But don’t just take it from me. Kyle, a software engineer and parent of a student in Seattle Public Schools, allowed me to share the testimony he delivered to our school board last week. As you will see, Kyle makes clear what many of us on the outside have suspected: mining and harvesting our children’s data is not an accident in EdTech products, it IS the product.

I’m Kyle. I am a software engineer and parent of a Seattle Public Schools kindergartener.

I build software for a living, and I want to offer a perspective grounded in that experience.

This district does not have a coherent, enforced EdTech policy. What it has are documents that delegate decisions to individual teachers and school administrators. Which devices, which tools, which grades, who authorizes what — those questions don’t have district-level answers. I learned from my child that their iPads were used in a music class which only meets every three weeks, where they should be making music instead.

And when a parent decides, in their child’s best interest, that they’d rather opt out of personal device use, that burden falls entirely on the classroom teacher, with no district guidance to support them.

That’s not fair to teachers either.

Here’s what I know professionally: tech companies collect children’s data for profit. Not as a side effect — as the business model. And securing internet-connected devices for children is genuinely hard. Seattle Public School’s own policies acknowledge web filtering is “best effort.” If the district cannot completely solve data harvesting and device safety, the responsible choice is to stop issuing 1:1 devices by default to our kids entirely.

I’m fully in favor of dedicated tech education — coding, computers, AI literacy, social media safety — at the right age and in a lab setting, with transparency and clarity for parents.1

But not iPads and Chromebooks issued as a general classroom tool.

EdTech does not improve education outcomes, and the data on this problem is not ambiguous. Sweden went all-in on classroom technology and reversed course, having to spend over $100 million reintroducing physical books after citing declining student performance across the country.

I’m asking for a district-level EdTech policy review with a real timeline and with an informed audit of ed-tech and devices. Not delegated down to schools.

Deferring real decision-making is still a decision, and our students deserve better.

-Kyle

My Statement for Public Testimony

My name is Emily Cherkin. I am an educator, advocate, and SPS parent. In January, I testified before the U.S. Senate on Commerce, Science, and Transportation about technology’s impact on childhood.

Today, this district provides 1:1 internet-connected devices to nearly every student, spending roughly $9,000 per child on tech alone.

It is past time we ask: Is this worth it?

Because the answer to these questions:

How many children should be able to use their school laptop to:

• Watch YouTube and play games?

• Search up harmful content?

• Talk to strangers?

• Watch porn?

• Use AI to write their essays?

…should be “Zero.”

But it is not. Seattle students have done all of these things on their school devices.

Children do not need EdTech products to be successful in the future. The best preparation for a digital future is an analog childhood and an education built on people, paper, and pencils.

This is not a kid problem. This is not a teacher problem. This is a leadership problem.

So I would like to know: This fall, when Seattle Public Schools again hands out laptops and iPads, will the district inform parents:

• Their children can watch YouTube, engage with chatbots, and play online games?

• That parents are responsible for laptop misuse?

• That the district consents on behalf of EVERY parent to EVERY SINGLE privacy policy of EVERY SINGLE app or website their child will encounter?

• That the “safety” features installed on student devices for school don’t apply at home?

• That GoGuardian turns teachers into classroom IT police and kids find ways to evade it anyway?

• That the CEO of the district’s recently adopted “SaferWatch App” was arrested for bribing the NYPD?

I don’t know what topic today is more universal than every child in our district being given an internet-connected device, but I do know that very few parents think six-year-olds should be able to watch porn or chat with strangers on a computer at school.

Where are the adults who will change this?

Thank you.

The Letter I Wrote

April 22, 2026

Dear Superintendent, Board Directors, and District Staff,

Seattle students are using the district-issued devices in ways that are far from educationally beneficial, safe, or effective. At the bare minimum, school leaders should be aware of these issues, because current mitigation efforts are not working (and teachers shouldn’t be IT police anyway).

I want to be extremely clear: I do believe there is a time and place for technology use in education– more so today than ever. However, it is a fallacy to think that EdTech products are the same thing as Technology Education. Put simply, EdTech is not Tech Ed.

It is time for Seattle Public Schools to answer why the number of students who can access porn, chatbots, and predators on school devices is anything other than “zero” and do something about it. The EdTech companies you contract with are no different from the business model of companies like Snapchat and Meta, and such a business model is fundamentally at odds with child development.

To ignore this fact is to imperil children.

I have refused the district-issued device for my daughter for the past two years and we will continue to refuse it next year when she enters high school. However, she has to access Schoology at home on occasion because participating in public education in Seattle means being forced to consent to the use of these products because there is no viable alternative. In spite of these hurdles and lack of support at the district level, my daughter is thriving. I am increasingly aware of other families who are or will refuse the 1:1 device going forward and I will continue to encourage other parents to pursue this path as well, especially until the district makes changes.

Seattle has the potential to be a national model of excellence in public education. But “potential” is only what something is not. Let’s change that.

Thank you,

Emily

What’s Happening on 1:1 Devices in Our District

Here are a few examples of what Seattle children are doing on their district-issued devices in school:

• “My middle schooler is spending hours a day on YouTube during school hours.”

• “When I ask how much screens are used per day, I’m told it is ‘minimal but depends on the day.’ But I know not every student is getting the same amount of screen time. If my kid finishes their morning work, they get extra time on the device.”

• “In my experience, how much devices are used and what they are used for can vary dramatically depending on the school (and year to year within a school.)”

• “We use GoGuardian to block all games and social media, but it’s whac-a-mole, frequently updating the ‘blocked’ list as new game sites are found.”

• “The rather minimal restriction on YouTube for elementary school kids is such a problem. In the case of both my kids, I’d say early elementary teachers can be naive about how savvy these kids can be about using school-issued devices beyond the intended uses.”

• “I asked our school’s tech person to turn off access to YouTube and Pinterest after my then-5th grader found nearly pornographic material on Pinterest on her school device and made herself a YouTube channel. I was shocked at what she had access to on a school device and what she was able to search without getting noticed.”

• “iReady is very expensive so there’s clearly a disconnect between the administrators who buy it and teachers who don’t believe in it.”

• “I think there’s also a difference in [use of EdTech products by] grade. My child is in kindergarten. They don’t use iPads much, but it does seem that the older grades use it more.”

• “Is there a way to ban websites for use during the school day? YouTube…shopping sites… Pinterest? iReady is already just too much and whatever other educational websites… but what about access to non-educational sites?”

• “I took YouTube off my second grader’s Chromebook and the teacher got annoyed and told her she wasn’t allowed to do that.”

• “I wish we could just return the damn thing [laptop] and have loaner computers that come out only when strictly needed during specific classes.”

• “Blocks on devices are only marginally effective. Students figure ways around them or get peers to share devices or look things up for them.”

• “Frankly, I was appalled by the unfettered internet access one child was accessing at the school with no redirect by teachers because they don’t have time and the kids have figured out hacks to bypass GoGuardian.”

• “I’m really concerned with the continuous loop of the district paying for technology, teachers are instructed to use tech because it has been paid for, [and] no one tracks overall screen time or child development issues. We have no great answers for if kids can listen to music on YouTube at school– how do we stop them from going down a YouTube rabbit hole?”

• “It has been a rude awakening for me seeing just how saturated Seattle schools are with technology right now.”

We have the power to effect change. Chelsea is a first fish— but the more we see first fish doing things like this, the more second and third and fourth fish will come swim too.

TESTIMONY of Chelsea DeLorme, Maine, on February 20, 2026.

Hello esteemed members of the Appropriations and Education Committees,

My name is Chelsea DeLorme and I’m testifying in support of section GG, what we parent advocates refer to as Phone-Free Schools for ME.

I’m also testifying in support of Maine students, educators, parents and our collective future. As well as in support of our Education Committee, for raising the volume on this conversation in our state and making it more informed. Final thank you to the school boards who saw the light early and have put time into this issue already.

For context: I’m a parent who holds tech boundaries with my kids, as hard as that is given the culture we’re in. I have a 7th grade daughter who doesn’t have a smartphone or social media, a third grade son who doesn’t have a PS5 or YouTube access, and a 4 year-old who questions her crayons when she sees kids her age—or younger—on iPads in restaurants.

I’m also one of legions of parents radicalized by the book Anxious Generation, a cofounder of Turn the Tide Coalition and Landline Kids. My personal epiphany in reading “Anxious Generation” was that the moniker doesn’t refer to our kids, it refers to us, their parents. Anxious often for good reason, with bad results.

Our kids are the Avoidance Generation. Avoidance is how anxiety shows up through behavior. Avoidance is easy. Avoidance is convenient. Avoidance is comfortable. And avoidance is not a healthy habit for adults to accommodate.

Because avoidance is the opposite of learning. And a lifetime of avoidance isn’t life at all.

Friction is inherent to learning, whether that learning is in math class, the hallway, or in the cafeteria—academic, emotional or social. Our kids need support to face friction. Many of them want it.

Too often high schoolers have been asked: Do you support a bell-to-bell ban during the school day? when that is NOT the question. The real question is: If none of your classmates had a phone during the school day would you be OK without one too? (The answer is: They would be. They are.)

“Too often high schoolers have been asked: Do you support a bell-to-bell ban during the school day? when that is NOT the question. The real question is: If none of your classmates had a phone during the school day would you be OK without one too? (The answer is: They would be. They are.)”

—parent and advocate, Chelsea DeLorme, Maine.

