A Dark Consensus About Screens and Kids Begins to Emerge in Silicon Valley
“I am convinced the devil lives in our phones.”
SAN FRANCISCO — The people who are closest to a thing are often the most wary of it. Technologists know how phones really work, and many have decided they don’t want their own children anywhere near them.
A wariness that has been slowly brewing is turning into a regionwide consensus: The benefits of screens as a learning tool are overblown, and the risks for addiction and stunting development seem high. The debate in Silicon Valley now is about how much exposure to phones is O.K.
“Doing no screen time is almost easier than doing a little,” said Kristin Stecher, a former social computing researcher married to a Facebook engineer. “If my kids do get it at all, they just want it more.”
Ms. Stecher, 37, and her husband, Rushabh Doshi, researched screen time and came to a simple conclusion: they wanted almost none of it in their house. Their daughters, ages 5 and 3, have no screen time “budget,” no regular hours they are allowed to be on screens. The only time a screen can be used is during the travel portion of a long car ride (the four-hour drive to Tahoe counts) or during a plane trip.
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Recently she has softened this approach. Every Friday evening the family watches one movie.
There is a looming issue Ms. Stecher sees in the future: Her husband, who is 39, loves video games and thinks they can be educational and entertaining. She does not.
“We’ll cross that when we come to it,” said Ms. Stecher, who is due soon with a boy.
Some of the people who built video programs are now horrified by how many places a child can now watch a video.
Asked about limiting screen time for children, Hunter Walk, a venture capitalist who for years directed product for YouTube at Google, sent a photo of a potty training toilet with an iPad attached and wrote: “Hashtag ‘products we didn’t buy.’”
Athena Chavarria, who worked as an executive assistant at Facebook and is now at Mark Zuckerberg’s philanthropic arm, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, said: “I am convinced the devil lives in our phones and is wreaking havoc on our children.”
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Ms. Chavarria did not let her children have cellphones until high school, and even now bans phone use in the car and severely limits it at home.
She said she lives by the mantra that the last child in the class to get a phone wins. Her daughter did not get a phone until she started ninth grade.
“Other parents are like, ‘Aren’t you worried you don’t know where your kids are when you can’t find them?’” Ms. Chavarria said. “And I’m like, ‘No, I do not need to know where my kids are every second of the day.’”
For longtime tech leaders, watching how the tools they built affect their children has felt like a reckoning on their life and work.
Among those is Chris Anderson, the former editor of Wired and now the chief executive of a robotics and drone company. He is also the founder of GeekDad.com.
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“On the scale between candy and crack cocaine, it’s closer to crack cocaine,” Mr. Anderson said of screens.
Technologists building these products and writers observing the tech revolution were naïve, he said.
“We thought we could control it,” Mr. Anderson said. “And this is beyond our power to control. This is going straight to the pleasure centers of the developing brain. This is beyond our capacity as regular parents to understand.”
He has five children and 12 tech rules. They include: no phones until the summer before high school, no screens in bedrooms, network-level content blocking, no social media until age 13, no iPads at all and screen time schedules enforced by Google Wifi that he controls from his phone. Bad behavior? The child goes offline for 24 hours.
“I didn’t know what we were doing to their brains until I started to observe the symptoms and the consequences,” Mr. Anderson said.
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“This is scar tissue talking. We’ve made every mistake in the book, and I think we got it wrong with some of my kids,” Mr. Anderson said. “We glimpsed into the chasm of addiction, and there were some lost years, which we feel bad about.”
His children attended private elementary school, where he saw the administration introduce iPads and smart whiteboards, only to “descend into chaos and then pull back from it all.”
This idea that Silicon Valley parents are wary about tech is not new. The godfathers of tech expressed these concerns years ago, and concern has been loudest from the top.
Tim Cook, the C.E.O. of Apple, said earlier this year that he would not let his nephew join social networks. Bill Gates banned cellphones until his children were teenagers, and Melinda Gates wrote that she wished they had waited even longer. Steve Jobs would not let his young children near iPads.
But in the last year, a fleet of high-profile Silicon Valley defectors have been sounding alarms in increasingly dire terms about what these gadgets do to the human brain. Suddenly rank-and-file Silicon Valley workers are obsessed. No-tech homes are cropping up across the region. Nannies are being asked to sign no-phone contracts.
