The Four Norms of EdTech

This article originally appeared on Emily Cherkin’s First Fish Chronicles, her resource for information, advocacy and community building in support of her mission to dismantle EdTech. It is republished here with permission.

The winds are blowing, the tides are turning, and change is coming, friends.

My mission here at First Fish Chronicles is to save children, education and democracy by dismantling the EdTech industry through grassroots change. I’ve been at this fight for many years — but for the first time, things feel very, very different, and this gives me tremendous hope.

Last year, Jonathan Haidt put out his “Four New Norms to Free the Anxious Generation” to help reverse the effects of overprotecting children in the real world while under-protecting them online. In parallel, states and schools around the country are actively pursuing bell-to-bell phone policies (which I wholeheartedly support).

But we have to acknowledge that it is extremely confusing to simultaneously tell a child: “You can’t bring that small rectangular internet-connected screen into the classroom, but here is a larger rectangular internet-connected screen for learning.”

Teacher-turned-neuroscientist Jared Cooney Horvath, in his book “The Digital Delusion,” brilliantly lays out the evidence we’ve been waiting for to finally prove what so many of us have been concerned about for so long: “Screens for learning” is a contradiction.

Simply put, the introduction of computers into classrooms has led to a generation of children today who are less cognitively capable than we were at their age.

This is a pretty breathtaking finding and a historic reversal of the consistent pattern of each subsequent generation performing better than the previous one. Until today.

What happened? In his book, Horvath points out that starting around 2012, student performance globally started to decline. As a classroom teacher myself from 2003–2015, I noticed two big changes starting around 2010:

• First, as a teacher, I was increasingly expected to use more technology, like posting grades in an online portal and telling my students to “check Moodle” (as it was called back then). But this meant I was steering my middle schoolers to a computer to find out how they were doing in my class instead of encouraging them to practice and hone the skills that I really believed mattered at this age — self-advocacy, communication, problem-solving — by coming and speaking to me about their schoolwork. Those moments were then opportunities for me to better connect with my students, which in turn made me a better teacher. Sending them to a website didn’t make sense to me. Wasn’t this the opposite of what these students needed to learn and grow?
• Second, as a result of this digital online portal, parents now had access to grades too, and the number of parental emails I got rose rapidly — “Why haven’t you graded this essay yet?” “Why did my child get that grade on the most recent vocabulary test?” “What can she do to improve her class grade?” Questions that historically would have been brought to me by my students were now coming via anxious emails — so frequently at times that I knew some parents were refreshing the portal every few minutes, waiting for the latest upload, then pouncing.

All of this was pre- “1:1s”— the modern-day phenomenon where every American child was given an internet-connected device, usually an iPad or a Chromebook, for school. It’s important to note that the pandemic didn’t spur the rise of 1:1s — that was already in process well before COVID hit in the spring of 2020. But the pandemic accelerated the rise of 1:1 computers for each child. Then, when students returned to the classroom in the months following, so did the 1:1 devices, and education’s dependence on them, much to the detriment of actual learning (and, I would argue, human relationships).

As Horvath notes, data now reveals this: Today in the United States, test scores are lower than they have ever been since we’ve been recording national scores.

So what does this mean for children, for teachers, for education and for democracy?

It means three things:

• We’ve made a big mistake. Whether that is by allowing Big Tech (in a sweater vest or school uniform) posing as benevolent EdTech to enter our classrooms, or by thinking that these very wealthy and powerful companies we’ve hardly heard of (PowerSchool, Renaissance, iReady) can help administrators produce impactful progress monitoring reports, or by assuming that the companies who build “tools for learning” surely — must be! — doing it because it is best for children and learning (but it isn’t) — it doesn’t matter which Kool-Aid we drank, but we’ve drunk it and it’s bad and it’s time to own up to it: We were wrong. It’s time to make things right.
• We do not have to accept Big Tech’s takeover of education as inevitable or a foregone conclusion. Now is the time to find other parents and educators and yes, administrators, and policymakers and work together — like so many have done on the phone-free schools and the smartphone-free childhood movements! — to fight for the same protections of children in classrooms too. Nearly all American children are provided with direct access to the internet while they are at school, often unsupervised (this is not the fault of teachers, so don’t go there), often on products that are unvetted, untested and unproven. By now, most of us have realized that excessive smartphone and social media use is harmful to children and their development. Now we must take that same conclusion, realize it’s happening via EdTech and 1:1 devices in school, and fight that fight, too. It’s already happening. One of the most impactful aspects of this work is realizing that this is a concern shared across the political spectrum — most of us don’t want this for our children and my goodness, I hope all of us agree: No one should be able to access pornography on a school-issued device.
• To have that fight, we need to agree on some new norms for education. Inspired by Jonathan Haidt’s Four Norms, I created Four New Norms of EdTech, which are an attempt to reverse three big mistakes we’ve made when it comes to the use of technology in education:
  • Mistake #1: Over-reliance on 1:1 and internet-connected tools in the name of “learning” or “efficacy” (in spite of evidence to the contrary and a business model which encourages children to spend more, not less, time on screens during school)
  • Mistake #2: Undervaluing the hands-on, relationship-based role of teachers in the learning experience (learning happens in the context of both struggle and relationships)
  • Mistake #3: Failing to protect children from data and privacy breaches that are embedded within the business model of EdTech (a topic very few school administrators, let alone teachers or parents, fully understand).

The four new norms of EdTech

1. No internet-connected 1:1 devices in K–12 schools. Children do not need internet-connected devices for learning, and they aren’t learning on them anyway. If state-mandated testing is all digital, return to paper-based testing. Bring back hard-wired computer labs or laptop carts.
2. Tech Ed, not EdTech. Children need to learn about technology and all the ways it can be used, but do not need 1:1 internet-connected devices to do so. Tech Ed (Technology Education) can include learning how a computer operates, what the internet is, how AI and social media function, what an algorithm is, how to identify disinformation and misinformation, and how to type, all which can be taught without screen-based technology. Tech Ed is not the same thing as EdTech.
3. More paper, more handwriting and more relationships. Children learn best in the context of relationships with teachers they trust and through effortful struggle. Learning isn’t supposed to be easy; friction is the learning process. Schools should invest in teachers, not tech. The most advanced technologies in a classroom should be people, paper and pencils.
4. No AI use in K–12. Children are not ready developmentally, ethically or emotionally to use AI as a tool. Even those who build AI products do not fully understand how they work. If it is used, AI is a tool for adult experts. It is untested, unproven and unsafe for use by children. Students should learn about AI in the same way they learn about other high-risk activities, like driving or drinking alcohol — in the context of a structured course with an expert human teacher.

When a school of fish in the ocean wants to change direction, it takes one first fish to start the shift, but requires second and third fish to bring the rest along. Courageous school leaders and parents have an opportunity to serve as “first fish” changemakers when it comes to rethinking the role of EdTech, but many more second and third fish efforts are needed as well.

Challenging the trajectory of EdTech and AI is not without risk, but the risks of doing nothing to protect a thinking, feeling and voting future citizenry is a direct threat to democracy itself.

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