Anne Lutz Fernandez is a writer and former teacher, and she finds hope and inspiration in the rising tide of backlash against ed tech.
A grassroots movement led by parents worried about tech’s effects on children’s privacy, safety, mental health, and academic success is slapping back the oligarchs’ reach into K-12 schools. It’s working. Cell phone bans, restrictions on screen time, and now, moratoria on generative AI use are breaking a tech fever that has swept education over the past two decades.
The nation’s largest system, New York City’s, just placed a one-year block on “student-facing” AI tools from kindergarten through eighth grade with restrictions thereafter. The second largest, Los Angeles Unified, is hitting pause on generative AI as part of a comprehensive scaling back of tech in classrooms. Suburbanites are also activated: Katy, Texas, for example, is banning AI in K-6.
Like the protests against hyperscale data centers and Flock cameras, the push to slow tech’s roll in schools is a sign of growing resistance to the tools of autocracy — and it has the potential to protect children from a future in which these tools and their abuse have become the norm.
Backlash to accustoming kids to a surveillance state
Simply put: Schools use excessive amounts of technology. The average district accessed 3,001 distinct tools last year. This helps explain why many of the parents engaged on this issue are animated by concerns about their children’s privacy.
Some of these tools are educational technologies (”edtech”) built specifically for schools and others are general consumer products. Coincidentally, quite a few sound like names of drugs (Proctorio, Derivita, Protraxx, Asana, chatGPT), and they can have serious side effects.
Together, they collect an astounding array of personal information on students, including health information, grades, activities, schoolwork, and behavior that can be shared or sold by providers or hacked and sold on the black market. With data breaches common, many parents have well-founded fears for their children’s present safety and future opportunities.