We are currently in a collective action trap of our own creation and parents need schools to help get us out. The research base has caught up with common sense and across the past year it has become common knowledge: Phone bans are healthy for all of us. Full stop.

At this point, when people push back on phone bans it gives you good info. They are either: a paid lobbyist, afraid of something they can’t or won’t name, or they’re simply uninformed. Which is OK! There is a lot to care about in this world and we need to rely on others to do the work sometimes—you all are familiar with this phenomenon as legislators! But we have those experts—both local and national—and they’re in your packet.

It is not a panacea to give students a 6-7 hour break from phones at school, but it is an incredibly cost-effective, rapid intervention that positively affects individual students and school communities. As good for teachers—and parents—as it is for students and importantly: Most impactful for students struggling to reach their full potential.

To simplify the issue: Phones are social media. Social media is phones. If you’re following the trials in the Northern District of California—these products were designed by companies like Meta to be addictive. Of course we already knew that! But now we know that these companies knew it too—and they know we know they knew. Which changes everything. Anytime someone argues for having a phone during the school day or creating an exception beyond a 504, IEP or medically prescribed use, replace the word phone with social media and see how that sounds.

“To simplify: Phones are social media. Social media is phones.”

—parent and advocate, Chelsea DeLorme, Maine.

Last week, I had the chance to speak with an extraordinary educator, Prof. Jonathan Haidt himself. He had just returned from a European tour where he’d been prepared to pitch European leaders to follow Australia’s lead and ban social media for 16-and-unders. To Prof. Haidt’s delight he found that Europe was already there: No one needed convincing.

If we want to keep up with the rest of the world, this is what we need to do for our kids, today.

To wrap up: This IS a generation-defining question. And to return to the theme of parental anxiety: School shootings scare me too. But no, I don’t want my kids texting me in a time of crisis. I want them to be alert, I want them to listen to and trust their teacher. And I want them to already know how much they are loved every time they walk out of our porch door.

I want them to know that the invisible string that connects us is more important and powerful than a smartphone.

Thank you. I welcome any questions.

Written Testimony
By Natalie Houston, LPC, Clinical Mental Health Counselor, Bend, Oregon

Before the Oregon State Legislature Senate Committee on Early Childhood and Behavioral Health Hearing on Senate Bill 1546: Relating to artificial intelligence companions

February 4, 2026

I am here to express my support for Senate Bill 1546 and to urge its passage. My name is Natalie Houston. I am a licensed professional counselor from Bend and a parent of four children ages 7-20. I have been working with kids, adolescents and adults and providing support and guidance to parents in clinical practice for over 15 years. I also speak regularly in schools on the topic of digital devices and youth mental health, and I am a member of the Bend-La Pine School District Information Technology Stakeholder committee.

In my clinical practice, I have developed greater and greater concern about the impact of technology on children and adolescents, as I am seeing increasing numbers of youth and families seeking services related to tech overuse as a result of products that are designed to make the virtual world more appealing than the real world, as well as exploit youth’s developmental needs for acceptance, a sense of competence and belonging.

In my practice, I have treated:

• youth who have become addicted to pornography on school-issued iPads;

• teens whose video game playing prevented them from graduating high school;

• children with insomnia and enuresis owing to exposure to violent digital imagery;

• and adolescents who have developed dysmorphic beliefs about their appearance to the point of starvation and self-mutilation owing to algorithmic social media feeds.

As a society, we are in the early stages of reckoning with the youth mental health crisis catalyzed by digital devices and apps. We now know that social media platforms, video games and the devices themselves are designed to maximize engagement, which encourages excessive use and results in persistent distraction and emotion dysregulation from artificially manipulating the brain’s dopamine-reward pathways, which is at the root of why digital devices are so problematic for all of us, but especially for our youth.

And this is before Artificial Intelligence and AI chatbots entered the picture. We are now facing an even higher level of risk for youth, one that carries exponentially more potential for developing problematic use, dependency and harm because of the primal brain circuitry it activates and manipulates: The attachment system.

When an infant is born, its first instinct after enduring the stress of birth is to cry out – it is not a cry for food or water, it is a cry for human connection to help them regulate their nervous system, i.e., calm down, after the stress of birth. Only after the infant experiences the reassuring embrace from a caregiver can they attune to other survival signals such as hunger, temperature, fatigue, etc.

This point cannot be emphasized enough: The very first instinct every human being has is an attachment instinct – the drive to connect to other human beings to feel safe. We do not self-regulate our nervous systems; we co-regulate our nervous systems with trusted members of our social circle. This attachment instinct is what has allowed our species to survive hundreds of thousands of years and supersedes most other human drives, which is why people will go to the ends of the earth to connect to someone they love and why social isolation is used as a form of torture. We are a social species.

“AI chatbots artificially manipulate the attachment instinct— our most basic human instinct— by tricking the human brain into believing it is engaging in a social relationship and providing a false sense of attachment. Children particularly vulnerable to believing that fictional or imaginary characters are real.”

—Natalie Houston, LPC

AI chatbots artificially manipulate this most basic human instinct by tricking the human brain into believing it is engaging in a social relationship and providing a false sense of attachment. While adults are more able to differentiate between what is real/not real, children are inherently trusting and are particularly vulnerable to believing that fictional or imaginary characters are real. One need only think of Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, and even Elf-on-a-Shelf moving around the living room throughout the month of December to understand how predisposed children are to believe in things that aren’t real, especially if they are human-like, until their brains develop the structures and capacities to help them discern fact from fiction.
AI Chatbots are intentionally designed to exploit this orientation.

Children are the most vulnerable population to this manipulation of the brain’s attachment system because of their prolonged dependency on supportive caregivers to survive. While many other mammals can walk and function independently from their parents within minutes of birth, human beings require the longest period of time to mature into a fully autonomous adult, depending completely on a community of adults in order to do so.

The human brain itself does not complete maturation until approximately age 25. When a child reads caring, empathic words on a screen from an AI chatbot that mimics the attuned response of a caregiver on which they rely for their very survival, a distorted, dystopian dependency can materialize, and already, tragically, has resulted in horrific outcomes for too many young people.

Youth, especially adolescents, are also interacting with AI chatbots out of the developmentally appropriate need to seek novelty. But what often starts as curiosity and amusement often ends in unrealistic expectations and distorted beliefs about relationships, sexuality, and identity as, because unlike human companions, AI chatbots have no self, no filter on output, no needs, and never tire.

“AI chatbots have no self, no filter on output, no needs, and never tire…[yet] children are turning to chatbots to meet their attachment needs.”

—Natalie Houston, LPC

In my practice, I am now observing young people turning to AI chatbots not only for cognitive offloading (completing homework, writing outlines, brainstorming), navigating life’s challenges (what job to get, where to go to college), and communication (help composing emails, texts or Snaps), but, more troubling, meeting their attachment needs: Emotional connection, support and companionship.

There is a fundamental problem with this form of artificial attachment, especially for younger users in moments of emotional distress: AI chatbots don’t truly understand emotions, human problems or the needs of the user, they can only simulate empathy and regurgitate automated responses. But since it feels real, it may as well be real for the individual engaging with the chatbot.

As AI chatbots programmed to mimic the response of an attuned caregiver try to “help”, vulnerable youth may trust advice that isn’t appropriate or safe. When topics turn to mental health, relationships, or identity issues, youth can be led into believing false information. Chatbots can sound confident and authoritative even when they’re wrong. Young users often do not have the experience to fact-check claims or advice. Young people can become dependent, or attached to the AI companion, often displacing the necessary experience of connecting with a real human being for support and guidance. In fact, turning to a trusted caregiver in times of distress builds the neural framework of emotion regulation and creates the foundation of a young person developing a sense of competence that they can handle life’s challenges.

As one can easily imagine, this set of dynamics is even more problematic for young people who don’t have trusted caregivers or friends to turn to in real life, rendering them even more at risk for developing unhealthy connections and dependencies on unreliable automated systems.

Owing to the prolonged period of time required for a human brain to fully develop, children and adolescents are vulnerable to manipulation, exploitation, and addiction, which is why, as a society, we have laws, regulations, and safeguards to protect their health and development. We need these protections now for this emerging technology. For some children and adolescents, it is already too late, but for many others, the safeguarding of their childhood depends on it.

I respectfully urge this committee to pass Senate Bill 1546 as the least we can do to protect our children in this rapidly changing digital world.

My name is Emily Cherkin. I am a writer, teacher, and speaker. I do not accept funding from technology companies for my work.

I recently testified before the United States Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation on the threat educational technology poses to children.

In 2013, Bill Gates said, “We won’t know for ten years” if investing in EdTech will improve learning. A decade plus later, the EdTech industry is worth $400 billion, but children today are less cognitively capable than we were at their age.

Today, nearly 90% of American public schools give children internet-connected devices for “learning,” but test scores and skills have been falling since we started handing out Chromebooks. Pre-kindergarteners now read the numeral “11” as “pause”-- like the pause button. Young children think “Click and Subscribe” means “goodbye” because that’s how YouTube videos end. Teenagers can purchase drugs using their school laptops.

The NTIA has a unique opportunity to tackle these problems and those raised in the December listening session by using these funds to reclaim education from technology companies.

Specifically, the NTIA should:

1. Fund peer-reviewed, independent research about the harms of EdTech;

2. Audit EdTech products, especially around their use of algorithms and gamification; and

3. Pilot technology-free classrooms or schools to show we can do things differently.

Ten years ago, we took a “wait and see” approach with social media. This week, social media executives are in court as the harms of their products have become impossible to ignore.

