Independent journalist, teacher, and podcaster Jennifer Berkshire is among those noticing that many folks are getting fed up with ed tech.
Quick! Which cause now unites Hugh Grant, Texas Senator Ted Cruz and Oprah Winfrey? If you answered “getting screens out of schools,” you’d be correct. But the unusual allies I’m more interested in aren’t media moguls, right-wing showboats or rom-com heartthrobs (Will Thacker!!) What’s so interesting about this fast-moving movement is that “pressure is coming from every direction,” as the Boston Globe’s Christopher Huffaker reported this week about Massachusetts.
[P]arents in Scituate, the teachers union in Melrose, cost-conscious administrators in Arlington. The Melrose teachers union, for example, is calling for device restrictions as part of contract negotiations that make paper the default option for testing and reading assignments. In Winchester, one School Committee member is calling for a recently formed technology committee to consider banning personal laptops in certain grades. And Northampton elementary school parents are worried about the use of YouTube videos in place of teacher-led story time.
This is about more than just screens
First, let’s pause here momentarily to acknowledge that “parents are worried about the use of YouTube videos in place of teacher-led story time” may be the most depressing education-related sentence you’ll read today… Now back to the main event. As is so often the case when we’re fighting over school in this country, there’s something larger at stake here. As my podcast co-host, education historian Jack Schneider observed in our recent episode about Silicon Valley’s vision for schools, people are also objecting to the way in which edtech turns schools into ‘black boxes’—privatized and proprietary.
When the size of that black box is getting bigger and bigger inside our schools, it suggests to us that that a larger and larger share of this thing that is technically ours is not ours any longer to inspect or understand or adapt or control. And I think that people are sensitive to the fact that when you look all around our society, what used to be ours is increasingly theirs.