Why These Parents Want Schools to Stop Issuing iPads to 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 sizeto face an organized - and growing - campaign by parentsdemanding that schools pull back on mandatory screen time. Thediscontent in Los Angeles Unified, the second-largest school districtin the country, reflects a growing unease nationally about the amount of time children spendlearning through screens in classrooms. While a majorityof states prohibit children from using cellphones in class, 88%of schools provide students with personal devices, according to theNationalCenter for Education Statistics, often Chromebook laptops or iPads. The parents hope getting a districtthat has over 409,000 students across nearly 800 schools to changehow it approaches screen time would send a signal across publicschool districts to pull back from a yearslong effort to digitizeclassrooms.... [In the Los Angeles school district] Students in grade levels as low askindergarten are provided iPads, and some schools require them totake the tablets home. Some teachers have allowed students to optout of the iPad-based assignments, but other parents say they'vebeen told that they can't. Parents can also opt their children outof havingaccess to YouTube and severalother Google products... The billion-dollar 2014 initiative togive tablet computers to everyone becamea scandal after the bidding process appeared to heavily favorApple, and it faced criticism once it became clear that studentscould bypass security protocols and that fewteachers used the tablets. Currently, the district leaves it upto individual schools to decide whether they want students to takehome iPads or Chromebooks every day and how much time they spend onthem in class... Around 300 parents attended listening sessions the district heldlast month about technology in the classroom. Nearly all who spokecriticized how much screen time schools gave their children in class,pointing to ways their behavior and grades suffered as studentswatched YouTube and played Minecraft... Several also asked districtofficials to explain why children as young as kindergartners wereasked to signa form to use devices in which they promised they would honorintellectual property law and refrain from meeting people in personwhom they met online. "Is it possible for children to meet peopleover the internet on school-issued devices?" one father asked. Thedistrict officials declined to answer, saying it was meant to be alistening 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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