Repenting from the K-12 screen fad | Hour 1

What's going on? Thank you so much for listening to this podcast. It is heard live every day from noon to three on WBT Radio and Charlotte. And if you want exclusive content like invitations to events, the weekly live stream, my daily show, prep with all of the links. Become a patron, go to dpeakclendarshow dot com. Make sure you hit the subscribe button, get every episode for free, write to your smartphone or tablet, and again, thank you so much for your support. UH. For more than a decade, North Carolina's education establishment has pushed schools to issue every K twelve student a laptop or iPad, spending more than three billion dollars in the process. At this point, the public school system has more than one point two million such devices, with seventy five percent of them traveling home with students each day. It was called innovation equity personalized learning, but the real impact has been turning the school day into a need, a nearly endless parade of screen time that is crippling student's ability to learn, so, writes Andrew Dunn. He is a contributing columnist to The Charlotte Observer. He is also the creator of Longleafpolitics dot com or longleafpol dot com, Longleaf Politics. You can go there subscribe to the newsletter highly recommended. I do, and you can watch his podcast as well. It's all there longleafpol dot com. Andrew, how are you, sir? I am doing well. How about yourself? I am doing well as well. And well, this was a very lengthy piece that you wrote up about North Carolina's huge school technology mistake. Okay, so first off, let's walk through a bit of the history here, because I'm glad you make a point, because I think a lot of people will think, well, this was because of COVID, right that everybody went online to learn. When the schools were closed. But when you trace back, the history of these initiatives pre date COVID by quite a bit, right. That's exactly right. And if you hear school districts talk about it, and there are some discussions around this which I'm sure we'll get into, but you'll typically hear school administrators say, oh, well, this is a COVID thing. We had to give everybody a device because they were learning from home and it just never went away. But that is not really the case. I mean, the earliest. Examples of this one to one policy that I can find date all the way back to two thousand and seven, two thousand and eight. Mooresville Schools were one of the cutting edge school districts on this and President Barack Obama at the time, he actually came to Moresville to tell how great it was that they were going so. Deep into technology. But it was really in the. Early years of the second term of the Obama administration when this really caught on around the country and around the state of North Carolina. It was part of the Race to the Top contest where you know, states had to pitch their ideas for how they were going to solve big education challenges and basically they were incentivized to give devices to every student. And you know, ever since then, it's just moved continually in that direction. Yeah, you say, the craze really exploded through Obama's Race to the Bottom, sorry, Race to the Top program. North Carolina jumped right onto the train. You had districts, you had the General Assembly under Republican control. Everybody was getting on board with this idea and to some extent, like I understand why, right, it's a new technology, and the idea was you save a lot of money on textbook purchases. Right, you can reuse the laptops over and over again. You can customize the curriculum or the you know, the learning plan per kid. Right, they could they could drive their own educational achievement to some degree by working at their own pace. Right. It seemed more of like a personalized, customizable experience. But it doesn't seem to have worked out that way. Yeah, and it almost sounds quaint when you look back at at what people were saying back then. I mean, school administrators were really talking about, Oh, technology is the wave of the future, and you know, the jobs of the future are going to require students to use technology, and so we need to get them prepared for that, you know, as if there is no other way for students to be exposed to technology if not through the schools system. And I don't obviously hindsight is twenty twenty. But there could not have been anything more misguided than that. All right, So why is it misguided? Are what are the impacts? What do we know at this point? Well, it's hard to quantify. There's not a whole lot of hard data. A lot of what we're seeing is in the observations from teachers and from parents. I mean, the hard data is inescapable, but it is a little bit messy. I mean, our standardized testing scores. You know, we talk about the NAPE a lot, the national whatever, the nation's report card, and they continue to go down. And there's a lot of factors that go into that. But I think it's safe to say that the technology has certainly not helped that. But when you talk to teachers and when you talk to parents, I mean they're describing attention attention issues, retention issues where students who are reading all these things on their devices simply can't retain the information as well. And some teachers are even starting to say that, you know, now that cell phones are banned in schools, the actual devices that students are issued by the schools are just as distracting, if not more so. Yeah, and you you talk about this in your piece, you say every distraction is one click away because you've got the thing. You've got your laptop open, right you finish your exam or your lesson, or even if