The teachers pushing back on screens in schools

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1:06WBUR Podcasts, Boston. This is OnPoint, I'm Megna Chacrabardi. In just the past few years, a remarkable revolution has happened in American public schools. More than 30 states have passed laws either curtailing or fully prohibiting cell phone use in schools. Those are these so-called bell-to-bell rules. Now the bands are driven by increasing concerns over kids' mental health, their ability to focus, and reduced learning. Well now, that backlash is spilling over to all screens in classrooms. Not just phones. It's affecting his social and emotional well-being, I feel like, and it's affected his habits, his attention span. He used to love reading, and really spent a lot of time outside, and I have seen a dramatic cliff he has fallen off of in terms of prioritizing screens, feeling glued to his laptop.

2:16And it's not even like doing schoolwork. There's like games on the school laptop. That's OnPoint listener Dana, who has a middle schooler in Lincoln, Nebraska. Here's Natalie. She's a mom of four in Oregon. We've made little progress in getting the school district to take these concerns seriously. When the school district installed a student facing AI app on the students, iPads, and grades, and as young as third grade, which is eight-year-olds, parents organized to push back. A coalition of concerned parents put together a parent and community sign-on letter to the school board demanding that the district remove the generative AI app. Other concerns parents brought up was YouTube videos being increasingly used in classrooms for behavior management, even in PE, and the new requirement that all elementary age kids bring an iPad to the library for browsing and checking out books. Well, a teacher in Winston-Salem, North Carolina also reached out to us and says that the mandatory use of laptops in the classroom is keeping kids from learning even the most basic skills.

3:18Unless I walk around the classroom the whole time, I won't know exactly what they're doing on their computers. And then when it comes to doing manual work, they don't want to do it. And sometimes they don't know how to feel a paper out. Sometimes if it's notebook paper, they don't know which side of the paper to write on. So it's very disheartening. Well, today we're going to talk about the rising concern over any screens at all in U.S. schools. And we'll hear from people who think they should be banished, and from those who think that tech can be a powerful learning tool when used wisely. But this is such a present issue in American schools right now that I want to start by going a little deeper into a few examples of the kinds of shifts that some districts are starting to make. So, on your book in Sunteles' was CEO of Baltimore Maryland Public Schools for 10 years. Her tenure ended in June, but she made a huge change before leaving. This year, Baltimore students in kindergarten through second grade will have screen time limits of just 15 to 20 minutes per day in class.

4:22That's a first for central Maryland school districts. To me, this is a is a no brainer. We see what it's doing to the neurological patterns of young people. Teachers are experiencing the differences in classrooms. We already have young people who are using devices at home. I felt it was important to send the signal to our teachers, to our families, to our young people. That we know that learning with an over reliance on technology is really harming the long term academic capacity and outcomes for our young people. Baltimore City Public Schools did not give every child a laptop or iPad prior to the COVID pandemic, but of course that change during school shutdowns and remote learning. But in the classroom, Sunteles' and her team noticed that screens are reducing learning, contributing to limited attention spans, executive functioning issues, and even behavioral challenges.

5:25Maryland recently banned cell phones at the high school level, and Sunteles' says now's the time to reduce digital distractions for younger kids. So, gone. We'll be the one-to-one devices. Screens will have to be shared. If sometimes the teacher has to log into the account to that. Or, you know, rarely we start with WhatsApp too,bach if parents will when texting, you know. You don't have to remember that to our flower site or two to read. And frankly, that's how our pre-K classrooms are. And it's almost like our pre-K has been a detox, right? From all of it because it's device free. There's none of that. It's wooden toys, it's plastic food, it's bugs and huge magnifying glasses. And it's circle time going through letters and sounds. Like that's what our pre-K is. And our kids are better for it.

