The Los Angeles Unified School District recently approved the most sweeping pullback on screen-time of any big city public K-12 system in the U.S.

Under the draft policy, students up through first grade get zero screen time at school. Second and third grades get no more than 20 minutes a day. Grades four and five, half-hour tops. Older students get a school-issued computer with suggested use time. Social media will be blocked on school devices. And both personal and school devices will be prohibited during lunch, recess, and passing periods.

SFUSD, meanwhile, relies heavily on school-issued computers and digital curriculum (opens in new tab). Instead of a systemwide policy, the district leaves it up to administrators and teachers to use school-issued devices however they see fit.

The digital crackdown came in no small part because of a parent-led coalition called Schools Beyond Screens, which has since expanded to more than 150 school districts — including in San Francisco.

With the group bringing its advocacy to SFUSD, we caught up with its deputy director, L.A. screenwriter Anya Meksin, to talk about how she became a crusader against technology’s takeover of public education.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

I’m not a hardliner by any means — I’m a screenwriter, I’m a filmmaker. I’ve exposed my child to what I consider meaningful film, art, and animation — things that I think are amazing enrichments for him. But using a screen as the delivery mechanism for all curriculum is extremely problematic.

The idea that children are going to learn basic academic skills by playing gamified apps — the evidence just shows that they’re not learning. Cognitive skills are declining, attention spans are declining, executive functioning skills are declining. Human brains don’t work well by learning from screens. All of the research says one thing; why are the schools doing another?

And the more I dug into that, it was a case of follow the money.

There are for-profit edtech companies that have infiltrated our public school systems, using taxpayer money to get huge contracts for untested, unproved products that are making our children addicted and not giving them measurable benefits. There weren’t policies in place, or guidelines, or transparency on any of these things districts were basically listening to sales reps from for-profit companies that were setting district policy on how the curriculum is going to be delivered.

No. I was always set on sending my child to public school. I believe in public education — it’s a really important public good and the basis of an informed society. I also don’t have the means to send my kid to private school. For me, it’s important to figure this out rather than detach and retreat into our own private world.

This isn’t just about my kid and his education. It’s about the future of society and the future of humanity. Do we have the right to human consciousness? Do we have the right to cognition? Are those rights that can be protected in childhood? I think these are really important philosophical questions for us to be asking as a society, because tech companies are actively trying to colonize our inner world, our minds, our attention, our very limited time on this planet.

The tech industry is very good at selling this vision of the future to districts. They say, “This is inevitable, this is the future, this is how it has to be. If you don’t get on board, you’re doing a huge disservice to these students.” There’s a lot of fear-mongering, a lot of pressure, a lot of equity talk — if you don’t give iPads and Chromebooks to every student, you’re punishing poor children. 

The vast majority of people in public service — teachers, administrators, district officials — are goodhearted people who have the best interests of children and the community in mind. I just think there’s a culture of accepting this doctrine as truth when in fact it is just a sales pitch. Tech companies move fast and break things. And one of the things they moved fast and broke was public education.

I think AI is really problematic for children to be using in school. I’m in favor of a moratorium on the use of large language models by children.

What research is showing us is massive cognitive offloading and cognitive atrophy — and that’s been documented in adults using AI. So what’s going to happen to children who haven’t even built the cognitive structures yet? They’re basically not going to build those parts of their brain at all. I think that’s a kind of child abuse, to be honest.

I already think things are getting better just from the increased awareness and dialogue around these issues — having teachers, administrators, and parents continuously asking these questions is what creates a culture of accountability and responsibility around tech use. It’s not going to be like we suddenly arrive at some glorious new future where everyone is happy and protected. This is going to be an ongoing process of push and pull.

But in concrete terms: a drastic reduction in screen-based learning, and a return to kids reading books and texts, analyzing literature, learning to write by hand, learning to write long-form pieces themselves without relying on AI to do it for them. A computer lab model for the early grades, certainly. In high school, students need more independence but there should still be pretty stringent rules around technology use, particularly AI.