The almost 500,000 students in the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) will all experience a dramatic technological shift this fall. The California district just announced a first-in-the-nation overhaul of their policies regarding screen time in the classroom, use of take-home technology, and artificial intelligence use. LAUSD is imposing harsh caps on weekly screen time in the classroom and taking away automatic personal student laptops.
LAUSD’s new adoption is a grand experiment as to how technology limits can be implemented at scale. (For context, Minnesota’s entire statewide population is only about 1.5 times the L.A. school district, clocking in at around 780,000 students.)
The move comes as concern continues to grow about rising digital addiction, off-task behavior, and corporate involvement in ed-tech sales. Even if LAUSD’s first attempt at regulation highlights a few policy positions as misses, the L.A. district is doing the United States a favor by running the experiment at all.
Minnesota’s school districts should watch these reforms closely. While not everything will stick, it will be helpful to see what works, what doesn’t — and why.
The Shift
LAUSD will now impose strict screen time limits, with different hours depending on the grade. Students below second grade will not be allowed to use screens at all. Starting in second grade, students can use a total of 1 hour and 40 minutes per week on a screen. Screen time rises as students age. Standardized testing and tech-based courses don’t count towards the time limit.
Middle schoolers will receive one hour of screen time per week within each class, which totals six hours across the week. The number rises to 1.5 hours per week for each class in high school, for a total of ten hours.
Teachers won’t be playing whack-a-mole with their students’ computers anymore. The district’s new rule removes the previous practice of issuing a personal school computer for every student to take home. The classroom cart, full of computers, will be making a comeback. Low-income families can take comfort in the fact that free laptops will still be available upon request for families.
Homework is included in the screen time limits.
The district is serious about the new rules. All school computers will be newly programmed with a software that tracks screen time usage over the weekly time period.
AI use, currently permitted for students 13 and up, is seemingly next on the chopping block. Board members and parent groups have spoken about the technology as potentially harmful for young learners.
Administrators in the district are largely backed up by parents. The digital moratorium was fueled by parent concern, proven by several petitions. The new rules gain popularity through ever-increasing concern from district parents that ed-tech can heavily distract from real learning and provide a portal for digital distraction.
It’s not a perfect policy
After the free-for-all digital push of the last decade, it’s become clear that throwing technology into the classroom doesn’t solve previous issues like disengagement, but instead creates new ones like digital addiction, off-task websurfing, and thoughtless scrolling. While LAUSD’s new policy does an admirable job of creating more intentionality around ed-tech in the classroom, there are still some kinks that need to be worked out.
Many advanced high school courses, like Advanced Placement (AP) courses, have a centralized curriculum designed around an online student portal. As AP courses often require an hour or more spent on homework every night, the idea that students can limit their digital use while completing homework seems a bit shortsighted. The district may have to expand high school time limits for certain classes.
Additionally, the use of screen time boundaries as the primary limiting factor is a very blunt instrument. What about helpful uses of screen time, like digital dictionaries or encyclopedias? Education policy writer Meredith Coffey writes,
The first guardrails should go up around the tools, rather than the minutes. If students are engaging in low-quality or off-task activities, that’s a problem for any amount of time. Conversely, if they’re engaging productively with tech, that time shouldn’t face arbitrary limits.
While I agree with Coffey’s sentiment, I’ll point out that we currently live in the Wild West of education and digital technology. Teachers who think that a Blooket or Kahoot game is a deeply profitable use of a class period need professional development and a digital reset before they’re ready to think strategically about digital tools. Administrators need to get serious about blocking off-task sites like Roblox and Youtube, and prove that they’re willing to back up teachers who ask them to intervene with off-task students.
None of that has happened yet, and a dramatic shift will have to occur for it to do so. LAUSD’s move here is a blunt, sweeping first step. If the district can learn to handle digital nuance, it shouldn’t be the last step.
The strongest part of LAUSD’s policy is the implementation of the class laptop cart. When every student (no matter their age) has a laptop in front of them during every class period, it is incredibly difficult for them to resist the urge to peek. The easy access to personal technology also allows teachers to slide into digital reliance when they choose lesson content. The physical removal of the devices from everyday classroom use means that when they return, teachers and students alike are prepared to use them with intentionality.
(Plus, the district will save a pretty penny by not handing out a personal laptop for everyone’s use.)
Currently, the Minnesota Department of Education only requires that districts have a plan for how to handle personal cell phone use, and that little learners (PK-K) can’t use individual screens without teacher engagement. Individual Minnesota districts should be more thoughtful. Minnesota districts can and should take a page out of LAUSD’s book. Particularly, districts should consider a simple shift this fall away from personal laptop distribution to a classroom technology cart.