Education Week - April 18, 2018 - 4

What Principals Really
Think About Tech
School leaders are worried
about tech, but support
greater use of it, survey finds

By Benjamin Herold

AS DIGITAL DEVICES AND SOCIAL-MEDIA PLATFORMS
become an ever-larger part of children's
lives, the nation's school principals find
themselves in an uncomfortable-if familiar-bind.
On one hand, principals say they're worried about technology's potentially harmful effects: A full 95 percent believe their
students are using screens too much at
home, and 97 percent say they're at least
"mildly concerned" about how students use
social media outside of school, according
to a new national survey of school-based
leaders conducted by the Education Week
Research Center.
At the same time, however, principals are
welcoming technology and technologydriven trends into their own buildings.
More than half described personalized
learning as either a "transformational way
to improve public education" or a "promising idea." The relatively new idea of offering computer science education to every
student is already on most principals' radar
screens.
Why do those findings matter?
Because ready or not, when it comes to
technology, the country's 90,000-plus
public school principals play a critical gatekeeper role, said Daniel Kelley, the president of the National Association of Secondary School Principals, who also heads
Rhode Island's Smithfield High.
That means staying up-to-date with
the latest technologies, responding to the
problems technology creates, figuring out
how such tools can be used for learning,
and navigating pressure from tech companies and vendors to expand technology
use-all while juggling a thousand other
tasks, Kelley said.
"It's our responsibility to meet kids where
they're at and have a basic understanding of
their world," Kelley said. "But trying to keep
up can become overwhelming."

PRINCIPALS' DIVIDED MINDS ABOUT TECHNOLOGY
are nothing new, said Jonathan Zimmer-

4

Education Week / April 18, 2018

man, an education history professor at the
University of Pennsylvania.
In the 1910s and 1920s, for example, a
general moral panic occurred around the
potential harms associated with motion
pictures-at the same time innovators
such as Thomas Edison were arguing movies could revolutionize public education.
"This is an overarching trend through
the last 100 years of education history,"
Zimmerman said. "We see a lot of nervous
hand-wringing about what technology will
do to kids, but also a kind of technological
fetishism that leads schools to try to adopt
every new idea in the hopes of making education better."
Nowhere is that tension more evident
today than on issues related to screen time
and social media.
School leaders are clearly worried about
what children are doing on devices at home.
But even as districts rush to give every
student his or her own Chromebook or
iPad, 61 percent of principals say their students are getting "the right amount" of
screen time in school.
Principals are also twice as likely to say
they're "extremely concerned" about students' social-media use at home than their
social-media use at school-even as class
assignments and homework increasingly
move online, creating new opportunities
for children to become distracted by YouTube and other popular digital platforms.
Such is the reality of life in 2018, said
James Steyer, the founder and CEO of
Common Sense Media, a nonprofit that
promotes responsible technology use by
children and families-and helped launch
a "Truth About Tech" campaign to warn
about the dangers of technology addiction.
"Technology, used wisely and appropriately, can be an excellent resource for
learning," Steyer said. "But there is also an
arms race for our kids' attention going on.
It's being led by certain tech companies,
and there are really significant downsides.
Principals need to understand that."

GIVEN THE STAKES, IT'S UNDERSTANDABLE THAT
parents and the public want principals to
be informed, savvy gatekeepers on technology issues.
But on that front, too, some concerning signs emerge in Education Week's
new survey data, said Justin Bathon,
Education Week - April 18, 2018

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