6:25There are 77,000 students in Baltimore City Public Schools, roughly 70% of them are black, 20% Latino, and 15% are so are multilingual learners. 85% of the students are on free and reduced lunch. And roughly 50 out of the city's 130 schools have poverty rates high enough that they've been designated to receive additional state funding. So as with everything in education, the question of equity looms very large when it comes to technology in the classroom. Some argue that removing screens will set back students who will otherwise not have access to the tech and apps. But Santa Lisa says that's a flawed way of looking at equity in education. I think that when we don't cause, take a look at what the evidence is saying and turn, then that really becomes the equity issue. Because my goal was never one to one devices. For back, brown low income, first generation kids

7:26in Baltimore City. My goal was equal educational opportunity, equal access to high learning opportunities, equal access to quality teaching, to rigorous coursework, to rigging extracurriculars. That's the end goal. You need to pressure test the equity argument to wall paper over with this argument that the goal was one to one devices. For me, as a limited, stunted, uninformed definition of equity. Now, the use of technology in the classroom may have once been seen as a silver bullet to achieve better learning. But Santa Lisa says her on the ground experience does not match that. And as CEO of Baltimore Public Schools, it was her responsibility to make the right decisions for the district's 77,000 children. We like quick easy answers. We like to check the box.

8:27We need to have this conversation. And the action that results from that, which is why I said, we have to at least in Baltimore City make this first step. Because I've got families who are worried about whether they're going to be sent out into the country. I have families who are worried about if they're rent, they're going to make rent this month. And they don't have time, nor should they have to. So I see you all men and say, you know what? Yeah, I'm going to make the decision that your five-year-old is not sitting in front of a device all day. So why don't you go attend to making sure your family is fed? This is one less thing you have to worry about, at least during school hours. So that's one example. Let's go to an entirely different part of the country. Let's go to Kansas, where Inga Esping joins us. She's a principal at McPherson Middle School in McPherson, Kansas. She's been principal there since 2022. And by the way, in 2025, she was named Kansas Principal

9:30of the Year, Principal Esping. Welcome to On Point. Thank you so much for having me. I understand that in McPherson Middle School, they first had this widespread adoption of Chromebooks, roughly around 2016. Is that right? Yes, yes. We've been one to one for 10 years. So what was going on in education back then that made educators believe, hey, this was a powerful new tool to be a good idea for every kid to have one? You know, as I was listening to the previous person, that's exactly it. This was supposed to be the great equalizer. This was going to be the reason that students have so much more engagement, because we're offering them technology and how exciting is it for students to be able to learn on a device that's going to automatically increase their engagement. It's going to automatically increase equity across socioeconomic backgrounds. This is going to be the way to really prove that data is moving

10:31forward. Teachers are going to have that information in real time. Also, the thought of, I think, a big shift in education was, well, why would I teach them anything that they can look up? And so that was part of the shift towards technology. Let's work on deeper problem-solving skills and things like that. And we don't necessarily need to teach things that they can just Google. Haven't we now seen how flawed that thinking is? But I'll ask you about this background, because it's important to remember that at that time, you're exactly right. I mean, my kids are still in school. So I remember the time clearly. The idea really was. They have access to the entirety of human knowledge through computers. So what students really needed to learn were those skills, as you said, on how to be more critical thinkers. And the other part, which I just want to emphasize that I remember hearing is important. It's like, OK, well, we can personalize learning maybe. We can track kids and use the data to help better education. All of these things. It's kind of seemed like this paradigm

11:31shifting technology for classrooms. But what did you see as an educator? And then, of course, from 2022, when you joined McPherson Middle School, what did you see actually happening on the ground? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, all of those things were true. This is going to be the next greatest thing in education. And it has certainly fallen short. Our test scores have not improved. The reason that we made changes is our teachers came forward and said, I'm frustrated. I am constantly chasing the technology. I'm constantly chasing that students are on the correct site or on the correct application. And that they're not being distracted by so many other things that are exciting online. They're not being distracted by the social piece. And so it really became a management issue within the classroom. Our teachers were spending so much time making sure kids were on what they were supposed to. We couldn't make sure that we were teaching them what they were supposed to be learning. There is something powerful about the sound of the human voice.