We cannot afford to make this same mistake with education technology.

As you hear testimony today from parties who might seek to spend more money on tech-based solutions, let me suggest this: If we’re going to continue to experiment on children with AI and EdTech in schools, at the very least we should be assessing the damage.

“Let me suggest this: If we’re going to continue to experiment on children with AI and EdTech in schools, at the very least we should be assessing the damage.”

—Emily Cherkin, testimony before NTIA

Like social media and smartphones, the use of internet-connected devices in schools presents numerous risks to children because the business model of EdTech and Big Tech are the same and fundamentally at odds with healthy child development.

I urge the NTIA to use these resources to reclaim education from technology companies, and return it to children, before it’s too late.

Thank you.

By Faith Boninger Testimony re H.650, February 6, 2026

Chair Marcotte and members of the committee:

Thank you for the invitation to testify today about H.650.

My name is Faith Boninger. I’m testifying today in my personal capacity, but for identification purposes, I am a research faculty member at the University of Colorado Boulder, in its School of Education’s National Education Policy Center. I’ve studied marketing in schools for nearly 20 years, and for the past ten years, my research has focused on the educational and privacy impacts of the digital technologies used in schools. I don’t accept funding from tech companies for my work.

I very much support H.650 as essential to protecting Vermont’s children—including their data privacy, the integrity of their educations, and the content they’re exposed to online through their schooling.

Ubiquity and Nature of Digital Educational Products

Schools are so different than when we—or even our children—were kids. Digital educational products are now ubiquitous in American classrooms. For those of us regularly in schools, their ubiquity can make it hard to remember that it was not always like this. For those of us not regularly in schools, it’s hard to comprehend all the many functions that digital educational products serve, and also shape. Any given district may use hundreds of digital products, or more.[1] Teachers and students use them to organize and provide curriculum content, structure classroom teaching and student collaborations, assess and track student learning, and communicate with parents and guardians. Administrators use them to make staffing and procurement decisions, and for reporting purposes. Just a handful of student-facing examples are Google Workspace for Education, Kahoot!, Zearn, Khan Academy, MagicSchool, Nearpod, and PowerSchool.

Some argue that, used under the supervision of teachers for educational purposes, so-called “ed tech” is different, and better, than other forms of digital technology platforms like social media or video games. My research indicates that this isn’t true. In many ways, ed tech is worse. This committee has spent a lot of time thinking about big tech, data privacy, and age-appropriate design of tech products. Everything you know from those deliberations is relevant to thinking about digital products used in schools. Essentially, ed tech is still big tech—complete with many of the design concerns associated with the social media and gaming platforms that kids use outside of schools. And then some, because “ed tech” products are mediating between teachers and students, delivering educational content, making educational decisions, and through all of it, collecting huge amounts of sensitive data from children as they learn and grow. Importantly, children are required to use these products in their schooling.

“Some argue that, used under the supervision of teachers for educational purposes, so-called “ed tech” is different, and better, than other forms of digital technology platforms like social media or video games. My research indicates that this isn’t true. In many ways, ed tech is worse.” —Faith Boninger, NEPC

Pedagogical Issues to Consider

Digital products influence the nature of teaching and learning in a variety of ways.[2] All of them point to the importance of the state knowing which products are being used in its schools, establishing a means of understanding what their characteristics are, and laying out ground rules for companies that want to do business in Vermont and have access to its children. Particularly, the pedagogical theories embedded in digital platforms and learning programs shape the student learning environment. In other words, the algorithms embedded in these products shape teaching, curriculum, and assessments. They tend to narrow the curriculum to competency-based approaches that are amenable to digital delivery and assessment. They also may embed cultural and other biases in curriculum and in assessments. Further, digital educational products may expose students to marketing and behavioral tracking. This is especially the case for students in low-income districts, which are more likely to choose less costly products or options. Assessments in digital educational products that use predictive analytics, artificial intelligence, and machine learning can harm students in difficult-to-identify ways. As a general rule, the economics of bringing tech products to market incentivizes opacity and discourages adequate testing of their algorithms.

Student Data Privacy

Ed tech products also collect vast amounts of data. They do this partly to fulfill their intended educational functions.[3] And also because more data allows for additional uses, including interoperativity with other products and the development of new features and complementary products.

Importantly, data privacy policies, consistent with most federal and state law, distinguish between “student data” that is clearly associated with a student and “de-identified data” that no longer has that student’s identifying information attached to it. There are no retention limits on so-called de-identified data. Providers can save, share, and use these data in perpetuity for all sorts of commercial and other purposes, like predicting the likelihood that a student might engage in risky behaviors or commit a crime. And whether the predictions are accurate matters less than that they’re made and used, for such uses as determining insurance rates or police surveillance or guiding students toward different academic tracks. In short, providers are enabled to collect, retain, and use data extracted from students from all aspects of their state-required schooling—for their own undisclosed purposes, in perpetuity, with virtually no limits.

“Providers can save, share, and use [student de-identified] data in perpetuity for all sorts of commercial and other purposes, like predicting the likelihood that a student might engage in risky behaviors or commit a crime.”

—Faith Boninger, NEPC

Artificial Intelligence (AI)

AI amplifies these concerns. In addition to stand-alone AI products for schools, other ed tech products increasingly incorporate generative AI features. There’s a lot of money supporting the integration of AI into public schools, and it’s happening at dizzying speed. Products that incorporate artificial intelligence are particularly opaque, as the mathematical calculations embedded in them are unknowable even to their own developers.[4] These products threaten to corrupt curriculum with misinformation, degrade the relationships between teachers and students, bias consequential decisions about student performance, exacerbate violations of student privacy, increase surveillance, and further reduce the transparency and accountability of educational decision-making.[5] All of these, of course, increase the need for the registry provided by H.650. And for annual registration to address the fact that products continually change, with many of those changes currently in the direction of more AI.

“[AI] products threaten to corrupt curriculum with misinformation, degrade the relationships between teachers and students, bias consequential decisions about student performance, exacerbate violations of student privacy, increase surveillance, and further reduce the transparency and accountability of educational decision-making.” —Faith Boninger, NEPC

Students and Their Schools Need Their State to Support Them

In theory, districts carefully choose the best ed tech products, negotiate contracts with providers, and directly control the ways that the products work.[6] That’s not the reality. More often than not, teachers and administrators are flooded with marketing for tech products. Districts lack the personnel, expertise, and power to clarify contract clauses and negotiate effectively with providers. And although they may try products before they adopt them, they can’t legally examine the programming of proprietary products, including the programming that determines how a product makes educational decisions and how it processes student data.[7] In many cases, districts, schools, or teachers adopt products via “click-through” agreements without any negotiation at all. Google, which is a major provider worldwide, as a matter of course dictates terms and conditions to districts that districts have no recourse but to accept. And as with any other digital product, when ed tech products are “updated,” schools must either accept the changes or absorb the costs involved in finding alternatives. It’s very difficult, if not impossible, for a parent to know which products are used or may be used by their child, or how those products have been vetted.

“In many cases, districts, schools, or teachers adopt products via “click-through” agreements without any negotiation at all. Google, which is a major provider worldwide, as a matter of course dictates terms and conditions to districts that districts have no recourse but to accept.” —Faith Boninger, NEPC

Small and under-resourced districts have no money to hire enough staff to review and vet products or to pay for adequate data protection. And the more products that are used, the more opportunity there is for data misuse—both by outside “bad actors” and by the providers and the sub-contractors with which they share data. And, again, many districts are currently using hundreds of products. While many districts try to vet products for data privacy concerns, they are limited in their ability to do so.

School leaders—and the children and families affected by directly by the ed tech products they adopt—need higher-level policy to support them by establishing oversight and accountability mechanisms. The registry proposed in H.650 would free districts of the expense and effort required to vet platforms and negotiate with providers. It would also reduce inequities among districts and leverage the power of the state to ensure the quality and safety of the products that students use.

The registry serves both as assurance of the pedagogical quality of products that can be used in the state and also, essentially, as a privacy agreement between the state and providers. It provides a way for the public to know about the products that enter its schools, and to leverage the power of the state to impact the nature of those products. As such, it’s an important step in improving the lives of Vermont’s children and families.

Suggestions for Revision

The bill as written addresses almost everything my research suggests that it should in order to adequately protect Vermont’s children. I do, however, have some suggestions:

1. As written, a certified product will not sell or share data with third parties. In many cases products must share data with sub-contractors in order to function. I recommend adding a provision for this kind of sharing that also holds sub-contractors accountable for the student data that comes into their hands. The bill could require providers to list their sub-contractors and have the sub-contractors register as well. There will be overlap in the sub-contractors used by different providers.

2. As written, the bill does not define “student data.” I recommend including a definition that explicitly includes de-identified student data as “student data.”

3. As written, the Secretary of State is fully responsible for developing, publishing, and annually reviewing the standards for product certification. It may be more practical to create an independent entity (perhaps under the supervision of the Secretary of State and/or together with the Agency of Education) to conduct these activities. It will be important to include the expertise of educators who can address the products’ pedagogical aspects and developers who can define and evaluate issues associated with programming.

Conclusion

Overall, H. 650 is an important step forward in recognizing and reducing the threats posed to Vermont’s children by the technology they use in school. I support it wholeheartedly and thank you again for inviting my testimony.

Faith Boninger is a research professor at the University of Colorado Boulder, at the National Education Policy Center.