Those who have exposed their children to screens try to talk them out of addiction by explaining how the tech works.
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John Lilly, a Silicon Valley-based venture capitalist with Greylock Partners and the former C.E.O. of Mozilla, said he tries to help his 13-year-old son understand that he is being manipulated by those who built the technology.
“I try to tell him somebody wrote code to make you feel this way — I’m trying to help him understand how things are made, the values that are going into things and what people are doing to create that feeling,” Mr. Lilly said. “And he’s like, ‘I just want to spend my 20 bucks to get my Fortnite skins.’”
And there are those in tech who disagree that screens are dangerous. Jason Toff, 32, who ran the video platform Vine and now works for Google, lets his 3-year-old play on an iPad, which he believes is no better or worse than a book. This opinion is unpopular enough with his fellow tech workers that he feels there is now “a stigma.”
“One reaction I got just yesterday was, ‘Doesn’t it worry you that all the major tech execs are limiting screen time?’” Mr. Toff said. “And I was like, ‘Maybe it should, but I guess I’ve always been skeptical of norms.’ People are just scared of the unknown.”
“It’s contrarian,” Mr. Toff said. “But I feel like I’m speaking for a lot of parents that are afraid of speaking out loud for fear of judgment.”
He said he thinks back to his own childhood growing up watching a lot of TV. “I think I turned out O.K.,” Mr. Toff said.
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Other Silicon Valley parents say there are ways to make some limited screen time slightly less toxic.
Renee DiResta, a security researcher on the board of the Center for Humane Tech, won’t allow passive screen time, but will allow short amounts of time on challenging games.
She wants her 2- and 4-year-old children to learn how to code young, so she embraces their awareness of gadgets. But she distinguishes between these types of screen use. Playing a building game is allowed, but watching a YouTube video is not, unless it is as a family.
And Frank Barbieri, a San Francisco-based executive at the start-up PebblePost that tracks online activity to send direct mail advertising, tries to limit his 5-year-old daughter’s screen time to Italian language content.
“We have friends who are screen abolitionists, and we have friends who are screen liberalists,” Mr. Barbieri said.
He had read studies on how learning a second language at a young age is good for the developing mind, so his daughter watches Italian-language movies and TV shows.
“For us, honestly, me and my wife were like, ‘Where would we like to visit?’” Mr. Barbieri said.
Nellie Bowles covers tech and internet culture. Follow her on Twitter: @nelliebowles
Silicon Valley Nannies Are Phone Police for Kids
Child care contracts now demand that nannies hide phones, tablets, computers and TVs from their charges.
SAN FRANCISCO — Silicon Valley parents are increasingly obsessed with keeping their children away from screens. Even a little screen time can be so deeply addictive, some parents believe, that it’s best if a child neither touches nor sees any of these glittering rectangles. These particular parents, after all, deeply understand their allure.
But it’s very hard for a working adult in the 21st century to live at home without looking at a phone. And so, as with many aspirations and ideals, it’s easier to hire someone to do this.
Enter the Silicon Valley nanny, who each day returns to the time before screens.
“Usually a day consists of me being allowed to take them to the park, introduce them to card games,” said Jordin Altmann, 24, a nanny in San Jose, of her charges. “Board games are huge.”
“Almost every parent I work for is very strong about the child not having any technical experience at all,” Ms. Altmann said. “In the last two years, it’s become a very big deal.”
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From Cupertino to San Francisco, a growing consensus has emerged that screen time is bad for kids. It follows that these parents are now asking nannies to keep phones, tablets, computers and TVs off and hidden at all times. Some are even producing no-phone contracts, which guarantee zero unauthorized screen exposure, for their nannies to sign.
The fear of screens has reached the level of panic in Silicon Valley. Vigilantes now post photos to parenting message boards of possible nannies using cellphones near children. Which is to say, the very people building these glowing hyper-stimulating portals have become increasingly terrified of them. And it has put their nannies in a strange position.
“In the last year everything has changed,” said Shannon Zimmerman, a nanny in San Jose who works for families that ban screen time. “Parents are now much more aware of the tech they’re giving their kids. Now it’s like, ‘Oh no, reel it back, reel it back.’ Now the parents will say ‘No screen time at all.’”
Ms. Zimmerman likes these new rules, which she said harken back to a time when kids behaved better and knew how to play outside.