12:41Beautifully produced audio has the unique power to connect and inspire. Tell your organization's story with a custom podcast from CitySpace Productions, the Creative Studio from WBUR's Business Partnership Team. Become a thought leader. Recruit new talent. Reach new audiences. Whatever your goal, we can help. Discover how the magic is made at www.org slash creative studio. It's Ben Brock Johnson, Director of Digital Audio at WBUR. You've probably been following our consistent coverage of the Lindsay Clancy case, along with people around the country and around the world. Well, if you want to hear even more from WBUR's own veteran reporter, Deborah Becker, who has been covering the story for three years, we're putting deep dive podcast episodes and analysis about the Clancy case in a podcast feed. You can listen by searching beyond all repair wherever you get your podcasts. Principal Esping, before we get to the change

13:44that was recently made, I'd love for you to tell me a little bit more about the kinds of things that teachers were seeing. You mentioned behavior. I mean, was there kind of like online bullying that was going on too? Oh, absolutely. Students were using their school issued email or Google Docs to bully one another or even just to visit with one another during the day and be distracted from their learning. We saw students that were so invested in gaming that when a teacher would redirect them off of their device for the lesson at hand, we'd see an increase in different behaviors. Another challenge that we saw was just the misinterpretation that this device belongs to that student versus being a tool that the school has issued. And then parents were struggling to understand how to parent with a device that they didn't want for their child and that they didn't ask for. And really, where are those lines as well? So that's really what led us to rethinking

14:48our approach to Chromebooks. So then you make this big decision. And in December, so just a few months ago, kind of in almost in the middle of the school year, no more one-to-one issued Chromebooks. Were there tears in the hallways of the fearsome middle school? You know, really not as many as you would think. We definitely had some students who were upset. Interestingly, they would point to all of the reasons that we were taking them away. You know, this was how I would plan to meet up with my girlfriend outside of the restroom during class time. This is what I used at home to game. Coincidentally, though, most of our students have been very pleased with the decision. OK. You know, they've really appreciated iPad students even point out there is so much less bullying going on. That's a huge win. Wow. OK, so hang on here at Principal Esping, because I definitely want to hear more from you on how the school made the transition

15:50and how learning looks different now. But this is a good time to actually bring in Jared Cooney Horvath. He's a cognitive neuroscientist who specializes in the science of human learning, and he's author of the digital delusion, how classroom technology harms our kids' learning and how to help them thrive again. Jared Cooney Horvath, welcome to On Point. Thank you so much for having me on. All right, so give me the data here. How do you measure the difference in learning on a screen versus off the screen? Oh, you've got kind of two main angles you can take. The first is going to be these international and national tests. These things we've been giving for 30, 40 years, so we can track kind of progress over time, what's happening. And when you look at those scores, so that could be a cross-reading math science doesn't matter. Since the late 80s, early 90s, to about 2012, those scores always go up. And right around 2012, in every country we study around the world, they start going down.

16:51Now, that's where you get to now have a little bit of fun, and you can start to align that with how often our kids using tech in schools in these different countries, including the US. And that's where you'll see a very strong line between the more kids use tech, the more their learning goes down. So there's a strong correlation there. Massive correlation. And that's where a lot of people say, well, correlation is in causation, which is a really, that's an important thing to consider in single data sets. When you see the exact same correlation across countries, across years, across topics, across ages, that's when you really start to push towards causal inference and say, OK, it's going only in one direction. But that's where kind of to keep going on the question, you then can do research comparing tech to non-tech methods. And in those instances as well, tech almost invariably comes lower than analog teaching and learning methodology. And we've had that data since 1962, believe it or not. So it's all going in the same direction. Tell me more. Give me a little bit more detail, because of course, there's this huge question looming over all this,

17:53which is what is learning. But specifically, these tests that you're saying that are tracking this global decline in learning, what are those tests about? What are they? So most of those academic ones will look at reading skills, math skills, and science skills. But beyond that, we also have cognitive testing, which has kind of been peppered in throughout as well. So we're also looking at critical thinking skills, creativity skills, we're looking at executive functioning skills. And in every single cognitive measure we have, Gen Z is going down compared to their parents, except for one. There is one where they consistently do better than anyone in history. And that is rapid visual scene interpretation. Basically, they can watch TikTok really well. OK. Principle S-ping, let me come back to you. I'm hoping that you can play the role here of ground truth. So reflect on whether you've seen evidence in McPherson Middle School of the kind of decline in basic reading and mathematics skill

18:53over a period of many years as screens were introduced. I mean, absolutely. I wouldn't say here at our school it's necessarily been a rapid decline, but it sure has not increased. And so it feels like no matter what we've done, to really increase our math and reading scores, they've been pretty stagnant throughout these years. And so we recognize that less Chromebook time was one of the things that we can do to really focus on improvement of our scores. OK. So Jared, when I say screen, that's like such a generic term that let's break it down a little bit more, because there's the physicality of the screen itself and how information is transmitted on a LCD display. There's, of course, also the actual technology and the apps. So let's start with the first one. I don't know. Is there any, are there any studies that can help us understand why learning is different through an actual physical screen versus a book where I've got 50 sheets of paper here in front of me?