[1] Instructure reports that in the 2023-24 school year, school districts it works with accessed an average of 2,739 distinct ed tech tools annually. Instructure (2024). EdTech top 40: A look at K-12 edtech engagement during the 2023-24 school year. Salt Lake City, UT: Instructure. Retrieved May 5, 2025, from https://www.instructure.com/edtech-top40

[2] Boninger, F. & Molnar, A. (2020). Issues to consider before adopting a digital platform or learning program. Boulder, CO: National Education Policy Center. Retrieved February 4, 2026, from https://nepc.colorado.edu/publication/virtual-learning

[3] Access4Learning Community (2024). National Student Data Privacy Agreement, Standard Version 2 (Clauses 4.5-4.7). Retrieved February 3, 2026, from https://files.a4l.org/privacy/NDPA/NDPA_v2-2_STANDARD_WEB.pdf

[4] Williamson, B., Molnar, A., & Boninger, F. (2024). Time for a pause: Without effective public oversight, AI in schools will do more harm than good. Boulder, CO: National Education Policy Center. Retrieved April 11, 2025, from http://nepc.colorado.edu/publication/ai

[5] Williamson, B., Molnar, A., & Boninger, F. (2024). Time for a pause: Without effective public oversight, AI in schools will do more harm than good. Boulder, CO: National Education Policy Center. Retrieved April 11, 2025, from http://nepc.colorado.edu/publication/ai

[6] In 2008 and 2011, U.S. Education Department expanded its definition of “school officials,” as used in FERPA, to include “contractors, consultants, volunteers, or other third parties” that perform “an institutional service or function for which the agency or institution would otherwise use employee.” Ed tech companies rely on this definition to claim school official status, even though they cannot be “under the direct control of the agency or institution with respect to the use and maintenance of education records,” as required. Privacy Technical Assistance Center, U.S. Department of Education (n.d.). Who is a “school official” under FERPA? Retrieved February 4, 2026, from https://studentprivacy.ed.gov/faq/who-school-official-under-ferpa

[7] For example, Zearn markets itself as providing a comprehensive, standards-aligned K–8 mathematics curriculum. However, it provides no way for educators to review its complete curriculum in detail. The platform offers documentation to show that it meets local standards in each U.S. state, but the software prevents independent evaluation of lesson quality, problem sets, or instructional sequences. Most critically, the adaptive algorithms that determine student pathways, prerequisites, and readiness for advancement are “black boxed,” making it impossible for educators to assess whether these decisions align with district instructional goals or individual student needs. Boninger, F. & Nichols, T.P. (2025). Fit for purpose? How today’s commercial digital platforms subvert key goals of public education (p. 46). Boulder, CO: National Education Policy Center. Retrieved February 4, 2026, from https://nepc.colorado.edu/publication/digital-platforms

My Written Testimony for Vermont re: H.650 (EdTech Registry)

February 6, 2026

Hello and thank you for the opportunity to testify today-

My name is Emily Cherkin. I am a parent, author, speaker, and teacher. I do not accept funding from tech companies for my work. I am here to testify in support of H. 650.

I come today with an urgent warning: Technology is fundamentally changing childhood, and in the process, undermining parents, destroying education, and threatening the very health of our democracy.

Let me start with an overview of what childhood in America looks like today in 2026:

• Children 8- to 18-years-old average 7.5 hours a day on screens– outside of school hours.

• 62% of children under two watch YouTube.

• 40% of two-year-olds have a personal tablet.

• Nearly 90% of American public schools provide children with internet-connected devices for “learning.”

• Occupational therapists teach young children how to turn the pages of a book.

• Preschool teachers report that toddlers don’t like getting their hands dirty.

• I know one teen so addicted to his phone he sealed it in a ziploc bag and brought it into the shower with him.

• 26% of 13- to 17-year-olds use ChatGPT to do their schoolwork– which they access on the laptops the school gives them.

• Elementary school children are literally falling out of their chairs in classrooms because they lack the core strength to sit for long periods of time.

• One child viewed more than 13,000 YouTube videos in less than three months– at school on his school-issued laptop. Another spent 72 hours in one weekend on YouTube.

• Just this week, a teacher told me that while assessing kids for kindergarten readiness, children could correctly identify their ABCs and the numerals 1-10. When they got to identifying “11,” however, the children said: “Pause.” (As in an “11” looks like what they recognize as a pause button on a screen.)

• Children are setting their alarms for 2 AM to get up and play on their school-issued laptops while their parents sleep, unaware.

• While still losing their baby teeth, middle schoolers in class imitate sex noises they hear on the internet.

Mounting evidence is showing that smartphones and social media harm children, and after nearly a decade of advocacy work, lawmakers and governments around the world are enacting changes.

I wholeheartedly support these efforts, but I wish to stress that further protection is needed of children during the school day, where nearly every child in America is provided with an internet-connected device in the name of education.

To protect children’s cognitive, mental, and emotional health we must do more than ban phones from classrooms or remove screens from childhood: We must get rid of EdTech too.

Unless you are a parent of a current school-aged child, school today looks very different not just from when we were students, but even ten years ago. Today,

• Children spend the school day hunched over individual laptops or iPads

• Teachers’ eyes are on a screen of screens to monitor students

• Chalkboards are digitized whiteboards

• Schools use hundreds, if not thousands, of unique EdTech products and apps per school

• Curriculum is online learning and grades are stored in digital grading portals

• Physical textbooks and workbooks rarely exist, but eBooks and note-taking apps do

• Teachers upload lessons and homework to online learning management systems

• Digital curricula uses persuasive design techniques that emphasizes rewards and engagement over learning

• And finally, human teachers are being replaced by AI “tutors,” even as harms of children’s use by AI products fill the headlines.

It’s okay if this is new information to you. The onslaught of digitized EdTech products into schools happened quickly and relatively quietly while other crises dominate the headlines. That distraction has served EdTech companies well. Yet many of the companies who build these EdTech products– whose names you’ve never heard of– are as powerful and wealthy as the companies whose names you do know– Meta, Snap, Google.

In reality, putting “ed” before the word “tech” doesn’t make it effective, safe, or legal. EdTech is just Big Tech in a sweater vest.

So it is critically important that lawmakers seek to hold these unheard of, yet still very powerful companies, as accountable as we are doing with the ones whose names we know. Because if you remember nothing else I say today, please let it be this: at its very core, the business model of EdTech is no different from the business model of Big Tech and both are fundamentally at odds with healthy child development. Big Tech has already co-opted the social lives of our children; we cannot let them co-opt their education too.

I am pleased to see that H.650 would establish a registry requiring EdTech companies to register in order to do business with schools in Vermont. This filter would be a first step in preventing health-harming products from getting in children’s hands.

Some of you may be wondering whether it makes sense to restrict educational technology in schools. After all, you’ve probably been told that children need these products to be successful, “digital citizens” of the future.

But here is the problem: such claims stem from industry-funded marketing that benefits technology companies, not children or teachers.

This propaganda has unfortunately fueled a wholesale re-structuring of childhood around screens– both at home and in school– and is catastrophic for children, families, and schools.

There are several myths propagated by the EdTech industry and repeated by those who do not know they are being manipulated:

1. EdTech improves learning. False. Children today are less digitally literate and less cognitively developed than their parents– a reversal that coincides with the introduction of EdTech products such as Chromebooks and learning apps into schools. You may be familiar with the work of Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath, whose recent bestselling book The Digital Delusion thoroughly debunks the claims of EdTech efficacy. Just a few examples:

   • Overwhelming evidence exists to show that reading and writing on screens harms cognition.

   • Another study based on over 300,000 primary students, found that even 30 minutes of digital device use in class had a negative impact on reading comprehension scores.

   • Finally, one study found that investing in air conditioning yields a 30% improvement in learning outcomes over giving children a Chromebook.

2. EdTech companies claim– and market heavily to school districts– that “EdTech products will help teachers” when in fact the very premise of “scaling” teaching through technology-- as EdTech companies intend to do– means displacing the human educators at the heart of the learning experience. “Success,” according to the EdTech industry, would mean fewer teachers serving more students and increasing teacher workload and class sizes, while turning teachers into IT administrators instead of mentors and instructors. It’s no wonder teachers are quitting or retiring early and schools are resorting to AI tutors who are far cheaper, even as they are more dangerous. All good educators know: learning is rooted in human relationships, and the EdTech business model is fundamentally at odds with this fact. EdTech tools don’t help teachers; they help schools hire fewer teachers, while generating greater profits for EdTech companies– some of whom are worth billions of dollars.

3. Third, you may have been told that EdTech will democratize education by giving underrepresented children access to products. But far from improving equity, EdTech products create new “digital divides”: a digital safety divide and a digital learning divide. Safer versions of EdTech cost more. Monetizing safety and privacy means under-resourced schools receive less safe versions of the product. Second, EdTech is offered as a “solution” to ballooning class sizes. But EdTech solutions in under-resourced schools means privileged children will get human teachers, while poor children will get technology and chatbots. That is deeply inequitable. Just look where technology executives themselves send their children – to nature-based, low-tech schools– and you can see that those who build and market these products for our children make starkly different choices for their own families.

4. Concerns about online safety are growing, and in spite of claims to the contrary or efforts to filter or block content, EdTech is not safe for children because these very products rely on the internet to deliver their services and the internet is not a safe place for children. Via school-issued devices, children are accessing pornography, pedophiles, suicide videos, and extremist content– even when filters and blocking software is in place. It is vital that we remove student access to phones during the school day, but doing so without also removing internet-connected devices from student’s backpacks simply transfers the risks of harm from an iPhone to a Chromebook.