Parents, though, find the rules harder to follow themselves, Ms. Zimmerman said.
“Most parents come home, and they’re still glued to their phones, and they’re not listening to a word these kids are saying,” Ms. Zimmerman said. “Now I’m the nanny ripping out the cords from the PlayStations.”
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The Nanny Contracts
Parents are now asking nannies to sign stringent “no-phone use contracts,” according to nannying agencies across the region.
“The people who are closest to tech are the most strict about it at home,” said Lynn Perkins, the C.E.O. of UrbanSitter, which she says has 500,000 sitters in the network throughout the United States. “We see that trend with our nannies very clearly.”
The phone contracts basically stipulate that a nanny must agree not to use any screen, for any purpose, in front of the child. Often there is a caveat that the nanny may take calls from the parent. “We do a lot of these phone contracts now,” Ms. Perkins said.
“We’re writing work agreements up in a different way to cover screen and tech use,” said Julie Swales, who runs the Elizabeth Rose Agency, a high-end firm that staffs nannies and house managers for families in the region. “Typically now, the nanny is not allowed to use her phone for any private use.”
This can be tricky. These same parents often want updates through the day.
“If the mom does call and the nanny picks up, it’s, ‘Well what are you doing that you can be on your phone?’” Ms. Swales said. “Damned if you do, damned if you don’t.”
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She said that at least wealthy tech executives know what they want — no phones at all. The harder families to staff are those that are still unsure how to handle tech.
“It’s almost safer to some degree in those houses because they know what they’re dealing with,” she said, “as opposed to other families who are still trying to muddle their way in tech.”
Narcing Out Nannies
Some parents in Silicon Valley are embracing a more aggressive approach. While their offices are churning out gadgets and apps, the nearby parks are full of phone spies. These hobbyists take it upon themselves to monitor and alert the flock. There are nannies who may be pushing a swing with one hand and texting with the other, or inadvertently exposing a toddler to a TV through a shop window.
“The nanny spotters, the nanny spies,” said Ms. Perkins, the UrbanSitter C.E.O. “They’re self-appointed, but at least every day there’s a post in one of the forums.”
The posts follow a pattern: A parent will take a photo of a child accompanied by an adult who is perceived to be not paying enough attention, upload it to one of the private social networks like San Francisco’s Main Street Mamas, home to thousands of members, and ask: “Is this your nanny?”
She calls the practice “nanny-outing.”
“What I’ll see is, ‘Did anyone have a daughter with a red bow in Dolores Park? Your nanny was on her phone not paying attention,’” Ms. Perkins said.
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The forums, where parents post questions and buy and sell baby gear, are now reckoning with public shaming and privacy issues. Main Street Mamas has recently banned photos from being included in these ‘nanny spotted’ posts, Ms. Perkins said.
“We follow and are part of quite a large number of social media groups around the Bay Area, and we’ve had families scout out nannies at parks,” said Syma Latif, who runs Bay Area Sitters, which has about 200 nannies in rotation. “It’ll be like, ‘Is this your nanny? She’s texting and the child is on the swing.’”
Sometimes a parent will step in to defend the nanny and declare that the phone use at that moment was allowed.
“They’ll say, ‘Actually it was my nanny, and she was texting me but thank you for the heads up,’” Ms. Latif said. “Of course it’s very, very offensive on a human rights level. You’re being tracked and monitored and put on social media. But I do think it comes from a genuine concern.”
Commenters will jump in to defend someone — or to point out that no one can be sure whether the perpetrator is a parent or a nanny. The standards are different.
“There is this thought that the moms can be on their phones,” Ms. Latif said. “They can be texting, because it’s their child.”
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Others say it shouldn’t make a difference.
Anita Castro, 51, has been a nanny in Silicon Valley for 12 years. She says she knows she works in homes that have cameras set up to film her. She thinks the nanny outing posts cross a line and feel like “an invasion.”
“I use the forums to find jobs, but now just reading the titles: ‘I saw your nanny…’” Ms. Castro said. “Who are these people? Are they the neighbors? Are they friends?”
A few weeks ago at the Los Altos library, another nanny told Ms. Castro about quitting after one mom followed her around parks to snoop.
“She’d pop up and say, ‘Hey, you’re not on your phone, are you? You’re not letting him do that, are you?” Ms. Castro recalled. “So she finally just said, ‘You know, I don’t think you need a nanny.’”
