Parents, educators and advocacy groups are mounting a broader challenge to the classroom technology model that expanded during the COVID-19 pandemic, citing excessive screen time, student-data collection, AI risks, exposure to inappropriate content and concerns that software is replacing too much direct interaction between teachers and students.
By yourNEWS Media Newsroom
A growing number of parents and educators are pushing schools to reconsider how deeply laptops, tablets, artificial intelligence and other educational technology have become embedded in American classrooms, arguing that tools adopted rapidly during the COVID-19 pandemic have evolved from temporary necessities into a default way of teaching children.
The movement is increasingly focused not on eliminating technology education, but on drawing a sharper line between teaching students how to use technology and requiring them to spend large portions of the school day learning through screens.
Parents in several communities are now seeking alternatives to school-issued laptops and tablets, requesting printed textbooks, handwriting assignments and other traditional materials instead.
Critics interviewed in a report by The Defender contend that the expansion of educational technology, commonly called EdTech, is affecting attention, critical-thinking skills, privacy and students’ relationships with teachers and classmates.
Emily Cherkin, an educator, mother and advocate known as “The Screentime Consultant”, said her objection is not to children learning how technology works.
“We need technology education more than ever,” Cherkin said. “Children today are actually less digitally literate than they were in previous generations, which is concerning given how many hours a day they’re actually spending on digital devices.”
Cherkin describes the distinction as one “between EdTech and tech ed.”
She said schools face a “dire need for technology education,” but often substitute screen-based delivery for basic academic and interpersonal development.
“What we are doing is giving children as young as 4 and 5 years old access to the internet in the name of education, but we’re just taking reading and writing and social skill development and assessment and putting it all onto an iPad or a Chromebook,” Cherkin said.
The debate has begun producing policy changes. Some states have moved toward restrictions on school-issued devices or student screen time, according to NBC News.
The issue is not confined to the United States. Sweden has advised schools to return more instruction to printed textbooks and pen-and-paper work.
Parents are also organizing around the idea that families should be able to decline technology-based instruction and request conventional alternatives.
How Pandemic-Era Technology Became a Classroom Default
Educational software and devices were already common before 2020, but pandemic school closures dramatically accelerated their adoption.
Districts suddenly needed a way to conduct classes remotely, and digital learning platforms, Chromebooks, tablets and video-based coursework became essential infrastructure.
Federal pandemic aid also gave school systems additional purchasing power. Some districts used federal stimulus funding to expand their technology inventories.
Years later, those devices remain deeply embedded in public education.
Approximately nine in 10 public schools now provide laptops or tablets to middle and high school students, according to the U.S. Department of Education.
Cherkin said widespread EdTech use may have been justified as a “necessary evil” during the pandemic disruption, but she questions why schools have been reluctant to scale it back.
Some districts, she said, point to the amount of money already invested in devices and software.
“It just seemed like an excuse to continue,” Cherkin said.
Tina Descovich, CEO and co-founder of Moms for Liberty, identified three areas her organization views as particularly concerning:
- The one-device-per-student model can result in children spending hours each school day looking at screens rather than interacting directly with teachers or printed books; artificial intelligence tools are entering classrooms without what the group considers sufficient guardrails, transparency or parental consent, including AI “companions” accessible through school devices; and student information collected by EdTech companies raises questions about who controls children’s educational and personal data.
Those concerns are increasingly being raised alongside questions about physical and behavioral effects associated with long periods of screen use.
A December 2025 NBC News report described a mother whose 6-year-old son repeatedly wet himself in class after becoming intensely focused on his tablet.
The family consulted the child’s pediatrician and decided to reduce his screen exposure because they believed he was becoming overstimulated. According to the account, the accidents subsequently stopped.
Cherkin said long stretches of sedentary screen use can raise multiple developmental concerns.
“I would argue that the physical experience of sitting in front of a screen for multiple hours a day is unhealthy,” she said. “We could talk about posture, we could talk about eye health, we could talk about [harms to] gross motor skills. We could talk about the lack of socialization. Those are all health risks.”
Parents Report Internet Access Going Far Beyond Schoolwork
Another major source of concern is what students can access once an internet-connected device is placed in front of them for much of the day.
One parent told NBC News that her teenage son became “sucked into communicating with strangers online” through an iPad supplied by his school.
Cherkin said she frequently hears similar complaints.
“I’ve heard from parents whose kids have encountered pornography on school laptops … which is horrible in and of itself. I mean, but also the number of parents who tell me that their kids are on YouTube for sometimes hours a day at school, and that they are shocked that that’s the case,” she said.
Even software intended for legitimate classroom instruction can create unexpected exposure, critics say.
Cherkin cited Typing Club, a keyboarding program, as an example. She said a parent reported that her 8-year-old son was “exposed to multiple ads for gambling websites, in video form” while using the service.
Some advocates connect these problems to broader concerns over children’s emotional health.