5. Just like school administrators and many teachers, you’ve likely been told that EdTech will “prepare kids for the future.” But no tech skills will matter if children do not first learn how to communicate, think critically, or problem solve. Children do need technology skills, such as understanding what “the internet” is; what is an “algorithm”; how to discern fact from fiction; and so much more. Children need to learn how technology works and how to do so safely. But do not confuse “EdTech” with “TechEd.” Learning about technology is very different from learning on technology. Giving EdTech products to children and calling it education poses an existential threat because of the degradation of skills that ensues. We must ask why such tools are being given to children with vulnerable brains in the name of education in the first place and do what we can to stop it.

6. Finally, I often hear the claim that “it’s too late to change things because technology is here to stay.” It is true that technology is and will continue to be a part of our world– but it is absolutely not a foregone conclusion that EdTech companies should be allowed to run rampant through our classrooms without consequences. Lawmakers do have the power to stop this. It is possible to build a safer internet, regulate technology companies, and protect children’s data and privacy as the default. Technology companies will always choose shareholders over people, so the only way these companies will meaningfully change is if they are forced to, such as having to register with the state, as Bill H650 proposes. We have regulated other health-harming products before when it comes to use by children. We can and must do the same with EdTech.

Doing nothing is not an option, because as a result of the harms caused by social media and smartphones in the hands of children, plus the ongoing enmeshment of EdTech companies and products into education, we face four crises that warrant immediate action:

First, a mental health crisis. Screen use before two years of age is linked to accelerated anxiety by age 13. Today, one in three teen girls has seriously contemplated suicide. The youth mental health crisis is so dire it elicited a warning from the surgeon general.

Second, we face a learning crisis. Reading and math scores are plummeting. We are quite literally wasting education dollars on ineffective technologies.

Third, we face a crisis in creativity. A 15-year-old in Kentucky told me the elementary school students she teaches in a drama class, when she said to them, “Let’s pretend we’re flying!” they looked at her and asked, ‘How?’“

If children can’t pretend to fly, they cannot imagine, and if they cannot imagine, they cannot innovate. Creativity means “having an original thought.” Technology access in childhood does not enhance creativity; it kills it. Remember, today’s tech titans had analog, play-based childhoods.

Finally, the enmeshment of technology in childhood is creating a crisis for our democracy. Jefferson himself said, “An informed citizenry is at the heart of a dynamic democracy.” When children spend hours being fed algorithmically-driven rage-bait content designed to increase engagement on internet-connected devices given to them by the adults who are supposed to protect them, they lose the ability to form their own opinions, detect bias, and think critically. That should frighten us all.

It is important to state that this is not a kid problem. It is an adult problem that is impacting children and adults need to do something, NOW. No one policy change will be sufficient by itself. We need many levers to work in concert to best protect children. In addition to what you consider today with the registry bill, warning labels on social media products and giving families the right to opt their children out of using these harmful products in schools are equally important actions to take.

Thank you for your time.

You can view the entire hearing, including public testimony from my colleagues and friends, Lisa LaVasseur of the Internet Safety Labs, Faith Boninger at NEPC, and Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath, here.

Since 2019, I’ve been invited to testify in other state legislatures, federal agencies, U.K. Parliament, and the United States Senate.

Other than my hairstyle, not much has changed from my initial testimony nearly seven years ago.

My team pulled together this highlight reel from some of my public testimony moments. Since we made the video, I’ve been invited to testify before two more state legislative bodies, so we will have to do a Part 2 soon!

Thank you for being here.

e

Today was an exhilarating day. Though I felt a lot of anticipatory nerves as I prepared to the hearing, once I sat in that chair, I was not at all nervous.

Not one bit.

It’s easy to tell the truth.

e

For those who’d like to print off a copy of this, here is a downloadable PDF version of this testimony:

My Testimony To The United States Senate By Emily Cherkin

2.94MB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

Here is a link to the video recording of my statement.

Here is a link to the full hearing.

My full statement:

Chairman Cruz, Ranking Member Cantwell, and Senators–

Thank you for the invitation to testify today.

My name is Emily Cherkin. I am a parent, author, speaker, and on faculty at the University of Washington. I do not accept funding from tech companies for my work.

I am here with a warning: technology is fundamentally changing childhood, and in the process, undermining parents and threatening the very health of our democracy.

Let me paint you a picture. Today, in America:

• 40% of two-year-olds have a personal tablet.

• Children 8- to 18-years-old average 7.5 hours a day on screens– outside of school hours.

• Nearly 90% of American public schools provide children with internet-connected devices for “learning.”

• Occupational therapists teach young children how to turn the pages of a book.

• Preschool teachers report that toddlers don’t like getting their hands dirty.

• I know one teen who is so addicted to his phone he seals it in a Ziploc bag and brings it into the shower with him.

• 26% of 13- to 17-year-olds use ChatGPT to do their schoolwork– which they access on the laptops the school gives them.

• My own university students have never received handwritten feedback on their papers.

• Elementary school children are literally falling out of their chairs in classrooms because they lack the core strength to sit for long periods of time.

• One child viewed more than 13,000 YouTube videos in less than three months– at school on his school-issued laptop.

• The juxtaposition of childhood innocence and technology’s overreach can be seen in this anecdote: Middle schoolers, still losing their baby teeth, think it’s funny to imitate the sex noises they hear from watching online content. t

But doesn’t technology make our lives easier and prepare our children for the future?

Unfortunately, no, in spite of the rosy claims made by technology companies. As a result, the wholesale re-structuring of childhood around screens is catastrophic for children and families and has led us to four crises:

Crisis #1: Youth mental health

First, a mental health crisis. Screen use before two years of age is linked to accelerated anxiety by age 13. Today, one in three teen girls has seriously contemplated suicide.

The youth mental health crisis is so dire it elicited a warning from the surgeon general.

Crisis #2: Learning

Second, we face a learning crisis. As schools double down on EdTech products, reading and math scores are plummeting. One study found that investing in air conditioning yields a 30% increase in learning outcomes over investing in tech. We are quite literally wasting education dollars on ineffective technologies.

Crisis #3: Creativity

Third, a crisis in creativity. A 15-year-old in Kentucky told me older kids feel like the lucky ones. In an afterschool elementary school drama class she teaches, she said to the younger children: “Let’s pretend we’re flying!”

They looked at her and asked, ‘How?’“

If children can’t pretend to fly, they cannot imagine, and therefore, cannot innovate. Technology access in childhood does not enhance creativity; it kills it. This threatens the future of entrepreneurship in America. Remember, today’s tech giants had analog, play-based childhoods.

If children can’t pretend to fly, they cannot imagine, and therefore, cannot innovate. Technology access in childhood does not enhance creativity; it kills it. This threatens the future of entrepreneurship in America. Remember, today’s tech giants had analog, play-based childhoods.

-Emily Cherkin, to the United States Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, January 15, 2026

Crisis #4: Democracy

Finally, the enmeshment of technology in childhood is creating a crisis for our democracy. Thomas Jefferson said, “An informed citizenry is at the heart of a dynamic democracy.” When children spend hours being fed algorithmically-driven rage-bait content designed to increase engagement, they lose the ability to form their own opinions, detect bias, and think critically.

All of this is by design, of course. Technology companies build their products to hook and hold our attention, and children’s brains are especially vulnerable. To make their products safer, tech companies would have to compromise profits. And they don’t want to.

As a result, the business model of Big Tech and EdTech is fundamentally at odds with child development and its intrusion into family life undermines the choices parents can make.

This is not a kid problem. It is an adult problem that is impacting children. But parents especially need your help.

• Parents may delay access to smartphones and social media, only for their children to view TikTok videos on a friend’s phone.

• Parents block YouTube at home, but the school laptops give children direct access.

Senators, I invite you to think about your own childhoods: the teachers who inspired you, the awkward social moments, triumphing over a difficult high school essay, making– or not making– the basketball team.

We remember these moments because in the discomfort, we learned something. When we seek benefits from the convenience of technology, we forget the benefits of struggle.

We have reached a moment that demands we slow down and build things, even when the tech industry insists on the opposite. Legislation like the Kids Off Social Media Act is a start– and I believe we can go further. Just as we have done with regulating alcohol and tobacco access, we can do so with social media too.

Parents are not naive. We know that our children will use technology for work and life in adulthood.

We just want to ensure they have a childhood first.

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For the link to all the testimony, visit here.

Delivered during NTIA Listening Session, December 10, 2025

My name is Emily Cherkin. I am on faculty at the University of Washington Evans School of Public Policy and I just returned from London where I testified before Parliament about the harms EdTech poses to children. I want to be clear up front: I take no funding from tech.

My message to this body is simple: at its very core, EdTech is Big Tech and both are fundamentally at odds with healthy child development. I implore the NTIA to request funding disclosures from speakers today, especially those who push for more tech for children, because EdTech is breaking education. These products are inequitable, unsafe, and often funded by Big Tech. Beware the pro-EdTech messaging you hear today because much of this propaganda benefits tech companies, not children.

EdTech will not “close the achievement gap.” It will widen it. The solution to overcrowded class sizes and teacher burnout is not more tech. More tech does not mean “better learning.” EdTech products destroy focus, steal attention, and displace relationships. Students need teachers, not technology.

EdTech creates new “digital divides.” Safer versions of EdTech cost more. Monetizing safety and privacy means under-resourced schools receive less safe versions of the product. This is inequitable and means that privileged children get human teachers, while poor children get chatbots.