Nellie Bowles covers tech and internet culture. Follow her on Twitter: @nelliebowles
The Digital Gap Between Rich and Poor Kids Is Not What We Expected
America’s public schools are still promoting devices with screens — even offering digital-only preschools. The rich are banning screens from class altogether.
The parents in Overland Park, Kan., were fed up. They wanted their children off screens, but they needed strength in numbers. First, because no one wants their kid to be the lone weird one without a phone. And second, because taking the phone away from a middle schooler is actually very, very tough.
“We start the meetings by saying, ‘This is hard, we’re in a new frontier, but who is going to help us?’” said Krista Boan, who is leading a Kansas City-based program called START, which stands for Stand Together And Rethink Technology. “We can’t call our moms about this one.”
For the last six months, at night in school libraries across Overland Park, a suburb of Kansas City, Mo., about 150 parents have been meeting to talk about one thing: how to get their children off screens.
It wasn’t long ago that the worry was that rich students would have access to the internet earlier, gaining tech skills and creating a digital divide. Schools ask students to do homework online, while only about two-thirds of people in the U.S. have broadband internet service. But now, as Silicon Valley’s parents increasingly panic over the impact screens have on their children and move toward screen-free lifestyles, worries over a new digital divide are rising. It could happen that the children of poorer and middle-class parents will be raised by screens, while the children of Silicon Valley’s elite will be going back to wooden toys and the luxury of human interaction.
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This is already playing out. Throwback play-basedpreschools are trending in affluent neighborhoods — but Utah has been rolling out a state-funded online-only preschool, now serving around 10,000 children. Organizers announced that the screen-based preschool effort would expand in 2019 with a federal grant to Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota, Idaho and Montana.
Lower-income teenagers spend an average of eight hours and seven minutes a day using screens for entertainment, while higher income peers spend five hours and 42 minutes, according to research by Common Sense Media, a nonprofit media watchdog. (This study counted each screen separately, so a child texting on a phone and watching TV for one hour counted as two hours of screens being used.) Two studies that look at race have found that white children are exposed to screens significantly less than African-American and Hispanic children.
And parents say there is a growing technological divide between public and private schools even in the same community. While the private Waldorf School of the Peninsula, popular with Silicon Valley executives, eschews most screens, the nearby public Hillview Middle School advertises its 1:1 iPad program.
The psychologist Richard Freed, who wrote a book about the dangers of screen-time for children and how to connect them back to real world experiences, divides his time between speaking before packed rooms in Silicon Valley and his clinical practice with low-income families in the far East Bay, where he is often the first one to tell parents that limiting screen-time might help with attention and behavior issues.
“I go from speaking to a group in Palo Alto who have read my book to Antioch, where I am the first person to mention any of these risks,” Dr. Freed said.
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He worries especially about how the psychologists who work for these companies make the tools phenomenally addictive, as many are well-versed in the field of persuasive design (or how to influence human behavior through the screen). Examples: YouTube next video autoplays; the slot machine-like pleasure of refreshing Instagram for likes; Snapchat streaks.
“The digital divide was about access to technology, and now that everyone has access, the new digital divide is limiting access to technology,” said Chris Anderson, the former editor of Wired magazine.
Technology Is a Huge Social Experiment on Children
Some parents, pediatricians and teachers around the country are pushing back.
“These companies lied to the schools, and they’re lying to the parents,” said Natasha Burgert, a pediatrician in Kansas City. “We’re all getting duped.”
“Our kids, my kids included, we are subjecting them to one of the biggest social experiments we have seen in a long time,” she said. “What happens to my daughter if she can’t communicate over dinner — how is she going to find a spouse? How is she going to interview for a job?”
“I have families now that go teetotal,” Dr. Burgert said. “They’re like, ‘That’s it, we’re done.’”
One of those families are the Brownsbergers, who had long banned smartphones but recently also banned the internet-connected television.
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“We took it down, we took the TV off the wall, and I canceled cable,” said Rachael Brownsberger, 34, the mother of 11- and 8-year old boys. “As crazy as that sounds!”
More on the new digital divide
She and her husband, who runs a decorative concrete company, keep their children away from cellphones but found that even a little exposure to screen time changed the boys’ behavior. Her older son, who has A.D.H.D., would get angry when the screen had to be turned off, she said, which worried her.
