New York City Council members are forcing YouTube’s classroom use into public scrutiny.
Shekar Krishnan and Eric Dinowitz are calling for the city to block students from viewing YouTube on school devices, ban gamified learning apps, eliminate individual digital devices for kindergarten through fifth grade, and return to paper-and-pencil standardized tests. They also want the Department of Education to justify other uses of YouTube, including teachers’ classroom videos, with evidence.
That is not a revolution in education policy. It is a demand for an accounting.
The proposal comes shortly after Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s administration announced a ban on student-facing artificial intelligence for elementary and middle-school students through eighth grade for one year. As we noted when New York City schools moved to restrict student-facing AI, the important question is not whether a tool is new. It is whether adults can show that putting it in front of children improves learning rather than merely increasing device use.
Krishnan, who chairs the Council’s Oversight and Investigations Committee, has supplied the plainest statement of the concern. “Companies like Google know exactly what they are doing,” he said. “They know that if they can get our children and our schools hooked on their apps from a young age, it is a pathway to depend on them all the way through middle, high school and beyond.”
That is Krishnan’s allegation, not an established finding about Google’s intent. The documented policy question is narrower and more concrete: whether New York City schools should permit students to use YouTube without requiring the Department of Education to produce educational evidence for that use.
The distinction matters. Public officials should not replace evidence with suspicion. But neither should a company’s general assurances replace evidence about what happens to children in a classroom.
The Wall Street Journal’s investigation found that YouTube is difficult to avoid in American classrooms, with some students exposed to hundreds of frequently inappropriate videos during school hours. Google has said school administrators control what students watch and that its tools allow schools to limit or block access. The disagreement is therefore not abstract. It concerns who bears responsibility when a device in a child’s hands opens access to material the school did not intend to provide.
The council members are also naming two related breaches of judgment: gamified apps placed before children without sufficient evidence, and device saturation treated as an educational good in itself. Krishnan said parents have complained that the “dopamine hits” children receive from gamified apps and YouTube at school undermine limits families try to set at home. He pointed specifically to children whose brains are still forming and whose cognitive abilities are still developing.
That is the vulnerable population here: kindergarten through fifth-grade students, not an imaginary average user with adult judgment and an adult capacity to refuse. A five-year-old cannot meaningfully negotiate the terms of a digital platform. The adults who select the platform, assign the device, and control the school day carry the duty to justify the choice.
Dinowitz, a former teacher and chair of the Council’s Education Committee, said teachers have told council members they feel pressured to use screens because standardized tests are digital. He also said, “We have seen dips in test scores as a result” of educational technology being placed before children without evidence.
That statement requires care. The source does not establish that YouTube or gamified apps caused the decline in test scores. It does establish the council members’ allegation that schools adopted educational technology without adequate proof and that teachers are being pushed toward screens by the format of standardized testing. Those are sufficient grounds for an oversight hearing. They are not permission to announce a causal finding the record does not yet support.
This is where the proposed requirement that the Department of Education justify YouTube use becomes important. A teacher showing a carefully selected instructional video is not the same as giving a student unrestricted access to a platform. A paper test is not the same as abandoning technology in every subject. A ban on gamified learning apps is not a ban on teaching children to use computers.
The rule breach is simpler: schools have treated access as if it were evidence. It is not.
The adults who want YouTube available to students should identify the educational purpose, the safeguards, the material students can reach, the supervision required, and the evidence that the benefit outweighs the risk. If the use is educational, the Department of Education should be able to make that case. If it cannot, the device does not belong in the child’s hands merely because the contract has already been signed or the test has already gone digital.
Los Angeles has already banned student-led YouTube use and generative AI tools across its schools. New York City’s proposal would go further in some respects, but it is not inventing the question. Large school systems are being asked to decide whether digital access is serving instruction or whether instruction is being reorganized around whatever digital access makes available.
That question deserves more than the usual argument that technology is inevitable. Nothing about a gamified app is inevitable. Nothing about an individual tablet for every young child is inevitable. Nothing about a standardized test being digital requires every classroom activity to become screen-based.
I have sat in enough church basements and women’s-study rooms to recognize the old moral trick: put a new practice in front of children, call it progress, and ask the people who object to prove that it is harmful. The burden belongs in the other direction when the institution holds the power and the child bears the consequence. The adult who introduces the tool must show why it belongs there.
New York’s Council is not yet banning YouTube. Krishnan plans to introduce legislation compelling the Department of Education to assess the proposal, and the council members plan to raise the issue at an oversight hearing scheduled for Sept. 15. That process should examine the claims carefully, including the claims made by the council members themselves.
But the premise is sound: YouTube use in school should require an educational justification, gamified apps should not be treated as harmless by default, and device saturation should not be mistaken for learning. The youngest students deserve adults who can tell the difference.
The question before New York is not whether it is anti-technology. It is whether the city will make a million students carry the burden of proof for an experiment they did not design.