We only need to look where technology executives themselves send their children – to nature-based, low-tech schools– to see the truth: those who build and market these products for everyone else’s children make starkly different choices for their own.

EdTech products are unsafe. These products rely on the internet to deliver their services and the internet is not a safe place for children. In school, kindergartens are handed iPads for “learning” and told to “be responsible users” but developmentally-speaking, children lack the cognitive ability to safely navigate the web or regulate their own screen use. Yet via school-issued devices, children can spend hours on YouTube or gaming, when they aren’t being exposed to pornography, pedophiles, suicide videos, or extremist content.

Children’s personal data is collected via EdTech platforms and sold to third parties without informed parental consent. According to Internet Safety Labs, 96% of EdTech platforms sell children’s data. I am currently the lead plaintiff in a class action lawsuit that alleges these exact claims against PowerSchool, a $6 billion EdTech company owned by Bain Capital.

Embedding GenAI tools into existing EdTech platforms further exposes children to newer and bigger risks. A.I. tutors are A.I. chatbots and the emerging evidence of harm due to use of chatbots by children is deeply concerning. Just as there is no such thing as a safe cigarette, there is no such thing as safe GenAI for children, despite the persuasive marketing you may be hearing. Don’t fall for it.

It is critical that this body sees the existential risk posed by giving such products to children and calling it education. The degradation of skills and risks to safety and privacy poses a direct threat to democracy itself and we must ask why such tools are being given to children with vulnerable brains in the name of education in the first place.

For nearly two decades now we’ve been told that giving children laptops and internet access for school is progress. In fact, it is a giant step backwards.

-Emily Cherkin, M.Ed., First Fish Chronicles

Note from Emily: Julie is my hero. Not only is she an absolutely brilliant attorney, she is fierce, dedicated, and kind. With her husband, Andrew, she co-founded the EdTech Law Center fighting to protect students, parents, teachers, and schools from the exploitative practices of the EdTech industry. Julie was part of the group who addressed members of Parliament with me and the following is her speech from that event on Monday, November 24, 2025. Her brutally true stories about individual children harmed by EdTech products moved the audience— and panelists— to tears. (Warning: this essay references disturbing content…which our children have access to on their school-issued devices. If you find these examples concerning, join us in sounding the alarm on EdTech.)

As advocates both personally and professionally, Andy and I have worked with dozens of families whose children have been harmed by their school computers. These are just a few:

• A 6-year-old boy, who, on his school iPad, on the school network, during the school day, was served hardcore pornography for weeks before the teacher noticed, just by innocently asking Siri for pictures of pretty girls.

• Another student was able to use his school-issued Chromebook to view more than 13k YouTube videos at school in less than three months.

• A 7-year-old girl was required to use an online tutoring platform at school and was assigned an adult tutor. Her parents were never even informed that she had an online tutor. One day, the tutor was using a cartoon filter during their session. When the filter glitched, the child saw that the tutor was completely naked.

• A 10-year-old girl was victimized by a sexual predator while using her school-issued Chromebook, whose efforts to discover where she lived were thwarted only by her dad accidentally discovering the messages. One moment he was helping her with an essay, the next he was scrolling through weeks of grooming, reading hundreds of messages between his daughter and the predator. It began with the predator telling the girl that he loved her and quickly became explicit, with him telling her he wanted to use a sex toy on her and “go fast and hard” in her. He even “joked” that he was going to kidnap her. But for her father’s intervention, she could have met the same fate that thousands of children have at the hands of online predators. In fact, less than a year later, a different 10-year-old girl from the same town was kidnapped and raped by a man who had met and groomed her through the same social media platform our client had used.

• An 11-year-old, neurodivergent boy had never had internet access before receiving his school-issued Chromebook. His searches for information about Pokémon quickly and algorithmically led to anime, then pornographic anime, and ultimately to real people having real sex, which he then could view anytime he wanted at school—neither the school nor his parents could stop him. His parents weren’t there, and the school’s restrictions were inadequate. And simply not using a Chromebook was not an option, as even in-person learning is now online. The result: the boy developed a debilitating pornography addiction and compulsive sexual behaviors. In addition to watching porn, the boy would exchange naked pictures of himself with strangers and even arrange meetings with strangers for sex. His addiction has persisted through in-patient treatment and even being pulled from public school and placed in a low-tech educational environment. The boy will likely struggle with these behaviors the rest of his life.

These are just a few examples of the countless harms that students are suffering while using school-issued devices. There’s also cyberbullying, drugs, sextortion, online scams, radicalization, explicit deepfakes of peers, exploitation of students’ personal data, and the latest threat: unregulated AI chatbots, the harms of which are quickly accumulating and go far beyond cheating.

Students are persistently distracted by the allure of social media, videos, games, and now AI, all engineered to elicit compulsive use. And all just to keep kids using so that big tech can harvest more and more of their data.

Andy and I founded the EdTech Law Center to fight for these children and their families in court. In doing so, we continue a long tradition of using the justice system to protect vulnerable people from powerful, predatory actors and dangerous products, from tobacco and exploding cars, to asbestos and opioids. Today, the biggest companies in the world are selling dangerous digital products to schools for use by children as young as five. Worse, they’re marketing them as both essential and safe.

When a child gets hurt using her school computer, these companies are quick to blame everyone else—the school, the parents, even the child herself—despite that it is the companies that design, build, market, sell, operate, and ultimately profit from these products. Despite that they and they alone have the power to make them safe.

When parents speak out after their child has been harmed, or because they fear that she may be, schools variously humor them, dismiss them as Luddites, and even retaliate against them. They tar them as bad parents who have raised bad kids. Countless families have been driven out of their schools, and denied their right to a safe education.

As parents, we find ourselves asking, why is my school siding with tech companies instead of my child? While it is an understandable question, and one with many answers, it is not the most pressing one. The question we all should be asking is why are tech companies selling inherently dangerous products to schools for use by children as young as five? Shouldn’t these companies design products that come safe out of the box for students of all ages? Isn’t that what the law requires?

Imagine if a textbook company delivered math books randomly crammed with games, lotto tickets, notes from other students, and pictures of naked girls. Would we really say that it’s the school’s job to inspect every book and remove this material, rather than the company’s job to make math books that are only about math?

What if a manufacturer of playground equipment delivered playscapes missing vital parts? Would we accept it if, when their swing set collapses and hurts or kills a child, they say that the harm could have been prevented if only the child had been “Playground Awesome” and fully had inspected it first? Of course not. But how is that any different from Google telling kids to avoid getting hurt online by being “Internet Awesome”?

Would it be OK for a school builder to build an elementary school composed of nothing but chemistry labs—with fire and tall stools, toxic chemicals and fragile glassware—saying that chemistry is essential and kids need to learn all they can about chemistry before they graduate, leaving schools to figure out how to make them safe? Certainly not, but how is that different from what Google demands of schools with its inherently dangerous Chromebooks?

What about EdTech’s data practices? Would we allow a massive company to assign a human observer to every student, to follow them around all day and night, at school and at home, to monitor and record their every move—their grades and class participation; but also their private conversations; their journal entries and doodles; how they write and hold their pencil; all while noting what tends to capture their attention; their strengths and weaknesses, their likes and their fears, so that the company can make predictions about their performance and behavior—all for undefined “educational purposes”? Of course not. But is it really any different when it is done invisibly through a computer, as happens on today’s EdTech platforms?

These examples are absurd, and yet they’re not. They’re simply analog approximations of the current digital reality. Schools and students are confronted with similarly absurd challenges, decisions, and dangers every day when they log onto their devices.

But it doesn’t have to be this way.

It’s a choice. A choice made by big tech—not to enrich children, but to enrich themselves.

The digital environment at school can and should mirror the physical environment. In the physical school environment, the people students interact with, the products they use, and the information available to them are strictly controlled to help kids learn while keeping them safe. Trained professionals are welcome; strangers are not. Dodge balls are ok, while guns are not. Vetted curriculum and age-appropriate books are let in; pornography, ultraviolence, and other adult material are kept out.

We’re not asking for censorship; we’re asking for curation. Curation by professionals trained in healthy child development—the same as we require in the physical space.

We have to return to first principles. Schools have to stop being sites of pervasive, unaccountable, corporate surveillance that directly undermines the freedom of thought that education is designed to nurture. And they have to start prioritizing student safety and welfare over empty promises by big tech. That’s what children deserve and what the law demands.

Returning to first principles does not mean turning back the clock or starting from scratch. There are many brilliant scholars who have spent their careers examining EdTech closely and objectively, some of whom live right here in the UK.

To name just a few, there’s Dr. Valerie Handunge, who examines EdTech’s capture of education, Dr. Velislava Hillman, who specializes in the datafication of learning, and who you will hear from next, as well as Dr. John Potter and Dr. Ben Williamson, the editors of Learning, Media and Technology, the leading journal for critical EdTech studies. We must banish the big tech salesmen who view education as just another market to capture, and listen to those devoted to preserving education as a space to cultivate human potential, nourish democratic values, and provide for the common good.

Excerpt of Julie delivering her speech to Parliament, Nov. 24, 2025.

If you have a concern related to your child’s use of EdTech products in school, please contact Andy and Julie at EdTech Law Center.

To view my speech to Parliament, visit this link. To view Andy’s speech, visit this link.