you don't write, all you have to do is just open up another browser page and boom, you're off to something else. And it almost seems like we are cultivating attention deficit disorder, you know, like here are kids, yeah, yeah. Use these things, and sometimes teachers can try to follow along with what students are doing. But also a lot of these schools are relying heavily on YouTube to get information across. So if you see a student on YouTube, you don't know if they're, you know, watching what Carl Sagan videos or something, or if they're just watching the latest minecraft. They're not watching Carl Sagan. But come on, they're not watching Carl probably for yeah, that's probably for the best true. All right. So, and you started off the piece by saying the field of education is notoriously susceptive to fads, and I've talked about this over the years as well. So I'm curious why do you think that is so? Because I agree with you one hundred percent, So why do you think that's so? Yeah, that's a good question. And I did a little bit of research into this and couldn't come to anything, you know, one hundred percent. Solid on this. But I think a lot. Of it has to do with how long the gap is between when you start a policy and when you can really gauge whether it's working or not. Oh yeah, A lot of these policies take years and years for the repercussions to really be understood, but eventually they do. And I think we're getting to that point with the technology. Yeah, yeah, one hundred percent. That is part of it. And yeah, I would submit it's not any one thing. I think there's probably a host of factors involved. I think the delayed feedback on effectiveness is exactly part of the problem. As you mentioned, I think there's a fomo aspect to it, a fear of missing out, like, oh, this state's doing this thing, and they're going to race ahead of us, and you know they're going to be cited as the best, and so they're going to want to implement something that some other state or district is doing. There's money involved, right, tied to a lot of these new types of initiatives, like the Race to the Top program for example, the pressure to increase achievement and scores and graduation rates. So you've got that pressure as well, and then you've got an entire cottage industry that is, you know, not based, they're not teachers, they're academics, and you know their path to fame is to come up with and you mentioned it in the piece, this whole learning or whole language program whatever, that was just completely implemented without any kind of long term studies to see if it actually was better than phonics, and turns out it was not. But you know, the woman who came up with it, you know, she wrote a book about it, she got famous for it, she got tenure or had tenures, so like she used it for her own, you know, personal advancement, whether intentional or not. But she benefited from that. And I think all of these play a role to some degree. Yeah, I think you're exactly right. And I think also there's the factor that you know, teaching is kind of it's a romantic profession, and I mean that more in the literary sense where people, you. Know, everyone has experience with it. Everybody has their ideas and their nostalgia and their memories, and so a lot of education policy is driven by, you know what an idealized. Version of what people think school should be. Yeah, I agree. I've talked about that as well. Because everybody either went to school, or has a kid that is going to school, or went to school right their parents went to school. Everybody has some personal knowledge of sort of the format and the experience, and so everybody has opinions on it. But also like I just I don't think that the K twelve factory model that we've been using for one hundred years works anymore. But I think a lot of people, because of that nostal, that romanticism, they think things are the same as when they went to school thirty forty years ago, and it's just not now. You do offer some potential solutions here, and one you know thing I have, you know, thought like, well, why can't a parent just walk on down there and say, hey, stop giving my kid a chromebook. I don't want my kid to have any screen time. Does that work? It does not work. And I have direct personal experience with that. And that's honestly one of the reasons why I started researching and writing this piece is, you know, I have older kids and younger kids, so I see it all. And my older child, you know, we were concerned in our family about whether he was getting distracted or whether he was able to adequately understand his material when everything was on the laptop, and we asked the public school, can we get an accommodation where he does he gets more things on paper and on physical books. Rather than on the computer, and there was no discussion. It was basically, no, that's not possible. Everything we do is on the computer, all the quizzes, tests, everything is on the computer. So if you're a parent who wants to push back on this, and at least Charlotte Mecklenberg schools, you are out of luck. I will say, I am old school. I print out everything that I find. For all my show prep, I print everything out and I highlight stuff, I make notes in the margins. That's still the optimal way for me to retain stuff. So I agree that it's just different having a book versus you know, reading something off a screen. I retain it much better. I understand it much better because and I'm a bit of a slow reader too, because I read through everything that's like and I read it to myself in my head like I can't you know, it's like this voice going. So I'm amazed people can read quickly. My wife is a speed reader, and