We are NYC District 14 families and community members with significant concerns about the widespread and accelerating use of technology in our schools. We are asking NYC Public Schools and District 14 leadership for:
Intentional and evidence-based use of technology.
Genuine empowerment of communities to make informed choices.
More accountability and oversight.
We do not call for a blanket ban on technology. Rather, we ask for clearer information, stronger guardrails, and meaningful family input before digital tools become the default in our children’s classrooms.
Read the letter below. Add your name here:
To: Mayor Zohran Mamdani, Chancellor Kamar Samuels, Superintendent David Cintron, Members of the District 14 Community Education Council, US Representative Nydia Velazquez, State Assembly Member Emily Gallagher, State Senator Kristin Gonzalez, Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso, Council Member Jennifer Gutiérrez, and Council Member Lincoln Restler,
We, the undersigned families and community members, have many concerns about the wide-spread use of technology in District 14 schools. Technology tools have been incorporated into the school day and curriculum without appropriate public examination of their educational purpose, evidence base, costs, risks, and alternatives, despite substantial concerns being raised by community stakeholders. Specifically, we are concerned that:
Technology tools broadly used in the District have a weak evidence base. Many of them have not been shown to be effective in independent high-quality research.
Families and teachers report poor user experience with commonly used technologies: the software can be clunky, frustrating, and difficult to navigate, and it fails to live up to the advertised promise of personalized education.
Instructional time is precious. Use of technology during the school day crowds out important teacher-led and social learning experiences, including reading and discussing whole books, hands-on science, arts education, and more.
Casual familiarity with technology at an early age is over-emphasized relative to core academic learning. Meanwhile, actual technology instruction in basic skills such as typing and spreadsheet fluency is missing from the district-wide curriculum.
Overuse of digital devices and screens is overstimulating, tiring, distracting, and hurts students’ attention spans. Students regularly find ways to get around guardrails and use devices for non-educational purposes.
Especially in light of the April 2026 report by the NY State Comptroller highlighting problems within NYC Public Schools, parents are justified in having significant concerns about digital safety and privacy.
Families are deeply worried about the developmental, social, and environmental impacts of educational technology and AI and the long-term effects on learning and critical thinking in their children. These concerns deserve to be heard and taken seriously.
More details and evidence for these concerns are available here. Families in District 14 have raised these concerns consistently for over a year, but we have not yet received a clear, public, substantive response from District leadership. Nor are we alone in having these concerns. As has been widely reported in the media, parents, teachers, and school leaders across the nation and world-wide have started to push back against the proliferation of educational technology in schools.
To address these concerns, we call on District 14 leadership, NYC Public Schools, and the District 14 CEC to implement the following recommendations by the beginning of the 2026-2027 academic year:
Intentional and Evidence-based use of Technology.
Before adopting any major new student-facing instructional technology, and for most widely used existing tools, district and school leaders should clearly explain what learning problem it is designed to solve, the quality of the evidence for its use, the students it is expected to serve, and why a technological solution is preferable to available non-digital alternatives.
Every technology tool should come with an honest accounting of benefits and costs (e.g. financial costs, instructional time costs, practical issues) that are grounded in a clear and inspiring vision of what constitutes an excellent, rich, knowledge-building education.
District 14 should identify specific, basic, age-appropriate technology skills that students should learn and make a plan for teaching them.
Genuine Empowerment of Communities
District 14 should maintain, or require each school to maintain, a publicly accessible technology-use statement that accurately lists major student-facing instructional tools, the purpose of each tool, the grade levels in which it is used, the devices students access, and estimated minutes of daily and weekly use.
Families, teachers, and schools should be provided with options for how to solve instructional challenges. In a diverse district, one size needn’t fit all. Where non-digital alternatives are educationally sound and feasible, schools should have discretion to use them, and families should be informed when low-tech options exist.
More Accountability and Oversight
The CEC should distribute an anonymous survey to principals in District 14 each year to verify that information communicated by district leadership on technology use is accurate. The CEC should also provide a way for teachers and parents to anonymously report inaccuracies in district or school communication.
After the first year of implementation of student-facing software, and subsequently at least every two years, district leadership should publicly report on its efficacy, examining whether it is successfully addressing the learning problem it was implemented to solve and stating whether its ongoing use is warranted.
The DOE should add questions to the annual NYC School Survey that allow families to express their opinions on how much technology is used at school, if they think it is used well, and their overall level of satisfaction with decision-making at the school, district, and DOE levels individually.
We are not asking for a blanket ban on technology. Technology has a valid role to play in our schools, but its use must be intentional, evidence-based, and limited. It is time to re-center our children’s learning around high-quality, rich, knowledge-building, teacher-led instruction.
Respectfully