Note from Emily: I’ve had the privilege of knowing Andy Liddell since 2019, where our aligned concerns around screen-based technology use in schools merged through our volunteer work with Fairplay. (Today, Andy and I serve as co-chairs of Fairplay’s Screens in Schools Action Network group.) Over the years, Andy and I have worked together on several efforts to explore the efficacy, safety, and legality of issues relating to EdTech product use in education. Andy was part of the group who addressed members of Parliament with me and the following is his speech from that event on Monday, November 24, 2025.

EdTech, as we currently know it, will invariably harm children and diminish their academic performance. That is because EdTech, as we currently know it, is designed to serve the business model of the modern internet, in which the needs of the human being on the other side of the screen are subordinated to the desires of those who would pay for information about that person.

We did not get here overnight, and we did not get here by accident.

The story of EdTech is the story of the internet, and how the internet transformed since the ’90s from a distributed, publicly funded means of sharing knowledge to a closed, corporately owned means of observing and manipulating human behavior. EdTech must be considered as an ecosystem, rather than as any one device or program in isolation. But one company, more than any other, is responsible for the transformation of the internet beginning in 2001. It’s the same company responsible for the transformation of the classroom that began a decade later.

In her 2019 book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Harvard professor Shoshanna Zuboff explains how, around 2001, Google invented a new way of doing business online. Then as now, web companies collected reams of information about their users as they browsed the internet, only at that time, these so-called metadata were seen as such useless byproducts they were deemed “digital exhaust.”

But like the clever engineers who discovered how to capture natural gas at an oil well rather than just burn it off, Google’s engineers figured out a way to refine this exhaust into a valuable commodity. Eventually, industry followed suit, such that every internet company, and many companies in the real world, benefit to at least some extent from the data trade. This includes EdTech companies.

Phones, computers, and other networked devices record everything a person does online and off. That information is fed into sophisticated algorithms, allowing companies to predict what that person is going to do next, influence their behavior to make those predictions more likely to come true, and then sell those predictions to others looking to benefit from that knowledge.

Under this new model, companies were able to offer products more cheaply, or even for free, because the human beings using those products paid with their time and attention. The real customers were those who paid money for the predictions and the power to influence users.

As Google grew, the surveillance business model began to crowd out other potential ways of making money online. Investment in alternative business models dried up. Success was now measured in user metrics, not revenue. And thus every company, to at least some degree, became a surveillance company. EdTech companies are no exception.

As this model took hold, companies ceased to design their products solely for the benefit of the human user and instead began to design to maximize the user’s time with the company’s product. User time is company money: the more time a user spends with a product, the more data is generated, the better the predictions become, and the greater the opportunity to reach the user. Design briefs shifted from, “How do we make this product fun, interesting, and useful to the user, so that they choose to come back?” to “How do we coerce the user to spend as much time as possible with this product?”

Persuasive design was the answer.

Sitting at the intersection of behavioral psychology and computer science, persuasive design is the discipline of using a computer to influence the behavior of a user for the benefit of someone else. These techniques are now familiar to us: the endless scroll; autoplay; algorithmic feeds that push content that you don’t choose; daily streaks; and virtual rewards; all intentionally deployed to keep us fully immersed, scrolling and clicking, while we lose track of time and forget the thing we set out to do. It’s what Big Tech euphemistically calls “engagement,” and it is the only measure of success in the data economy. It’s “engagement,” Vegas-style. Across a large enough population, persuasive design techniques can influence the behavior of a meaningful number of users in favor of tech companies and their paying customers.

Collectively, tech companies employ thousands of experts in persuasive design. Their dream? To keep users on their platforms forever, pointing their attention toward whatever is most profitable.

The father of persuasive design, a Stanford professor named B.J. Fogg, observed in the late 1990s that a computer could be three things: a tool, a medium, or a persuasive agent. A tool; something necessary that I use to accomplish a task. A medium; a way to exchange information between me and other people. And a persuasive agent; a way to manipulate my behavior for the benefit of someone else.

In 1998, this was radical stuff: computers were huge, the internet was slow, and hardly anyone was online. It was hard to imagine that a computer could be used to change human behavior, but Fogg’s experiments showed it was possible. Over the next decade, as computers shrank to the size of a smartphone, the internet sped up, and everyone logged on, persuasive design features became embedded in every internet platform that monetized user attention and information.

The mix of tool, media, and persuasive agent changed as well.

In the beginning, computers were pure tools, room-sized behemoths for making massive-scale calculations for military and business planning. When I entered school in 1989, personal computers were a mix of tool and medium—think word processors and electronic encyclopedias—which nevertheless centered the needs of the user. But today, even though they are marketed only as tools and physically resemble the laptops of decades past, school computers are mostly persuasive agent, some media, and very little tool.

That’s because all EdTech exists in the larger environment of attention-mining through the internet. A Google Chromebook is just an internet browser wrapped in a hardware package. When we give kids EdTech, we’re really just putting them online, insisting that they stay focused and make good choices in an environment intentionally designed to redirect their focus and make choices for them.

What students experience as distraction, tech companies experience as profit.

The EdTech revolution promised that, by giving every student a Chromebook or an iPad, they would thrive. They’d become better digital citizens, develop “21^st century skills,” and receive instruction specially tailored just for them. According to those who sold this vision, anything else would be inequitable: the future was digital, the world was going online, and we risked leaving out marginalized children unless they had the same access to the internet as everyone else did. Schools, they said, could level the playing field, ushering in a new age of knowledge and equality.

These gauzy promises are impossible to quantify. But by the traditional metrics used to evaluate educational success, the revolution has failed. Beginning in 2012, when so-called 1:1 programs begin to go mainstream in the US, the steady gains that students had made in math, science, and reading over the previous four decades began to rapidly reverse. By 2025, scores had fallen to levels not seen since the ‘70s, erasing more than fifty years of progress. Youth mental health is worse now than it has been in generations. And perhaps surprisingly, given that kids now spend most of their day on computers, they are even less computer literate today than they were just ten years ago.

When companies can make money by pointing user attention where it is most profitable for them and nothing is stopping them, they will—child welfare be damned. Sustained attention is a necessary condition for learning. When our kids are steeped in a digital environment that fractures and redirects their attention for the benefit of others, falling performance is not only unsurprising, it’s entirely expected.

Excerpt of Andy delivering this speech to Parliament, Nov. 24, 2025.

If you have a concern related to your child’s use of EdTech products in school, please contact Andy and Julie at EdTech Law Center.

To view my speech to Parliament, visit this link.

UK Parliament, November 24, 2025

To view the video of my testimony, please visit this link.

6 Myths and 6 Truths About EdTech and GenAI

My name is Emily Cherkin. I am a teacher, an author, an activist, and a parent fighting the onslaught of technology in schools.

I am here from America with a warning.

To protect our children’s cognitive, mental, and emotional health we must do more than ban phones from classrooms. We must get rid of EdTech.

Walk into any school today and the environment will look very different from when you were in school: children hunched over individual laptops, teachers staring at a screen of screens to monitor students, digitized whiteboards, online student assignments, and assessments housed within digital learning management systems. Even math is delivered as a gamified product emphasizing rewards not learning. Many schools no longer have computer labs.

This is EdTech today.

“EdTech” refers to any digital tool or product used in or for education. This can include digital curricula, assessments, learning management systems, and 1:1 devices such as Chromebooks and iPads. Generative AI products fall in this category, as they are deeply embedded within existing EdTech products. Some reports suggest that individual schools use hundreds^[1] if not thousands^[2] unique EdTech products.

If you remember nothing else I say today, please let it be this: at its very core, the business model of EdTech is no different from the business model of Big Tech and both are fundamentally at odds with healthy child development. Big Tech has already co-opted the social lives of our children; we cannot let them co-opt their education too.

After all, EdTech is just Big Tech in a school uniform.

The incursion of EdTech products into schools is powered by several myths. We have been hoodwinked into believing that these products are effective, safe, and legal. They are not.

To fight back, we must first dismantle these myths, and then seek what I call a “tech-intentional” vision for education, where technology serves the needs of children and teachers, rather than tech companies.

Myth: “EdTech improves learning.”

Truth #1: EdTech worsens learning outcomes.

There is plenty of evidence^[3] that the onslaught of computer-based learning has not delivered on its claims and has a detrimental effect on student achievement. The OECD^[4], the National Library of Medicine^[5], and over 126 independent studies^[6] have found that increasing access to technology for students does not improve learning outcomes. One study^[7] based on over 300,000 primary students, found that even 30 minutes of digital device use in class had a negative impact on reading comprehension scores. Another found that investing in air conditioning yields a 30% improvement in learning outcomes^[8] over giving children a Chromebook. Finally, overwhelming evidence exists to show that reading^[9] and writing^[10] on screens harms^[11] cognition.^[12]

EdTech claims to help students learn faster and better. But learning occurs in moments of struggle and difficulty. When we attempt to make learning “more efficient” we by definition stop the learning process. Friction is a good thing in education and learning requires time.

Myth #2: “EdTech helps teachers.”

Truth #2: EdTech is ruining teaching.

At its heart, EdTech seeks to fundamentally change the nature of teaching. The end goal of EdTech companies is to “scale” instruction, so that one teacher can serve even more kids. Yet to think of children or teachers as scalable widgets is morally abhorrent and deeply offensive. “Success,” according to the EdTech industry, would mean fewer teachers serving more students and increasing teacher workload and class sizes, while turning teachers into IT administrators instead of mentors and instructors. It’s no wonder teachers are quitting or retiring early.

