When the parent advocacy group Schools Beyond Screens surveyed local parents regarding their thoughts on how Portland Public Schools utilizes educational technology and screens in classrooms, many parents called for more paper-based learning.
Some noted that too many videos were used in classrooms, and video games and screen time were being used as rewards. Some raised concerns that classroom technology usage didn’t align with the rules surrounding tech in their homes.
The organization took this feedback, what they learned from the district and their own experiences as parents to create a draft revised tech and AI policy for PPS.
We’ll hear from Miranda Rake and Holly Hofkamp, two of the co-founders of the Portland chapter of Schools Beyond Screens, about what the draft policy entails.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed using AI and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. Today is the first day of school for most students at Portland Public Schools, and in other districts all around the state. It’s a return to math and English, to recess and lunch, and for many kids, to time spent in front of screens in class. Plenty of parents celebrated last year when Governor Tina Kotek banned the use of cell phones in schools. But the ban on those small screens had no impact on the laptops and tablets that have become ubiquitous in public education all over the country.
My next guests want to change that. Miranda Rake and Holly Hofkamp are both parents of kids in PPS and co-leads of the Portland chapter of the group Schools Beyond Screens. Miranda is a writer and a podcaster. Holly is a family practice physician. They’re asking the district to adopt new policies to limit the use of screens and AI in schools. They both join me now. It’s great to have both of you on Think Out Loud.
Holly Hofkamp: Thank you.
Miranda Rake: Thanks for having us.
Miller: Miranda, first – when did you become focused on the issue of screen time in schools?
Rake: I have a rising kindergartner and third grader, and I noticed computers in the kindergarten class, and I thought that was pretty surprising.
Miller: For your, now, soon-to-be third grader.
Rake: Yes. And then I got really involved in the issue mid-school year last year, when PPS sent out a survey about AI in the classroom. I had written an article last summer for The Atlantic about AI and kids, and was pretty concerned at the thought that PPS was thinking about incorporating generative AI into our K-12 classrooms. So I got involved then, and then eventually formed Schools Beyond Screens Portland with Holly.
Miller: We should say this is a Portland chapter, but this is a national movement of parents who are concerned, like you, about what they see as the overuse of screens in classrooms.
Holly, what about you? When did you first become focused on this issue?
Hofkamp: I also started becoming interested based on my own kids’ experience in school. I was similarly surprised at the young age where screens were introduced, and also just the amount of screen time that younger kids were exposed to, particularly for things like reading books and writing, where a kindergartner might be reading a book online rather than using a physical book, or being read to by a video of a person reading a book. I was also alarmed by the content that was available to students, and the amount of distractions they were causing in our school.
When I heard parents in my own school and educators in my own school raising that concern, we formed a parent-teacher committee about technology in our school, and we surveyed our own school, and had an overwhelming response within two days. So it was really obvious this was a hot button issue for our community.
Miller: You’re talking there both about the scale of screen use, but also, as you mentioned, you said you were alarmed by some of the content that kids were exposed to. What do you have in mind when you say that?
Hofkamp: I was. My own child was using ChatGPT at a pretty young age, unsupervised, and when I asked, learned that he was trying to use it to build a website during school. And then when we surveyed our community, we heard stories about kids watching R-rated movies throughout a whole week when substitutes were at the helm. And then just YouTube Shorts and a lot of games. For instance, there’s kind of a tradition where a document with a lot of different HTML media files that you can download is passed around, and students download these files and then spend time gaming in school.
Miller: And this is passed on, some kind of secret knowledge, as a way to very easily, once you have this document, get access to stuff that you want student to student.
Hofkamp: Yeah, exactly.
Miller: I was gonna say for people who aren’t parents – and maybe for parents as well because one of the that that you have been trying to highlight is the lack of awareness that some parents may have about what their kids are being exposed to – can you just give us a sense for the physicality of this? How it is that a second grader could be watching YouTube or a movie in the middle of class? What do they often have access to technology-wise?
Rake: So what I would say is Chromebooks are pretty ubiquitous across PPS, across many districts across the country. We know that internal Google documents that have been released describe this as a strategy to create a “pipeline of future users” – that’s a direct quote from a Google internal document. So our students are sitting there with Chromebooks. And then this really points to why we need a screen policy. PPS does not have a policy around screens, so it’s sort of every man for themselves. It’s very inconsistent across our 87 PPS schools right now, because it’s teacher to teacher. There are things that are going on that the district has told us they would describe as misuse, like the YouTube video reading to children instead of a human teacher. But there’s no policy saying that is against … there’s nothing that that’s violating right now, technically.
Miller: My understanding is there are some guidelines for what the district says how long students at different ages should be spending for different screen-based activities, whether it’s assessments or some kind of math program. But I’m curious what you’ve learned about the gulf between those guidelines that the district has put forward, and what you’re actually hearing students are experiencing from them, or their teachers or their parents. How big a gulf is there?
