“Natasha Singer is a reporter for the New York Times who writes about how tech companies, digital devices and apps are reshaping childhood, education and job opportunities.” This article appeared April 29, 2026.

Los Angeles parents are fed up with schools loading up students with laptops and tablets, and assigning schoolwork on a slew of apps.

Some families, who had decided against giving their children screens at home, told school board members that they were appalled to find young students using school-issued devices — even in kindergarten. Some parents complained that their children were able to play video games or watch social media videos during school. Others reported that an A.I. app, which fourth graders were assigned to use to create portraits of the fictional Swedish schoolgirl Pippi Longstocking, generated sexualized imagery.

Such concerns prompted parents last year to form a group called Schools Beyond Screens to push for increased technology oversight in the Los Angeles Unified School District, the nation’s second-largest public school system.

Last week, the Los Angeles school board passed a resolution requiring the district to restrict student access to YouTube, eliminate digital devices entirely through first grade and develop screen time limits for higher grades — becoming the first major U.S. school system to do so.

The parents’ successful campaign points to an escalating national reckoning for the powerful classroom technology industry. Encouraged by the fast spread of school cellphone bans, parents, teachers and legislators across the United States have banded together to ensure that technology use in schools is beneficial for learning.

In New York City, hundreds of parents have urged the mayor to postpone the introduction of artificial intelligence chatbots like ChatGPT in schools. Last month, the governor of Utah signed a law that will allow parents to see how much time their child spent on a school device and review the websites their child visited.

In Oregon this month, parents successfully pressed the Bend-La Pine school board to pass a resolution requiring a district review of all school-issued devices and apps for educational effectiveness. The resolution also requires the district to remove apps that don’t prove effective.

In Los Angeles, parents urged school board members to back the new tech restrictions.

“For over a year, our members have been advocating for a safe and science-backed approach to classroom technology,” said Anya Meksin, the deputy director of Schools Beyond Screens. “Enough to Big Tech encroaching into our public schools.”

For years, tech giants like Google and Apple, along with companies that make school software, have marketed their technologies to schools. The tech industry promised that the devices and apps would customize learning, improve students’ academic results and widen job opportunities. Many districts rushed to adopt the tools, fueling a booming, multibillion-dollar school tech market.

But some researchers have found that digital devices failed to boost students’ test scores and graduation rates, and that they can significantly detract from learning.

Current and former school district officials say the fast-growing parents’ crusade reflects a longstanding reality: Many public schools lack the resources to adequately vet classroom tech.

“The burden on school districts to manage these systems is enormous,” said Hal Friedlander, a former chief information officer of New York City Public Schools who has also helped other school districts evaluate technology. “Unfortunately, most districts are small and they don’t have the resources or the expertise.”

Some children’s educational organizations have similar concerns. This year, two United Nations agencies, UNICEF and UNESCO, issued online learning guidelines warning that public schools had largely ceded digital education to private tech companies.

Online learning tools had introduced important innovations, the U.N. agencies said. But they also warned that digital learning platforms could treat schoolchildren “like consumers”; expose students to health, safety and privacy risks; and threaten school “autonomy.” Instead, “public needs and public purposes must steer” digital learning, UNESCO and UNICEF recommended.

Some tech companies and school tech organizations note that using school laptops and apps can teach students important digital skills. And they argue that parent groups are conflating children’s social media use — like students scrolling through streaming videos during class — with useful learning tools specifically designed for education. Some math and reading apps, for instance, can customize lessons to each child, allowing teachers to chart the student’s progress.

“Educational technology allows teachers to differentiate instruction and assess student understanding in real time,” said Keith Krueger, the chief executive of the Consortium for School Networking, a nonprofit organization for school technology leaders. (The school networking group’s corporate sponsors include Amazon, Google, Lenovo and Microsoft.)