19:56Absolutely. And that's a great one. So let's just take the reading example. So this is just one of many mechanisms. Our brain loves spatial location. Where in three-dimensional space did something occur? That becomes a strong part of your memory that you can use later to access that learning. Until a book burns into dust, that book has a static, unchanging three-dimensional location. Like, for instance, like the word the will be 10 pages in, left page, top left hand side, it ain't going nowhere. And that becomes a part of what you learn. That's why if you're an avid reader of books, you'll recognize when you're done reading a book, you might not know verbatim everything you just read. But you will know exactly where in the book everything occurred. Like you can flip right to that quote that you were looking for. Now, when we read on a screen, there is no three-dimensional location. The same word, the will start at the bottom of the screen, go through the middle, pass out the top. So an entire aspect of human memory just gets dumped. So this is why when we read from screens, everyone, not just kids, this is across the board, after about two or three minutes, we just start skimming.

20:58Because our brain basically tells us, we're not actually locking any of this down. So you might as well just look for keywords and get a gist and then get out of here. That is huge. So all of us just sort of naturally our brain's shift to skimming mode when we're reading from a screen? Most of us can feel it. So when we read, our eyes will move in these very predictable, about nine letter chunks across a page. And so if I can track your eyes, I'll just see the same bang, bang, bang across a page. We track that same person on a screen, after a couple of minutes, the eyes just go vertical. Instead of going across the page, they just start going up and down, which means they're basically just looking for anchors. And then they'll look for one or two words and off they go. No one reads well from a screen, unfortunately. Fascinating. Okay, Principal Espingh, I'm coming back to you. So starting this January, when there were no more one-to-one Chromebooks, how did that change, how teachers were actually presenting information or having kids put their own ideas down? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, previously note taking a lot of times was done,

22:01either using a Google doc or using a Google presentation. So just what Dr. Horbeth was saying, we're just hunting and pecking for information and not taking the time to actually read what the information is to understand what that information is and why this is an important note to take. So now note taking is done on paper. Teachers are helping students learn some of those executive functioning skills of how and why note taking itself is important. Here's different note taking strategies and why they work even more for different subjects versus others. Also just the physicality of handwriting and how that just deepens knowledge versus typing something that feels the exact same way, writing the word the feels different. It implants in your brain differently and so our students are note taking, they're doing physical worksheets, they're doing physical work for math

23:04rather than using a computer program to help an assist. So it really has been a game changer. Do they like it? Do they like it when you're like, you can either choose to do an exercise on the Chromebook or on paper? They do. So when teachers have given an option, you will largely see most of the students choosing paper for certain items. Let's say they're typing a report. Some students will choose to type, but I've been shocked at how many students have said, no, I prefer to handwrite. I feel like I can understand what I'm doing better. So by and large, more than half of students are choosing paper if given the option. I happen to be the mom of a kid who really struggles with handwriting. It's a major challenge for him and the way he's able to get his ideas down better are through typing. So how do you make those accommodations or how do you deal with kids who have different kinds of needs in terms of how they can get their ideas down? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we certainly have students who do struggle and require text to speech, speech to text options.