Experts interviewed by the Daily Caller in July pointed to loneliness, difficulty developing relationships and other problems they said can be aggravated when technology increasingly substitutes for direct human interaction.
Former child psychotherapist and parent coach Nicole Runyon argued during a Moms for Liberty online event that the repeated dopamine stimulation associated with excessive screen use can leave children “numb and disconnected.”
She said that can contribute to “apathetic” behavior and “purposelessness, meaninglessness.”
AI adds another layer to the discussion.
Critics have cited concerns involving chatbot hallucinations and adolescent well-being, data harvesting, explicit material, political or ethical bias and AI sycophancy — the tendency of an AI system to reinforce or mirror a user’s views.
Cherkin said school policies can also conflict directly with limits parents have deliberately established at home.
“Parents have actually limited and restricted them at home for the last five years, only to have their kids show up at school and be given the same thing that they’ve been told is not safe for children to use,” she said.
Special-Needs Families Question Whether More Screens Mean Less Individual Support
Parents of children with autism and other special needs have raised an additional concern: technology promoted as personalized learning may, in some cases, replace precisely the direct human attention their children need most.
Anna Moench, the mother of an autistic child, told NBC News that some exercises created by educational software — along with the data generated from a student’s performance — remain proprietary and are not fully visible to either parents or teachers.
“In order to help figure out how I can best support my child, who is autistic, I need accurate information about what’s happening at school,” Moench said.
Descovich said parents of children with special needs have told her that “classroom screens make attention and self-regulation struggles worse.”
“Parents of children with special needs worry about vulnerable kids being handed devices for hours a day and interacting with AI chatbots they may not fully understand,” Descovich said. “These are the very students who most need what technology crowds out: individual attention and human connection.”
Cherkin acknowledged that some assistive technologies can be valuable.
“There are certain kids for whom certain tools might be very important. But if they are still having their data mined and they are still able to get on YouTube or access predators, that is not OK,” she said.
She pointed to the Los Angeles Unified School District, which has been reducing the use of some technology programs for most students.
One program involved is i-Ready, which is used for reading and mathematics.
Cherkin said she is concerned that special-needs students may continue using technology more extensively even as other students are moved away from it, warning against what she called schools’ “overreliance and overprescription” of EdTech for those children.
Teachers Question Whether Algorithms Are Replacing Instruction
The pushback is no longer coming exclusively from parents.
Some teachers argue that educational software can weaken their ability to determine what students need, understand exactly what children are being asked and directly assess their progress.
NBC News reported that i-Ready, for example, can generate questions for students based on their previous performance and individual user profiles.
Because those questions are generated through proprietary systems, parents and teachers may be unable to see precisely what a child was asked.
Math teacher David Stein said in February that EdTech has become “the default” in many classrooms rather than something teachers use only after first asking, “Do we need to do that on the screen?”
Descovich said the issue creates unusual common ground.
“Parents and teachers are natural allies,” she said.
“When decisions about instruction and grading shift from the teacher to a vendor’s algorithm, teachers become monitors of software instead of masters of their classroom,” Descovich added. “The teacher-student relationship is the heart of education, and we should defend it, not automate it.”
Cherkin said teachers have privately expressed similar worries.
Many educators she has spoken with “have concerns with what EdTech is doing to children, whether that’s at home or at school or both.”
But, she said, “there is a lot of reticence and fear” when educators are asked to discuss those concerns publicly.
“There is a culture of fear for a lot of educators speaking out against this,” Cherkin said.
Some, she said, have agreed to speak only if their real names were withheld.
Cherkin suggested that burned-out teachers could eventually become more dependent on the very technology some of them distrust.
“If you weaken these teachers and you make them feel defeated and burned out and overwhelmed, then the solution is conveniently going to be more technology,” she said.
Data Collection Becomes a Central Part of the Fight
For critics, the debate extends beyond screens themselves to the commercial structure behind the EdTech industry.
Cherkin said the business model is “identical” to that used throughout Big Tech.
“In order to please shareholders to increase profits — because these are all for-profit companies — you have to increase engagement,” she said.
Cherkin argues that those commercial incentives conflict with children’s developmental interests.
“Digital screen time is fundamentally at odds with healthy child development. What children need will never be increased screen time,” she said.
Student data are an equally important issue, according to parents and privacy advocates.
“We have yet to hear of a platform that isn’t in some way using information about the students, even to ‘refine our product,’” Cherkin said.
She called that arrangement a “slippery slope,” particularly because children cannot provide the same legal consent as adults.
Cherkin said schools may reasonably need certain information, including test scores and academic performance metrics, but educational platforms can potentially encounter far more sensitive material.
“They might be writing about their family situation or a medical condition or a behavioral health issue or a mental health issue. These are extremely private and personal things that shouldn’t be accessible to anybody but the people absolutely necessary to see them,” she said.
