Why These Parents Want Schools to Stop Issuing iPads to the Their Children

What happened when a school in Los Angeles gave a sixth grader an iPad for use throughout the school day? 'He used the iPad during school to watch YouTube and participate in Fortnite video game battles,' reports NBC News.

His mother has now launched a coalition of parents called Schools Beyond Screens 'organizing in WhatsApp groups, petition drives and actions at school board meetings and demanding meetings with district administrators, pressuring them to pull back on the school-mandated screen time.'

Los Angeles Unified is the first district of its size
to face an organized — and growing — campaign by parents
demanding that schools pull back on mandatory screen time. The
discontent in Los Angeles Unified, the second-largest school district
in the country, reflects a growing unease nationally about the amount of time children spend
learning through screens in classrooms. While a majority
of states prohibit children from using cellphones in class, 88%
of schools provide students with personal devices, according to the
National
Center for Education Statistics, often Chromebook laptops or iPads. The parents hope getting a district
that has over 409,000 students across nearly 800 schools to change
how it approaches screen time would send a signal across public
school districts to pull back from a yearslong effort to digitize
classrooms....

[In the Los Angeles school district] Students in grade levels as low as
kindergarten are provided iPads, and some schools require them to
take the tablets home. Some teachers have allowed students to opt
out of the iPad-based assignments, but other parents say they've
been told that they can't. Parents can also opt their children out
of having
access to YouTube and several
other Google products... The billion-dollar 2014 initiative to
give tablet computers to everyone became
a scandal after the bidding process appeared to heavily favor
Apple, and it faced criticism once it became clear that students
could bypass security protocols and that few
teachers used the tablets. Currently, the district leaves it up
to individual schools to decide whether they want students to take
home iPads or Chromebooks every day and how much time they spend on
them in class...

Around 300 parents attended listening sessions the district held
last month about technology in the classroom. Nearly all who spoke
criticized how much screen time schools gave their children in class,
pointing to ways their behavior and grades suffered as students
watched YouTube and played Minecraft... Several also asked district
officials to explain why children as young as kindergartners were
asked to sign
a form to use devices in which they promised they would honor
intellectual property law and refrain from meeting people in person
whom they met online. 'Is it possible for children to meet people
over the internet on school-issued devices?' one father asked. The
district officials declined to answer, saying it was meant to be a
listening session.

In 2022, Los Angeles Unified started requiring students to complete benchmark assessments on educaitonal software i-Ready, the article points out, which generates unique questions for each students. 'But parents and teachers are unable to see what children are asked, in part because the company that makes the program considers them proprietary information...'

One teacher says his school's administartors are requiring him to use i-Ready even though it doesn't have any material for the science class he's actually teaching. He's also noticed some students will use answers from AI chatbots, bypassing the school's monitoring software by creating alternate user profiles. But the monitoring software company suggests the school misconfigured their software's settings, adding 'More commonly, when students attempt to bypass filtering or monitoring, they do so by using proxies.'

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the article.

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