that's amazing to me. I wish I could do it. It would save me a lot of time. But yeah, I mean the hard copies of stuff. I think is it is important. I think it does play a role as does writing things out Longhand. Yeah, and there's plenty of actual science to back that up. It's not just your perception or my perception. I mean, there are rigorous studies that show that retention is aided by physical media. And I think a lot of it has to do with how your brain processes information. I mean, you might think if you're reading a textbook, you can I remember when I was studying, I would remember, oh, this was on the right hand side of the page, and it's kind of cues or how your brain stores the information. Yeah, and I just saw there was some research I was reading about a week ago about people who write stuff out retaining stuff because you're activating more parts of the brain because rather than typing, because typing is just muscle memory and there isn't really anything there, whereas with the writing actually having to engage more parts of the brain in order to drag your hand and hold the hand hold the pencil, rather you know, drag it across the page, write the words, formulate the sentences, whereas when you just type stuff, it's just like sort of a mechanical process that does not engage nearly as many parts of the brain. So I think there's something to that. Sorry, So what's the state to do, what's the what are districts to do? Well, We're starting to see some responses to this. There are some school districts. In North Carolina that are starting to move away, and one of the key ones is Burt County Schools and they've done some interesting things. You know, they started with making Tuesdays and Thursday's screen three days, and that has been a wildly successful experiment. I mean, even the students are on board with it. I watched some news covers, some TV news coverage that actually went into. The schools, and you. Know, when you go on a Monday or a Wednesday, nobody's talking to each other. It's eerily quiet inside the school. But on Tuesday and Thursday, with no screens, kids are interacting with each other, They're asking more questions in class. It's really remarkable what the difference that makes. So I would hope more public school districts would at least start to adopt those sorts of policies, but we're already We're also seeing some of the private schools who are starting to go in the opposite direction. Failey's Academy, which is a classical chain of classical schools. I think they have one in Waxhaw, They've got a. Couple in the Raleigh area. But basically their director of curriculum I was watching an interview he was doing. He basically said that they repented, that. They realized they were doing something wrong, and they're going in the opposite direction. So now they are you right. Sizing technology in the schools. They're not giving every child a device and their own, only using the technology when it absolutely makes sense. You can read the whole piece. It's very lengthy. It's over at longleafpol dot com. Andrew Dunn, thanks so much for your time, buddy, great work. I appreciate it. We'll talk to you next week. Thank you all right, Sea. You know, stories are powerful. They help us make sense of things, to understand experiences. Stories connect us to the people of our past while transcending generations. They help us process the meaning of life, and our stories are told through images and videos. Preserve your stories with Creative Video started in nineteen ninety seven and Mint Hill, North Carolina. It was the first company to provide this valuable service, converting images, photos and videos into high quality produced slide shows, videos, and albums. The trusted, talented and dedicated team at Creative Video will go over all of the details with you to create a perfect project. Satisfaction guaranteed. Drop them off in person or mail them. They'll be ready in a week or two. Memorial videos for your loved ones, videos for rehearsal, dinners, weddings, graduations, Christmas, family vacations, birthdays, or just your family stories, all told through images. That's what your photos and videos are. They are your life told through the eyes of everyone around you and all who came before you, and they will tell others to come who you are. Visit creativideo dot com. Couple of messages that I have received on said text line from Debro says, my son's girlfriend has a nine year old who is academically gifted. She sent us a thank you note and I could barely read it. Her printing was horrible. Okay, she's nine. I have seen better work come from a kindergarten. It said, well, look at least you got a thank you note, right, Some people just have bad handwriting. I like, I've known people like this. They're just chicken scratch. Bill says, our daughter in law is a teacher in North Carolina and in elementary school during COVID, kids were allowed to take their electronic devices home. In the spring of twenty twenty. When COVID broke out, when it came time for school to start back in the fall, most of the personal devices had disappeared, sold, destroyed, given away, whatever. The county had to buy all new devices for basically all the kids because they were still in remote learning. Such a waste of resources and money. And Jeff said, we were told laptops would take care of test scores and discipline at Morrisville. Probably did not. And Mike says, I sent a handwritten letter to my three nephews this spring and asked them to reply to me via handwritten letter. I just wanted to see for myself how their handwriting would look. I could barely read their handwriting. It was shocking. Way to go K twelve, But they