24:08And absolutely, we allow that. We've helped students learn how to become independent using those different options. But then we're also really focusing on, let's continue to teach you handwriting skills and let's find ways and situations where we can hopefully make that be a little less laborious, help you understand some of the why, help you understand how to get that down a little bit differently. My son's in that exact same boat, where handwriting is almost painful for him in some ways. We're still kind of enforcing him in the practice. And here's the why. But then here's a tool that you can use in these situations to help provide an accommodation if need be. Okay, so Jared, principal S being there brought up two really other huge areas of what constitutes learning. Let's stick with handwriting or at least in terms of how there's maybe some kind of physicality to learning that helps deepen knowledge

25:08or at least deepen how we hold information in our brains. A lot of us think that, yeah, we were brain hitching a ride inside of a body. Like you are nothing but gray matter just coasting along while these things move you. And we forget that no, you are as much your body as you are your brain, which means when the entire system is doing something that contributes to the learning as well. So take something like typing, the most gross motor skill which is consistent across the table. Basically anyone can do it and it's once you learn it once you can do it everywhere. Versus handwriting where every single tool you pick up is it crayon, is it a pencil, is it a pen, everything you write on is it hard papers, graph paper is a cardboard, everything is so suddenly different if forces you to think differently as you're doing it. And the speed issue and physicality of writing basically forces us to think, writing becomes thinking whereas typing basically becomes transcription of either previously thought thoughts or words coming at you.

26:08So by all means the slow deliberate physical nature of writing changes how we actually think and learn through that process. Slowing things down deepens the learning. That is so interesting. Absolutely. Okay, there's another one here that the principal mentioned. When I was growing up I can tell you no one in my cohort or the parents of all my friends, no one really heard of the term executive functioning but now I feel like every parent or many, many parents are deeply concerned about it because they're seeing their kids not being able to do stuff that they could do when they were the same age. So how would you define executive functioning, Jared? And how does that play into, again the tech and the classrooms issue? You make a great point. The reason why we never really talked about it in the past was because we never really had to consider something like resilience. We never had to teach resilience because you earn resilience through life. It's the same with executive functioning. This is your ability basically to control your own thoughts,

27:08your own behaviors. If you think about education it's the ability to remember. I have to do some homework tonight. I have to schedule my time accordingly. I have to bring it in and hand it in the next day. All of these little things that forced kids to take control of their own behaviors and thinking and in so doing we failed. How many times did we forget our homework? All of that is what builds executive functioning. Cut to the modern world where we use digital technology to offload all of that. I have an LMS system that pings me, remember to do your homework. Now all I have to do is press a button. It will submit my homework for me online. All of these little many things that were teaching us this ability to control and recognize our own behaviors are going out the window because tech is basically taking it over for us. It's Ben Brock Johnson, director of digital audio at WBUR. You've probably been following our consistent coverage of the Lindsay Clancy case, along with people

28:09around the country and around the world. Well, if you want to hear even more from WBUR's own veteran reporter Deborah Becker, who has been covering the story for three years, we're putting deep dive podcast episodes and analysis about the Clancy case in a podcast feed. You can listen by searching beyond all repair wherever you get your podcasts. We received a lot of feedback from you. Let's listen to another teacher here. This is Jim from Austin, Texas. He's a parent and also sometimes a substitute teacher. Teacher director screen time can be powerful in the hands of skilled motivated teachers and engage students, but that's rather than more the rare case. Too often it becomes a crutch, especially for less motivated or less prepared teachers. Platforms like Google Classroom end up replacing real instruction rather than supporting it. The result is a more passive classroom, minimal effort, very little critical thinking, widespread cheating,

29:10and frankly a real erosion in student character. Screen time isn't a problem, but how it is used too often is. Principle, Inga Esping, let me ask you. When he mentioned Google Classroom there, we haven't talked about the actual software yet. And I'm just wondering before this year, I mean, how ubiquitous was things like Google Classroom or any number of the other million educational apps that are out there? How ubiquitous were they in your classrooms? You know, we have certainly used Google Classroom. That was definitely something that we used much more heavily, starting with COVID. All of our curriculums are able to have a strong online component. Something that I think is misinterpreted sometimes though is there is a difference between like a Google Classroom and some of the other online curriculums. There are curriculums out there that do a fair amount of the teaching for that teacher, then they're not able to get in and really do

30:11what they've been passionate about. Google Classroom, however, is much more of a management system. And that's where, as we talked about previously, Google Classroom really takes away those executive functioning skills. That's where teachers can, you know, place, here's your assignment and here's the due date, and it emails you auto reminders of, here's the due date. You don't have to physically hold onto a copy to turn it in. You can't lose it because it's there on Google Classroom for you. So really, where we see a struggle with a platform such as Google Classroom is, it's not given students the chance to become responsible for their learning, for their materials, and for investing further. When you decided to stop using the Chromebooks or the apps, I mean, I don't know if you know this, but were there any sort of contractual obligations that the school had to fulfill, or were potentially breaking in terms of having this stuff and then not using it?

