Emily Oster

11 min Read Emily Oster

Emily Oster

Kids, Screens, and Schools (Part One)

How worried should we be?

Emily Oster

11 min Read

When I was a kid, the computers at school were in the computer lab. You could go there and learn to code with a moving turtle, or play Oregon Trail (you’re dead! Dysentery … again).  

Fast-forward to the current moment, and your kids probably use computers at school all the time. Screens have become a ubiquitous part of classroom life. Is this a good thing?  

Banana Bones for ParentData

Today is the first of two episodes on kids, screens, and schools. I’m talking to Jessica Grose from the New York Times, who writes on parenting and recently ran a survey of parents about their kids’ screen usage. Her goal with the survey was crowdsourced data to understand, basically, how much are kids actually using screens? And do their parents think it’s good for them? 

Here are three highlights from the conversation:

How much time are kids spending on screens in school?

Jessica Grose:

In February or March, someone asked me how much time my kids are spending on screens every day. And I had no idea. I had never thought about it.

But I was like, “I should know how much time they’re spending on screens when they’re in school. And I also want to know how much time the average American child is spending on screens in school.” And so I started to look into the research. 

And the short answer is, we have no idea, because there is so much variation. Not even district to district, state to state — we’re talking classroom to classroom. So an English teacher in Room 301 might be using screens entirely differently than the chemistry teacher in Room 302.

And I felt like the data that we did have was not particularly granular. And I feel like with a topic like this, the devil really is in the details. And so I wanted to hear from teachers and parents, “How much time and in what ways is tech being used in your children’s classrooms?” And there’s so many different ways it’s being used, too, so I wanted to get really granular information on that. You know? You have the Promethean boards, the whiteboards, the screen whiteboards. You have individual Chromebooks and iPads that are, honestly, more ubiquitous than I thought before I embarked on this project. And then you have apps; you have all different apps.

And again, we’re going to come back to this theme of lack of research. I talked to researchers at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education who had done a study on educational apps. And they said that when they did a review of the literature, there were only 36 studies. There are hundreds of thousands of apps billed as educational on any app store. And especially the way that education has really been remade in the past 10 to 15 years, it’s kind of incredible that there’s not more research.

How is screen use impacting how kids learn?

Emily Oster:

Why do you think this is important? You know, there are a lot of things that happen in our schools. Different crayons that they use. There must be something about this particular set of choices that you think really matters.

Jessica:

We are seeing that test scores have dropped over the past decade, but obviously COVID was a huge crater in terms of learning loss. And I had been hearing anecdotally from teachers for years, but basically since smartphones came in and laptops became the norm in college classrooms, that the kids were not doing as well, they could not retain information as well, they had much shorter attention spans, they simply could not concentrate on longer texts.

And so this was something that I had been hearing from college professors for a long time. And then it started creeping down, in terms of the stories that I had been hearing about the lack of attention, the lack of ability to concentrate, the lack of ability to do any work that required any kind of longevity and prolonged attention. And I think — people might disagree — I think that’s an important skill to have. 

And I think that anything that is working against that skill, we need to think about, we need to talk about, but I also think that we all, as a society, have got into a narrative, led by tech companies, that more tech is better. That the higher tech that you get, anything, you will have an improved experience. 

There’s little things around the edges that some things can improve a little. And especially for kids who have learning differences — dyslexia was one thing that really has been improved by tech — so I don’t mean to say it’s all bad. Nothing is all bad or all good. But I think overall, there just has been very little scrutiny into something that has been a massive shift in the way kids learn in the past, let’s say, two decades.

How can we implement better policies around screens in schools?

Emily:

The implementation piece of this feels so challenging, right? Because once I say, “Look, in English class, I want everyone to be able to write an essay on the computer” — then they’ve got their computers open. And so then you get the distraction piece. And then the teacher is not just teaching, but also walking around the classroom, seeing who’s clicking between tabs in YouTube.

So somehow, I can imagine for schools, for parents, etcetera, getting to something that is a balance could feel almost impossible, right? That maybe there’s really only: go back to writing or just let it go like it is, neither of which seems like a great current solution.

Jessica:

I don’t ever mean to suggest that this is an easy problem to fix, because the other part of it is we need kids to learn how to be good digital citizens to each other and to humanity.

Emily:

Yeah. And even beyond the question of digital citizenship, we are training kids for a world in which the expectation is that they know how to open up a Google Doc and do stuff. And there’s a set of skills there that they need to learn.

Jessica:

It is a skill that they’re going to have to build, also, to be able to avoid the constant distraction, attention-sucking nature of the internet in the modern world, so I don’t think full abstinence makes sense for pretty much anybody forever.