can text with the best out there. Handwriting is a lost art. I'm sixty five, I am a guest. I guess I am officially the old uncle. Correct, Mike, you are welcome to my world. One last message here from the screens in schools topic that I'm moving on. Russ says two or two of my grandchildren are attending an academy in Lancaster, South Carolina. It's a private charter school. It's a throwback. There are no screens, but a lot of individual attention, a basic curriculum of reading, writing, and arithmetic. Also, everyone has fizz ed. Okay, I lied. Here's another one that just came in from Lisa. My oldest son of freshman at the time, was in the first group of students that received an iPad when South Carolina first introduced them to our school system. He was the kid that went from winning all the academic awards in elementary and middle school to barely passing his freshman year. As parents, we were naive to what this new iPad was going to do to our son and our home. He would be gaming while he was supposed to be doing homework on the iPad. The hardest part was knowing when to step aside and let him pass or fail on his own. We tried everything to get him back on track that year, but he was a fresh and we couldn't continue to babysit him while he did his homework. He did pass that year, but it was probably the most stressful year we've ever had. We learned a lot after that. Yeah, so I think like a lot of things with the technology and like social media and all of this stuff. We have run the experiment. The results are in and it has not been good. It has not been a good thing for especially kids. It's just not there's the benefits. Are far, far, far. Far outweighed by the downsides, and even for adults. And I say that as one who you know, I scroll on Twitter all the time, but I have the excuse that I need to do so for work. See, so like I have a legitimate excuse. But it's true, right, people's I. Would not have been this dellar student that I was for a little bit of time and then, like I mean, I was like I was straight a's, I was you know, gifted and talented. I did all of that stuff. And then I got into high school and I got into my safe school, and I knew where I was going to college, and then I kind of just mailed it in. And then I got to college, and that's a whole different story. I was living my best life, if you will. But yeah, I mean that's the the experiment has been a failure for kids, and so as Andrew Dunn said, we need to repent, We need to we need to be dialing this stuff back because it's not helpful. It's it's doing damage to kids. Then there's this story. Charlotte Mecklenburg Schools has reached a ninety five thousand dollars settlement in a federal lawsuit involving that painted rock at Rdrie Kell High School their spirit rock right where they stick a rock out front and then you can like reserve space and paint it. And after the assassination of Charlie Kirk in September of twenty twenty five, some kids painted it and it said live like Kirk. And then it had the Bible scripture passage John eleven twenty five, which is I am the Resurrection in the life. Whoever believes in me will live even though they die. So they had John eleven twenty five there, and then Freedom seventeen seventy six. So three students painted the rock. CMS said that the painting was done without permission and considered it to be vandalism, which I don't think is actually possible on the Spirit rock. I made this clear at the time. You literally put a rock out in front of the school and you encourage people to paint it. Therefore, anybody who comes along and paints it, even without a permit, I don't think it classifies as vandalism. Okay, the parents, and you know it's funny too. When I was in Ashville, you have a whole bunch of these graffiti vandals that run around the city and they spray paint everything, and they paint stuff all over buildings and whatnot. And there's always this argument that comes from the defenders of the graffiti vandals. They call them artists and that they're just doing art. See, this is artwork. But if you paint a rock at Ardery Keel that says live like Kirk with a Bible passage on it and Freedom seventeen seventy six, well then that's vandalism. See, make it make sense. People, I can paint, I'm an artist. If I have no permit and spray paint the side of somebody else's building their property without permission, that may be an artist. But if I paint a rock that's specifically made to be painted, that's vandalism. Make it make sense. The Alliance Defending Freedom Senior counsel Travis Barham represented the student and the student had said that the student had received permission to paint the spirit rock and was then shocked to see the message removed and to have the act publicly characterized as a crime. So the fact that the school district settled on this would seem to indicate that the student was correct, that the Alliance Defending Freedom was correct, that the kid did have permission, that the school gave permission for the art right for the message to be painted on the graffiti rock. And then when people saw the message, some people, probably leftists because they're just miserable, complained about it. How dare you? And in the wake of the blowback, that's when CMS said, oh, we didn't approve that. That's wrong. We're gonna paint over that's vandalism. But now CMS has reversed its stance, saying its original decision was wrong. As part of the settlement, Barm said the district will pay ninety five thousand dollars in damages and attorney fees, exonerate the student of any alleged wrongdoing, and implement a new student free speech policy, which was voted on last week. Also, I think they have to