His Christmas wish list was a Wii, a PlayStation, a Nintendo, a MacBook Pro and an iPhone.
“And I told him, ‘Kiddo, you’re not gonna get one of those things,’” Ms. Brownsberger said. “Yeah, I’m the mean mom.”
But one thing has made it easier: Others in what she described as a rural neighborhood outside Kansas City are doing the same thing.
“It takes a community to support this,” she said. “Like I was just talking to my neighbor last night — ‘Am I the worst mom ever?’”
Ms. Boan has three pilots running with about 40 parents in each, looking at best practices for getting kids off phones and screens. Overland Park’s Chamber of Commerce is supporting the work, and the city is working to incorporate elements of digital wellness into its new strategic vision.
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“The city planner and the chamber of commerce said to us, ‘We’ve seen this impact our city,’” Ms. Boan said. “We all want our kids to be independent, self-regulated device users, but we have to equip them.”
The Privilege of Choices
In Silicon Valley, some feel anxious about the growing class divide they see around screen-time.
Kirstin Stecher and her husband, who works as an engineer at Facebook, are raising their kids almost completely screen-free.
“Is this coming from a place of information — like, we know a lot about these screens,” she said. “Or is it coming from a place of privilege, that we don’t need them as badly?”
“There’s a message out there that your child is going to be crippled and in a different dimension if they’re not on the screen,” said Pierre Laurent, a former Microsoft and Intel executive now on the board of trustees at Silicon Valley’s Waldorf School. “That message doesn’t play as well in this part of the world.”
“People in this region of the world understand that the real thing is everything that’s happening around big data, AI, and that is not something that you’re going to be particularly good at because you have a cellphone in fourth grade,” Mr. Laurent said.
As those working to build products become more wary, the business of getting screens in front of kids is booming. Apple and Google compete ferociously to get products into schools and target students at an early age, when brand loyalty begins to form.
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Google published a case study of its work with the Hoover City, Ala., school district, saying technology equips students “with skills of the future.”
The company concluded that its own Chromebooks and Google tools changed lives: “The district leaders believe in preparing students for success by teaching them the skills, knowledge, and behaviors they need to become responsible citizens in the global community.”
Dr. Freed, though, argues these tools are too relied upon in schools for low-income children. And he sees the divide every day as he meets tech-addicted children of middle and low-income families.
“For a lot of kids in Antioch, those schools don’t have the resources for extracurricular activities, and their parents can’t afford nannies,” Dr. Freed said. He said the knowledge gap around tech’s danger is enormous.
Dr. Freed and 200 other psychologists petitioned the American Psychological Association in August to formally condemn the work psychologists are doing with persuasive design for tech platforms that are designed for children.
“Once it sinks its teeth into these kids, it’s really hard,” Dr. Freed said.
Nellie Bowles covers tech and internet culture. Follow her on Twitter: @nelliebowles
Silicon Valley Came to Kansas Schools. That Started a Rebellion.
WELLINGTON, Kan. — The seed of rebellion was planted in classrooms. It grew in kitchens and living rooms, in conversations between students and their parents.
It culminated when Collin Winter, 14, an eighth grader in McPherson, Kan., joined a classroom walkout in January. In the nearby town of Wellington, high schoolers staged a sit-in. Their parents organized in living rooms, at churches and in the back of machine repair shops. They showed up en masse to school board meetings. In neighborhoods with no political yard signs, homemade signs with dark red slash marks suddenly popped up.
Silicon Valley had come to small-town Kansas schools — and it was not going well.
“I want to just take my Chromebook back and tell them I’m not doing it anymore,” said Kallee Forslund, 16, a 10th grader in Wellington.
Eight months earlier, public schools near Wichita had rolled out a web-based platform and curriculum from Summit Learning. The Silicon Valley-based program promotes an educational approach called “personalized learning,” which uses online tools to customize education. The platform that Summit provides was developed by Facebook engineers. It is funded by Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, and his wife, Priscilla Chan, a pediatrician.
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Many families in the Kansas towns, which have grappled with underfunded public schools and deteriorating test scores, initially embraced the change. Under Summit’s program, students spend much of the day on their laptops and go online for lesson plans and quizzes, which they complete at their own pace. Teachers assist students with the work, hold mentoring sessions and lead special projects. The system is free to schools. The laptops are typically bought separately.