Learning is rooted in human relationships, a goal which EdTech is fundamentally at odds with. EdTech tools don’t help teachers; they help schools hire fewer teachers, while generating profits for EdTech companies.

Myth #3: “EdTech can close the achievement gap.”

Truth #3: EdTech worsens inequities.

EdTech companies would have you believe that access to their devices and services helps disadvantaged children close the achievement gap. But far from improving equity, EdTech creates new “digital divides”: a digital safety divide and a digital learning divide.

First, safer versions of EdTech cost more. Monetizing safety and privacy means under-resourced schools receive less safe versions of the product. That is inequitable.

Second, EdTech is offered as a “solution” to ballooning class sizes. But as my colleague Dr. Velislava Hillman has warned^[13], EdTech solutions in under-resourced schools means privileged children will get human teachers, while poor children will get technology and chatbots.

We only need to look where technology executives themselves send their children^[14]– to nature-based^[15], low-tech schools^[16]– to see the truth: those who build and market these products for our children make starkly different choices for their own families.

Myth #4: “EdTech is safe for children.”

Truth #4: EdTech products harm children.

EdTech companies claim their products are safe for use by children, but these very products rely on the internet to deliver their services and the internet is not a safe place for children. Children are also not small adults. Developmentally-speaking, they lack the cognitive ability to safely navigate the web or regulate their own screen use. Yet via school-issued devices, children are accessing pornography,^[17] pedophiles,^[18] suicide^[19] videos, and extremist^[20] content.

We face an international mental health crisis^[21] and loneliness epidemic^[22] among young people. Removing phones from schools– the absolute right thing to do– without removing internet-connected devices from student’s backpacks simply transfers the risks of harm from an iPhone to a Chromebook.

Another pernicious harm is in the exposure of children’s data collected via EdTech platforms and sold to third parties without informed parental consent. My colleagues Andy and Julie Liddell will address this next.

Finally, we cannot ignore the fact that the embedding of GenAI tools into existing EdTech platforms further exposes children to newer and bigger risks.^[23] A.I. tutors are A.I. chatbots and the emerging evidence of harm^[24] due to use of chatbots by children is serious, significant, and deeply concerning.^[25] Just as there is no such thing as a safe cigarette, there is no such thing as safe GenAI for children.^[26]

Myth #5: “EdTech prepares kids for a technological future.”

Truth #5: Children need TechEd, not EdTech.

The most common argument for EdTech is that it will prepare our kids for “jobs of the future.” In reality, technology may have changed, but children’s needs have not. While the jobs of the future will utilize technology, the skills that children need to use such technologies effectively will come from acquiring communication, collaboration, critical thinking, and problem-solving skills in childhood. We cannot know what technologies will matter in ten years, but we do know that solving problems and thinking critically will always matter.

Let me be clear: Children need technology skills. They need to learn how technology works and how to use it safely. But do not confuse “EdTech” with “TechEd.”^[27] Children should learn about technology: what is “the internet”; how it works; what is an “algorithm”; what is an LLM and how it is built; how to discern fact from fiction; why protecting your data is important; and so much more.

But none of that is EdTech.

As policymakers and leaders, it is critical that this body sees the existential risk posed by giving such products to children and calling it education. The degradation of skills due to overreliance on technology is a serious threat to democracy^[28] globally and we must ask why such tools are being given to children with vulnerable brains in the name of education in the first place and do what we can to stop it.

A functioning democracy requires a thoughtful and capable citizenry. EdTech products fundamentally threaten that.

Myth #6: “We can’t fight EdTech. It’s too late.”

Truth #6: EdTech is not a foregone conclusion.

The most pernicious myth perpetrated by EdTech companies is that it is too late to remove their products from education.

Do not accept this.

We will have and use technology in the future. But if we get this right, children will not be harmed in the process. It is possible to build a safer internet, regulate technology companies, and protect children’s data and privacy as the default. Of course, if technology companies wanted to do any of this, they would have. But they choose not to because it’s out of alignment with their business model. The only way these companies will meaningfully change is if they are forced to put the needs of people before profits. We have done this before with tobacco, dangerous chemicals, automobiles, and even banks. We can do the same with EdTech.

I have heard many times that this fight feels like David versus Goliath. It is true– we aren’t as well-funded or platformed as the mighty technology behemoths we battle. On a personal note, I am fighting this in the States as the lead plaintiff in a class action lawsuit against one of the largest American EdTech companies.^[29] At times, I feel very much like small David with my slingshot.

Disentangling ourselves from the enmeshment of EdTech will be messy and difficult and a long process. But that doesn’t mean we give up or walk away without trying.

We have a choice– none of this is a foregone conclusion.

And remember, in the story of David and Goliath, it is the end of the story that is the part of this analogy that matters:

David won.

Thank you.

To view the video of my testimony, please visit this link.

^[1] Internet Safety Labs: K-12 Edtech Safety Benchmark Findings Report (2022) https://internetsafetylabs.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/06/2022-K12-Edtech-Safety-Benchmark-Findings-Report-2.pdf

^[2] The EdTech Top 40: K-12 EdTech Engagement https://www.instructure.com/edtech-top40

^[3] “The EdTech Revolution Has Failed: The case against student use of computers, tablets, and smartphones in the classroom” by Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath (After Babel Substack)

^[4] OECD Report “Students, Computers and Learning: Making the Connection” (2015)

^[5] Salmerón L, Vargas C, Delgado P, Baron N. Relation between digital tool practices in the language arts classroom and reading comprehension scores. Read Writ. 2023;36(1):175-194. doi: 10.1007/s11145-022-10295-1. Epub 2022 May 7. PMID: 35571994; PMCID: PMC9076497.

^[6] J-PAL Report “Will Technology Transform Education for the Better?” (2019)

^[7] Salmerón, L., Vargas, C., Delgado, P. et al. Relation between digital tool practices in the language arts classroom and reading comprehension scores. Read Writ 36, 175–194 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11145-022-10295-1

^[8] Tracey Gunter, Jing Shao; Synthesizing the Effect of Building Condition Quality on Academic Performance. Education Finance and Policy 2016; 11 (1): 97–123. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/EDFP_a_00181

^[9] Liao, Sixin et al. “Dynamic reading in a digital age: new insights on cognition.” Trends in Cognitive Sciences, Volume 28, Issue 1, 43 - 55

^[10] Marano G, Kotzalidis GD, Lisci FM, Anesini MB, Rossi S, Barbonetti S, Cangini A, Ronsisvalle A, Artuso L, Falsini C, Caso R, Mandracchia G, Brisi C, Traversi G, Mazza O, Pola R, Sani G, Mercuri EM, Gaetani E, Mazza M. The Neuroscience Behind Writing: Handwriting vs. Typing-Who Wins the Battle? Life (Basel). 2025 Feb 22;15(3):345. doi: 10.3390/life15030345. PMID: 40141690; PMCID: PMC11943480.

^[11] U.S. Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences, National Center for Education Statistics, National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), various years, 1971–2023 Long-Term Trend (LTT) Reading and Mathematics Assessments.

^[12] Nataliya Kosmyna, Eugene Hauptmann, Ye Tong Yuan, Jessica Situ, Xian-Hao Liao, Ashly Vivian Beresnitzky, Iris Braunstein, Pattie Maes. Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task. June 2025.

^[13] Dr. Velislava Hillman. “Big tech has transformed the classroom – and parents are right to be worried.” The Guardian. Sept. 2025.

^[14] Chris Weller. “An MIT psychologist explains why so many tech moguls send their kids to anti-tech schools.” Business Insider. November 2017.

^[15] https://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/23/technology/at-waldorf-school-in-silicon-valley-technology-can-wait.html

^[16] https://wezift.com/parent-portal/blog/why-tech-ceos-raise-their-kids-tech-free/

^[17] Alyson Klein. “Students Are Viewing Porn at School. How Educators Can Stop Them.” Education Week. January 2023.

^[18] Z.G. v. Google LLC. The EdTech Law Center. Case filed June 2025.

^[19] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/26/technology/chatgpt-openai-suicide.html

^[20] Odette Youseff. “Nihilistic online networks groom minors to commit harm. Her son was one of them.” NPR. August 2025.

^[21] Office of the Surgeon General (OSG). Protecting Youth Mental Health: The U.S. Surgeon General’s Advisory [Internet]. Washington (DC): US Department of Health and Human Services; 2021. PMID: 34982518.

^[22] Report of the WHO Commission on Social Connection. “From loneliness to social connection:

charting a path to healthier societies.” (June 2025)

^[23] National Education Policy Center Report. “Fit for Purpose? How Today’s Commercial Digital Platforms Subvert Key Goals of Public Education.” (September 2025)

^[24] Sanford, John. “Why AI companions and young people can make for a dangerous mix. Psychiatry & Mental Health, Stanford University.” (August 2025).

^[25] Horwitz, Jeff. Reuters. “Meta’s AI rules have let bots hold ‘sensual’ chats with kids, offer false medical info.” (August 2025).

^[26] Cherkin, Emily. “There is No Such Thing as “Safe AI” for Children.” (August 2025).

^[27] Cherkin, Emily. “EdTech is Not Tech Ed.” (November 2025).

^[28] Cherkin, Emily. “Why Opting Out of EdTech Matters Now More Than Ever: A Fight for Democracy.” (November 2024).

^[29] Cherkin, et al. v. Powerschool Holdings, Inc., 3:24-cv-2706 (N.D. Cal.) Filed on: 05.06.2024