The Backlash Against Too Much Tech in Schools is Good for Democracy

If you’re looking for inspiration in the fight against authoritarianism in the US, you might want to talk to parents of school-age children — because a bunch of them are taking on the tech oligarchs and notching wins.

A grassroots movement led by parents worried about tech’s effects on children’s privacy, safety, mental health, and academic success is slapping back the oligarchs’ reach into K-12 schools. It’s working. Cell phone bans, restrictions on screen time, and now, moratoria on generative AI use are breaking a tech fever that has swept education over the past two decades.

The nation’s largest system, New York City’s, just placed a one-year block on “student-facing” AI tools from kindergarten through eighth grade with restrictions thereafter. The second largest, Los Angeles Unified, is hitting pause on generative AI as part of a comprehensive scaling back of tech in classrooms. Suburbanites are also activated: Katy, Texas, for example, is banning AI in K-6.

Like the protests against hyperscale data centers and Flock cameras, the push to slow tech’s roll in schools is a sign of growing resistance to the tools of autocracy — and it has the potential to protect children from a future in which these tools and their abuse have become the norm.

Backlash to accustoming kids to a surveillance state

Simply put: Schools use excessive amounts of technology. The average district accessed 3,001 distinct tools last year. This helps explain why many of the parents engaged on this issue are animated by concerns about their children’s privacy.

Some of these tools are educational technologies (”edtech”) built specifically for schools and others are general consumer products. Coincidentally, quite a few sound like names of drugs (Proctorio, Derivita, Protraxx, Asana, chatGPT), and they can have serious side effects.

Together, they collect an astounding array of personal information on students, including health information, grades, activities, schoolwork, and behavior that can be shared or sold by providers or hacked and sold on the black market. With data breaches common, many parents have well-founded fears for their children’s present safety and future opportunities.

Schools are also spending heavily on security and AI is being integrated into more school security products, making children vulnerable in new and disturbing ways. Flock cameras on and near school grounds and sensors in student bathrooms are just a couple of the deeply invasive methods by which students are being surveilled. These have triggered traumatizing false alarms and arrests. Tracking software monitoring children’s internet use in and out of school buildings is common, a threat to their privacy, free inquiry, and free speech.

Our youngest citizens shouldn’t grow up thinking that constant surveillance — and the level of policing it allows — is necessary or normal.

Today’s parents, who grew up in an age of tech optimism, are inclined to understand this, Andy Liddell of the EdTech Law Center explained: “We have now reached a critical mass of parents that have seen the promises of internet liberation that suffused our youth curdle into the technofascism that has defined our early middle age. We want better for our kids.”

Pushing back on the threat to independent thinking

Tens of billions are spent each year on edtech, a number that’s grown despite meager evidence that K-12’s dramatic turn to technology has improved teaching and learning. The Economist has deemed it useless, and indeed, declines in standardized test scores since the spending boom began suggests it’s been at best wasteful — that is, if it hasn’t harmed academic achievement. This reverse correlation has made some parents and educators reluctant to entertain tech oligarchs’ furious efforts to jam AI products into schools.

The oligarchs have been aided by President Trump, whose campaign and vanity projects many of them have funded. AI use from kindergarten has been plugged (sometimes hilariously) by his Education Secretary Linda McMahon and First Lady Melania. Media outlets have aided the hype by repeating fear-mongering about the future of work. Until recently, it seemed like this full-court press might work, as districts announced AI initiatives and the American Federation of Teachers took millions last year from Microsoft, OpenAI, and Anthropic to train teachers.

Since then, however, study after study has indicated that student and worker dependence on AI tools like chatGPT inhibits critical thinking, lasting knowledge, motivation, and creativity. Brookings, which set out to investigate the pros and cons of AI in schools, determined the risks outweigh the benefits in a report that NPR’s Cory Turner said illuminates “a kind of doom loop of AI dependence, where students increasingly off-load their own thinking onto the technology, leading to the kind of cognitive decline or atrophy more commonly associated with aging brains.”

This should alarm parents and defenders of democracy, which needs its young citizens to become knowledgeable and thoughtful voters.

Facing the danger of easier indoctrination

Scripted curriculum and instruction delivered via software is a boon for autocrats, who seek to control both what is taught and how it is taught. MAGA has aggressively pursued K-12 censorship and book bans this decade, but bans and snitch lines only go so far in controlling educators. So they’re moving from what students shouldn’t read to what they must read, as Texas did recently by mandating a collection of texts including passages from the Bible.

Even when some texts and topics are forbidden and specific curricula or censored textbooks are required, however, teachers still have some agency. They can choose how and when to present material and can foster discussion, questioning, and connections. Students have options, too: They can put down a book. By contrast, instruction and assessment delivered by computer helps ensure compliance — teacher and student use of required software is logged and reported to higher-ups.

Instruction via closed information loops supplied by tech oligarchs is a bad idea. Elon Musk has been explicit that his Grok chatbot should reflect his extremist views, and of course he’s not the only tech billionaire with a fascist vision for the nation and the world. Even industry leaders who are less ideological are bending reality for the autocrat in the Oval Office. Google, which swiftly relabelled bodies of water at his whim, is the leading supplier of tech to schools.

While many of the programs widely used in K-12 (such as iReady and IXL Math) provide math and reading instruction, the Trump Administration’s America 250 Civics Education Coalition and related Freedom 250 website give a glimpse of how AI can be put to use in schools in the rewriting of history. For this project, the Christian Nationalist propaganda factory Prager U mixed fact with fabulism in a series of AI videos. Several commentators noticed, for example, that its AI “John Adams” quotes right-wing media personality Ben Shapiro.

More ordinary providers of AI tools for schools can also pervert history. When law professor Eric Muller engaged with the “Anne Frank” bot on school.ai, he “had a helluva time trying to get her to say a bad word about Nazis.” The bot was programmed to relentlessly return students to themes of hope and resilience, aligning well with MAGA “divisive concepts” laws meant to whitewash history.

While the company has since retooled this product, it laid bare the potential for ahistorical, emotionally manipulative AI to inculcate passivity instead of resistance — an authoritarian’s dream.

Resistance to resignation

It’s good for democracy, this backlash, because too much tech in schools can aid illiberalism — but also because the movement behind it is empowering.

Lila Byock is a parent who founded Schools Beyond Screens, a coalition of parents and teachers that has been instrumental in pushing Los Angeles to craft new policies restricting edtech. Byock told me:

I had started to get pretty cynical about democracy and our civic institutions, but I didn’t want that cynicism to infect my kids. So when I realized the extent of the influence the tech companies were wielding in their schools, I just decided I wasn’t going to take it anymore. I wanted to prove to my kids (and maybe to myself) that you can fight a corrupt system. And you can win.

With school governance residing largely at the state and local level, the movement shows Americans the power they have to take action and make change locally, highlighting the value of federalism as a bulwark against authoritarianism.

The movement is cross-partisan, with parents on the left, the right, and all the in-between, and while some of their motivations may vary, their collaboration and their successes are a reminder that we can find common cause — and are not powerless against the machine.