City officials held a rally ahead of a NYC council meeting Tuesday on the use of technology and screen time in DOE schools.
Photo:Will Alatriste/NYC Council Media Unit
Lawmakers, parents, educators and advocates rallied Tuesday ahead of a City Council oversight hearing on screen time and digital devices in schools and called on New York City Public Schools to ban some types of screens for students, return to analog testing and seek more evidence around technology in education.
Council Member Shekar Krishnan (D-Queens) and Education Committee Chair Eric Dinowitz (D-Bronx) hosted the rally at City Hall Park ahead of the hearing and stressed that technology should supplement education in school, not replace it.
“We will not let the greed of big technology companies get in the way of our children’ s future or their educational success,” Krishnan said at the rally.
The hearing’s co-chair, Dinowitz, told onlookers that he worried the reliance on technology during the COVID-19 pandemic had overstayed its usefulness. The Bronx council member was a public school teacher when education went remote in 2020, and every NYC public school student was issued a device and asked to learn through a screen.
“The kids stopped going to school, and they were immediately given devices,” Dinowitz said. “We were teaching, and they were learning on screens.”
He said it was a solution to a national emergency, but that once pandemic precautions subsided, educational reliance on technology remained, creating a barrier between NYC students and teachers.
“Instead of looking across the desk at one another, they were looking down at a screen,” he said.
“The same thing we ask our children to do in essays, we are asking the DOE to do today
Education technology in the city has been under immense pressure recently. In recent weeks, the DOE chose to suspend the use of student-facing, generative AI in the classroom from 2-K to 8th grade for one year. The decision came after months of pressure from parents, educators and advocates.
But the hearing didn’t just follow the DOE’s AI decision. It came on the heels of explosive revelations over the weekend, when executives from AI companies like Anthropic and Open AI publicly called for the industry to slow down the technology’s development due to concerns over public safety and unchecked regulations.
The news sparked renewed calls for regulation around AI and Big Tech. Local lawmakers such as Council Member Carmen De La Rosa (D-Manhattan) emphasized the personal responsibility that government has to its youngest citizens.
De La Rosa spoke about how children in the NYC public school system had been prompted by ed tech applications approved by the NYC Department of Education to authorize payments which would advance them to the next level of a game.
“It is on all of us to create the guardrails that are going to keep our children safe,” De La Rosa said.