Hofkamp: I believe you’re referencing their screen time guidance that’s online. From my understanding, that’s very recent that that became available. It was shared with principals widely early in August, and I think it’s being shared with teachers probably within the last week. And when I look at that screen time guidance, I see what you described. It’s describing how long students should be on screens to achieve the curricular mandates. So for things like i-Ready, students are expected to be on a screen for 20 to 45 minutes per week, I believe.
Rake: And can I share that when the district talked about that expectation that they apparently have around the use of i-Ready, which is a math curriculum thing that the district uses, they talked about that at the district that students should be on it for 20 minutes twice a week. They said that at a board meeting and the whole room laughed, because we all know that students are on i-Ready for much longer than that in some schools, right? And in other schools, maybe they’re even on it less than that.
So I just wanna share that the district has been open to chatting with us and has shared that they know that there’s a wide gulf.
Miller: And the variation is worth pointing out. You’ve both mentioned it, but there was a helpful illuminating article in Willamette Week in July, where the reporter interviewed kids from four different schools. She found that a student at Metropolitan Learning Center, an alternative school, said that she essentially had no screen time. Meanwhile, one at Richmond Elementary School in Southeast Portland, reported three to four hours a day, in her experience.
You mentioned, Holly, that you had a screen time survey. What stood out to you in the many responses? I saw a 30-page document of relatively small font size. Parents had a lot to say. I’m curious, in the big picture, what stood out to you?
Hofkamp: Well, for starters, just the sheer amount of people that responded so quickly stood out to me. I think the lack of transparency and the real hunger for understanding how much screen time is being used at schools, and understanding what content is accessible, that’s a real desire for parents. The one statistic that really stood out to me was that 43% of our survey respondents said that their student had either been negatively impacted or harmed by a device that was issued by the school, which was a pretty alarming number to me.
Miller: Miranda, what have you heard from students themselves about their take on this technology?
Rake: Yeah, that’s been interesting. Just thinking again about experiences in the school board meetings, one of our members’ daughters actually spoke about, she had been at King in their Mandarin immersion program and then she moved to Irvington Elementary and experienced very different screen time school to school. At, I think it was King, it was heavily relying on the screen, and she felt that she couldn’t learn in that environment and didn’t feel like she was good at math, and moved to Irvington where the teacher was much more using manipulatives and written worksheets. She felt that she was making a lot more progress. So, I think the students themselves have really spoken up about it.
We’re talking about our survey that we sent out, what Holly was speaking about. But PPS actually sent out a survey related to AI. And the results of that, the students were very anti-AI, a huge number of them. So interesting to hear what they want.
Miller: I want to turn to your proposed screen time policy, what you’re asking the district to adopt. It’s long, but these are some of the high points in my reading of it: a prohibition on individual screens, like personal Chromebooks as I read that, for students in kindergarten through second grade; limited or supervised use of screens for grades three to eight; and for everyone, many more screen-free periods in general, outside of classes, like during lunch, recess and PE.
Holly, how did you all go about developing this policy?
Hofkamp: Well, we are lucky that there is a national organization of Schools Beyond Screens, and they do have a model tech policy that we started with as a working draft. We took that draft, we took the comments from the surveys that we had done, and went through literally line by line and thought, how would this policy apply in our own context, in our own district? And that’s how we went about formulating that.
Miller: With large class sizes now because of budget cuts, the sense I get is that sometimes teachers turn to Chromebooks to keep kids busy, or to give them what they can’t provide themselves with 34 kids in class. One example that I’ve seen is if a kid has already mastered some particular math lesson, a teacher might say, “go to i-Ready and move on to the next one while I try to help the kids who are struggling.” I bring this up because, how do you think about the push to decrease the use of screens, when teachers might be really struggling to manage the number of students that they have?
Rake: Well, before we took the policy to the school board – and it’s with the policy chair now – we took the policy to the teachers union and asked them to look at it with us. We had a long meeting with the new president of the teachers union, and really want to support them. We see our causes as really aligned. We have two policy asks: a screen policy and proposed AI policy, which is a five-year moratorium. [Our asks] rely entirely on human educators in the classroom. So we want more teachers in the classroom to support this work.
Miller: Right, exactly. But we are all getting fewer teachers. That is the budget reality right now.
Rake: Well, we have a public records request out to find out exactly how many educational technology tools our district is currently paying for, and we are waiting on that. We’ve been told it could cost our organization $400 to get that information because it doesn’t exist yet in a single place. So we are working on that. But other chapters of Schools Beyond Screens have found upwards of $30 or $40 million in looking closely at what the district is spending on tech.
Miller: Those are large districts like LA?
Rake: I think they were in Idaho or something like. It was a specific one that found $39 million in just Chromebook repair, looking at everything the district was spending to support their technology programs.
Miller: I’m curious, more broadly, what have you heard from teachers about this? Holly, what stands out to you?
Hofkamp: So as part of our local effort at our own school, what we have heard from teachers is one of the biggest concerns is the management of distraction, and the amount of time that takes and the chaos that it causes.
Miller: Like, “Hey, Jimmy, get off the Chromebook, stop watching YouTube”?
Hofkamp: Yeah, exactly. And they have a system called Securly. They have a screen at the front of the room where they can visualize every student’s Chromebook and kind of see what they’re doing, and monitor if they’re on task or if they’re off task. And to me, it’s sad to think of a teacher sitting up there trying to play whack a mole with this security monitor, really.
