
Parents Thought They Wanted Tech in Every Classroom, Now They’re Not So Sure - benryon
https://www.wsj.com/articles/in-a-school-district-where-technology-rules-grades-fall-parents-ask-why-11567523719?mod=rsswn
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rjkennedy98
This headline bothers me. What evidence is there that parents drove the use of
technology in schools? From the beginning parents have been extremely
skeptical about the use of technology and have always voiced concerns. There
is every evidence that this was driven by administrators responding to
incentives and mandates, and tech companies hoping to make money selling
software and devices. There has never been any evidence that giving kids
screens helps them learn, and as we see in the real world, the exact opposite
is what is happening.

~~~
randogogogo
I cannot speak to motives behind the move but my experience has also been that
administration has driven this.

My kids schools are 100% Chromebooks. This has been great for scheduling
extracurricular activities and making their backpacks lighter. It really
hasn't improved their ability to learn mathematics or English.

~~~
quotha
Chromebooks have absolutely no place in the classrooms, I am dreading my kids
entering what has become of this school system.

~~~
geebee
I'm a little disappointed with chromebooks as well.

I was one of the kids who was a little disappointed when the first MacOS came
out. Where was the command line? Where did I wrote code? The commodore64 did a
lot more for kids who wanted to learn about computers, an affordable and
highly hackable and programmable computer. I felt like the first Mac was a big
step forward in terms of ease of use for the general consumer, but a step back
from the AppleII in getting in there and really enjoying computing.

Chromebooks put more, not less distance, between a kid and what I consider to
be the interesting things about a computer.

Think of it this way - google talks a lot about a critical skills shortage.
Ok, so, would a kid who grows up using a Chromebook be more likely to develop
these skills than a kid who uses a linux system, or Mac OS X? Or hell, even a
windows system, at least it's relatively easy to get a bash shell working
there.

Nah, let's face it, the future of google's workforce is not going to be found
among the the kids using google's educational products. Bet you google execs
and high up engineers most definitely have their kids learning on something
else, and they probably avoid too much exposure to any kind of electronics for
a longer period of childhood than google pushes out there in the classroom.

~~~
filoleg
Chromebooks in education were not supposed to get students interested in
computing or teach them about it. They were supposed to be used as an
alternative for heavy backpacks with books and make scheduling and other
organizational things to be done easier (considering that all of those things
are slowly moving to online space, like class registration, gradebooks, etc.).

I.e., it isn't a programming-friendly OS vs. chromebooks, it is heavy
backpacks filled with textbooks and notebooks vs. chromebooks. Don't mistake
chromebooks for a computing tool, it is an everyday student things kind of
tool that just happens to be served by a computing device.

~~~
geebee
And yet, google has induced millions of families to spend their limited
computing budget on a "non-programmable" OS. Was it really beyond google's
capabilities to make this a more open, perhaps linux based environment?

~~~
leggomylibro
I dunno, I got a C202SA Chromebook specifically for software development. It
was designed for schools, so it has a spillproof keyboard, shock-resistant
case, 1.5-2 days of battery life with my usage, it only costs like $250, and
it's smaller than 12".

I installed GalliumOS, and I love it. It is a complete Linux environment
(Ubuntu), and it easily meets my needs even if Firefox sometimes slows down a
bit with Javascript-heavy web apps (I haven't installed Chrome.) My only
complaint is the limited storage space.

Google may not ship Chromebooks with a customizable OS, but they and the OEMs
don't interfere with end users' ability to install one (yet), and I really
appreciate that the education market has created so much demand for machines
with this sort of form factor.

------
mrkurt
There's been a big backlash against screens in my high privilege/high
achieving community.

My dyslexic/ADHD daughter did a trial day at a private school with a "no
screens in classrooms" policy. It was awful for her, because she's grown
comfortable using text to speech, dictation, and other tools to do cope with
the friction in her brain. My other kids benefit in different ways, they've
all learned to do independent research way earlier than I ever did and know
how to find answers to pretty much anything they think about.

