OPINION: How Much Screen Time Is Enough?

There's a push to eliminate not just cell phones from schools, but screens all together. It's a good idea. It won't fix what's wrong with public education.

By Martin Davis
EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
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Photo by Solen Feyissa on Unsplash

The movement to ban cell phones in schools continues to gain traction in both Virginia and across the country. Legislation recently signed by Gov. Abigail Spanberger takes the cell phone ban legislation signed by then-Gov. Glenn Youngkin to another level.

The legislation — SB 108 — now requires that schools not just mandate zero cell phone use during the day, but rather restricts “student cell phone and smart device possession and prohibit[s] student cell phone and smart device use on school property from bell to bell.”

But will that be enough?

There is a small but growing movement among educators who want more than phone bans; they want to dump screen time all together.

Jenny Anderson wrote about this last week for The Atlantic in “What Happened After a Teacher Ditched Screens.” The piece chronicles what happened when Colorado teacher Dylan Kane — after 12 years of being an advocate for personal computer devices in the classroom decided in January to take away the students’ phone books.

The promise of technology and AI in the classroom is “personalization,” writes Anderson. But what Kane found was that “all of the dashboards and data analytics of ed tech did not make the individual needs of students clearer, nor did they much help those who were struggling.” Instead, Anderson writes, “the screens offered students cover, a way to appear engaged without any actual sustained effort.”

In my two years teaching at James Monroe High School, I find much to agree with in Kane’s experience.

Even when JM took away the cell phones, the Chromebooks were still there. Walk around the classroom, and students are doing everything but what they should be doing. Instant messaging apps, YouTube, social media channels, and sports pages were abundant.

As for the tasks we were working on? They were there, and students were adept at toggling between tabs.

Schools are not unaware of this and are constantly shutting down applications and creating solutions that give teachers power over what students see.

Kane, however, found this didn’t really help. “Even with the best-designed software with pause functions,” Anderson wrote …

… so he could remotely freeze students’ screens to recapture their attention, he noticed that his students tended to stare at their screens during class discussions. “There’s this gravity that the screens exert on student attention,” he told me. “They’re waiting for it to unpause, waiting for it to pull them back in.”

The obsession with personal devices is pervasive in Fredericksburg, Spotsylvania, and Stafford, where the districts make sure every student has a computer. And increasingly, these districts are working to figure out how to effectively integrate AI into the educational experience.

The challenge is that while there is value to this technology, and it has the potential to enhance learning, it is a challenge that to this point hasn’t worked. In fact, we seem to be running in reverse, an argument supported by declining scores on the only national assessment we have for student achievement — NAEP — and made by Jared Horvath in his new book The Digital Delusion.

Removing Screens Won’t Fix What’s Wrong

The problem is about far more than technology and screen time, however, of which teens — and all the rest of us — spend too much time in front of. And there are consequences, as this article from Stanford University shows.

At its core is a more foundational question — what is the point of education?

Martin Luther King Jr. wrote in 1947 — well before he was an internationally known civil rights advocate — that education has two points: utility — preparing one to successfully navigate the challenges that life offers — and cultural.

Of the latter, King wrote:

Education must also train one for quick, resolute and effective thinking. To think incisively and to think for one’s self is very difficult. We are prone to let our mental life become invaded by legions of half truths, prejudices, and propaganda.

That type of learning does not happen behind a computer screen. And it is not strengthened by AI. Both fundamentally undermine that goal. (And, as I have written elsewhere, high stakes testing carries with it the same problem.)

Kane has also found that to be true:

Education, Kane knows, is profoundly and stubbornly social. “There are a lot of students who need accountability,” he said. The answer is not more surveillance, but more companionship in the struggle. “Students benefit from being in a room with a bunch of other people who are learning the same thing, the collective effervescence of all trying to make progress together,” he said. “And they benefit from an adult who knows them, who is in the room, who says ‘I care about your learning.’”

Learning is social. And it depends upon teachers who are accomplished being allowed to lead their students’ learning.

Instead, this approach — derisively labeled the “sage on the stage” approach — has been replaced with the misguided notion that we should tailor educational needs to every student. And technology is the tool that will get us there.

During my orientation at JM, I sat through a presentation by a technology leader who equated educators to baristas. We once poured everyone coffee from the same pot, she said. Today, “students expect individualized attention.” In same way that baristas create custom coffees for their customers, we must use technology to create lessons that can be tailored to each kid that both entertain and teach them — coffee for you, Frappuccino for you, a macchiato for you, and latte for you.

To anyone who has taught, it’s the classic example of an idea that sounds good, but is not just impractical in practice, but foolish to pursue.

Students don’t need more screen time. They need teachers who care.

At JM, as at most schools across the country, teachers were constantly being challenged to guesstimate who would pass, who would fail, and who was underwater but had a shot at the SOL. Reams of data poured in, supposedly to inform the teacher where there students were at.

The good teachers didn’t need it. When teachers pour in to their students. When they form relationships and work with them — as opposed to reacting to standardized scores — they don’t need “data” to tell them where the kid is.

We know.

The question becomes, do people trust teachers to act?

It’s Time to Respect Teaching

The simple fact is that teachers have been stripped of autonomy. They are told what to teach (ONLY what’s on the state-approved curricula). When to teach (Bell-bell, unless you’re being pulled for IEP meetings our parent conferences or pushing an endless cycle of district mandated materials). How to teach (For heavens’ sake, don’t lecture more than 10 minutes, and don’t expect kids to write and read — they can’t handle it.)

And it affects public education across the board.

In wealthy communities with all the benefits that offers, many parents demand A’s regardless whether their child earned them or not. And they complain loudly to administration when they don’t get what they want.

In Spotsylvania, we just lived through a period where extreme religious conservatives demanded — and to an extent succeeded — in banning books and controlling everything their child is exposed to.

The list could go on, but the point is made.

Teachers are not trusted. More important, they are not respected.

If we are to see a change in education, it will only come when teachers are again given control to teach.

Yes — technology and screen time make teaching harder.

But it’s nothing compared to the damage that the distrust of educators and learning in general has done to public education.

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