Students across the state are back in school this week, and according to many members, that means a return to excessive screen time, the result of administrators increasingly prioritizing screen-based educational software.
Each week, Lesli Deninno’s first-grade students are supposed to clock a prescribed amount of time on Raz-Kids and ST Math, proprietary educational software.
“I am putting the kids on these programs a certain amount of hours per week, but if you read all the research, it's the exact opposite,” said Deninno, president of the Rockville Centre Teachers Association. “This is not what kids really need. There are so many articles written on this, and it's just counterproductive.”
Over the last decade, in schools across the nation, administrators scrambled to replace old-fashioned paper-and-pencil learning with the latest laptops and tablets. However, a growing body of research is showing that so-called ‘old-fashioned tools’ might actually be better learning tools. A 2024 study “Turning the Page: What Research Indicates About Print vs. Digital Reading” that appeared in Oklahoma Education Journal concluded that young students who spend 10 hours reading print materials will exhibit six to eight times higher levels of reading comprehension than students who spent the same amount of time reading on digital devices, and a 2025 neuroscience study that appeared in Life, concludes that handwriting does a better job than typing when it comes to supporting letter recognition, spelling, reading fluency and memory retention, particularly for young children.
Educators who have seen first-hand what the digital revolution has done to students are starting to raise the alarm.
First-grade teacher Rebecca Donders, a member of the Half Hollow Hills TA, said the conversion to digital learning is getting in the way of important aspects of children’s development.
When statewide digital testing and instruction is mapped against results on the National Assessment of Educational Progress or "the Nation's Report Card," a striking pattern emerges: NAEP reading and math scores declined −1 to −2 points per year after statewide digital adoption, as highlighted in Jared Cooney Horvath’s book, The Digital Delusion.
These drops began before the pandemic, and align with districts moving to one-to-one devices, not the COVID-19 lockdown, Horvath writes. Even more striking, the patterns are duplicated globally with drops in international tests occurring during the same period of digital conversion.
Pamela Puttre, a high school English teacher and member of the Hendrick Hudson EA, calculates that her students are spending more than 20 or more hours a week on screens, and that’s leading to more off-task behaviors and distractions, shortened attention spans, and an overreliance on AI – not to mention academic dishonesty.
“Students’ reading, writing, comprehension and critical thinking skills have all declined over the last six years, and we struggle with students cheating,” said Puttre. “The primary struggle is that students do not see using AI Chatbot as cheating in many cases.”
But what’s worse than that? It turns out AI cheats students, too.
A 2025 study from researchers at MIT's Media Lab demonstrated that when students use AI, it harms their critical thinking skills and memory and retention, and a 2026 Brookings Institution’s Center for Universal Education study concluded that AI’s risks to students far outweigh any potential benefits.
And educators say those kinds of trade-offs are too big for students to weigh on their own. “In my opinion, and in my observation as a professional for more than 30 years in the classroom, high school students' brains are not mature enough or sophisticated enough to anticipate the long-term damage that skipping out on learning will have,” Puttre said.
In May, NYSUT’s Board of Directors passed a resolution that calls for developmentally appropriate limits on screen time and artificial intelligence in New York schools – especially for the youngest learners – while affirming that educators, not technology companies, should drive decisions about how technology is used in the classroom.
NYSUT will continue this conversation at next week’s “Unplugged” event, which will bring together educators, researchers, parents and policymakers to discuss technology trends and explore what it takes to create healthier, more effective learning environments.