None of our kids have access to Candy Crush or other gamble-games, though, so
they tend to have healthier screen habits than their friends. All the quotes
from parents in the article make it sound like they're helpless. I think
that's an indication of just how bad tooling and education for _parents_ is.

~~~
jseliger
Almost all of these policies have exceptions for disabilities.

Most technology seems to be used to detract from learning:
[https://jakeseliger.com/2008/12/28/laptops-students-
distract...](https://jakeseliger.com/2008/12/28/laptops-students-distraction-
hardly-a-surprise) rather than enhancing it. Obviously there are exceptions,
like spaced-memory repetition software or some computer science classes. But
focus and concentration seem to be in short supply, relative to technology.

~~~
mrkurt
I don't think it does my daughter any favors if she's the only one using an
iPad in a classroom, it just makes her obviously different in a way that'll
create resentment. She also benefited long before she was diagnosed, I think a
lot more kids _can_ make use of screens than are diagnosed with a disability.

My general belief is that gadgets are great for kids with the right
boundaries, and what we're lacking is (a) parent / teacher experience managing
those boundaries and (b) tooling.

------
markbnj
My wife and I raised three daughters, all of whom are in their 20's now. Their
generation went from no home Internet in the mid-90's to smart phones in their
pockets today. As parents we struggled like everyone simply because we didn't
know what was right. I would describe the phases we went through as something
like: uncertainty combined with attempts at control, followed by a loss of any
illusion of control as the channels proliferated. I specifically came to feel
that we were experiencing a grand and fundamental change in human society and
that anything I tried to do to stand as a filter between the girls and the
rest of the world that was now pouring in would do more harm than good.

In the end, they all came through it fine. I won't rattle off metrics of their
normality, but they are doing fine, along with all the others of their
generation that we came to know over the years. Being human they proved
impressively adaptable in the face of change, even high-velocity vertigo-
inducing change. As for my wife and I, we still don't know how much technology
and information is the right amount, at home or in schools. In fact the only
thing I think we learned on that score is how much we didn't know, how much we
still don't know, and how terribly weak our ability to predict how any of this
will work out is. Probably parents felt similarly 30 or 40 years after the
invention of printed material, or radio, or phones. Regardless, the genie is
well out of the bottle.

------
lacker
Expecting a laptop to improve education because it's "tech" is like reading a
book chosen at random and expecting to become more intelligent.

~~~
liability
That is in fact a delusion many people seem to have. Reading books is seen as
an inherent good, regardless of the book. School children are often told to
get one book a week from the library. Any sort of book, it's often thought,
will be good for the child. In my personal experience, most go straight for
the _" Where's Waldo"_ books. Fun books... but come on.

~~~
randogogogo
I'd pile on to this sentiment with noticing that many kids who do read these
days are not progression past YA fiction in their discretionary reading
options.

~~~
SolaceQuantum
YA fiction isn't any less literature than other fiction.

~~~
liability
True if literature isn't synonymous with _' worthwhile.'_

~~~
SolaceQuantum
It isn't synonymous with 'worthwhile'. That's just true. For one thing,
'literature' is a form of media, 'worthwhile' is an subjective quality of
experience.

~~~
liability
You snark, but I think the enclosing conversation was about whether YA fiction
is worthwhile (or, whether we should be concerned when people fail to progress
past it), not whether it's literature.

~~~
SolaceQuantum
Whether or not a literal entire genre of literature is worthwhile is itself a
question of the worthwhileness, IMO. Historically, this has already been
debated multiple times with multiple different genres- experimental fiction,
fiction by female authors, fantasy, scifi, fiction by american authors. Must
we repeat it for every new genre that becomes popular or even remotely
prominent in the sphere of mainstream consumption?

~~~
liability
I assert that some books have more value to children than others and that the
distribution of worthwhile books is different in different genres. I further
assert that YA fiction is proportionally less worthwhile than other genres
generally accessible to the "young adult" demographic.