In recent interviews and Zoom meetings, parents in more than a dozen states raised concerns about the safety, privacy and effectiveness of student devices, classroom software and learning apps. Some parents pointed to well-known school software companies that have recently faced complaints about poor data security and the collection of sensitive student data. Other parents said their districts struggled to limit student access to video games and video-streaming platforms on school-issued devices.

Over the last year, Los Angeles has become a center of parent-led efforts to rein in school tech.

In a recent Zoom presentation for Los Angeles parents, Alisha Mernick described how she had started a campaign at her son’s elementary school to help families opt their children out of i-Ready, a math and reading app with gamelike features.

Ms. Mernick, 40, and other parents said they were concerned that the app used video-gamelike techniques, including cute animation and reward points, to hook youngsters.

In some schools, students who accumulate reward points for completing lessons on i-Ready, a math and reading app, can use the points to play games.

“If I’m giving my 5-year-old a game-ified version of a worksheet, it will hijack the development of her intrinsic motivation and jeopardize her ability to learn,” said Ms. Mernick, who teaches art education at California State University, Northridge.

In a statement, Curriculum Associates, the company behind i-Ready, said its online learning assessments and lessons “help teachers act on student needs faster and more precisely.” The company added that i-Ready’s student-engagement techniques “mirror classroom reward systems.”

Parents say their concerns escalated after recent scandals related to student tech.

In 2023, the Los Angeles Unified School District approved a $6.2 million deal with a little-known A.I. start-up to develop a chatbot for student use. The next year, federal prosecutors charged the founder of the start-up with defrauding investors.

The A.I. chatbot fiasco prompted Schools Beyond Screens this year to start a petition, called “Get Big Tech Off Kids’ Desks.” It urged the Los Angeles school system to audit recent tech contracts to make sure the digital tools for students were “safe, legal and effective.” More than 1,000 people have signed on.

Among the concerned parents is Sandra Martinez Roe, 50, a children’s book author whose son attends a Los Angeles elementary school. She said she had chosen not to buy him an iPad or a laptop for home use. At the start of second grade, however, her son came home with a school-issued Chromebook for his schoolwork.

She worried about the kinds of websites the school device might enable him to view. She was also concerned that some online learning software seemed to lack rigorous proof of educational effectiveness.

“They’re just selling it and pushing it through the school system,” said Ms. Roe, who is a member of the Schools Beyond Screens leadership team. “Our children are the guinea pigs.”

In a statement, the Los Angeles Unified School District said it had thorough processes for evaluating technology tools to ensure that “any platform used with students meets rigorous standards for privacy, cybersecurity and educational effectiveness.”

After the Pippi Longstocking incident, the district said, it reviewed how the A.I. tool was used in classrooms and worked with the software company on “strengthening content controls.” As for i-Ready, the district said the math and reading app helped inform teachers’ instructional decisions and improve student learning.

“We will continue to apply and strengthen our review processes to ensure that all approved tools meet the high standards our students and families deserve,” the district statement said.

Meta is accused of failing to keep children off Facebook and Instagram.

Now, Los Angeles school board members like Nick Melvoin are pushing for increased tech oversight in schools. In 2024, he championed a board resolution that barred student cellphone use during school. This year, after working with Schools Beyond Screens, Mr. Melvoin introduced the recent resolution curbing school technology.

In addition to new screen time limits for each grade, the policy will require elementary and middle schools to prohibit student device use during lunch and recess. The district must also compile a report on all current school technology contracts.

“I think of it as a recalibration, a policy that tries to strike the right balance for our kids,” Mr. Melvoin said in an interview. Additional oversight seems especially urgent, he added, now that some popular school tech products have enabled new A.I. tools for students.

“I do think parents should know: Your kids have access to these tools at school,” he added.

An ongoing data extortion attack targeting the widely-used education technology platform Canvas disrupted classes and coursework at school districts and universities across the United States today, after a cybercrime group defaced the service’s login page with a ransom demand that threatened to leak data from 275 million students and faculty across nearly 9,000 educational institutions.

