Randi Weingarten is right about screens in classrooms — but don’t stop there

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Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, has made a remarkable admission: Screens are damaging children’s ability to learn.

Weingarten recently announced a 10-point plan to ban screens and limit artificial intelligence in our nation’s classrooms. She says she is standing up for “the essential purpose of education: teaching students how to think and giving them enough knowledge to do it well.”

As a former teacher with 14 years working with students, I couldn’t agree more. Limiting screens is a welcome start. But Weingarten has also been one of the most powerful defenders of an educational establishment that allowed schools to drift in the first place. The larger challenge is to return schools to their core mission.

Screens are only the most visible symbol of a deeper problem. The same institutions that pushed devices into classrooms have also ushered in the precipitous decline in children’s reading and math skills — all while embracing politicized frameworks that distract from academic subjects.

Parents are not merely asking for fewer screens; we are asking schools to recover their core purpose of educating our kids.

Teachers and parents see the damage from so much exposure to technology every day. Children are less able to sustain attention. Many struggle to read a full page, write a coherent paragraph, or sit with a problem long enough to solve it, and their mental health is suffering. A classroom built around apps, gamified lessons and AI shortcuts does not produce deeper learning or student well-being. Too often, it trains children to skim, click and move on.

So give credit where it is due: Less screen time in school is a good idea. It supports focus. It cultivates cognitive skills. It underscores the human relationships in the classrooms, an important part of student development. And it gives children more time with books, discussion, and the productive intellectual struggles that real learning requires.

But Weingarten should not stop there. There are many deeper problems in the school system over which she has an enormous amount of power.

Parents and teachers want a return to basics in more ways than just on technology. We want a return to schools focusing on reading, writing, math, history, science, civics and disciplined habits of mind. We want schools that teach children to decode words, understand difficult texts, reason from evidence, speak with confidence and know our country’s history — warts and all. We want classrooms that form capable human beings, not laboratories for every new educational theory or political trend.

Education is both a private good and a public good. It helps the individual child build knowledge, character, independence, and opportunity. It also helps the country sustain an informed citizenry, a productive economy, and a shared civic life. A nation that cannot teach children to read, write, think and argue constructively cannot remain self-governing for long.

Yet too many schools have lost sight of that mission. The basics have been crowded out by ideological frameworks, which are now embedded in state bureaucratic rules that govern teacher training, licensure, and curriculum.

The evidence is hard to ignore. The U.S. now spends nearly $1 trillion per year on public K-12 education — about $17,600 per pupil — yet reading and math scores remain dismal across the country. This is not a problem of investment. It is a problem of mission-drift. Schools have drifted from their most basic responsibility: teaching children to read, write, and think.

AI makes the problem even more urgent. AI can be useful for adults who already know how to read, think, reason, and evaluate. But for children who have not yet built those capacities, it can become a substitute for developing them.

“Back to basics” for education is more than nostalgia; it is an urgent and necessary correction that recognizes the importance of academics for development. Children need facts before analysis. They need to understand complexity before they can critique it. And they need schools that cultivate attention, evidentiary thinking, logic, reasoning, and agreeable disagreement.

This is where Weingarten has an opportunity. If she recognizes that screen overuse has damaged learning, she should also recognize the broader concern. It is not just the devices that are distracting from learning. It is also the union’s commitment to taking sides on divisive political issues that push academics to the backburner —  to the detriment of our nation’s millions of children.

So yes, put the screens away. But then it is just as important to put books back at the center. Let children encounter the world through language, knowledge and human instruction. Teach them to read closely, to ask questions and to think independently.

Weingarten has identified a real problem; now she should follow the logic where it leads. The screen debate is only the beginning. The deeper question is whether American schools will once again do the work our society needs from them: to educate children well enough to become free, capable, responsible citizens.

Dana Stangel-Plowe, an educator and attorney, serves as the Chief Program Officer at North American Values Institute.

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