Can you convince me that any of those assertions is wrong? Pointing out that
_" YA fiction is literature"_ doesn't come anywhere close to refuting any of
the above assertions.

~~~
SolaceQuantum
Neither have you refuted that this has been a historical game of stack ranking
literary genres and I’m asking when we will grow up and let people enjoy good
books.

------
tsumnia
"An interactive program delivered an image of a token on the screen when she
completed an assignment. She could then trade in those tokens to play games.
To Dr. Boyd, a professor of medicine at Johns Hopkins, it looks more like a
video game than a math class."

I think this is a core part of the problem. Gamification, perceived
usefulness, and enjoyment are being used in lieu of actual learning gains. I
believe, however there is too much focus on "enjoyment" rather than learning.

As an example, my research is on rote practice of writing code. Literally
retyping syntax, because I believe the technical literacy is the foundation to
conceptual understanding. This is no different than a cook, musician, athlete,
even doctors. However, retyping syntax is not "fun". It's not "interactive".
It's not meta-cognitive. It's drilling. But the responses I get are near
bimodal. Some people fully understand the logic and others outright argue
against it.

However, rote practice is (in my opinion) the first step to high-level
learning. Meta-cognitive skills like self-explanation are great but only if
you have the prior knowledges to utilize them. They should not be given to a
pure novice; however, no one wants to admit to being a novice. Somehow, that's
for children, but I'm an adult / young-adult / "big boy"! True novices should
be given the chance to learn these lower level skills without feeling like its
beneath them or treated as "lesser" than higher level skills.

------
geebee
I've reflected a lot on this, as a parent. I can't quite get behind the "no
computer screen" thing, because a bit part of me wants to get my kids into
unix, python, and interesting electronics projects from an early age. Another
part of me sees this as a potentially endless loop of gummy bear videos (and,
to paraphrase "war of the roses", "by the time this is all over, an argument
about gummy bear videos will seem like one of your lighter moments").

I've come to a general, porous, leaky set of guidelines. The closer you are to
black text on a white background (or white text on a black background), you're
more likely it is you're doing something interesting. That could mean reading
a novel or analyzing data with python or R or unix on the command line or in a
relatively lightweight IDE. If lots of distractingly flashy colors and sounds
are going on around you, then odds are you're getting sucked into the screen
vortex, even if you aren't actually looking at a screen.

And like I said, porous. There are, indisputably, phenomenal comic books (ok,
graphic novels) with great depth. Videos and movies can have tremendous
artistic value. Those flashy images on a screen could be watching Citizen
Kane. That black and white text could be 101 fart jokes. What the hell do I
know.

But overall, I feel like the equation holds, sort of. If you're looking at
symbols on a background, odds are this isn't the wrong kind of screen time,
and it could be very intellectually enriching.

~~~
mrkurt
We also have porous guidelines for our kids. The ones that worked the best for
us are:

* Only creative / educational games (including minecraft), and those for less than 2 hours per day. They don't get games that are heavily optimized for addiction.

* No screens in their bedrooms ever. As my oldest got more of a social life, we noticed the drama of friends kept following her around and she never naturally escaped from it. Once we stopped letting her have her phone in her room her ability to deal with drama bombs improved drastically.

* No video apps at all for the younger kids.

Screentime makes it reasonably easy to enforce this stuff on iPads, and the
original Screen Time
([https://screentimelabs.com/](https://screentimelabs.com/)) is even better on
Android.

------
Isamu
>There is a role for technology in school, she says, but it is a matter of how
much and at what age.

Something about the school procurement process that knocks all the nuance or
subtlety out of the goals.

This issue with technology goes way, way back decades. Always there are
promising trials, it works here and there, under the right circumstances, and
so some school wants to roll it out broadly and it doesn't work as well. Then
there is a rollback.

