Stop Saying the Research Says All Screens Harm Children. It Doesn’t.

Research about social media, cell phones, distraction, and excessive use is too often used to condemn every screen students encounter.

That is not what the research says.

A student scrolling through social media is not having the same experience as one using a device to analyze data, translate text, receive feedback, collaborate, create, or access captions and text-to-speech. Calling both “screen time” strips away the information that actually matters.

In my latest article, I examine what the research shows, where the arguments from Jared Cooney Horvath and Jonathan Haidt do and do not apply, and why returning students to paper does not automatically improve learning.

The question is not whether students are looking at a screen. The question is what they are doing, whether the technology supports learning, and whether students have meaningful choices.

[Read the full article here.]

We Bought the Devices. We Forgot the Professional Learning.

My library media center in Harlem in the 90s where
 students intentionally went to a space to use technology.

Schools invested heavily in devices and platforms, but too often failed to make the same investment in professional learning, coaching, and staff support. We expected classroom teachers to become technology integrators, often with little more than a device, a login, and a brief introduction to a new platform.

In We Bought the Devices. We Forgot the Professional Learning., I examine what the screen-time conversation is revealing about that approach. More technology use may shift into libraries, labs, technology classes, and other designated spaces. That could be a positive change when it connects students with educators who have the expertise and time to make technology use meaningful.

Reducing routine device use will not fix weak implementation by itself. Schools must invest in developing knowledgeable staff who can decide when technology adds value, when another approach would work better, and how to use each in service of learning.

A Better Measure Than Screen Time

In my latest Tech & Learning article, A Better Measure Than Screen Time, I argue that schools are measuring the wrong thing.

A student clicking through a weak drill & kill program for 30 minutes is not doing the same thing as a student using that same time to read, research, collaborate, create, or get feedback.

Same screen time. Very different learning.

We don't measure paper time. Why are we measuring screen time? Instead of asking how long students were on screens, we should ask what they were doing, what they were learning, and whether technology helped.

What do you think schools should be measuring instead of minutes on a screen?

We Blamed the Tests. Now We’re Blaming the Screens.

For years, parents and educators knew what they were fighting: high-stakes testing. Families organized opt-out movements. Teachers explained how testing narrowed the curriculum, consumed instructional time, and replaced meaningful learning with test preparation. Students spent weeks taking assessments that produced scores too late to help their teachers.

Then the tests moved onto computers, and our attention moved with them. Instead of continuing to challenge the testing system, we started blaming the technology used to deliver it.

As education journalist Natasha Singer points out in a recent post about her forthcoming book, corporations were shaping what schools bought, taught, and measured long before today’s technology companies entered classrooms. Consumer-product companies supplied branded materials. Publishers sold textbooks and packaged curricula. Testing companies influenced what counted as learning and how students demonstrated it.

None of this required a screen.

Take the technology out of schools and many of those same corporations will return with paper. Testing companies will continue selling unnecessary high-stakes assessments, now with additional costs for printing, shipping, handling, and scoring. Publishers will continue selling dull, one-size-fits-all textbooks, workbooks, and scripted curricula.

We may get Big Tech out of classrooms while leaving Big Testing and Big Publishing firmly in control.

Technology Became the Convenient Target

Technology makes an easy villain because it is visible. We see the laptop on the desk and the student clicking through test-preparation programs. We do not see the contracts, purchasing decisions, accountability rules, and corporate interests determining what appears on the screen.

When students spend an hour answering low-level questions on a computer, blaming “screen time” allows the testing company, curriculum vendor, and decision-makers who purchased the program to escape scrutiny. Put those questions in a workbook and the learning does not improve.

I have made this point in Screen Time Is the Wrong Unit of Measurement and Reverting to Pen and Paper Won’t Improve Learning. Better Learning Design Will. The quality of learning depends on what students are doing, why they are doing it, and what they can do as a result. The delivery format tells us very little.

The Opt-Out Movement Had the Target Right

The opt-out movement did not argue that paper and pencils were harming children because students used them to take standardized tests. Parents challenged the tests. They questioned the instructional time lost, the misuse of scores, the pressure placed on children, and the corporations profiting from public education.

I was part of that conversation. In 12 Most Convincing Reasons to Opt Your Child Out of Standardized Tests, I helped parents understand why and how to resist excessive testing. In Common Core State Standards: The Precursor to Testing Disaster, I questioned why assessment had become synonymous with standardized testing when students could demonstrate learning through more meaningful work.

We need that same clarity now. Digital testing did not transform the underlying system. It gave the system a new delivery method. Yet the backlash has shifted from opting out of bad assessments to restricting the devices on which those assessments appear.

That shift benefits the testing and publishing industries. If the public focuses on screens, corporations can continue selling the same standardized learning model in whatever format is politically acceptable. As I argued in Laptops Did Not Take Away Their Brains. The School Model Did, blaming devices ignores what schools were asking students to do with them.