In January, NBC News reported on internal Google documents suggesting major technology companies have viewed schools as a way of “turning children into lifelong customers”.
Cherkin said technology can have an appropriate place in education but argued that schools need stronger boundaries.
“I do believe there is a place for technology in schools, but not via privately owned companies, not via data collection and theft and privacy risks, or via content exposure that’s deeply traumatic to children,” she said.
Political Rivals Find Common Ground Over Screens and AI
The growing concern has produced alliances between organizations that ordinarily disagree on major education and cultural issues.
In March, Moms for Liberty joined with the American Federation of Teachers, one of the country’s largest teachers unions, in an effort addressing classroom chatbots and technology.
AFT President Randi Weingarten described the collaboration in unusually stark terms.
“We’re together on this because we’re seeing what is happening to our kids, and it really is us against [the] money,” Weingarten said during a March event.
The partnership is notable because AFT has also supported educational technology in other contexts, and the union and Moms for Liberty remain sharply divided on other issues, including sex education.
Descovich said those disagreements remain.
Her organization’s differences with teachers unions “are well known,” she said, and “haven’t gone away.”
But she said people across ideological lines increasingly recognize “the same problem: too many screens, too little learning.”
“My message is simple: Welcome to the fight. When anyone is willing to put children and parental rights first, we will stand with them every time,” Descovich said.
The collaboration has expanded into policy advocacy, with Moms for Liberty and other organizations supporting bipartisan state legislation aimed at limiting school technology and screen exposure.
Legal challenges are emerging as well.
In June, Florida sued OpenAI, citing what the state described as “serious risks” to children.
Federal policy, meanwhile, reflects competing goals.
In May, the Department of Health and Human Services published a Surgeon General’s toolkit on children’s screen use, characterizing the issue as an “urgent public health issue.”
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said the government was increasingly concerned about the evidence.
“While screen use can have some benefits, the evidence of a range of risks to children’s overall mental and physical health is mounting.
“These negative outcomes are related to harmful use, including use by children with vulnerable medical conditions, along with the ubiquity of devices and features deliberately built into many tech platforms to promote ‘engagement,’ a positive sounding word that, for too many young people, is a path to addiction-like behavior.”
The White House also issued a national artificial intelligence policy framework in March calling for Congress to “empower parents and guardians with robust tools to manage their children’s privacy settings, screen time, content exposure, and account controls.”
At the same time, the federal government continues supporting AI education.
The Department of Education is prioritizing certain grants intended “to expand the appropriate and ethical use of AI” in schools.
The Trump administration’s 2025 AI Action Plan similarly called for schools to “prioritize AI skill development.”
The result is not a simple federal rejection of classroom technology, but an unresolved effort to encourage AI literacy while simultaneously addressing privacy, health, parental-control and screen-time concerns.
Parents Move From Asking Permission to Declining Technology
For some families, the policy debate is moving too slowly.
A growing number of parents are using legal and administrative arguments to request that their children opt out of school-issued technology altogether.
Cherkin and Descovich said families frequently discover that the process is difficult.
“What I’m hearing and seeing is the majority of school board leadership or school district leadership … tends to be doubling down instead of asking those tough questions or rethinking things,” Cherkin said.
Descovich described the opt-out process in some districts as intentionally difficult to navigate.
“In too many districts, opting out is a maze designed to make you give up,” she said. “Parents are told there’s no paper alternative or that the curriculum requires the platform, and many parents don’t even know what to opt out of because schools never disclosed what’s on the device or what data is collected.”
Moms for Liberty has launched a Safety in AI Education Initiative to help parents investigate the technology being used in their children’s classrooms.
Descovich advised families to “ask questions now, before the routines set in,” preferably in writing and, when possible, alongside other parents.
“How many hours a day will my child be on a screen? What apps and AI tools are on the device you’re sending home? What data is collected on my child and who gets it? Can I opt out and request paper materials?” Descovich asked. “If the school can’t answer, that tells you something.”
Cherkin has developed her own Unplug EdTech Toolkit for families concerned about technology use in schools.
Her advice has become more assertive as the movement has grown.
She said she previously encouraged parents to ask districts for permission to opt their children out. She now recommends a different approach.
“What I’m saying this year, because the momentum has changed, is, don’t ask, just decline. Just say, ‘We don’t consent to the way these products are being used with children. We don’t consent to the privacy risks. We don’t consent to the extra screen time. So, we are going to decline this product until it is effective, safe, legal and superior to the human teacher.’”
That message captures the larger shift taking place in the EdTech debate.
The question confronting schools is increasingly no longer whether technology belongs in education at all. Instead, parents and teachers are asking what technology genuinely improves learning, how much daily screen exposure is appropriate, what information private vendors are collecting, when AI should be used and whether families should have the right to choose traditional instruction instead.
For advocates such as Cherkin and Descovich, the standard should be that technology serves the teacher and student rather than becoming the classroom itself.
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