With New York’s distraction-free schools policy now taking hold, educators are turning to a larger question: In an era when screens are everywhere, how do we ensure that technology remains a tool for learning rather than a substitute for the relationships and experiences that help students thrive?
With students’ phones out of schools, distractions and bullying are down and students are talking to one another again. And in a recent survey conducted by the Governor’s office, 80 percent of educators reported positive results from the phone-free policy.
But the phones were never the whole problem. New York’s restrictions covered devices students bring in — not the tablets, laptops, and software the schools hand out. Over the past decade, a school-issued device for nearly every child became the default, and when state tests moved onto screens, K–12 schools became the EdTech industry’s single largest customer. Then came AI.
“The future of education isn’t more technology. It’s better judgment about when technology helps and when it gets in the way,” said NYSUT President Melinda Person.
Technology has the power to fundamentally change how instruction is delivered, but in order to maintain its efficacy and ensure all students are reaching their full potential, we have to know how and when to use it.
The case for caution is strongest where children are youngest, because screens tend to displace the very things young children need most: the fine-motor control to hold a pencil, the patience to sit with a problem, and the give-and-take of real conversation.
“We're seeing there's major shifts in motor issues,” said first-grade teacher Lesli Deninno, president of Rockville Centre Teachers Association. The Rockville Centre TA and several other locals introduced a resolution at this year’s RA to reduce excessive screentime in classrooms.
“Children are not holding pencils as often as they used to. If I look at my first-grade class now, the amount of children who do not have a proper grip is unbelievable. Plus, the attention issues, the lack of interpersonal relationships,” Deninno said. “It's really upsetting because we're not doing what's best for kids.”
“There are so many different threads of learning integrated in something as simple as fine motor development that you’re not going to get from tapping away at a screen,” said Jennifer Santosuosso, assistant professor and program chair for early education at Dutchess Community College and a member of the Dutchess United Educators. “They’re using their imagination because they’re developing play scenarios. They’re communicating and problem solving. Or even when they are just snipping with scissors, they are using both of their hands, they are crossing midline, strengthening the muscles in their fingers and wrists, those types of skills that are going to support them in being stronger writers at the next stage.”
Handwriting shows what is at stake. A 2024 brain-imaging study found that writing by hand activates broad connectivity across a child’s brain — including the rhythms tied to learning and memory — while typing lights up only small, localized areas. Play matters too: pediatricians call recess a crucial part of childhood development, yet it keeps shrinking as screens compete for what little time remains in the school day.
This is not nostalgia. For young children, paper, pencils, play and a teacher’s full attention are not extras — they are how learning happens.
As students move up the grades, the harm changes shape. After a decade of one-to-one devices and computer-based testing, the data has taken a troubling turn. Neuroscientist Jared Cooney Horvath has documented how national reading and math scores rose for years, then declined as states rolled out classroom technology. This pattern repeats across states, subjects and grades. On the 2022 PISA assessment, students distracted by devices in math scored about nine points lower than their peers, roughly half a school year. The telling exception: moderate, teacher-directed use of technology was linked to a small gain. The problem is not technology itself, but passive, unstructured use.
“I think the most important question we as educators need to ask ourselves is, would this lesson be better with or without a device?” said Alison Chaplar, technology specialist for her district and president of the Uniondale Teachers Association. Chaplar works closely with teachers across grade levels to determine the appropriate balance between technology and instruction. “Our students are often highly distractible, and I think a big part comes from the constant stimulation they experience through technology.”
AI sharpens the danger. Real learning depends on productive struggle. It’s the hard, sometimes frustrating work of figuring something out that fosters learning skills. A tool that does that work for a student circumvents that process and degrades ability to focus and learn. One 2025 study found that the heaviest AI users scored lowest on tests of critical thinking, a habit researchers call “cognitive offloading.” In an MIT experiment, students who wrote essays with a chatbot showed the weakest brain connectivity and built up what the authors called “cognitive debt.”