31:12Thankfully, our district know, but I know that there's a number of districts out there that do have contractual agreements with different EdTech apps and things like that. Thankfully, in my district, they were forward thinking enough that all of our curriculum had both an online and a physical component, which made our transition very easy. It's really been sad to connect with educators across the country to hear all of the challenges that they may face if they would like to lessen tech in their own classrooms. That is a really good point, right? Because what do you do when you take away the screen-based curriculum? OK, Jared, let me ask you this. Google has said, in terms of some of the behavior and security concerns that both educators and parents have that there are tools that schools can use to lock down Chromebook screens. They can restrict content. They say they've done that by default for K through 12. Why aren't these things enough to mitigate?

32:12No, I'm asking you genuinely to mitigate the harms of screens and classrooms. I love that. That's the use tech to cure tech. I'm going to invent a new cigarette to help you get off the old cigarette. I guess these things could work, but you've got to remember, human beings have a drive within them to break systems. That's what we do. If anyone listening right now has ever played a big open-world video game, you'll notice the first thing you do is you try and break it. Kids are no different. The second you put a tool in place that tries to block them from something, guarantee you 20% of them are going to spend nothing but the next two hours trying to get around that block. And they'll find a way. Best example of this, I won't name the country. I lived in a different country for a while. And they took their national test online. And so all the kids had to do it all the same time. Everyone is in their classrooms. Everyone logs on. They said, we have this thing. It's locked and loaded. Five minutes, it took some kids somewhere in that country to hack that system and completely shut it down. So there was no score that year. No one could take that test.

33:12It's so it's cute. It's funny. It's just that's not the world that we actually live in, unfortunately. I mean, I'm just kind of giggling at what Dr. Horvath just shared. We actually had our tech company that we partner with to help support our system. We had a student that we knew was not using their Chromebook appropriately this fall. But they were so crafty at getting around everything that we had in place that honestly, we watched them for two and a half weeks just to learn from them how to get stronger at setting restrictions before we address the problem with them. Because they, I mean, Golly, that child was such a hacker. I'm just such an incredible hacker. Anything we had in place, they were just like he said within five minutes able to get around it. So we learned a lot from that student. But that's not what we want teachers to do. We don't want them to be chasing tech issues all day long. They've got too much content to give to students to help prepare them. You have your own in-house white hat hacker.

34:13Wow. We do. And every school across the nation has their own at least one. OK, I want to just hear from one more educator because it occurs to me that the way we've been talking about learning people might think that maybe the absence of screens in classrooms is particularly good for, say, the humanities for reading. But it turns out that lots of teachers and other subjects are saying that taking laptops away from the classrooms has had a positive impact. One of them is Dylan Kane. He teaches seventh grade math in the Leadville Colorado Public School District. He's been teaching for 14 years, both middle school and high school math. A couple of years ago, I was using a lot of technology in the classroom. I would say maybe 50% of class time students were on Chromebooks for all sorts of different websites, practice tools, different things. I actually made my own math fluency practice website because I was just a big believer in technology,

35:15in the instant feedback, and the personalization that you can give students. And over time, I kind of became a little disillusioned with that. I just realized that a lot of the tools were very clever and very cool, but weren't getting students to think hard in the way that helps them learn. So he began reducing tech time in his classes, dropped it to about 20% of class time this past fall, but he still wasn't satisfied. What I was seeing was students who just couldn't tear their eyes off of the screen. And so when I tried to get students to do something on a screen and then talk about it with each other or to talk about it as a class, it was like once the screens were out, there was this gravity that was just pulling them. I saw screens cause students to turn into video game mode. Their goal was to beat the level rather than to think about the math and learn something from it.