Then, students started coming home with headaches and hand cramps. Some said they felt more anxious. One child began having a recurrence of seizures. Another asked to bring her dad’s hunting earmuffs to class to block out classmates because work was now done largely alone.
“We’re allowing the computers to teach and the kids all looked like zombies,” said Tyson Koenig, a factory supervisor in McPherson, who visited his son’s fourth-grade class. In October, he pulled the 10-year-old out of the school.
In a school district survey of McPherson middle school parents released this month, 77 percent of respondents said they preferred their child not be in a classroom that uses Summit. More than 80 percent said their children had expressed concerns about the platform.
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“Change rarely comes without some bumps in the road,” said Gordon Mohn, McPherson’s superintendent of schools. He added, “Students are becoming self-directed learners and are demonstrating greater ownership of their learning activities.”
John Buckendorf, Wellington High School’s principal, said the “vast majority of our parents are happy with the program.”
The resistance in Kansas is part of mounting nationwide opposition to Summit, which began trials of its system in public schools four years ago and is now in around 380 schools and used by 74,000 students. In Brooklyn, high school students walked out in November after their school started using Summit’s platform. In Indiana, Pa., after a survey by Indiana University of Pennsylvania found 70 percent of students wanted Summit dropped or made optional, the school board scaled it back and then voted this month to terminate it. And in Cheshire, Conn., the program was cut after protests in 2017.
“When there are frustrating situations, generally kids get over them, parents get over them, and they all move on,” said Mary Burnham, who has two grandchildren in Cheshire’s school district and started a petition to end Summit’s use. “Nobody got over this.”
Silicon Valley has tried to remake American education in its own image for years, even as many in tech eschew gadgets and software at home and flood into tech-free schools. Summit has been part of the leading edge of the movement, but the rebellion raises questions about a heavy reliance on tech in public schools.
For years, education experts have debated the merits of self-directed, online learning versus traditional teacher-led classrooms. Proponents argue that programs like Summit provide children, especially those in underserved towns, access to high-quality curriculums and teachers. Skeptics worry about screen time and argue that students miss out on important interpersonal lessons.
John Pane, a senior scientist at the RAND Corporation who has studied programs that use digital tools to customize learning, said the field remains in its infancy. “There has not been enough research,” he said.
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Diane Tavenner, a former teacher and Summit’s chief executive, founded a series of public charter schools starting in 2003 called Summit Public Schools and began developing software to use in the classrooms so that students could “unlock the power within themselves.” The resulting program, Summit Learning, is spinning out into a new nonprofit called T.L.P. Education. Ms. Tavenner said the Kansas protests were largely about nostalgia.
“There’s people who don’t want change. They like the schools the way they are,” she said. “The same people who don’t like Summit have been the sort of vocal opposition to change throughout the process.”
Summit chose not to be part of a study after paying the Harvard Center for Education Policy Research to design one in 2016. Tom Kane, the Harvard professor preparing that assessment, said he was wary of speaking out against Summit because many education projects receive funding from Mr. Zuckerberg and Dr. Chan’s philanthropic organization, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative.
Mr. Zuckerberg backed Summit in 2014 and assigned five Facebook engineers to develop the software. In 2015, he wrote that Summit’s program would help “meet the student’s individual needs and interests” and that technology “frees up time for teachers to do what they do best — mentor students.” Since 2016, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative has committed $99.1 million in grants to Summit.
In a statement, Abby Lunardini, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative’s chief communications officer, said, “We take the issues raised very seriously, and Summit has been working with school leaders and parents on the ground to address them.” She added that many schools that used Summit “love and support the program.”
Few places better illustrate the reaction to Summit than the central Kansas towns of Wellington (population 8,000) and McPherson (population 13,000). The towns are surrounded by wheat fields and factories. Residents work in farming, at a nearby oil refinery or at aircraft parts manufacturing plants.
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In 2015, Kansas announced that it would support education “moon shots” like “personalized learning.” Two years later, it picked school district “astronauts,”including McPherson and Wellington. When parents received brochures promising “personalized learning,” many were thrilled. The school districts’ leaders selected Summit.
“We wanted to get every kid on an even playing field,” said Brian Kynaston, a dentist in McPherson and school board member, adding that it helped that Summit was free.
He said he liked Summit’s program. His daughter, Kelcie, 14, said she felt self-directed. “Everyone is judging it too quickly,” he said.
