Last week in Los Angeles, while the leaders of YouTube and Instagram were being deposed in a landmark trial on the addictive nature of social media, the home of the superintendent of L.A. Unified School District was raided by the FBI in connection with a $6 million contract between the district and a failed AI start-up (a chatbot called “Ed” pitched as an “educational friend” to students) that has since filed for bankruptcy.

Today across the United States, nearly 90% of school-aged children are assigned a Chromebook or an iPad at school. Many districts use over a hundred EdTech platforms and services to deliver instruction, host digital curricula, manage grades, and even use chatbots to teach kindergartners how to read.1 Yet few, if any, of these products have a proven educational benefit. Districts are rolling out chatbots (powered by OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google) to “scale education” or “personalize learning” ignoring that humans aren’t scalable widgets and learning has always been “personalized”.... by a skilled teacher.

Imagine this scenario: A drug company announces a new drug with a “lot of potential” to improve children’s health. Though they are “still researching it,” your local children’s hospital begins administering it to all its young patients. Parents who express concerns about this untested and unproven drug are told that they are “interfering with progress” and they should “trust the administrators.”

Imagine this scenario: A drug company announces a new drug with a “lot of potential” to improve children’s health. Though they are “still researching it,” your local children’s hospital begins administering it to all its young patients. Parents who express concerns about this untested and unproven drug are told that they are “interfering with progress” and they should “trust the administrators.”

This is exactly what’s happening in schools.

This is exactly what’s going on in schools globally. Untested EdTech products, especially those with AI-embedded “tools” are being forced on teachers, students, and families with little evidence of their efficacy or safety, and even less consent. Tech companies– and right now, especially AI companies– who stand to benefit from increased engagement, more data, and future loyal users (yes, “users”2) by hijacking the educational system and the young minds they are supposedly molding, are building AI teacher training programs, deploying reading chatbots to five-year-olds, and making a lot of really big claims about potential.3

What’s Needed Now: Radical Transparency

Just like all tech executives aren’t corrupt, neither are all superintendents. But these recent events in Los Angeles should prompt every parent and every school district in America to take a hard look at the now clearly visible and known harms perpetuated by companies like Instagram and YouTube and start to ask how contracts with EdTech companies– which are built on the same exact business models and gamified designs– are procured and examine who really benefits from them.

Spoiler alert– it’s not children. While we know of YouTube and Instagram, the most powerful companies you’ve never heard of are currently fracking education and are equally wealthy, equally powerful, and equally risky. We should be equally concerned.

It’s time to demand radical transparency.

While we know of YouTube and Instagram, the most powerful companies you’ve never heard of are currently fracking education and are equally wealthy, equally powerful, and equally risky. We should be equally concerned.

More specifically, it’s time to demand transparency about the EdTech products being brought into our children’s classrooms and put onto their crappy 1:1 school-issued Chromebooks (and what is a Chromebook but an internet browser? It cannot and does not function without an internet connection). It is time for administrators to prove they are making sound and intentional decisions about which technology products– before they are brought into our schools and handed to our children.

As parents and teachers in Los Angeles are now rightfully demanding, an audit of all existing EdTech products in education is a bare minimum starting point. Before even entering a school, all EdTech or AI products used should be evaluated by these four simple questions:

1. Is the product effective?
2. Is the product safe?
3. Is the product legal?
4. Is it better than a human teacher, a physical book, or a piece of paper and a pencil?

Those who claim EdTech products are effective– or even beneficial– usually rely on evidence produced by the companies who built the product, or cite studies that only measure whether or not the product, when “used effectively” (as so many user agreements stipulate), improve from use of that product– but saying nothing about the effectiveness of the product on skills outside use of it. Sometimes, the user is blamed– the “student wasn’t using it correctly” or the teacher didn’t “use it with fidelity.”4

There is ongoing debate about whether or not these products cause learning harms or if they are correlated to them. I believe high-quality, independently peer-reviewed research matters. But I also, quite frankly, don’t care whether or not these products directly “cause” harm or if the harm children experience are simply “correlated” to their use. The problem is– they’re just bad for children, because the business model is fundamentally at odds with healthy child development.

If you want to sit and wait for causational research to prove that putting kids on the internet at school where they can be contacted by pedophiles or spend hours consuming YouTube videos is maybe unhealthy, then don’t use everyone else’s children as your guinea pig. We all know that the executives of these companies send their own children to low-tech, nature-based schools. It’s for us, but not for them.

Quite frankly, I don’t care whether or not these products directly “cause” harm or if the harm children experience are simply “correlated” to their use. The problem is– they’re just bad for children, because the business model is fundamentally at odds with healthy child development.