A screenshot shared by a reader showing the extortion message that was shown on the Canvas login page today.

Canvas parent firm Instructure [NYSE:INST] responded to today’s defacement attacks by disabling the platform, which is used by thousands of schools, universities and businesses to manage coursework and assignments, and to communicate with students.

Instructure acknowledged a data breach earlier this week, after the cybercrime group ShinyHunters claimed responsibility and said they would leak data on tens of millions of students and faculty unless paid a ransom. The stated deadline for payment was initially set at May 6, but it was later pushed back to May 12.

In a statement on May 6, Instructure said the investigation so far shows the stolen information includes “certain identifying information of users at affected institutions, such as names, email addresses, and student ID numbers, as well as as messages among users.” The company said it found no evidence the breached data included more sensitive information, such as passwords, dates of birth, government identifiers or financial information.

The May 6 update stated that Canvas was fully operational, and that Instructure was not seeing any ongoing unauthorized activity on their platform. “At this stage, we believe the incident has been contained,” Instructure wrote.

However, by mid-day on Thursday, May 7, students and faculty at dozens of schools and universities were flooding social media sites with comments saying that a ransom demand from ShinyHunters had replaced the usual Canvas login page. Instructure responded by pulling Canvas offline and replacing the portal with the message, “Canvas is currently undergoing scheduled maintenance. Check back soon.”

“We anticipate being up soon, and will provide updates as soon as possible,” reads the current message on Instructure’s status page.

While the data stolen by ShinyHunters may or may not contain particularly sensitive information (ShinyHunters claims it includes several billion private messages among students and teachers, as well as names, phone numbers and email addresses), this attack could hardly have come at a worse time for Instructure: Many of the affected schools and universities are in the middle of final exams, and a prolonged outage could be highly damaging for the company.

The extortion message that greeted countless Canvas users today advised the affected schools to negotiate their own ransom payments to prevent the publication of their data — regardless of whether Instructure decides to pay.

“ShinyHunters has breached Instructure (again),” the extortion message read. “Instead of contacting us to resolve it they ignored us and did some ‘security patches.'”

A source close to the investigation who was not authorized to speak to the press told KrebsOnSecurity that a number of universities have already approached the cybercrime group about paying. The same source also pointed out that the ShinyHunters data leak blog no longer lists Instructure among its current extortion victims, and that the samples of data stolen from Canvas customers were removed as well. Data extortion groups like ShinyHunters will typically only remove victims from their leak sites after receiving an extortion payment or after a victim agrees to negotiate.

Dipan Mann, founder and CEO of the security firm Cloudskope, slammed Instructure for referring to today’s outage as a “scheduled maintenance” event on its status page. Mann said Shiny Hunters first demonstrated they’d breached Instructure on May 1, prompting Instructure’s Chief Information Security Officer Steve Proud to declare the following day that the incident had been contained. But Mann said today’s attack is at least the third time in the past eight months that Instructure has been breached by ShinyHunters.

In a blog post today, Mann noted that in September 2025, ShinyHunters released thousands of internal University of Pennsylvania files — donor records, internal memos, and other confidential materials — through what the Daily Pennsylvanian and other outlets later determined was, in part, a Canvas/Instructure-mediated access path.

“Penn was the named victim,” Mann wrote. “Instructure was the mechanism. The incident was treated as a Penn-specific story by most of the national press and quietly handled by Instructure as a customer-specific matter. That framing was wrong then. It is dramatically more wrong in light of the May 2026 events, which now look like the planned escalation of an attack pattern that ShinyHunters had been working against Instructure’s environment for at least eight months prior. The September 2025 Penn breach was the proof of concept. The May 1, 2026 incident was the production run. The May 7, 2026 recompromise was ShinyHunters demonstrating publicly that the May 2 ‘containment’ did not happen.”

