How's it going America,
A BRAND NEW episode of The Pod Millennial just dropped today! One of my favorite things is doing new monologues every week, and this one is about my teenage quest for the perfect book and wrestling with the "woman writer" issue. Then I talk to author and columnist Kurt Schlichter about the comeback of men and artist Adam Thompson about the Great American Art Competition. You don't want to miss it! Subscribe, rate (5 stars, of course), and listen.
Let's get into it:
The results are in: Chromebooks cannot replace actual classroom instruction. After spending more than $30 billion collectively on laptops and tablets in schools, our American kids are doing worse than ever before. In fact, they're the first generation to do worse than their parents.
There are Chromebooks in school where there should just be books. Instead of packing up their textbooks, kids pack up their laptops and chargers. When they're given assignments, they're often through these online portals like IXL and other nonsense that don't teach kids how to be anything but good button pushers.
It's been a disaster. Everyone knows it's been a disaster. But it keeps being pushed anyway. In fact, Google is one of the pushers. During COVID, the company donated massive numbers of Chromebooks to schools. More were donated to accommodate remote learning during the California wildfires. Once the devices were in schools, the curriculum shifted to online rather than on paper, and school districts signed years-long contracts with Google for devices and services.
Testing, individualized education plan services, and regular classwork moved to devices just as education and parenting experts screamed to give the kids less screen time. Do you have any idea how hard it is to keep kids off screens when their actual homework is ON SCREENS? When the books they were assigned to read are ON SCREENS?
An added difficulty is that it's hard to see what your kids are studying when there are no books, workbooks, and papers, but portals, passwords, and online folders. Syllabi are distributed electronically, and papers are turned in on Google Docs or through Canvas. Even communication between parents and administrators or teachers happens through portals.
Teachers don't like it, parents don't like it, students don't like it, so why is it still happening? Author Jonathan Haidt asks: "Where are the students who think they benefited from Chromebooks and iPads in school? Where are the teachers who believe that ed tech greatly improved education?" He calls for them to be ripped out of elementary schools by September, noting that it will be harder in higher grades, but still necessary.
When COVID was over, and kids returned to school, they took their Chromebooks with them. So much of so-called learning and education had moved online that it was just standard operating procedure to plunk kids down in front of screens and watch their eyes flicker with blue light all day. It's time to put an end to this failed experiment.
Libby