“Used liberally, AI is not a cognitive partner; it is a cognitive surrogate. It does not accelerate children’s cognitive development — it diminishes it.” — Brookings Institution, A New Direction for Students in an AI World (2025)
The most troubling signs are not related to test scores but to children’s emotional lives. A 2025 Common Sense Media survey found that 72 percent of teens have used an AI “companion,” more than half of them regularly. A separate study found that nearly one in three teens now turn to chatbots for social or even romantic connections. Built to agree and to keep users engaged, these chatbot programs deny young people the ordinary friction — the small conflicts and misunderstandings — through which children learn empathy, compromise and resilience.
In the worst cases, the consequences have been tragic. In 2025, 16-year-old Adam Raine died by suicide after months of confiding in ChatGPT, which his family says discouraged him from turning to them. A year earlier, 14-year-old Sewell Setzer III took his life after forming an intense attachment to a Character.AI companion. Both families have testified before the U.S. Senate, urging lawmakers to regulate the AI apps they hold responsible.
Here in New York state, a NYSUT-backed bill has passed the legislature placing limitations on chatbots that prohibit features that foster unhealthy emotional attachment or dependency, restricts outputs that could endanger minors and bans content promoting sexually explicit behavior or other harmful actions.
This action at the state level is an important step to push back on the overreliance of unregulated technology and the harm it’s causing our children, intellectually and emotionally.
What links these harms is also their remedy: human teaching and interaction. A skilled educator is exactly what a device cannot replace: the one who spots the struggling reader, models how to wrestle with a hard problem, and builds relationships that help a child grow.
Yet the pressure within the educational ecosystem runs the other way, recasting teachers as facilitators of products designed and sold by someone else. The global EdTech market, projected to more than triple within a decade, has every incentive to sell as much as it can, as early as it can. Too often, those choices arrive in the classroom as a mandate — school administrators pushing a top-down approach, and contracts already signed to adopt a specific classroom technology before a single teacher weighs in.
“It’s a challenge that a lot of educators are feeling right now; this pressure, this feeling of a loss of professional autonomy, not being able to make our own choices in our classrooms,” Santosuosso explained. “Sometimes educators’ hands are tied and it’s really quite frustrating because we know that children really need to be given the opportunity to explore sensory materials and things that can’t be replaced by a screen.”
Educators are increasingly looking for resources and support to help them navigate a teaching environment with an ever-growing number of AI tools. Last year, AFT launched the National Academy for AI Instruction (aiinstruction.org), which promises to help “[shape] the future of AI in public education, grounded in safety, and people-first technology.”
Recently, Santosuosso started a professional development course through SUNY Empire called AI in EdTech and Learning Design and said she can see potential benefits that educators can harness from using the technology but remains cautious about its use for students.
“I do see a glimmer of hope that there can be value in using a system to generate reports or complete administrative tasks that might otherwise take a long time … but I don’t necessarily see the value for students at this early childhood/early elementary age level,” she said. “(Students) really still need to be talking, socializing, exploring ... we don’t want to offload critical thinking skills to a computer system. We still need to remember the heart of early childhood education which is meeting children where they are and using their interests to plan activities that are hands on and meaningful to them.”
NYSUT is not asking schools to turn back the clock. In May 2026, its Board of Directors adopted a resolution calling for developmentally appropriate limits on classroom technology — limits meant as a floor, not a ceiling, with the firmest protections around the youngest learners. The goal is not to banish technology, but to put educators and families, rather than vendors, back in charge of how and when it is used.
And NYSUT is not alone. More than a dozen states are moving to rein in classroom screens, the U.S. surgeon general has warned about youth screen use, and the American Federation of Teachers has urged a “devices-down, eyes-up, hands-on” approach to the AI era.
“Educators are not anti-technology. We are pro-child,” Person said. “Every decision made in the name of innovation must actually serve the students in our classrooms — and NYSUT will lead that fight.”