[edit] And I could say the same about software development processes.

~~~
khawkins
>Something about the school procurement process that knocks all the nuance or
subtlety out of the goals.

The people authorizing the deals, administrators and school boards, aren't
incentivized to improve outcomes, they're incentivized to make the people who
put them there seem like they're doing something valuable.

If parents could choose the schools they were sending their children to,
instead of being saddled with whomever the state has appointed to run a
particular school, they'd pick schools for which evidence has proven better
outcomes. Sure, they might be swayed by flashy tech, but as other comments
have said the push for tech didn't largely come from parents.

------
theandrewbailey
> An interactive program delivered an image of a token on the screen when she
> completed an assignment. She could then trade in those tokens to play games.

> To Dr. Boyd, a professor of medicine at Johns Hopkins, it looks more like a
> video game than a math class. She isn’t sure if the lessons are sticking
> with Jane and worries about the hyper-stimulating screen time.

I think gamifying school is probably a good idea. How many kids don't know the
parts of speech, but have memorized the Pokedex?

~~~
colpabar
I have to agree. I've accepted that the Pokedex part of my brain is never
going to be reclaimed. What worries me though is that it will end up being
even worse than standardized testing. I fear that these "games" will be
nothing more than smaller, more frequent tests that will be used to generate
metrics which will be used to "fund" individual students.

~~~
Nasrudith
That brings to mind a classic issue - it isn't the tech but how it is used.
The same standardized test approach which combines the worst features of
feudalism and bueracracy with the virtues of neither was there before. The
games or lack of them won't change that.

I vividly remember how in Elementary School they had workbooks after workbooks
of multiple choice analogies with words used within occasionally unexplained.
They insisted it was all very important when we asked why so overboard. The
real answer became obvious when the SAT was changed to have a writing section
instead of an analogies one and they promptly vanishes into the void only to
appear on standardized tests four questions a year at very most.

They didn't even have the honesty to say "It is used a lot for in important
test."

------
gervase
This seems like it would be related to a broader shift (among tech parents, at
least [0]) from digital to analog.

From my perspective, it seems like a pendulum. On the whole, baby boomers
didn't adapt to the advent of computers very well. However, they generally
recognized their value, and provided access to the devices in a mostly
unstructured way. Thus, their Gen X/millennial children are overall more
technically savvy than they.

Now, those children are becoming parents themselves, and reflecting on the
potential negative aspects of unlimited screen access, social media,
widespread gamification, etc. on their own children. Providing the same
unrestricted access to their own children may seem unlikely to produce the
same results that they themselves experienced. Thus, alternatives like
reducing or restricting access at home/school become more common/popular.

Perhaps the next generation will resent their parents' restrictions, or feel
left behind technically, and swing back the other way?

[0]
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18309305](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18309305)

------
meristem
There is a panic regarding having children 'ready' for the future-- and having
kids be proficient in 'future' technologies/ needs. We in tech drive this,
actually, as salaries in the area outpace other salaries. That pushes
technology into the classroom, which is not the same as thoughtful uses of
well-tooled technology that aids students.

------
beamatronic
I feel that one could teach a fairly complete CS class with a piece of chalk
and a chalkboard.

~~~
behringer
i feel like CS is lightyears ahead of where it was when I was in school. My
son learned Python and Java in HS, something I would only have dreamed of when
I was his age. Instead I got to learn MS Office.

~~~
jrochkind1
A) On the other hand, in middle school in the 80s, I learned Commodore 64
BASIC. (and my DAD learned BASIC because when you bought an Apple IIe, the
manual suggested that learning BASIC was how you learned how to use the Apple
IIe, and included a tutorial, so my Dad just followed it. I think programming
has become a lot less common as a 'basic computer skill', not more).

B) I think you are confusing CS with programming/software engineering. They
are related, but the "CS" class the post you are responding to suggested with
nothing but a chalkboard would not have it's students ready for a job getting
paid programming. (I don't mean this as an insult to you). On the other hand,
the class in which you were learning MS Office probably wasn't CS at all. A
class involving Python and Java might get someone more ready for a job getting
paid programming, but may or may not be a CS class, depending on... if it
includes any CS.

------
Mathnerd314
I think there are a few viewpoints in this article all mixed together: 1\.
General anti-screen / anti-tech crowd (not uncommon, e.g.
[https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-
tech/ne...](https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-
tech/news/bill-gates-children-no-mobile-phone-aged-14-microsoft-limit-
technology-use-parenting-a7694526.html)) 2\. Anti-authoritarian crowd (privacy
concerns, complaints about quality of teaching, etc.) 3\. Pro-authoritarian
crowd (playing games, not learning anything, low scores on standardized tests)

I wonder if these just correlate with political party or there's a more
interesting pattern.

------
war1025
My in-laws are very anti-public schools. My wife was home schooled for a few
years and otherwise went to a private religious school.

Before we had kids, I thought that was the most ridiculous opinion I'd ever
heard. The closer our kids get to school age, the more reluctant I am to
entrust them to the school system.

Probably just paranoia, I guess. But it seems like the majority of what I hear
about schools anymore is how they have the same issue as the corporate world:
being too focused on showing short-term gains instead of actually doing what
is best over the long-term.

------
meangrape
One of my problems with the way technology is used in the classroom (at least
in my kid's school) is that they're being trained how to operate applications
-- not how to _use_ a computer.

------
baq
i'm a parent and i want to minimize distractions in the classroom and tech is
the greatest distraction ever, e.g. me posting here