But again, it’s not going to be a one-size-fits-all. I feel like you run into this often with the subjects you cover, that blanket recommendations are almost never useful. And so I think that just having those frameworks of “Is it useful? Is it necessary? Is it good?” is a place to start.

Emily:

I almost think there’s a shift of default that might help, right? We need to have an active reason to think [technology in school] would make this experience better, as opposed to saying, “The default is everything is on the computer and you need to show an active reason why it would be better to not do it on the computer,” which sometimes feels like where we are now.

Full transcript

This transcript was automatically generated and may contain small errors.

Emily Oster:

This is ParentData. I’m Emily Oster. If you’re a parent, especially of an older child, you’ve probably started thinking about phones. Your kids probably started asking about when they can get a phone and you’re probably also reading a lot, out in the world, about the dangers of phones.

Newsclip:

Let’s talk numbers. Research shows the average teen checks their phone every 15 minutes. As you might expect, teenagers will tell you, what’s the big deal? It just takes a second. But research shows the distraction lasts much longer than the ping! and the look.

Emily Oster:

Maybe phones ruin mental health, maybe they distract your kid, maybe they mess with their sleep.

Newsclip:

Fear of missing out. They are afraid if they’re not hooked up all the time, they’re going to miss out on something important.

Emily Oster:

Maybe you should avoid phones, until your kid is, I don’t know, in their mid-20s.

Newsclip:

Are cell phones disruptive in class? Yeah. Even you admit it? Yeah.

Emily Oster:

Part of what makes this hard is that it’s well outside of our own experiences. And that’s not just phones, that also goes for all kinds of screens, especially in school. When I was a kid, I remember the computer lab. Surely, you also had a computer lab. It was down the hall, that’s where all the computers were, and you would go in, learn typing and play Oregon Trail, dying of dysentery every single time. But now, there’s no computer lab. The computer lab is the classroom. Our kids have computers, right there, all the time. They’re doing their math homework on them, they’re doing their reading on them. And maybe they also have phones.

I ended up getting my kid a phone, specifically because she needed a bird app for school. It was an app that recorded songs of birds and told you what kind of bird it was. So, as parents it feels like we’re stuck between a place where our kids are using technology all the time and they need technology all the time. And, yet, we’re being told to be afraid of it. And it’s so far outside our own experiences, it’s hard to look back and say, “Oh. Well, here’s what worked for me,” because we’re not actually going back to the world of Oregon Trail any time soon.

With all that as background, I want to dive into the questions of kids and technology. And this episode is the first of two conversations about what it means for kids to have access to technology, what digital hygiene looks like, and, specifically, how do we think about devices in schools? Both of my guests have conducted extensive surveys into these issues, coming at them from different angles, from different kinds of expertise, but ultimately trying to get at these same core questions, “How can kids live in the modern world, as good digital citizens? How can we help them navigate this world, one that we didn’t ourselves grow up in? And how do we put together our fear that technology might be going too fast, there might be too much of it, with the recognition that it’s here to stay and somehow our kids need to learn how to coexist with computers, with phones, with the technology that’s out in the world?”

My first conversation today is with Jessica Grose. Jess is New York Times reporter who covers family and education issues. And I asked her to come talk because she did a series, reporting on a survey about the use of technology in schools. So, she, like many of us, got curious about how exactly kids are using tech in schools. And she couldn’t find any detailed data on that question, so she went out and asked readers, “How are your kids using technology in schools?” And she came back with some reports, “How much time are kids on technology? How are they using it? What are the rules, generally, about phones in schools?”

In this conversation, Jess and I talk about what she learned from her survey of parents. We also talk a little more generally about, “What’s the role of technology companies in kid’s schools? How can we help kids enjoy the benefits of computers and screens and the internet, without the constant distractions that often come along with them?” And we also talk about positive effects of screens, particularly for kids with learning differences.

Part of what makes the whole parenting in the face of school technology hard is it can be actually pretty challenging to understand what is going on at school, with our kids, all day? Most of what I get at the end of the day is, “It was fine.” And what’s really valuable here about Jess’s reporting is it gives us a very clear picture of what kids are actually doing on screens in schools. And let’s think about, “Which of these things are valuable? And which of these things might we like to replace? After the break, Jessica Grose.

Emily Oster:

Jess Grose, I’m so excited to have you on the ParentData podcast. Welcome.

Jessica Grose:

I’m so excited to be here. Thank you for having me.

Emily Oster:

So, I’d love to have you start, by telling us a little bit about who you are and what you do.

Jessica Grose:

So, I am an opinion writer for the New York Times, where I cover a range of issues, including family, politics, culture, education, religion. And we are here to talk about a little series that I did about tech in schools, K-12 schools.