And if you think I’m being dramatic when I say that children are spending hours on YouTube in class or clicking through the gamified curriculum just to get to the end without absorbing any content, then you haven’t been in a school in the past few years.

Are there teachers resisting and limiting as much as they can? Absolutely. I know one kindergarten teacher who says the iPads haven’t come out of the closet since school started, but her colleague across the hall uses them daily. That’s a problem. But this is rarely teachers’ decisions and they are rarely able to resist or push back without risking their jobs. (And if you are a teacher resisting in big or small ways, thank you and keep going– we are right here behind you.) Teachers need us to speak out.

If you haven’t visited a school lately, here are some typical scenes:

• Classrooms of six-year-olds wearing headphones silently tapping through programs like iReady to meet district-mandated metrics.
• Middle schoolers will describe how much easier it is to just let Chat GPT write their essay than do it themselves.
• Have you watched a 4-year-old point to the number “11” and exclaim– “I know what that is! That’s ‘pause’!” …as in the PAUSE button!?

That’s the numeral 11, right? Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

As the brilliant John Allen Wooden recently commented while pushing back on a pro-EdTech blog post defending all this crap: “There is a point at which the analytic mindset becomes an ouroboros of asininity - an utter black hole of patently obvious common sense. This is that.”

Amen.

Ten Questions to Ask Your School Leaders

We are at a watershed moment in this fight right now, and school leaders have an opportunity to say “We made a mistake. We reject all of this. Let’s start fresh.”

How do we do that?

We start by asking questions. Here’s a list to get you started:

1. How many unique EdTech products does our district have contracts with?
2. Where can I see the contracts for each EdTech product used by our district?
3. How much money does our district spend on EdTech contracts per year? Where can I easily find that information?
4. Which budgets cover technology products, such as our learning management system, digital curricula, and online portals? Do books and paper come from that same budget, or a different one?
5. Where can I find a list of all EdTech products used in our district?
6. Which EdTech apps and platforms are used by which grades? In other words, where can I find a list of the products my child will encounter in their current grade/subject?
7. What is the process by which a district vets each unique product– not just digital curriculum adoption, but any other digital product that is used by teachers and/or students?
8. What GenAI products does the district use, not necessarily as distinct products, but what existing EdTech products embed GenAI? If I do not consent to my child using GenAI products, how will the district support that?
9. Schools cannot consent on behalf of parents to data and privacy collection. Where can I see a list of each product’s terms of use and privacy policy? If I do not consent to them, what are my options?
10. How does the district support teachers and parents who do not consent to the data collection, privacy risks, or additional screentime presented by Edtech products?

We learn more each day about what YouTube and other social media companies know about the harms they cause to children– that opportunities to put profits before people are baked into the business model.

Historically, many parents have trusted that what the schools tell them and what materials they hand their children are vetted, safe, and effective. No one wants to think that school leaders are intentionally harming students. In many ways, school leaders are victims of EdTech too. But when it comes to EdTech, and while this may be frightening to realize, we now know that like Big Tech companies, EdTech companies do not have our children’s best interest at heart either. They present the same risks, the same lack of protections, and the same lack of transparency as Big Tech companies.

No one wants to think that school leaders are intentionally harming students. In many ways, school leaders are victims of EdTech too. But when it comes to EdTech, just like Big Tech companies, EdTech companies do not have our children’s best interest at heart either.

It is time for school leaders to step into the part of their role that includes protecting the most vulnerable members of their communities– children.

It’s time to accept and admit that mistakes have been made, but now that we know better, we can do better.

It is time to see that parents and teachers are allies in this continued fight against EdTech and Big Tech, and that we share the same goals– raising children to be thriving and healthy adults.

Not all players in this are bad actors, of course. Corruption exists in every industry. However, just as Big Tech deserves the scrutiny it is getting right now, so too do EdTech companies. We have every right to demand transparency because the system is only as honest as it is visible.

1 Interestingly, MagicSchool AI, maker of another chatbot called “Raina,” recently removed Raina from the student-facing platform last month following concerns raised by parents in Bend-LaPine, OR. Bizarrely, Bend-LaPine school officials defended use of the chatbot.

2 “There are only two industries that call their customers ‘users’: illegal drugs and software” — Edward Tufte, American statistician

3 The word “potential” appears 13 times in the 2023 “Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Teaching Report,” 98 times in the 2010 “Transforming American Education: Learning Powered by Technology” National Education Technology Plan, and a whopping 98 times in the recent Brookings Report: “A new direction for students in an AI world: Prosper, prepare, protect.” (H/t to Denise Champney for having these numbers for me!)

4 See Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath’s book and writing for excellent responses to these myths or my own essay here.