In February, a ShinyHunters spokesperson told The Daily Pennsylvanian that Penn failed to pay a $1 million ransom demand. On March 5, ShinyHunters published 461 megabytes worth of data stolen from Penn, including thousands of files such as donor records and internal memos.

ShinyHunters is a prolific and fluid cybercriminal group that specializes in data theft and extortion. They typically gain access to companies through voice phishing and social engineering attacks that often involve impersonating IT personnel or other trusted members of a targeted organization.

Last month, ShinyHunters relieved the home security giant ADT of personal information on 5.5 million customers. The extortion group told BleepingComputer they breached the company by compromising an employee’s Okta single sign-on account in a voice phishing attack that enabled access to ADT’s Salesforce instance. BleepingComputer says ShinyHunters recently has taken credit for a number of extortion attacks against high-profile organizations, including Medtronic, Rockstar Games, McGraw Hill, 7-Eleven and the cruise line operator Carnival.

The attack on Canvas customers is just one of several major cybercrime campaigns being launched by ShinyHunters at the moment, said Charles Carmakal, chief technology officer at the Google-owned Mandiant Consulting. Carmakal declined to comment specifically on the Canvas breach, but said “there are multiple concurrent and discreet ShinyHunters intrusion and extortion campaigns happening right now.”

Cloudskope’s Mann said what happens next depends largely on whether Instructure’s customers — the universities, K-12 districts, and education ministries paying for Canvas — choose to apply pressure or absorb the breach quietly.

“The history of education-vendor incidents suggests the path of least resistance is the second one,” he concluded.

‘Artificial’ didn’t scare Americans in the 19th century. Why does it scare them now?

Marc Andreessen Egg Game

Marc Andreessen Egg Game is a game about doodling on eggs to make them look like Marc Andreessen.

Here's a raw link, if you need it: https://eieio.games/blog/marc-andreessen-egg-game

One of the classic challenges of teaching math: you teach a skill, students can do it in class, then the next day you ask them to use the skill again and it’s as if they have never seen it before in their lives.

What’s a teacher to do?

Most teachers agree students need practice. But how much practice is enough? Put a bunch of smart, experienced teachers in a room and they can give you a pretty good guess for how much practice students will need, but that guess will never be right for every classroom.

I take an empirical approach: practice until learning is secure in long-term memory.

First, I want to be clear about what I’m talking about. This is a strategy for improving retention for procedural skills. Think multi-digit subtraction, or long division, or solving a two-step equation, or finding a derivative using the chain rule. This isn’t about conceptual understanding, or how to initially introduce those skills. The problem here is that you’re teaching a procedural skill, students can do it one day, but they forget it the next.1

My Approach

I teach the skill day one. I have students practice a bit.

Day two, I ask students to try the skill again to check for understanding. I typically use mini whiteboards for this. No scaffolding, no hints, I just want to see how many kids remember. Then, I’ll model, or we’ll look at an example together, or we’ll scaffold up to the skill with some easier questions. Then practice. This isn’t a whole class period: there’s the check for understanding, then a reminder and a bit of scaffolding, then maybe five minutes of practice.

Day three, we do the same thing again. I start with a check for understanding. The key question: how many kids get it right? Let’s say on day two it was 30%. Day three, it might be 60%. The goal is to get that number a little higher each day.

Wash, rinse, repeat. My goal is to practice until students can reliably retrieve the skill the next day.2

When the success rate is low, I’m likely to choose a whole-class worked example and scaffolding. Once the success rate gets up to 80-90%, I start focusing on those final few students. Most students now know it, so I check in individually with the students who missed the check for understanding, try to figure out how to help them, and then we all practice for five minutes.

The last 10% can be stubborn. If the skill is important, I try to stick with it until we get to 100%. Are some students ready to move on? Sure. But a quick chunk of practice isn’t doing any harm, and that extra practice makes a huge difference for the students who need it most.3

Once we reach 100%, we shift into retrieval practice mode. Instead of five-minute chunks of practice, I’m mixing these questions into a Do Now or mixed practice assignment. Students should keep seeing them regularly, but one or two questions at a time is enough to keep the learning secure in long-term memory.