Emily Oster:

Yes, we are. And you have, I would be remiss not to note you have an excellent book, relatively recent book, called Screaming on the Inside, which is about how it’s hard to be a modern parent.

Jessica Grose:

Yes. As I put it, America makes it harder to be a parent than it really needs to be. It doesn’t have to be this hard.

Emily Oster:

Okay. So, but let’s talk about what you did in The Times about screens in schools. I’d love to just have you start with why you embarked on this data collection exercise and what you were curious to learn.

Jessica Grose:

So, I felt very silly because in February or March, someone who I was talking to about a totally different story asked me how much time my kids are spending on screens every day. And I had no idea. I had never thought about it, which I was disappointed in myself, I was like, “You showed a real lack of curious about what your kids were doing,” but was more like they are neurotypical girls who had always done well in school and there was no problem, so I was like, “There’s no problem. I’m not making a problem.”

But I was like, “I should know how much time they’re spending on screens when they’re in school. And I also want to know how much time the average American child is spending screens in school.” And so, I started to look into the research. And the short answers is, we have no idea, because there is so much variation, not even district-to-district, state-to-state. We’re talking classroom-to-classroom. So, and English teach in Room 301 might be using screens entirely differently than the chemistry teacher in room 302.

And I felt like the data that we did have was not particularly granular. And I feel like with a topic like this, the Devil really is in the details. And so, I wanted to hear from teachers and parents, “How much time and in what ways is tech being used in your children’s classrooms?” And there’s so many different ways it’s being used, too, so I wanted to get really granular information on that. You know? You have the Promethean boards, the whiteboards, the screen whiteboards. You have individual Chromebooks and iPads that are, honestly, more ubiquitous than I thought before I embarked on this project. And then you have apps, you have all different apps.

And, just again, we’re going to come back to this theme of lack of research. I talked to researchers at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, who had done a study on educational apps. And they said that when they did a review of the literature, there were only 36 studies. There are hundreds of thousands of apps built as educational on any app store.

Emily Oster:

Yeah.

Jessica Grose:

And so, 36 studies is nothing, so that’s what-

Emily Oster:

That’s like 36 studies on almost any topic.

Jessica Grose:

… Exactly. So, I mean, and especially the way that education has really been remade in the past 10 to 15 years, it’s kind of incredible that there are not more, there’s not more research. So, I’m not a science, I’m a journalist, but I think you can get a lot of information from surveys like this. And I got about 1,000 responses and they were paragraphs long and I read through as many of them as I possibly could. And I called back about probably 30 people and had long conversations. And I wrote a series of four pieces, based on what I found.

Emily Oster:

So, before we get into those pieces and what you found, why do you think this is important? You know, there are a lot of things that happen in our schools. You know?

Jessica Grose:

Sure.

Emily Oster:

Different crayons that they use. Like, things that happen in schools that I don’t know what it is, but there must be something about this particular set of choices that you think really matters.

Jessica Grose:

Well, so, we are seeing that test scores have dropped, over the past decade, but obviously COVID was a huge crater in terms of learning loss. And I had been hearing, anecdotally, from teachers, for years, but basically since smartphones came in and laptops became the norm in college classrooms, that the kids were not doing as well, they could not retain information as well, they had much shorter attention spans, they simply could not concentrate on longer texts.

Emily Oster:

Mm-hmm.

Jessica Grose:

And so, this was something that I had been hearing from college professors, for a long time. And then, it started creeping down in terms of the stories that I had been hearing about the lack of attention, the lack of ability to concentrate, the lack of ability to do any work that required any kind of longevity and prolonged attention. And I think, people might disagree, I think that’s an important skill to have. And I think that anything that is working against that skill we need to think about, we need to talk about, but I also think that we all, as a society, have got into a narrative, led by tech companies, that more tech is better.

Emily Oster:

Yeah.

Jessica Grose:

That the higher tech that you get, anything, you will have an improved experience. And they have never had to prove that. And there is no proof, really, that things… There’s little things around the edges that some things can improve a little, but… And we’ll get into it. And especially for kids who have learning differences, so dyslexia was one thing that really has been improved by tech, so I don’t mean to say it’s all bad. Nothing is all bad or all good. But I think, overall, there just has been very little scrutiny into something that has been a massive shift in the way kids learn, in the past, let’s say, two decades.

Emily Oster:

All right. So, let’s look at what you learned. So, tell me first, headline reaction. You’re sitting down, you’re looking at this data, you’re going to write your first piece, what’s your first thing you want to say?

Jessica Grose:

Oh. The first thing I will tell you, reading through all of these responses, I felt physically ill.

Emily Oster:

Yeah. That comes out.

Jessica Grose:

Yeah. I had this sinking feeling, like when you’re in a horror movie and the monster is creeping.