~~~
quotha
It is such a big problem, we have to get the proprietary tech OUT -- and let
the teachers TEACH

------
tolmasky
I'm aware that funds aren't necessarily discretionary, but could the money
spent on all this technology be redirected to teacher salaries (or other basic
supplies) if the technology is dumped? I'd be curious to see the breakdown of
funds that gets used for iPads/Chromebooks/etc.

As someone who thinks that children should absolutely be learning programming
as soon as possible, I don't really think that means they need brand new
_whatever_ every year (not implying that's what is currently happening). When
I was growing up, we had incredibly old machines (in a computer lab, or
sometimes a couple shared computers pre classroom), and I think this actually
worked fine (perhaps better in some respects now -- since a "benefit" of an
old Apple II is that its pretty focused on the one task at hand, and can't
load up other things).

------
fullshark
As a parent I basically want tech to enhance learning if possible in the
classroom. I don't want tech that

1\. Replaces teachers / supervision.

2\. Distracts students.

It seems like administrators are particularly interested in 1 for cost savings
reasons, and are unable to solve 2.

~~~
Nasrudith
To be a smartass technically books qualify as #1 - and can count as #2
depending on their interests.

------
OedipusRex
I work in the EdTech realm writing software to keep students on track.
Technology in the classroom is a means and not and ends, it all depends on
usage.

We have two "model" teachers.

The old guard teacher who started their career before computers were in
classrooms, those teachers utilize our technology to accomplish a task (block
websites, etc)

The other model teacher is someone who welcomes technology into the classroom,
they utilize the deeper functionality of our program, and normally have more
than one technology of some kind running in the classroom.

Both are great teachers, they just use our product differently.

------
iamleppert
The biggest predictor by far of a child's success at school is and always
remains their parent.

Adding technology cannot make up for a parent who doesn't teach their child
study skills, good learning habits and places an importance on the value of
education.

Parents should look at themselves if their child is not performing rather than
put the blame on some tool like technology.

------
austincheney
When did books become bad? Now to save money schools give out tablets or
chrome books and the kids just watch YouTube all day.

~~~
adamnemecek
Books do have a lot of disadvantages (and I say this as someone who spends A
LOT of money on books).

They are heavy, expensive, take up space, you can't search them etc.

However, I find it almost impossible to learn hard subjects from a PDF.
Printed book is so much better. I wonder why.

~~~
somatic
There are studies showing that e-texts are significantly less “assimilable”
than paper texts. I think the consensus speculation is that the physicality of
the paper gives the brain a better understanding of the text, where you are in
the text, and so on. Text on a screen, on the other hand, has an effectively
infinite “depth”, among other things.

~~~
commandlinefan
I feel like I learn and retain more from printed books than e-books… but maybe
that’s just because I’m an old man who learned to read decades before there
was such a thing as an e-book?

------
scroot
"The music is not in the piano"