What’s Happening Under the Hood

I think it’s helpful to have a mental model for what’s happening in my students’ minds during this process.

Cognitive scientists delineate two different types of memory strength: retrieval strength and storage strength.

When you first learn something, retrieval strength is high. If I tell you that 18 x 8 = 144 and then ask you for 18 x 8, you will have high retrieval strength for that math fact. You won’t have high storage strength, and the learning fades quickly. Here’s what that looks like:

If I ask you for the value of π, you can probably tell me it’s about 3.14. You’ve seen it plenty of times before. You can retrieve it from memory, and that memory is durable. Rerieval strength and storage strength are both high. Here’s what that looks like:

Let’s think back to day one. Students can perform a skill. They get a bunch of questions right in a row, but they forget quickly. In that moment students have high retrieval strength, but low storage strength. They can do it in the moment, but it doesn’t quite stick. Here’s a gif to represent this situation. After practicing a bit, retrieval strength is high, but we haven’t added much to storage strength and retrieval strength fades quickly.4

The best way to improve storage strength is counterintuitive: forget a little bit, then practice again. It looks like this:

That’s the purpose of day two, and day three, and so on. Once you’ve practiced something 10 times in a row, the 11th time isn’t adding much. But if you practice 10 times, wait a day, then practice again — that does much more to improve storage strength.

High storage strength has two main benefits. First, forgetting is slower. Here’s what the model looks like when storage strength is high:

When storage strength is high, learning is more durable.5

Second, relearning is faster. All learning fades. If you don’t use it, you lose it. But if storage strength is high, you can relearn that topic quickly.6

This is the answer to the titular question. How much practice do students need? Enough that they can reliably retrieve the skill the next day. Learning is a change in long-term memory, and the best practical way to measure long-term memory is to wait a day and see what students remember. Continue practicing until students reach that threshold. Retrieval practice continues at a smaller scale after that point, and if retention slips we practice a bit more.7

Where to From Here

I know what some of you are thinking. This whole thing sounds nice, but there’s no time. I can’t spend 5-10 minutes practicing a skill from yesterday or last week every class. I have to move on to the next objective.

I hear you. To take this type of practice seriously requires a bit of instructional redesign. One approach is to set aside the first chunk of class to check for understanding and practice skills from previous days or weeks. That takes time away from your current lesson, but it averages out in the end: you’ll have less time for practice on the day’s objective, but make up for it with more time to practice on future days.

There is another option. This is where I plug my favorite off-the-wall curriculum design idea. Here is a rough sketch of a typical 7th grade sequence of units:

Six big ideas, one after another.

Here is what I did this year:

I took the toughest topics, the ones that students typically have the most trouble with, and stretched them out through the entire year. Multiple strands, taught side by side. Rational numbers means adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing, with negatives, fractions, and decimals. Equations and expressions includes a bunch of stuff, but the keys are finding equivalent expressions and solving two-step equations. Every day, we work a little bit on those two topics, as well as one of the other units. Sometimes it’s just a few minutes of practice on one strand. Sometimes it’s introducing a new concept. A bit of progress, every day. This structure provided time and flexibility to give students the spaced, repeated practice I’m describing in this post. It’s been a pain to plan, but it’s also my favorite change I’ve made to my teaching in the last few years.

Whatever approach you choose, you’ll need to accept that, if learning is a change in long-term memory, we can’t measure the success of our teaching in a single lesson. To figure out if students have learned, I need to check for understanding over multiple days and provide more practice when necessary. Many teachers and schools are strongly committed to the idea that every lesson must have exactly one objective, and every part of the lesson must be in service of that objective. I think we should let go of that idea. It simply is not consistent with how humans learn.