Emily Oster:

You can see, “Dah-dah, dah-dah, dah-dah, dah-dah”?

Jessica Grose:

Exactly. And it just felt like, “Oh my God,” I felt I was falling just through this hole of information that I had not dreamed was happening, I guess. So, let’s start with the sort of things that disturbed me the most. Then, we can get pulled back from there. I don’t think kindergartners should be on iPads, through much of the day, and reading on iPads. And there is research that shows that you do not retain information as well, when you are reading digitally, as when you are reading paper. And I think when children are learning to read and they’re learning… What’s the cliché? It’s like, “Up until third grade, you’re learning to read.”

Emily Oster:

And, “You’re reading to learn.” Yes.

Jessica Grose:

“And you’re reading to learn.” In that very special period, where you are learning to read, I just think minimal screens is really, really important. And so, again, it is very hard to say with any authority how widespread this is, but I heard numerous stories from teachers and parents about how their elementary schools had switched to digital only reading materials. And so, there just really weren’t books, there weren’t textbooks. There was one teacher who said, “I would kill for a math textbook. I’m desperate to give a math textbook to my students.” So, I didn’t enjoy that.

Then, you’re seeing YouTube is available on Chromebooks, many Chromebooks. And some schools don’t… There are a lot of settings, so this isn’t… That’s the other thing, this is hard, this is a very complicated problem. There’s lots of settings, there’s lots of tools. And not all schools and school administrators are well-trained in how to use the tools that they’re already using. And so, one thing that came up a lot was Chromebooks.

Emily Oster:

Mm-hmm.

Jessica Grose:

So, Chromebooks everywhere. Most schools have laptops, middle school and above, individual, so one-to-one. And the kids are watching just TV on YouTube, so that can range from just benignly distracting, you shouldn’t be watching TV, when you’re in the middle of class, I think that’s a bad idea.

Emily Oster:

Yeah.

Jessica Grose:

I’m going to come out and say that. But, then, sometimes the kids were watching really disturbing stuff, from porn to Clockwork Orange. It’s not great. It’s not.

Emily Oster:

So, I think what the… So, what some people would say is, “Oh. Well, that’s the fault of the school.”

Jessica Grose:

Yeah.

Emily Oster:

Like, “There’s a way, can’t they block YouTube on the Chromebook?”

Jessica Grose:

So, they can block YouTube, but when you have… Basically, the administrators described it as a game of Whac-A-Mole. Okay, you take the YouTube off. Then, if they’re on the… First of all, the kids are smart and they find a workaround.

Emily Oster:

Right. There is actually a website you can go to, I’m not going to say it on the… But, where it’s like just unblocks your YouTube.

Jessica Grose:

Yeah. And there’s VPNs. The kids are smart. Good for them, honestly, showing some initiative. But once the screen is out and it is connected to the internet, there is only so much you can do. And is it the best use of a teacher’s time to be playing Whac-A-Mole with what you don’t want them to look at on the internet?

Emily Oster:

Mm-hmm.

Jessica Grose:

And many of the teachers themselves said, “I don’t think this is a good use of my time.”

Emily Oster:

Right.

Jessica Grose:

And so, that’s the big picture of the negatives.

Emily Oster:

So, it’s both. I mean, just to dig into those negatives-

Jessica Grose:

Yeah.

Emily Oster:

… it’s kind of both that there are, at time periods in life, or subjects, or anything where, generally, we think that you would better learn with physical, some kind of either reading a physical book, working in a physical textbook, something where the digital solution is not the same. And then, there’s just the basic distraction piece, which is that the more technology we introduce and the more we have an iPad, or a Chromebook, or something in front of you, the more likely it is you are using that for something that isn’t school related.

Jessica Grose:

Correct. Correct. And so, ultimately, the takeaway is not, “Ban all screens. No screens, ever.” That’s both unrealistic and also ignores the fact that there are some really great uses.

Emily Oster:

Yeah. Tell us those. What are the good, great uses of this?

Jessica Grose:

Well, so, like I already said, for kids with learning differences, dyslexia, dysgraphia. Kids with physical differences, so hearing loss, all of those things, tech is amazing. Tech enables them to be able to learn like everybody else. And that should never be diminished in any way, so I heard a lot about that. And special ed teachers said it’s been a burden to them. Many of them said that, not all of them. Actually, someone said, “It’s worse for kids with ADHD,” but that aside, overall, the picture was that there are many assistive technologies that can be really, really helpful. So, discreet tools, like Desmos. I heard Desmos so many times.

Emily Oster:

I don’t even know what that is.

Jessica Grose:

Graphing. It’s graphing.

Emily Oster:

Okay.

Jessica Grose:

It’s for math. You know?

Emily Oster:

Uh-huh.

