Last fall, a father in California's Tahoe Truckee Unified School District asked for a screen-free track at his daughter's middle school. Edward Hilton, the district's chief technology officer, invited him to walk through classrooms first. The father saw Socratic discussion and direct instruction, and about a quarter of classes using devices that day. Hilton writes in District Administration that the tour left him with a problem: he couldn't prove the day was typical.

Parents who want screens out entirely are a small group in new polling from the National Parents Union. Echelon Insights surveyed 1,528 public school parents in early September, and NPU paired the results with a May wave of similar size. Eleven percent want screens banned in kindergarten through second grade, 7% want no limits, and 78% want limits without a ban. Republican and Democratic parents landed within four points of each other on every technology policy tested.

The larger numbers are about disclosure. In the May wave, 88% said schools should tell them if their child will use AI, and 84% said schools should disclose when staff use it for lessons, grading or scheduling. When parents graded their child's school on nine measures, communicating clear policies on technology and AI came in last. Just 32% gave it an A.

Hilton's district started counting. Students average 70 to 80 minutes a day on school devices; elementary students average 36. The five most-visited sites were Google Docs, Google search, Google Classroom, a math platform and a reading platform. YouTube averaged about five minutes a day at the high school. The district posted the raw files in a public folder, in English and Spanish, for anyone to download.

The older channels between parents and schools are getting less use. In a new national survey of nearly 2,000 parents from Learning Heroes and Edge Research, 56% said they had attended a parent-teacher conference this school year, an all-time low in the group's tracking. The share who talked with a teacher about how their child is doing academically has dropped 25% since 2022. Yesterday, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a bill from state Sen. Susan Rubio that lets California parents request a conference by phone or online when they can't come in person.

Learning Heroes also asked parents about an AI tool built for them, one where they could upload their child's schoolwork, tests, teacher comments and year-end results, with safeguards for the child's personal information. Eighty percent said they'd be likely to use it, including 86% of Black parents. In NPU's September wave, 86% of parents supported banning tech companies from using or harvesting children's online data, the highest score of any policy the group has tested.

Hilton writes that the father now talks about the district's approach "with something closer to pride." The project didn't need new money: the reporting tool came built into Securly, the digital safety platform the district already used. Parents in neighboring districts have called to ask how to copy it.

— Thomas

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