Earlier this spring, Newton teachers received a message from the city’s schools superintendent. 

We may, wrote Dr. Anna Nolin, “want to think about experiences that are less digital.”

Not a bad idea, I thought. It’s high time we consider spending less time on screens in schools.

To be clear, she was warning us to anticipate more interruptions to the internet connections that had failed several times in March. Faulty linkages had delayed PSAT testing, and some middle and elementary schools had to put off MCAS. An all-out effort to splice new fiber optic cable did succeed in making students’ Chromebooks connect for state testing at the high schools that month.

Perhaps, though, this hiccup should prompt us to ask some tough questions: What exactly is the value of putting a computer in the hands of every single student in our school district? What will be the value of introducing artificial intelligence into our curriculum?

The New York Times recently reported on a middle school in Kansas that yanked back all the Chromebooks it spent a sizable portion of its budget buying. Teachers and parents had complained that they were just another source of digital distraction. 

That school and thousands of others, including those here in Newton, have done what they can to get phones out of kids’ hands in the classroom, something now being considered by the Commonwealth’s legislature. But students often find a handy substitute in texting, gaming and video viewing on their school-issued laptops.

Even prior to COVID, school systems were seeking instructional benefits and an expanded sense of equity by providing all students with their own laptops. With lockdowns and lessons on Zoom, these so-called one-to-one initiatives were deemed a necessity. 

Yet the value of putting a computer within every student’s reach at any moment of the day has proven decidedly mixed. One longitudinal study found “no significant effects on academic performance,” while a report by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development indicates that students actually do worse. 

Jonathan Haidt, author of the book Anxious Generation, simply reasons that all those “nation’s report card” tests hardly demonstrate a surge in scores during the decade or two since tech invaded our classrooms.

I am not blind to the benefits of computers. Everything from the internet’s world of knowledge at kids’ fingertips to the marvel that my marginal comments on students’ Google documents are now legible speaks to some of the value they add. We should always be looking for a better way to teach. 

And yet there are many interests that seem to want us to forget that there is any other way but our current screen obsession. 

Over the past decade, we’ve paid millions of dollars for the machines that our kids are now forced to use to take the standardized tests that we’ve paid millions of more dollars to create for the machines we buy. These mandatory tests that require a keyboard in lieu of a Number 2 pencil have boosted corporate profits. 

Meanwhile, teachers need to take time to instruct students in how to adapt to the machine that tests them, in addition to teaching the reading and math being assessed. 

While the executives at Pearson and Lenovo and the College Board are making ever more money from tests scored by ever fewer humans, the push for “21st-century skills” often seems to drain the humanity out of our schools. 

When our internet crashed, I couldn’t help but feel a bit of the Luddite’s revenge upon the machines and their makers. I admit to experiencing a gleeful measure of irony when we lost for a few days the thing we’ve come to call connectivity.

Parents’ and teachers’ ambivalence about screen time dedicated to online math and reading practice programs and the hype over the potential of individualized AI tutors stem from these concerns. 

Glorified flashcards in digital form, and programs that learn as much about a student as a student learns from them, have the benefit of being both cheap and attention grabbing. They also seem like another way to isolate kids and market to them. 

AI even promises to grade my papers for me. This technological feat seems small compensation for the loss of trust, cognition and connection behind that promise.

Several years ago, when the state first implemented its online MCAS format, NPS ran a technical trial to check for any glitches. It found a big one, but also revealed what happens when students are left to their own human devices. 

All the students had piled into rooms and opened up their Chromebooks, signed into the state portal, and… nothing. No log in, no icons, no test. The computers themselves sat in stasis. While our poor administrators and IT folks scrambled to jumpstart the testing program, all we could do with groups of randomly assembled kids was sit and wait. 

But kids don’t wait. They play. 

Teenagers hit the floor. They formed circles. They talked and taught each other games they learned at camp. Whole rooms were singing and chanting in unison. I did feel sorry for the responsible central office staff that day, but many of my colleagues still speak of the fun of watching kids, divorced from computers, thoroughly engaged again with one another.

The machines are here to stay. In some ways, they have made my work easier. Maybe they’ve helped some students learn more. We just might not need them in every child’s hand, every day. 

We did, remember, teach forever without them. There might just be a benefit—to children’s well-being and the district’s budget—to keeping things a little “less digital.”

Tom Fabian is an English teacher at Newton North High School and faculty advisor to its student newspaper, the Newtonite. He can be reached at tfabianteaching@gmail.com.