Jessica Grose:

And it makes graphing so much easier and it’s really cool for the kids, they love to use it. Great. Word processing, obviously, we’re not going to ask kids to write 2,000-word stories in longhand-

Emily Oster:

Yeah.

Jessica Grose:

… that’s silly, that makes no sense. So, you know, there’s things like I see with my older daughter, she’s just doodling though, it’s great, it’s a tool and she uses it, in addition to other things. But, as a tool, helpful. There are apps that have been proven, especially with, I’m going to forget what the word is for these skills, but very straightforward skill building, so vocabulary, learning your multiplication tables, anything where it’s like you’re not learning a complex thing, you’re doing rote memorization, there are apps that are really helpful in doing that and can help you do it a little more quickly than you might’ve done it with just pen and paper. Is it 100% necessary? No, but it’s nice to have.

So, and then, there were teachers who said, “When I can do those sorts of things more quickly, then we can get into more complex discussions and more complex kinds of learning, more quickly.” So, I talked to a high school English teacher who said, “You know? Because they can look up vocabulary words so easily, now my vocabulary tests are more sophisticated ways of usage, ways of using these vocabulary words in a sentence. And I even allow an open-book test, but the actual mental work to do that quiz is perhaps a little more challenging, because you’re having to think about nuances, that before you were just memorizing the vocabulary words.” So, again, there are ways of using it. I think it just always needs to be really thoughtful. And that was ultimately one of my big takeaways was that in 2020 and 2021, because remote learning-

Emily Oster:

COVID.

Jessica Grose:

.. because of COVID, every went remote.

Emily Oster:

Yeah.

Jessica Grose:

And everything went online and everything was digital and everything went off the rails in this department. And then, we came back and a lot of schools were not able to walk it back in a thoughtful way and just let it run the way it had been running in 2020 and 2021. And so, I think it’s a real moment, now that everybody’s back in school, things are basically back to the way that they were, to reassess and for every teacher in every classroom to do even a tech audit, which is something that some experts suggested and they have a workbook about how to do such an audit in their classroom and look at every way they’re using tech, to evaluate, “Is this useful? Is there another way we could do this? Is this necessary? Is this good?” And so, simply, too many places, it just seems like we’re not asking those questions, in any kind of routine way.

Emily Oster:

Yeah. The lack of thoughtfulness about the use is interesting. I mean, the slippery slope piece of this feels… Maybe, “Slippery slope,” is the wrong word. The implementation piece of this feels so challenging, right?

Jessica Grose:

It’s really challenging.

Emily Oster:

Because once I say, “Look, in English class, I want everyone to be able to write an essay on the computer,” like, “I want you to be able to open a Google Doc and write in the Google Doc, because that’s much better than having to write it out in longhand and we all agree that that’s a very good use.” Once you do that, then they’ve got their computers open.

Jessica Grose:

Yep.

Emily Oster:

And so, then, you get the distraction piece. And then, the teacher is not just teaching, but also you’re walking around the classroom, seeing who’s clicking between tabs in YouTube.

Jessica Grose:

Yep.

Emily Oster:

So, somehow, I can imagine for schools, for parents, etc., getting to something that is an balance I think could feel almost impossible, right? That maybe there’s really only go back to writing and just let it go like it is, which neither of which seems like a great current solution.

Jessica Grose:

Yeah. I mean, it is, I don’t ever mean to suggest that this is an easy problem to fix, because the other part of it is we need kids to learn how to be good digital citizens to each other and to humanity.

Emily Oster:

Yeah. And, I mean, even beyond that, just beyond the question of digital citizenship, there’s the question of in the world they will have computers.

Jessica Grose:

Exactly.

Emily Oster:

Right? We are training kids for a world, in which the expectation is that they know how to open up a Google Doc and do stuff. And there’s a set of skills there that they need to learn. So, living in a hut with no technology is also not a good preparation for certain aspects of the modern world.

Jessica Grose:

Yeah. And you have to build the willpower to not… I mean, I am only one woman. I have 8,000 tabs open at every minute of the day. You know? And a lot of them are for work and I’m like, “Oh. Do I do this piece of work or this piece of work? And let me check Twitter,” it’s just like…

Emily Oster:

I just have a Zoom. All of the Zoom things. Somehow, Zoom opens a new tab every time I Zoom and I never close them, so my thing is just like Zoom, Zoom, Zoom, Zoom, Zoom, Zoom, Zoom, Zoom, so I don’t know. I probably should close.

Jessica Grose:

Yeah. It is a skill that they’re going to have to build, also, to be able to avoid the constant distraction, attention-sucking nature of the internet in modern world, so I don’t think full abstinence makes sense for pretty much anybody, forever. But, again, it’s not going to be a one-size-fits-all. I feel like you run into this often-

Emily Oster:

Often.

