Private school exits may pull funding from lower-income public schools
Silicon Valley parents who work in technology are pressing public school districts in California technology enclaves such as Mountain View and San Mateo to reduce classroom screens, phones and other technologies. Screens have become a ubiquitous part of life in public-school classrooms, and parents want public schools to re-embrace human connection over screen time. The parents are organizing and making a dent, with some public schools banning phones or rolling back computer-based tests and assignments.
In San Mateo, schools have stopped sending Chromebooks home with students in kindergarten through second grade, and high schoolers face a blanket ban on cell phones. Mountain View schools are moving away from i-Ready, an adaptive reading and mathematics program used in school districts across California that has drawn criticism for repetitive lessons and been accused of sharing students’ data without consent. Palo Alto public schools have prohibited “smart” glasses, a technology developed next door in Silicon Valley.
The changes fit a broader shift. The Guardian said evidence was mounting about the effects of social media and other platforms on young people and that courts had begun to agree with those concerns. The report said parents and governments had started to re-evaluate children’s relationships with technology and its role in education. Major U.S. school districts including New York City and Los Angeles had recently embraced technology rollbacks, while parents in other countries were increasingly scrutinizing technology’s encroachment into education.
Silicon Valley parents bring something many other communities do not have: firsthand knowledge of the industry. When the San Mateo union high school district formed a task force last year to examine the role of artificial intelligence in schools, at least two volunteer members worked at large technology companies, including one in Google’s AI division, according to school board trustee Jennifer Jacobsen. “These professionals know more than the average community member about the products,” Jacobsen said. “They can see a longer runway of where these products are headed and their potential impact on education.”
Many American public-school parents are dismayed to learn how early screens enter the classroom. Jillian Kolonski, a writer in San Mateo, was stunned when her five-year-old daughter was sent home with a Chromebook for math practice. “I was like, what?! She’s in kindergarten!” Kolonski recalled. Candice Wei, a Palo Alto college counselor, was similarly shocked to learn that her kindergarten-age son was using screens in class with few guardrails. “YouTube isn’t banned. Generative AI isn’t banned. It’s almost criminally negligent,” Wei said. “I don’t allow this in my house. Why is it allowed in schools?”
Wei, who started her local chapter of Schools Beyond Screens, said she hears that classroom screen time is an increasingly common cause for leaving the public system. “I’ve been approached by parents who considered [our public school], toured it, saw kids on screens, and were like, ‘I guess I’m going private,’” she said. The trend Wei describes has also motivated her and other parents to push public school districts to vet the companies landing multimillion-dollar contracts with schools and demand proof that their products improve learning. Kolonski, whose husband works for an AI company, said districts should identify the outcomes they expect and establish a plan if those outcomes do not materialize. “That means asking for data about what specific outcomes they’re looking for that this tech is supposed to help with, and knowing what the plan is if they aren’t seeing those outcomes,” she said. “A lot of these companies have really sexy pitches, but then on the ground, the work doesn’t quite bear out.”
In its early days, education technology was viewed as a sign of a more equitable and accessible digital future. The pandemic made it essential for remote learning, and many tools remained after students returned to classrooms. In 2025, 99% of school teachers surveyed by the New York Times said their students received school-issued devices, and 81% said their schools gave students screens by kindergarten.
Experts and a growing number of parents are worried about the pervasive use of technology in day-to-day learning. Half of U.S. teens spend four or more hours a day on screens, not counting schoolwork. David Monahan, campaign director of Fairplay, a U.S. advocacy organization that seeks to limit screen use among children, said, “There is much more buzz around this today than there was a few years ago.” Monahan sees classroom screen time as reinforcing those trends. “What sorts of habits are we fostering at school if students spend hours staring at screens with the seal of approval of their teacher?” he asked.
Research suggests students retain what they learn with pen and paper better than what they learn on screens. Critics also say excessive education technology replaces, or at least stunts, the student-teacher bond that is critical to emotional learning and strips away the productive struggle that fosters learning. Yvonne Kao, senior director of learning sciences and technology at the nonpartisan educational research nonprofit WestEd, said, “You as a human being are much more likely to put in effort for a teacher you love or a parent you love than for a computer that is not really going to give you love.”
Technology use varies widely among U.S. school districts, Kao said. She describes hearing about rural districts that lack the staff to vet technology or keep up with best practices for buying it. Silicon Valley parents are in a different position, she said: “There’s a savviness around tech that I think you acquire from being immersed in the tech environment. You know better what it is good for and what it is bad for, and you can kind of try to thread the needle.”
Concerns about classroom technology have pushed many families into private schools. California private schools are not bound by state and local bureaucracy, can change direction more quickly, are free to enact policies that limit technology and have more money to spend on teachers instead of apps. German Gil spends most of his waking hours looking at screens. Since moving to the San Francisco Bay Area in 2015, the software engineer has bounced between start-ups and giants including Netflix, Facebook and GitHub. He wanted his daughter Victoria to have a different school experience, one in which his “kid could be a kid.” Gil and his wife enrolled Victoria at the San Francisco Waldorf school, a private school built around nature-based play. Now in fourth grade, Victoria spends her school days free of screens. Instead of working on Chromebooks, students in her class bind books by hand.
The school sits in San Francisco’s affluent Pacific Heights neighborhood, two miles from the headquarters of AI company Anthropic. Kindergarten tuition runs $40,000 a year, and high-school tuition is close to $60,000. The program is intensely popular. According to executive director Lauren Smith, applications for early-childhood enrollment have grown notably, and many of the new parents work in technology. The trend has produced an apparent contradiction: many well-paid Silicon Valley technology workers have paid a premium to keep their children away from the platforms they help build.
Proponents of human-centered learning are heartened by the policy progress, but they are concerned that less-resourced districts will be left behind, stuck with digital learning tools that wealthier schools are abandoning. Jon Valant, director of the Brown Center on Education Policy, called the “techlash” broad and said parents across income levels want high-quality, human-to-human education for their children. The difference, Valant said, is which families can afford it. Staff salaries are the largest expense at any school, he said. Private schools are expensive partly because they have more adults in their buildings, and tightening budgets can make replacing people with technology especially tempting. “The reason [private schools] cost a lot of money is that they have a lot of adults in those buildings … It’s when budgets get tight that the temptation to replace people with technology is especially hard to resist,” he said.
The gap could widen as the Trump administration supports school-choice programs, including vouchers and education savings accounts that give families some or all of the public money that would otherwise have been spent on their children’s education for use in private schooling. When parents take their children out of public schools and into the private system, the funding follows them. Valant warned that technology could roll out unevenly across communities. “I am worried about this technology rolling out in ways that are very unequal across communities,” he said. “What we end up seeing is it’s the kids who are in the lowest income areas that find themselves spending a whole lot more time on screens, even if their parents don’t want them to.”
San Francisco Waldorf offers financial aid to families that cannot afford its tuition. Antero Garcia, a professor at Stanford’s Graduate School of Education, said private schools may be the only route to a screen-free education in some regions and that every student who opts out of public school takes funding with them. “What that looks like is fewer teachers, maybe a longer commute if a school were to close, and larger class sizes,” Garcia said. Garcia also argued that parents with the means to leave public schools are often best equipped to change public schools for everyone else: “They have the social capital and resources, and they probably understand how to work within the bureaucratic system.”