Follow the Money

If we want to identify what is shaping learning, follow the money. Technology companies are only part of the picture. Testing companies, publishers, curriculum providers, and consulting firms have profited from public education for decades. The product may change from a textbook to a platform or from a paper test to a digital one, but the business model remains.

Schools should scrutinize technology companies. Privacy, surveillance, addictive design, biased algorithms, poor-quality products, and aggressive marketing are legitimate concerns. Replacing corporate technology with corporate paper, however, does not return control to educators or students.

Too often, teachers are handed programs selected without their meaningful input and told to implement them with fidelity. Students move through the same content, at the same pace, and demonstrate learning in the same way. Whether that program arrives through a platform or in a box of workbooks is beside the point.

Models such as Schoolwide Enrichment and Big Picture Learning offer a better direction. As I described in 5 Innovative School Models You Might Not Know, powerful learning begins with student strengths, interests, projects, and real-world work. The learning goal determines whether students need technology, books, interviews, art supplies, hands-on materials, or some combination of them.

We once understood that high-stakes testing and the system surrounding it were the targets. We should not lose sight of that because the test now appears on a screen.

Technology is the messenger. To find the real problem, follow the money beyond the screen. Look at who profits from controlling what schools buy, what teachers teach, and what students are expected to produce. When educators and students regain that agency, corporations lose their grip and students win.

No, Tech Leaders Aren’t Keeping Their Kids From Learning With Technology

We often hear that leaders in the technology industry kept their own children away from technology. There is truth to that claim, but it leaves out the most important distinction. Many limited phones, social media, non-educational games and passive entertainment at home. They did not limit technology used to code, research, create, collaborate or access learning.

Rules about phones at dinner, devices in bedrooms and endless scrolling are not evidence against school laptops used for purposeful learning. We have confused limits on social and recreational technology with limits on instructional technology.

What Tech Leaders Actually Limited

The examples are mostly about home life: Bill Gates delayed phones and barred them at meals. Tim Cook opposed social media for his nephew. Steve Jobs limited technology at home. Susan Wojcicki restricted phones and unrestricted YouTube.

None of that demonstrates opposition to students using technology to learn. A Columbia Journalism Review analysis found that media coverage repeatedly stretched ordinary family boundaries in the home into claims that technology insiders wanted “the least tech” for their children. The parents featured in those stories were intentional about how tech was used and often encouraged technology use for learning even when the headlines suggested otherwise.

Ali Partovi, founder of iLike and cofounder of Code.org, made the distinction clearly in the original coverage. He separated time spent consuming from time spent creating and compared digital creation to painting, playing piano or writing. “I think it’s absurd to limit her time spent creating computer art, editing video, or computer programming,” he told The New York Times.

Affluent families also have more resources to replace recreational screen time with tutors, caregivers, travel, sports, music lessons and other enrichment. Removing technology from public schools does not create those opportunities. Without additional people, programs and experiences, it simply removes a resource.

Many Benefited From Early Access

In 1968, the Lakeside School Mothers Club paid for access to a computer terminal when few schools offered anything comparable. Bill Gates used it to play, experiment, program and solve real problems. Gates called the terminal his first opportunity to learn about computers. That access helped put them on the path to Microsoft.

Mark Zuckerberg began programming around sixth grade. His parents noticed his interest, hired a tutor and gave him the guidance and time to explore a talent.

They had time to experiment, make mistakes and persist. That rarely fits an arbitrary time block.

What Tech Leaders Encourage Their Own Children to Do

The reality is that these leaders encourage their own children to use technology with intention because it is often the best tool available for learning.

Peter Diamandis says he is teaching his twin teenage sons to be curious, find a purpose and use AI to go deeply into subjects they care about. He distinguishes between superficial AI use and genuine exploration.

Even the recent New York Times piece that renewed this narrative contains counterexamples. Mark Zuckerberg says his eight-year-old can code her ideas and produce videos, and that they use AI together while baking. Evan Spiegel limits phones and passive entertainment for his younger children but says his 15-year-old is “all-in on technology.” These are age- and activity-based limits, not a rejection of technology for learning.

Elon Musk created Ad Astra for his five children and a small group of SpaceX families. It rejected grade levels and standardized instruction, not technology, offering a Mac laptop to every student along with robotics, chemistry and hands-on problem solving. It was elite and experimental, but certainly not no-tech.

Even Waldorf Uses Technology Intentionally

The Waldorf School of the Peninsula is often presented as proof that tech families reject screens. It is one small, elite private school, not representative evidence. Its low-tech model also replaces textbook- and test-driven instruction with small classes, arts, gardening, field trips and hands-on learning. With tuition ranging from $34,900 to $47,500, most public schools cannot replicate it.