Jessica Grose:

… with the subjects you cover, that it is blanket-recommendations are almost never useful. And so, I think that just having those frameworks of, “Is it useful? Is it necessary? Is it good?” It’s a place to start.

Emily Oster:

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I almost think there’s a shift of default that might help, right?

Jessica Grose:

Yes.

Emily Oster:

Like, we are… There’s a thing that says, “By default, there’s no technology.” But if there is a reason to have, like, in order to get over the barrier of introducing technology into some [inaudible 00:23:19] at school, we need to have an active reason to think it would make this experience better, as opposed to saying, “The default is everything is on the computer and you need to show an active reason why it would be better to not do it on the computer,” which sometimes feels like where we are now.

Jessica Grose:

Absolutely. And I do think there just needs to be a lot. I mean, and something I did not even have supposed to get into in my stories was the data privacy piece of it. So, I don’t trust the tech companies to do what they say they will do in terms of protecting our data privacy. I just don’t. They have been sued before, they have lost those lawsuits. They have not shown themselves to be honest programs.

Emily Oster:

It’s hard a problem and it does not seem like it has been solved.

Jessica Grose:

Yes. And so, and then it’s like, you see some tech companies being like, “We should put VR in the classroom.” And it’s like, “First of all, from a practicality level, that headset would get broken by children, within 10 minutes,” so it’s just the expense, the practicality. I’m sure you could a couple of really cool things on it, but that’s something else that I did discuss in the piece was the expense part.

So, I think that there’s this idea that if we just digitized everything it would be cheaper and we wouldn’t have to pay for textbooks. It’s a, at best, a wash, because those Chromebooks… Some teacher wrote in and was like, “There’s one eighth-grader who we’ve had to give four new replacements of various things.” You know? It’s just like the expense of that, the ecological damage of getting rid of all of these laptops that become obsolete, pretty quickly. So, it’s just like, “Let’s not.” The electricity use, all of that. So, it’s like, “Yeah, we have fewer photocopies.” Okay.

Emily Oster:

Right. Yeah.

Jessica Grose:

True. But let’s not pretend that we’re not introducing a bunch of other issues and expenses that were not there before.


Emily Oster:

More ParentData, including whether schools should ban phones and the reader response to Jessica Grose’s reporting, after the break.


Emily Oster:

So, we talked a little bit about the idea of distraction, like kids are distractible. I think some pushback, I can imagine, just say, “Tech distraction is no different from, ‘There’s a bird out the window,’ distraction, from, ‘Somebody’s yelling outside,’ distraction. Kids have trouble focusing because they’re children.” Is your sense from the literature that this is fundamentally a pretty different kind of distraction?

Jessica Grose:

I do think it’s different. And this is a little more philosophical, rather than strictly data-driven, but, to me, when I think about my kids, when they are zombied out, watching YouTube, that is very different from sitting and staring off into space and daydreaming and having whatever is generating in your little mind. It’s different from looking out the window and being like, “What’s that dog doing?” and engaging with the natural world around you, with your peers, socializing.

I mean, that’s something that I have not allowed my middle-schooler to have a cellphone. And part of the reason why is because when she’s hanging out with her friends, I went them to be hanging out and not all gathered around a screen together, which, obviously, they still definitely do, but I would try to minimize that, especially when they are out and about in the neighborhood. And, even something like doodling, I think doodling is more generative than sitting and watching a clip from A Clockwork Orange, when you are supposed to be in the middle of your English class, which is an actual… Although, listen, A Clockwork Orange is a great movie, I’m not going to lie.

Emily Oster:

It’s not for English class, though.

Jessica Grose:

It’s not for English class, it’s probably not for a 13-year-old.

Emily Oster:

Not for children.

Jessica Grose:

Yeah. So, I mean, I think what is going on in their actual minds and having them focus on that or focus on the actual physical humans around them, I just think that that is better. And people can disagree with that, people can. That is, I think, a little bit more values and philosophy, but I do feel it pretty strongly.

Emily Oster:

Yeah. I think the other thing I would add to that is just that the way that something like YouTube works is it’s algorithmically designed to keep you there.

Jessica Grose:

Yes.

Emily Oster:

And so, if we think about that staring out the window form of distraction, eventually, the dog is gone. The world does is not algorithmically designed to keep you staring out the window. Whereas, YouTube is designed to keep you flipping through that. I mean, that’s literally some very smart people are figuring out how to do that.

Jessica Grose:

Right.

Emily Oster:

And I think that that piece of it is probably important to keep in mind, when we think about, “How are kids interacting with this, in a way that’s different from interacting with other forms of stimuli?”

