Are Screens to Blame for a Decade-long Slide in U.S. Test Scores?
TLDR: The decline in U.S. math and reading scores likely defy any single explanation, and cell phone bans won’t get us out of it.
If you pay any attention to national news on education and student academic performance in the United States, then you won’t have missed this recent headline in the New York Times: Why U.S. Test Scores Are in a ‘Generation-Long Decline’. The story covered newly released district-level test score data from the Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford University, which shows that students across America – regardless of district demographics or geography – are performing worse in both math and reading than their peers did a decade ago. While exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, this downward trend in student performance on state standardized assessments began well before 2020.
There is no single explanation for these declines but, as the NY Times story notes, their onset coincides with the easing of No Child Left Behind-era accountability measures and with the ascendance of social media, smartphones, and one-to-one computing in schools.
Darn you, ed tech?
This latter explanation strikes a chord that is already furiously vibrating across mainstream media, education circles, and my own personal network. At least 17 states are considering legislation that would limit the use of screens during school hours, while nearly 40 states have passed legislation to prohibit or restrict cell phone use in schools. And numerous friends and colleagues in different parts of the country have shared concerns about the amount of time their children seem to be spending on screens at school.
Concerns about overuse of screens and educational technology in schools, shared among a broad coalition of parents, policymakers, educators and even celebrities, are not unfounded. Whether we can place the blame for a decade of declining student performance on phones and screens, however, is less clear. Profound shifts typically defy any single explanation.
Also unclear is whether all-out cell phone bans or strict mandates limiting the use of ed tech in schools will do more good than harm. Top-down blanket mandates have a history of mixed efficacy in U.S. public education and are notorious for producing unintended consequences down the road.
But then what’s to be done?
From Bans to Better Evidence
Screens, social media, and (at lightning speed) AI have become part of the collective social fabric and woven into the rhythms of our individual daily lives. Collectively, we left schools largely on their own to deal with the ways these changes have profoundly impacted education. Most people I talk to recognize this.
As I’ve listened to concerns from friends and colleagues about their children’s screen time at school, more than anything they are frustrated by a lack of communication and transparency. They want greater clarity from teachers and school leaders about how much time their children are actually spending on screens and for what purposes, and about whether the ed-tech applications used by the school are backed by clear evidence of effectiveness.
Rather than blanket bans and top-down mandates, this suggests that we instead need more nuanced and evidence-informed solutions: district-wide tech audits that document students’ screen time for different purposes, independent research examining the effectiveness of specific tools and applications as well varying frameworks for technology use in schools, and age-appropriate digital (including AI) literacy curricula to prepare students for the realities of the current and future technologies that will continue to permeate their schooling and their lives.