Mr. Koenig, the factory supervisor, said: “You want your kids to be innovators. You want them to be on the cutting edge of what’s next.”
[If you are a parent, teacher or administrator who has experience with the Summit learning platform and want to discuss it, reach us confidentially here.]
When this school year started, children got laptops to use Summit software and curriculums. In class, they sat at the computers working through subjects from math to English to history. Teachers told students that their role was now to be a mentor.
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Parents of special-needs students noticed problems immediately. Amy Jackson, a night-shift nurse in Wellington, has a daughter, Megan, 12, who has epilepsy and whose neurologist recommended she limit screen time to 30 minutes a day to reduce seizures. Since the school started using Summit, Megan has had seizures multiple times a day.
In September, some students stumbled onto questionable content while working in the Summit platform, which often directs them to click on links to the open web.
In one class covering Paleolithic history, Summit included a link to an article in The Daily Mail, the British newspaper, that showed racy ads with bikini-clad women. For a list of the Ten Commandments, two parents said their children were directed to a Christian conversion site.
Ms. Tavenner said building a curriculum from the open internet meant that a Daily Mail article was fair game for lesson plans. “The Daily Mail is written at a very low reading level,” she said, later adding that it was a bad link to include. She added that as far as she was aware, Summit’s curriculum did not send students to a Christian conversion site.
Around the country, teachers said they were split on Summit. Some said it freed them from making lesson plans and grading quizzes so they had more time for individual students. Others said it left them as bystanders. Some parents said they worried about their children’s data privacy.
“Summit demands an extraordinary amount of personal information about each student and plans to track them through college and beyond,” said Leonie Haimson, co-chairwoman of the Parent Coalition for Student Privacy, a national organization.
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Summit says it complies with the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act.
By winter, many McPherson and Wellington students were fed up. While Summit’s program asks schools to commit to having students meet weekly in person with teachers for at least 10 minutes, some children said the sessions lasted around two minutes or did not happen.
Myriland French, 16, a student at Wellington’s high school, said she had developed eye strain and missed talking to teachers and students in class. “Everyone is more stressed now,” she said.
Collin Winter, the eighth grader in McPherson, said he had joined the January class walkout with about 50 other students. “I was scared a little bit,” he said of participating. “But I still felt good to be doing something.”
One recent evening in Wellington, a dozen parents and students held an organizing meeting in the back of a machine workshop owned by Tom Henning, a local parent. Chris Smalley, a machinist with two children, ages 13 and 16, attended. Mr. Smalley had put up bigger and bigger yard signs in front of his house, even though he knew Mr. Zuckerberg was unlikely to drive by and see them. They were red, with a slash across the word “Summit.”
“It sounded great, what they sold us,” Mr. Smalley said. “It was the worst lemon car that we’ve ever bought.”
Deanna Garver, a church secretary whose sons are in second and eighth grades, had also made a yard sign. It read: “Don’t Plummet With Summit.”
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After the fall semester last year, about a dozen parents in Wellington pulled their children out of public school, said Kevin Dodds, a city councilman. In McPherson, Mr. Koenig and his wife, Meggan, enrolled their two children in a Catholic school, using money saved for a kitchen remodel and vacation.
“We’re not Catholic,” Mrs. Koenig said. “But we just felt like it would be a lot easier to have a discussion over dinner about something that they might have heard in a religion class than Summit.”
Nearly 40 more families plan on taking their children out of public school by this summer, Mr. Dodds said.
“We’re out in the middle of nowhere,” he said. “So we’re the guinea pigs.”
Facing Segregated Schools, Parents Took Integration Into Their Own Hands. It’s Working.
Changes to middle school enrollment in parts of Brooklyn and Manhattan could force City Hall to take action on school segregation.
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For months, in two of New York City’s most politically progressive neighborhoods, parents debated what to do about their deeply segregated schools. Now, after adopting a series of initiatives last year following many spirited and emotionally charged discussions, these neighborhoods are starting to see swift changes in enrollment, according to city data released on Monday.
Several schools in districts in Manhattan and Brooklyn will be more racially and socioeconomically diverse on the first day of school this fall than they are today as a result of these new measures. And the apparent success these districts are seeing could prompt other neighborhoods to consider their own diversityinitiatives.