So I completely hear you, that there are budgetary constraints. And, I think that the amount of time that educators are spending managing the distractions that the Chromebooks are causing is time that could be spent for instruction. And I think, right now, you speak about differentiation in small groups. I think you can do some of that with physical books or math manipulatives. It’s just that we need to get back to the pre-COVID era when teachers were more used to doing this.
Miller: Miranda, how much of what we’re talking about do you think is a direct result of the almost overnight infusion of tech into K-12 education in this country that was a result of COVID?
Rake: Yeah, we asked Emily Glasgow at the district about that recently, who is head of curriculum for K-12. And she was really acknowledging … She called it Pandora’s box. She said we opened Pandora’s box, necessarily, quickly, and spent a lot of money and energy to meet kids in their homes. And now we need to close the box, is what she said. So that’s what they’re working on, and we’re very glad that they see it the same way we do.
Miller: Holly, I want to turn to questions of equity. It used to be, in general, that when people would use the phrase “the digital divide” to talk about computers in schools, it was a two-word phrase to say that richer families and their kids had access to technology that poorer families, in general, were less likely to have. Is it fair to say that that has switched, that we’re sort of looking at the mirror image of that now, when you think about equity and screens?
Hofkamp: Yes. The new digital divide is more about having access to high quality screen-free instruction. We have seen that students in lower-income households are often exposed to excessive screen use. One of the ways that we can help combat that inequity is through schools, which is a structural environment that we have a little bit more control over. So yeah, I would say that the digital divide has kind of been flipped on its head.
Miller: It makes me think of the sort of Silicon Valley masters of the universe, who are in the epicenter of these technological shifts for the globe, but often they’re the ones who say, “No, I don’t want social media for my kids. I don’t want generative AI for my third grader. But we will give it to the rest of the world.”
I was struck by a comment in your survey of PPS parents that I want to read to get your thoughts on. Someone wrote this, and I should say all of it is anonymous in what I saw:
“I agree that we need to be very cautious about the impact of too much tech use during school. But I also know that eliminating technology doesn’t necessarily mean that the quality of instruction is going to increase. For example, we have experienced packet-based instruction worksheets in PPS with our kids, which is so unacceptable. Instead of a witch hunt against tech and AI, let’s focus our conversation as parents about what high quality teaching and learning looks like. Sometimes this does include the use of technology and lessons about AI literacy. Eliminating tech will not guarantee strong teaching practices.”
Miranda, it’s a big question, but what are you hoping will replace the time that you want to give to kids now that they’re currently spending on screens?
Rake: That’s a great question. I think this is a great opportunity to say that as a group, as an organization, we are not anti-tech. One of our co-leads works for a big tech organization. I work in sort of a techie world, my spouse works at Google. We’re immersed.
But I think that what I’m hoping for is an environment at school that focuses on our children as developing creatures who really need the things that we know will help them get where we want them to be. PPS talks a lot about their graduate profile, who will you be when we launch you into the world. We want to just really make a case right now that it’s time to pause and to think about what we’ve brought in and whether or not it’s supporting our children’s development. And sometimes tech, maybe a little bit of tech, could be used intentionally, used thoughtfully. But again, to reference back to the Pandora’s box that we opened in COVID, some of that was brought in without intention. It was a scramble. So it’s time to just reassess.
Miller: Holly, I feel like both of you have been careful to give some praise to PPS for the way they have been responding to your efforts over the last year or so. What kind of feedback have you gotten from district leaders, from the school board, about your draft policies?
Hofkamp: Well, from district leaders, we started a series of meetings with them a few weeks ago. And there was an openness there that was exciting. And from the school board, we are really excited to be working hand in hand with the policy chair as well as the teaching and learning chair. They have our policy. They’re actively making comments in a shared Google Doc. We’ve met a number of times, so we’re excited that there’s collaboration there.
Miller: We’ve been focusing on screen time, but as you did mention, Miranda, there’s also a generative AI policy that you also want the district to adopt. It seems that one of your victories as an organization – not you alone – was a generative AI pause that the school board approved in June. What do you want to see going forward?
Rake: So that was really exciting. Virginia La Forte really pushed that through. So I think that what I’ve learned is that PPS was actually a quite early adopter of generative AI. They were running pilot programs in some of our schools last year. And in talking to national reporters, we’ve actually been reached out to because we were at the forefront of school districts adopting AI rather quickly. So I think we have an opportunity to then be one of the early adopters of a longer pause.
This AI moratorium is just asking our district to wait. It’s all so new, I think that we can’t do a good cost-benefit analysis yet. There’s just not enough information about generative AI and students.
Miller: Holly and Miranda thanks very much.
Hofkamp: Thank you very much.
Rake: Thank you.
Miller: Miranda Rake is a writer and podcaster, a PPS parent and a co-lead of the Portland chapter of Schools Beyond Screens. Holly Hofkamp is a family practice doctor, also a PPS parent and co-lead of this same chapter of Schools Beyond Screens.
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