By Jillian Butler
As technology advances, it is injected into the educational curriculum for children. Naturally, many parents have questions, concerns, and convictions. A national coalition of parents and educators called Schools Beyond Screens is advocating for research and evidence-based guidelines to be put in place for educational technology.
Ocean Beach mother, lawyer, and administrative judge, Angelika Oliver, is one of the parents leading the fight in San Diego, and there’s at least one other woman from OB involved. Below is an interview with her, conducted via email.
1) I have read up a little bit on your background and why you got involved with Schools Beyond Screens. Please tell me in your own words why you got involved in the movement.
My initial concern was screen and internet use at home. I believed that if we could agree as a community to limit our kids’ access to devices and the internet, we could help safeguard childhood. This thinking came largely from The Anxious Generation, the idea that kids need more supervision online and less in the real world, so they can take on independent tasks, explore freely, and develop grit and resilience.
But then I realized even if we limit screens at home, kids are on them too much at school. At first, I hoped our school site would respond to what parents clearly wanted and make changes at our elementary school. When I kept hearing that Chromebook use couldn’t be addressed at the school level and would have to be decided at the district level, I felt obligated to push for change there.
The more I learned, the more I understood that this is also a deep equity issue. The kids with the least resources are spending the most time on screens, and their parents or caregivers may not have the bandwidth or access to information, to advocate for change. That’s when I felt an even stronger obligation to work at the district level, so that intentional, purposeful tech use becomes the default for all students, not just those whose families have the capacity to navigate this issue.
2) What is at stake if we continue to push ed tech with little to no governance?
What’s at stake is our kids’ overall wellness, their ability to focus and learn without constant distraction, to perform at their cognitive best, to retain information, and to remain creative and innovative thinkers. Meanwhile, tech corporations continue to benefit enormously, financially, at taxpayer expense, while cultivating lifelong users and, in many cases, addicts of their platforms.
3) As someone on the later side of Gen Z, I personally witnessed and experienced the detriments of early exposure, specifically social media. Body image issues, cyberbullying, and even grooming by predatory adults seems to be a common denominator amongst people my age who were inundated by tech in the late 2000s/ early 2010s. Much has changed since then, especially with the influx of AI. What do you think is the greatest threat children face today in this realm?
The most urgent threat is online safety, children’s exposure to violent, pornographic, and otherwise harmful content. But I’d also point to something more insidious: the normalization of screens as a prerequisite for everything. Writing a poem, learning math, connecting with friends, the assumption increasingly is that a screen must be involved. As kids spend more and more time staring at devices, they become more isolated and find it harder to relate to other people in meaningful, authentic ways. That erosion of human connection is something I find deeply troubling.
4) At the moment are there any ways for parents to opt out of the ed tech boom, whether it be on moral, religious, or other grounds?
Within San Diego Unified, opting out may be possible at certain school sites, but I haven’t heard of it being successfully implemented yet.
That said, I want to be clear: an opt-out is not the solution. It’s a band-aid fix, a temporary workaround while we wait for the harder, more important work of determining how ed tech can be used in classrooms in ways that actually transform learning. Opt-outs are also deeply problematic from an equity standpoint. Parents who are working multiple jobs just to keep food on the table may not have the time or resources to navigate this issue, and their kids will be left behind. That’s precisely why we believe ed tech reform standards need to apply to all students, not just those with engaged or informed caregivers.
5) In an ideal situation, would ed tech be legislated at a state level like it is in Tennessee or Alabama?
Having every district independently figure this out does feel like a significant duplication of effort and resources. But I also think this is how meaningful change often unfolds. My hope is that once large districts like Los Angeles and San Diego establish real, substantive standards, other districts will be able to follow their lead without having to start from scratch. Sometimes change has to be demonstrated locally before it can scale.
6) During the April gathering, one sign read: “ed tech is the biggest grift in education”. Can you elaborate on this? Is the push for technology in classrooms serving corporate interests under the guise of giving children an advantage for the future?
Unfortunately, I had to work and couldn’t attend the protest in April, not too sure about the meaning of the sign.
Through an optimistic lens, I’d like to believe no one intended for things to reach the point they have — TK students on Chromebooks, first graders listening to audiobooks during, fourth graders watching (rather than doing) science experiments, middle schoolers logging 4+ hours of screen time during the school day, and high school teachers competing for attention against the constant pull of text messages, social media, video games during class.
The initial push toward ed tech had a clear catalyst: COVID. I watched my husband, a public high school English teacher, figure out how to move his lessons online day by day. It was necessary, it was scrappy, and no one had a roadmap, and the teachers tasked with figuring things out on the fly did the best they could so kids could keep receiving an education at home. But I think at some point, wealthy tech executives recognized a massive financial opportunity in education, and now those interests are deeply entrenched.
What makes this especially hard to ignore is the data. When cognitive neuroscientist Jared Cooney Horvath testified before a U.S. Senate committee that Gen Z is the first modern generation to underperform their predecessors across nearly every cognitive measure: attention, memory, literacy, numeracy, executive functioning, and general IQ, and pulling back on digital use is still this difficult, it raises a serious question about whose interests are actually being served. Right now, it feels like corporate interests are winning, at least for now.
7) Is there anything else that you would like to add?
I want to emphasize that Schools Beyond Screens SD recognizes that change is hard. Rolling things back is uncomfortable, and we don’t take that lightly. The changes we’re calling for in our petition feel necessary and common sense, but we understand that any amount of change will meet some resistance.
We’ve spoken with many teachers who are fully on board, and only a handful who prefer the status quo. We know that none of this works without teacher support; they are the ones in classrooms with our kids, and they’re the ones who make change actually happen.
We’re also actively digging into the district’s financial side of tech spending, because we believe the money currently spent on ed tech should be redirected to give teachers what they actually need: physical learning materials, textbooks, and curriculum of their choosing, professional development, planning time, etc.