Also, the strategies parents implemented, which included setting new enrollment rules and eliminating using academic screens to sort students for admission,could compel City Hall to take more forceful action to integrate one of the nation’s most segregated school systems.
“Part of why we did this is we felt very strongly that you couldn’t improve just one school,” said Kristen Berger, who helped create the plan for Manhattan’s District 3, which includes the Upper West Side and Harlem. “That’s not very useful. It’s really a system. We really wanted to see movement at high- and low-demand schools.”
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Parents who were frustrated with the segregated state of their local schools — and with the city’s reluctance to adopt measures to integrate the system as a whole — took matters into their own hands last year by drafting proposals that City Hall eventually approved.
As a result, in District 3 and District 15, most of the popular, high-performing, and largely white, middle schools will take on more vulnerable and diverse students. Also, more high-achieving children will enroll at low-performing schools that have typically been shunned by some middle class parents.
Though the new enrollment figures generally meet projections set by the city, much is still unknown about how the new system will work once in place. The mostly white parents who have been critical of the plans have said they are concerned about how struggling students will fare in the same classes as students with higher test scores and grades.
But proponents point to research showing that all children can benefit from going to school with students of other races and classes — a dynamic some sixth graders in New York City will experience for the first time this fall.
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At M.S. 51 in Park Slope, the popular middle school where Mayor Bill de Blasio sent his two children, the percentage of students who are poor, learning English or homeless will jump from 33 percent to 57 percent this fall.
In some ways, M.S. 51 is a test case for the neighborhood’s entire integration plan, which has been heralded by supporters of integration as one of the most substantial changes any district has made recently to encourage diversity.
District 15 includes mostly white and middle class schools in Park Slope, as well as schools with large Hispanic populations in Sunset Park and schools with mostly black students in Red Hook. Students will now be admitted into middle schools according to a lottery, and each school has to set aside about half of its seats for students who are low-income, homeless or learning English.
“Children thrive in classroom environments that are filled with the rich diversity that is the hallmark of our city,” said Anita Skop, District 15’s superintendent.
For years, the district used a competitive admissions process that ranked students based on test scores and attendance rates, giving rise to segregated schools even in a racially and socioeconomically mixed district.
Some local middle schools that have consistently shouldered the largest number of vulnerable students will have more diverse student populations starting this fall: 91 percent of students admitted to I.S. 136 in Sunset Park last year were poor, homeless or learning English. This year, that number will drop to 67 percent.
Mr. de Blasio and schools chancellor Richard A. Carranza have said they consider District 15 a model for grass-roots integration efforts. The city had relatively little involvement in the design of the plan, and the mayor’s role was limited to approving the final proposal during a celebratory news conference last September.
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Mr. de Blasio’s administration has faced criticism from advocates who believe the city has been too timid — and too reliant on parents in a handful of the city’s 32 school districts — in creating citywide integration policy. The mayor has said he wants families to lead the way, while the chancellor has vowed to create broader policy, but has not yet followed through on that promise.
“Districts 3 and 15 are showing how we can have the important conversations and take bold action on this issue,” Mr. Carranza said on Monday.
Across the city from Park Slope, middle schools in northern Manhattan will also see significant change in the new school year.
At Booker T. Washington — a high-performing, mostly white middle school on the Upper West Side that feeds a large share of it students into the city’s specialized high schools — the percentage of students who are both low-income and struggling academically will nearly double from 10 percent to 18 percent.
Under District 3's new plan, middle schools must reserve a quarter of their seats for low-income students who have low grades and low test scores. Previously, many of the highest-performing students were concentrated in the most popular middle schools, which were also attended largely by middle class and white children.
As in District 15, some of the middle schools in District 3 that have long educated the highest share of low-income and academically struggling students will be soon to home to more economically and academically diverse classrooms.
At P.S. 180 in Harlem, for example, the current student body is nearly 70 percent poor and low-performing; that percentage will drop to 40 percent when school opens this fall.
Still, Ms. Berger said, “the work is not done. We know it’s not just about admissions, it’s about the students’ experience in the schools.”
Eliza Shapiro is a reporter covering New York City education. She joined The Times in 2018. Eliza grew up in New York City and attended public and private schools in Manhattan and Brooklyn. @elizashapiro
A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A19 of the New York editionwith the headline: Parents’ Plan Hits Goal Of Integrating Schools. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
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