By Elise Abbruzzese, Greenwich
The Greenwich Public School budget has increased every year for many years. This is due to many factors, including inflation, but I want to suggest something that could help curb costs and result in better outcomes for children in our district. I believe GPS would save money on technology, special education, and summer school expenses, while also improving the educational experiences of children and parents with one major shift – phasing out Ed Tech for our students.
What is Ed Tech? According to The Screentime Consultant, Emily Cherkin, MEd., “Ed Tech” consists of digital tools, platforms, or apps used by schools, teachers, or students. Ed Tech includes both hardware (iPads, laptops, etc.) and software (curriculum and learning management systems). By contrast, “Tech Ed” consists of academic curricula designed to teach children how to use technology safely and effectively by building their typing, media literacy, and safe searching skills. Cutting edge schools spend their tech time on Tech Ed, not Ed Tech. They also delay Tech Ed until children are more mature and have mastered foundational skills like reading, writing, and arithmetic.
Last year, Greenwich Superintendent Toni Jones noted at a Board of Estimate and Taxation Budget Committee presentation that Greenwich Public Schools saw an increase of 189 special education students from October 2019 to October 2023. Tech use in all schools necessarily increased during the pandemic, yet most districts, including GPS, did not reconsider their reliance on Ed Tech when Covid restrictions receded.
During her BET presentation, Dr. Jones projected, “We’ve gone from a 10 percent special education population to now 14. Do we expect this to continue? Absolutely.”
Before we concede that a perpetual increase in special education is a foregone conclusion, let’s take a deeper dive into the details. A significant portion of students in our system who receive special education services are diagnosed with attention-related disorders.
According to WebMD, a child’s screen time can cause attention problems and make cases of ADHD worse. If our school system eliminates screen time for our youngest students and minimizes it in middle and high school, many children struggling to pay attention will find it easier to do so.
Jonathan Haidt, author of The Anxious Generation, explained on Episode 868 of the Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard, “I’m now studying educational technology because our schools are stuffed full of Ed Tech and a lot of it is gamified.”
Haidt explained that gamified Ed Tech apps that reward students for correct answers are very engaging. However, this engagement comes at a cost.
“The more activities we give our kids that lead them to quick dopamine, which is ‘You do something simple, you get a reward. Do something simple, get a reward.’ Like a slot machine, like social media…If you gamify a quarter of a kid’s day, that’s a lot of quick dopamine. The brain is going to react by down-regulating dopamine neurons so that they’re less sensitive to dopamine.” When the gamification is removed from the learning environment (e.g. lectures and seminars), students experience a dopamine deficit, which causes them to perceive normal experiences as dull and unpleasant. Haidt lamented, “If you gamify, gamify, gamify, then the rest of life is incredibly boring. And that includes talking to people. We’re really doing our kids a disservice.”
Harken back to the way we used computers as kids. We went to the computer lab once or twice a week and learned to type, then we got ten minutes at the end of class to play Oregon Trail. Our school days weren’t full of dozens of dopamine rushes. Obviously the computer capabilities are much more extensive today than they were in the 1990s, but elementary school children do not need to be spending hours a week, cumulatively, learning tech skills, which according to Mark Zuckerberg will become increasingly obsolete with the introduction of AI. Meanwhile, Sarah Wynn-Williams noted on Honestly with Bari Weiss that Silicon Valley is “awash in wooden Montessori toys, rather than high tech gadgets.”
Ok to Delay co-founder, Ariella Feldman, worked in tech before founding the local non-profit. In an interview with Greenwich Moms, Ariella explained that she left Meta in 2021 because her values conflicted with Meta’s mission noting that “Meta and other social media companies are always going to be pursuing strategies to attract younger audiences and make them spend as much time as possible on the platforms because that is how they make money.” In addition to social media platforms, Ed Tech companies are also incentivized to maximize usage because they collect and profit from user data.
What about the arguments for Ed Tech? Proponents say that it helps balance differentiation and school budgeting. In education, differentiation refers to tailoring instruction and learning experiences to meet the diverse needs and abilities of individual students. Over the last decade, schools have increasingly integrated Ed Tech software to bolster differentiation, while keeping payroll costs manageable. This approach is penny-wise and pound-foolish.
The negative impacts of Ed Tech on children’s behavior and attention outweigh the benefits. The behavioral consequences are taxing for teachers and make classrooms less effective learning environments. Many benefits of tech-based differentiation are negated by the corresponding behavioral disruptions and impacts on attention. As Jessica Grose noted in Get Tech out of the Classroooms Before It’s Too Late, teachers can either teach or referee, but “they can’t do both at the same time.”
In High School, children who struggled with self-regulation and concentration, due to the dopamine response triggered by Ed Tech, will struggle further as the quantity and depth of content increase. Additionally, high school students should take note that a mounting body of evidence supports the contention that handwriting notes is better for memory and learning than typing. Michael Bloomberg joined the conversation last week. In his piece, he cited a review of two decades of academic research indicating that “children using laptops are easily distracted — and distracting to their peers.”
During her viral lecture for the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, Sophie Winkleman observed that screens detract students’ “attention away from their teachers during lessons and away from each other during break time. [She] also observed children in general becoming a different species – the raucous exuberance of youth was being replaced with an anxious, irritable insularity which was disturbing to see.”
I encourage GPS parents to speak to school leadership and teachers regarding strategies to minimize the dopamine inducing Ed Tech in our classrooms. Show educators and administrators this article and encourage them to read the resources cited herein. Ask them what types of technology are used, and how much time each day children are spending on Ed Tech in class. Track the amount of time Ed Tech is required for homework assignments. And finally, collaborate with school faculty to decrease or, better yet, eliminate Ed Tech, starting with the gamified platforms.
It is a step in the right direction that Greenwich public schools have prohibited cell phones and smart watches in elementary and middle schools and placed restrictions on their use in the High School. However, there is much work to do in rolling back tech use and focusing on the fundamentals so we can best serve our students in a fiscally responsible way.