36:16So that's when Mr. Kane decided on another more drastic experiment. For the entire month of January, his math students got zero screen time, none at all. And he says it worked. For some reason, it's easier for students to hide when they're behind a screen, walking around to clancing at students' work on paper. I can get a much better sense of where students are at, who needs support, I think students who are willing to ask for help. And so I think that like social relationship, what was the biggest change? Like I think students really benefit from the like human to human interaction and human to human accountability that motivates them to learn. Jared, this gets me back to this question of how ubiquitous is the impact of screens and then also how consistent is the impact of removing them. For people out there who still say, look, I want my child to be able to get access to higher level math,

37:17say, through these apps, because we can't afford to send them to supplemental math education outside of school, what do you say? Yeah, that's where the equity issue becomes tricky, because there's a very narrow definition of it, which says where there was no access before I now have access. In that case, yeah, tech is great. If the debate is something versus nothing, you always take something. And but that's where you got to then blow out and realize, Ed tech isn't really talking about something versus nothing anymore. They're talking about boosting learning and narrowing learning gaps through their tools. And that's where you see in every country we've looked at, so just start in the US. From 1992 to 2012, the gap between the highest performing kids and lowest performing kids on national tests decreased about 10 points. So about one point per cycle. Since 2012, it has increased almost 20 points. We're now looking at a four points wing per cycle in the other direction. And then that's same across, if you look at 50 different countries, as soon as tech use increases,

38:17the gap between the highest performing and lowest performing starts to widen. And this is because if you want tech to be useful for learning, you already need to know how to learn. That's one of the weirdest things we've ever found. The only people who succeed learning on tech basically don't need any more support. They have what are called self-regulated learning skills. Now, where do you develop that? You develop that traditionally through a K through 12, general education. So the kids who need the most support are being thrown onto screens, and they have the least prep to be able to succeed on it. So we've kind of got this whole system backwards. And the equity issue has been getting worse and worse and worse since 2012. OK, Jared, I've become automatically skeptical of any solution that seems so simple and yet so potentially transformative. Like, could it really be as simple as reducing, if not illuminating screens in schools, to improve kids' happiness, how much they're learning, how much they're retaining?

39:18I guess what I'm saying is almost seems too simple. Yeah. But if you go and look back, 2010 was about the peak education around the world, and what were we doing then? It's one of those things where we started to do something wrong. And it doesn't mean we can't get better, but this is an issue of just backtrack. Things will get better, and then we can decide what's the better way to push forward after that. I always say, here's my favorite stat. I have yet to meet a single school that has either banned cell phones or taken away one-to-one devices that has ever gone back. As soon as they take them away, they go, oh, why didn't we do that earlier? So I don't say they don't exist. I just say, I haven't found them. I have yet to find a school that said that was a bad choice going back to analog methods. Well, principal S-Ving, for you, my last question, is I suppose in terms of if learning is improving, you're going to measure that through the testing metric, at least one way, as you talked about how you saw the decline in learning earlier. But I also want to know, in these first few months

40:18of doing this, do the kids seem more engaged? Do they seem happier? Absolutely. And the best part is hearing them say that out loud. I notice myself that I'm more engaged with my teacher. I notice my classmates are as well. I've seen, I have students who have pointed to, we're bullying one another less, because we don't have the ability to do that online. If we're going to say something mean, we have to say it in person. And many of us are not brave enough to do that. So truly, by and large, our students are happy about this decision. They appreciate having more engagement with their classmates and more time on paper. Well, Inga S-Ving is principal at McPherson Middle School in McPherson, Kansas. She is Kansas 2025 principal of the year, by the way, much deserved principal S-Ving. Thank you so much for joining us.

41:19Thank you so much for hosting me. And Jared Cooney Horvath, a cognitive neuroscientist and author of the digital delusion, how classroom technology harms our kids learning and how to help them thrive again. Jared, thank you so much for being with us. No, thank you for having this issue on. I'm Magna Chacobardi. This is on point. E-bikes are getting faster. Some go 35 miles an hour, even 50. There's one out there called the Revolution W that can go 80. And yet, these vehicles are somehow still classified as regular bikes. It's the loophole that I'm pissed off about because it's the source of the confusion, the wholesale use of a loophole to make these as widespread as normal bicycles. That's on the next on point.