Even Waldorf does not reject technology. Students study computer science, algorithms, hardware and large language models, while its robotics team builds and programs robots. The school says students should use technology as creators rather than consumers. That is intentional technology use.

Stop Counting All Screen Time as Equal

This distinction matters when schools treat evidence for phone and social media restrictions as justification for limiting all technology. A student scrolling through videos and a student coding an app may spend the same time on a screen. That does not make the activities educationally equivalent.

I support phone-free classrooms, age-appropriate social media restrictions and limits on addictive platforms and passive consumption. I also support evaluating which technologies provide meaningful learning, protect privacy and give students and teachers agency to choose the features and settings that work best for them. Teachers and students should decide when technology is the right tool for effective, accessible learning. Those positions do not conflict.

We should stop asking only, “How much screen time?” and start asking the kinds of questions technology leaders like Ali Partovi are actually asking: “What are students doing, and is it worth doing?” 

Why Elementary Students Need Access to Screens

Just as schools are preparing to open, New York City is putting new limits on technology use. As reported in The New York Times and Chalkbeat, there will be no individual screens before third grade and recommended caps on screen time for grades 3 - 8.

I understand where this is coming from. Students need to talk, play, move, build, draw, read, write, collaborate, and interact with teachers and classmates. Students should not spend their days sitting at desks consuming information and doing rote work, but taking away individual screens is not the same thing as improving learning.

As I wrote recently in Screen Time Is the Wrong Unit of Measurement, the problem with screen-time rules is that they measure the device rather than what students are doing with it. That's particularly problematic with young children because sometimes the screen is the thing giving a child access to learning.

Sometimes the screen is an accessibility tool

Think about what an individual device can provide: text-to-speech, speech-to-text, enlarged text, captions, adjustable text, dictionaries, audio, translation, and access through a refreshable braille display. For some students, these aren't extras. They're how they access learning.

Accessibility also extends beyond students with an official disability designation. A child learning English may need translation. A struggling reader may benefit from hearing a word or passage while following along. Another child may need larger text. If a student needs one of those supports before third grade, an individual-screen restriction becomes more complicated.

Another concern is that students who need screens may become stigmatized. We may also end up testing and labeling students who were learning successfully with built-in accessibility features simply so they can regain access to those supports. Technology can meet many learning needs without requiring a disability classification. Remove the technology, and the analog environment may turn a learning difference into a labeled disability.

Technology can help children learn to read

There's also an assumption in some of these discussions that screens and literacy are in opposition. The research is much more nuanced. A large systematic review comparing children's reading on paper and digital devices found that no difference was the most common result. Print had advantages in some circumstances. Digital had advantages in others, including vocabulary, engagement, and support for diverse learners. Knowing which platform is best for the learning goal is key.

I've seen the potential firsthand with Footsteps2Brilliance, an early literacy program. Research I’ve shared about the program has found strong literacy outcomes when young children use it consistently. What is best for students is using what works for the child and the learning goal, not dictating the platform. 

Sometimes the screen is the library

A laptop or tablet isn't just a screen. It can be a child's personal library. Young children should have physical books and access to digital ones. However, a classroom has only so much shelf space and providing books at all reading levels and languages is not practical. Digital libraries can provide thousands of additional choices along with features that paper can't easily provide. Students can enlarge the text, hear or define an unfamiliar word, translate something, or listen to a book while following along.

Access to learning by providing more books in more formats is something we should be expanding, not restricting.

Individual screens also make individualization possible

Elementary classrooms don't contain children who all read at the same level, learn at the same pace, speak the same language, or need the same supports. Technology can help with that. Tools such as Newsela can provide content at different reading levels while students explore the same topic. The student sitting next to them doesn't need to know which version they're reading. That's not just differentiation. That's dignity.

Technology can also provide additional practice, immediate feedback, audio, translation, and other supports while the teacher works with individual students or small groups. A teacher can't simultaneously rewrite every text at five reading levels, translate it into several languages, read it aloud at different speeds, and provide individual feedback to every student. Technology can.

Who should decide?

There's another problem with blanket restrictions. They take decisions about learning away from the people closest to the learning: teachers and students.

Teachers know their students. They should have the expertise to know when a device is helping a child and when it's getting in the way. Students also know things about how they learn that policymakers sitting far from the classroom don't.

One student may benefit from listening to a book while another does better with the print version. A student may discover that enlarging text helps them concentrate or that hearing a word helps them understand it. Another may be better off putting the device away because pen and paper works best.

Those are learning decisions. There will be times when young students should put the screen away, and there will be times when that screen gives a child access, choice, independence, or a better way to learn. A blanket policy making those decisions in advance puts agency in the wrong hands.

We should give teachers and students guidance for making good choices about technology, then trust them to make those choices.