Jessica Grose:

That’s right. And the connections that your brain is making on its own, serendipitously, are different than the ones that the algorithms my drive you to and the sort of things that you think about. And I just think that’s a better way to spend the majority of your day.

Emily Oster:

In school, paying attention.

Jessica Grose:

Exactly.

Emily Oster:

Learning math.

Emily Oster:

I’m curious, in the survey, whether people talked about phones?

Jessica Grose:

Yeah. I mean, they, uniformly, everyone was like… But I could not find a parent or a teacher who was like, “I like to have the cellphones in the classroom.”

Emily Oster:

I have yet to find, I have been looking for an expert-

Jessica Grose:

Yeah.

Emily Oster:

… who thinks we should have phones in classrooms and have not found one.

Jessica Grose:

Yeah. I’m not surprised. I mean-

Emily Oster:

So, why do you think? I mean, this maybe is a little beyond the survey, but the issue of phones in classrooms has struck me as something where the agreement among adults is quite widespread.

Jessica Grose:

… Yeah.

Emily Oster:

By teachers, among parents, among people, digital experts. And it is true that our children perhaps would like cellphones in the classroom, but I’m sure they would also like unlimited soda and cookies and all kinds of other things that we are not putting in the classroom.

Jessica Grose:

Right.

Emily Oster:

They’re kids. What do you think is the reason that not everyone has banned cellphones in school, in classrooms?

Jessica Grose:

So, the defense that I’ve heard of it is for safety and for parents to be able to reach kids at any time.

Emily Oster:

Yeah.

Jessica Grose:

But I don’t find that compelling, considering call the front office, if it’s an emergency, they’ll get the kid pretty fast.

Emily Oster:

Yeah.

Jessica Grose:

Like, it’s not a huge place, they are contained already. And we survived with… I hate that argument, too, it’s just like, “Back in our day…” but we did, we survived with the payphones and the PA system, it was fine. I just don’t think that there was so many reasons that a parent might need to reach a child during the day, so I don’t find that interesting.

Emily Oster:

Yeah.

Jessica Grose:

I do think, I mean, I think some of it is they don’t want to be responsible for taking the kids’ property.

Emily Oster:

Hmm.

Jessica Grose:

And if it gets damaged, it’s just this other sort of logistical and legal responsibility that I think schools sometimes don’t want to have, so those are the only two reasons why I think that it hasn’t happened yet. And then, [inaudible 00:27:40], to get Beyonder pouches, that’s an expense. And it’s just-

Emily Oster:

Right.

Jessica Grose:

… sometimes, I mean, I have, in extreme cases, heard that the teachers, they do have a ban against it, but the kids’ behavior is so bad and the kids become aggressive. And, at some point, policing the cellphone use, again, it’s just like, “Do I teach the class today or do I police the cellphone use?”

Emily Oster:

Yep.

Jessica Grose:

And so, that’s another layer to it. And, again, that is, we’re not talking elementary here, we’re talking middle and high school.

Emily Oster:

Yeah. Well, let me ask you this, because I, for me, if you had to say, “Make one tech change,” that is the tech change I would make.

Jessica Grose:

Yeah. Yeah.

Emily Oster:

Is to say, basically, let’s just get to a place where there are no phones in the classrooms.

Jessica Grose:

Yeah.

Emily Oster:

Or, ideally, in the school day. What is the one change, if you were like a fairy, like a wizard, what is the one tech change you would make?

Jessica Grose:

This is, I’m with you on the no cellphones, but beyond that, I would actually say, “The kids can have one-to-one devices, but they live in a tech room. They live not in the classroom. You’re not taking them from, for the older kids, you’re not taking them from English, to chemistry, to whatever. That having them live not with you creates a default that is not a computer.”

And even, possibly, and this is even more extreme, having time limits, saying, “An hour a day. We are striving to have the kids, one out of eight hours on screen, and that’s it.” Again, it’s like the needs of every school are so different, and so it is tough to say that, but just having them up all of the time, I can’t justify it. I don’t think that there is any reason for it and I think it is a net negative, so that’s what I would say.

Emily Oster:

It’s interesting because there’s actually some research at college that students learn better, they’ve done trials, where students basically learn better, if you don’t allow computers-

Jessica Grose:

Yeah.

Emily Oster:

… in the classroom. And so, I don’t let my students use computers. And I actually realized the biggest issue is not their own use of the computer, but almost the distraction of someone else.

Jessica Grose:

Yeah.