issue a public apology on the matter, as they should Okay, let me see here, guys, I'm trying to move on from these man. I mean, I know there's a delay, but like this is like ten fifteen minutes. Here, Stanley says in regard to the conclusion that the social media experiment has shown the downside, specifically for kids, has way more downsides than benefits. It's not the thing that's the problem, but the behavior of people using it. As in guns don't kill people, people do. Nuclear power can be used to produce energy to power homes or to make bombs. As with any new ideas, products, and technological advancements, the regulatory framework is always behind. We should always in advance assume the worst case scenario in terms of how people will use something, and get the regulatory curve ahead of it. Okay, Number one, that's impossible because when a new technology comes out, people don't know how it's going to be used because it's new, right, and technology advances so rapidly, So the regulatory frameworks are always behind. Because it's GOVC gov. Co's always behind the curve, as it should be, by the way, so you're never going to get out in front of a brand new innovative technology. It's just not possible. Number one. Number two, I understand the point about it's the tool, or it's the way people use the tool, not the tool itself. However, the regulatory framework that you're talking about is precisely what I was saying, is that this grand experiment that has been run on an entire generation of kids has proven that it is not a useful tool by and large for the kids. It's just not the downsides outweigh the upsides, and so giving kids total access and freedom to use this thing is it's not healthy and it hamstrings them. It retards their development. So no, we should not, you know, we should not just be like, well, we'll leave it up to the parent on this stuff. That's why you've got now a regulatory framework in your word, Stanley, to make sure there are age controls, right to get to get these types of regulations in place in order to not have kids getting access to everything. Right. Again, I've been saying this for a while now, which is if if you go online, you are in an informational battle space. Now that's not just geopolitical, that's also criminal. Okay, there is a battle online all the time, good and evil. Right, you've got bad people out there. They're trying to take advantage of these platforms. They use all of them to try to victimize people. Right, people have heard all of these horror stories. So the regulatory framework on that stuff is always going to lag behind. However, when it comes to particularly schools, and you're incentivizing or you're mandating screen time for the kids, and you've built everything around screens, and now we see the research and we see the impacts, the long term impacts of the screen use, there needs to be a course correction and that has to You got to start pulling this stuff out of the schools. That's my view. Look, you don't have to do it. All These districts can keep doing it, and you can keep sending your kids there. That's your call. However, I think the research is pretty conclusive at this point. As Jonathan Hate has pointed out in many many articles and columns and his book, we don't need to wait for the research to come in any longer. We have enough now the data shows that this is not helpful for kids. There was one other piece that Andrew Dunn had over at the Charlotte Observer. We did not get to it. We were talking about the screens and schools. But it's called here's one place North Carolina should tax. Like New York. They said, generally, we should never take tax advice from New York. Right. As a rule, that serves us pretty well. However, every rule has an exception, and he says, mine is sports gambling. Right now, North Carolina taxes online sports betting with an eighteen percent tax rate. Okay, New York is apparently looking at something like a fifty one percent tax rate, or they already charge that or something, and he says we should we should match that or even go above it, go fifty two percent. He says, there's a difference between taxing a paycheck and taxing a parlay. A low tax philosophy does not require pretending every activity is equally worth encouraging, and when bud when budget writers begin to count on the revenue, the state pretty quickly has its own interest in keeping the bets coming. North Carolina should avoid that from the beginning. Now, he is opposed to the online gambling, just like as as a general rule, He's like, I'm just opposed to it. However, he recognizes, you know, it's in place, it has been legalized, and so if we're going to have it, then this is the way that you should restrain it because it is detrimental to people. The Sports Betting Alliance has been doneping one hundred and fifty six thousand dollars into Facebook advertising in North Carolina over the past thirty days, more than any other advertiser in the state, and the ads are urging people to call lawmakers and to pose a higher tax on online sports betting, which makes sense, right. They know how to operate in high tax states, they just prefer not to, so they're trying to convince residents and voters to pressure lawmakers to not tax it above eighteen percent. All right, that'll do it for this episode. Thank you so much for listening. I could not do the show without your support and the support of the businesses that advertise on the podcast, so if you'd like, please support them too and tell them you heard it here. You can also become a patron at my Patreon page or go to vpetecallanarshow dot com. Again, thank you so much for listening, and don't break anything while I'm gone.