foster candid dialogues in class. Ask them to think critically about their past learning experiences and uncover where their expectations — about college learning, in particular — come from. Try to incorporate focused reflections and metacognitive exercises into your lessons or after specific activities.

Shifting your classroom away from a lecture-heavy style is a process. It may introduce growing pains for instructors and students. But by taking purposeful steps like these, we can better acclimatize students to active learning and wean them off lectures.

“Ruth Reader is a reporter at POLITICO, with a focus on the intersection of health care and technology, and co-author of the daily newsletter Future Pulse.

Most of her stories concern how technology is changing health and health care in the U.S. and what federal and state lawmakers are doing — or not doing — to ensure American citizens remain safe.“

This article appeared in Politico November 24, 2025.

Worried about too many screens in the classroom, a small but growing number of parents are getting so fed up they’re switching to low-tech private schools — or even pulling their kids out and opting to homeschool them, analog style.

“The school didn’t want to provide paper,” said Erica Frans, a mother in Kansas who says she decided to homeschool her fifth-grade daughter back in 2020, after watching her randomly guess the answer to math questions on a computer program.

Frans is also among a growing number of people who are joining relatively new advocacy efforts to get schools to rethink their tech-forward approach to education, which include groups like the Balance Project, Mothers Against Media Addiction and Smartphone Free Childhood.

Their frustration marks a twist in the debate over technology in schools. Much of the discussion around school tech policies is driven by worry about kids who lack access to technology and broadband. Another, newer, thread focuses on limiting mobile phone access in schools.

But with more education moving to apps and online portals, some parents and teachers are now worried that schools themselves have over-digitized. Their concern is raising big questions about the end goal of education, and the best way to achieve it.

Laptops have become ubiquitous in classrooms for the same reasons they’re in homes: They bring a whole universe of knowledge resources to each desk. Technology can be a great adjunct to traditional learning. In 2024, K-12 schools spent $30 billion on technology and could double that amount by 2033, according to a September report from the Consortium for School Networking

But research has also established that the more time kids spend on screens, the more at-risk they become of developing depression, anxiety, and mood disorders. Heavy screen use also has negative implications for how physically active kids are and how much sleep they get.

School devices have gotten relatively little attention in that debate, but they’re a huge source of children’s screen time. Some 88 percent of schools give children a personal device, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. And while more than three-quarters of schools ban cell phones in class, that policy does nothing to stop kids from loading up Youtube videos on their laptops and tablets while their teachers talk.

Even many teachers are skeptical: More than a third of teachers agree that school-issued devices distract kids in the classroom, according to a recent survey conducted by The New York Times.

In some ways, this is all a new version of an old argument. “In the late 70s, early 80s, there were individuals who were really worried about this — but in terms of TV,” said Gina Marcello, a media literacy professor at Rutgers University.

But technology is woven more deeply into the world than broadcast TV ever was. Antero Garcia, associate professor of education at Stanford University, has spent many years investing in using technology to enhance his teaching. He says that digital devices have crept out of computer labs and into classrooms in part because teachers have tried to replicate the pervasiveness of technology in the real world, where many desirable jobs are highly connected to tech.

“If you want to do creative work, ideally you’re engaging with devices throughout the day in ways that are building up personal and professional relationships,” said Garcia.

But mirroring real-world use of technology doesn’t necessarily make for good learning. Recent studies show that analog approaches to learning may have great benefits. For example, writing notes by hand, rather than typing, contributes to deeper learning. In young children, the American Academy of Pediatrics has been pushing blocks and boxes over tablets since 2018, noting that electronic media often replaces play and other interactions with caregivers that help cognitive abilities. And researchers say social interaction is a key component of how we learn.

Parents fear that social interactions are vanishing from screen-clad classrooms. Anastasiya Levin, a parent of two children in Wisconsin, says that despite living in a “good school district,” she still took her daughter out of kindergarten because of the teacher’s tech policy. She says videos were replacing basic human interactions. For example, the teacher would put on a video to say good morning to the children and goodbye at the end of the day, diverting eye contact with a teacher to a screen.

“Not only is my kid parked in front of a screen the whole day, but the teacher would barely recognize her if she saw her on the street,” she said. When she raised it with the school’s principal, she was waved off and told that teachers get to choose how they teach their classes.

Part of the problem is the lack of universal guidance on devices in school and educational applications aren’t well measured, says Holly Moscatiello, founder and director of the Balance Project, an advocacy organization that is pushing for state laws that will make schools phone-free.

The vast majority of apps that claim to be educational aren’t very high quality, according to a 2022 study. Similarly, an analysis from LearnPlatform, which manages ed tech, found only a quarter of the 100 most used ed-tech tools met any of the standards laid out in the Every Child Succeeds Act.

“I think what we’re struggling with is when is the right time to introduce it? How much? How do you evaluate the programs that are included, and when is the right time to take it home?” asked Moscatiello.

Marcello says that people are coming together and asking the right questions about the ubiquitous use of technology in classrooms, but cautions that it will be difficult for schools to unwind their vast investment into these tools.

“These are questions that we don’t have clear cut answers for, because we didn’t get here overnight,” she said.