Emily Oster:

These are adults. And so, “Look, if you don’t want to pay attention to what I’m saying, your parents paid for you to be at this Ivy League school,” like, “This is an opportunity and I think you should want to engage with that, but if you want to be checking your email or IMing…” I guess that people don’t instant message anymore, whatever. “Messaging other people from 1987, from my childhood.” Anyway, “If you want to be doing that, I think that’s on, in some sense, that’s on you.” But what I find is that if you’re sitting behind someone and they are texting or emailing and not taking notes, it’s actually quite distracting. And so, I think the biggest value to this, in the classrooms that I sit at the front of, are just other people are not distracted by your distraction.

Jessica Grose:

No, there are students said that, too, that just someone next to you, having a laptop open, means you will do worse and you will pay less attention.

Emily Oster:

Yeah.

Jessica Grose:

That’s absolutely true.

Emily Oster:

So, when we think about the question of like, almost like externalities, right? Like, in economics, when we think the government or some policy maker should intervene on something, we’re always looking for like, “Well, they want to intervene if there’s an externality.” If you are not internalizing the full cost of your behavior. And this is a place where I think kids are not internalizing the full cost of watching YouTube, because it’s distracting the other kid who’s trying not to watch YouTube, but is sucked into the shorts about pie or whatever.

Jessica Grose:

Yeah. And, I mean, what teachers will also tell you is there are some kids, especially in K-12, who just simply refuse to learn.

Emily Oster:

Yeah.

Jessica Grose:

And, at some point, but they shouldn’t be able to distract the kids who really do want to learn and pay attention.

Emily Oster:

Yeah.

Jessica Grose:

So, I think that’s-

Emily Oster:

I’m curious, my last thing I wanted to ask is, how do people react to your writeup of this?

Jessica Grose:

… They were mostly very into it. Parents thanked me. They were excited to be able to send it to their school administrator, so I’m sorry superintendents of America, that I’ve now darkened your doorstep. But I think a lot of them have been fighting this privately, or have a couple of like-minded parents that those who have banded together with, but I think so many parents feel totally helpless about this because even if they, in their homes, have very strict rules about device use, it’s like, “Oh. The kid’s coming home with a Chromebook and they have to do their homework on it. I can’t say, ‘No,’ to that.” So, I think having a desire for some backup from the school of a partnership and a state of desire to reduce the tech in the kids’ lives was very welcomed. And I did get some pushback, certainly. You know?

Emily Oster:

Mm-hmm.

Jessica Grose:

People who made really good points about how tech has improved their kids’ lives and I take that really seriously. And so, I don’t want to be, again, one-size-fits-all is tough, it doesn’t always work, but I think, overall, people were very excited to see more information on it, even if I am not a social science, but I think having 1,000 people talking about this, in granular detail, was very helpful to them.

Emily Oster:

Yeah. I think it’s also incredibly valuable, just to bring people’s attention to this.

Jessica Grose:

Yes.

Emily Oster:

Because if the argument is largely, “We defaulted into something which was very different than five years ago and we defaulted into it without really thinking about whether it’s what we wanted,” like having people just, “Hey, let’s have a conversation about whether that’s the right thing to have done,” is already a first step.

Jessica Grose:

I hope so.

Emily Oster:

So, thank you. Thank you for joining me. Thank you for doing the work.

Jessica Grose:

My pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.

Emily Oster:

ParentData is produced by Tamar Avishai, with support from the ParentData team and PRX. If you have thoughts on this episode, please join the conversation on my Instagram, @profemilyoster. And if you want to support the show, become a subscriber to parent data at parentdata.org where you can subscribe to weekly newsletters on everything to do with parents and data to help you make better, more informed parenting decisions. For example, earlier this summer, I wrote about screens and social media, particularly in schools and what the data, so far, says about how involved parents should be in monitoring it. Check it out at parentdata.org. There are a lot of ways you can help people find out about us. Leave a rating or a review on Apple Podcasts, text your friend about something you learned from this episode, debate your mother-in-law about the merits of something parents do now that is totally different from what she did, post a story to your Instagram debunking a panic headline of your own, just remember to mention the podcast too. Right, Penelope?

Penelope:

Right, Mom.

Emily Oster:

We’ll see you next time.

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dani
1 month ago

Seems like a lot of opinion and little to no data

Amanda
1 month ago

I’m not sure there’s anything wrong with writing a long essay in longhand. That’s what we all did back in the 90s. You can always type it up later.
I’m also not convinced we “need” to learn tech like google groups (which I barely use myself as an adult). I had only a typewriter until college. When I started college, I walked into a computer lab and asked another student how to type an essay on the computer. She taught me, and I was off and running with MS Word. You can always learn tech when you need to. No need to learn it just for the sake of learning.
Also, I did laugh a bit about the Clockwork Orange conversation. I actually DID watch part of it in a high school class, with the teacher. Our English class did a unit on film, analyzing them as literature. I’m for that kind of tech in school: the whole class viewing something together, guided by the teacher. Hey, it’s a great movie.

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