A couple days ago, I received an email informing me that I had a message in a special app called “ParentSquare”. In this special app—not in regular, low-tech email—the teacher had written an important message about my daughter’s schoolwork So, the email was a digital middleman that informed me of a message in a completely separate digital system. The email then repeated the contents of the app’s message anyways, making the separate app completely unnecessary. Confused? Me too.
You might wonder why an important message to or from a teacher could not be delivered through old-fashioned, direct email, without the redundancy of the fancy gatekeeper app. You might wonder what’s wrong with regular email—that breakthrough invention that supposedly enabled quicker business communication. If so, you wouldn’t be alone; most parents wonder these things, too.
Alas, things have changed for American education, and copious data suggests none of it is for the better. I’m not statistician, but I’ve noticed a couple things. First, schools are more expensive and tech-driven than ever, with textbooks and attention spans slowly disappearing from classrooms. Second, students are dumber and more out-of-shape than ever, belying the promises of special taxes and funding drives for the new technology and fancy gyms now nearly ubiquitous in American schools.
Something real has been lost in the rush to upgrade K-12 schools into campuses that rival community colleges. I’d say they’re a bit too smart for their own good. Members of the football team now look like sponsored athletes, with an array of warm-up gear suitable for a Nike campaign. It’s not just the kids getting fancy, though; where are the wrestling coaches wandering campus in their double-knit polyester shorts? These guys once doubled as physical education teachers and had us running the mile and climbing wooden walls in street shoes—feats many students are able to avoid nowadays. Most P.E. teachers now resemble NCAA coaches in quick-dry, school logo regalia, and the sweaty outdoor feats can be achieved through “online P.E.”
How about the other suffering that made us strong—the bulky textbooks with student names inscribed inside the front cover, or school lunches with only basic selections, including the world’s best rectangular pizza? I even miss the smell of damp, blue printer ink, the pink carbon-copy report card, and the very rare need to meet with teachers. It isn’t just a sentimental idea, either; paper and pencil make better brains. One of my kids desperately needed help with his math practice “sheet” a while back; when I went to help him, the “sheet” was on his screen, sending me on an education diatribe.
Today’s experience thus lacks the paper and ink that lent both precision and finality to the labors of students and teachers. What now exists in the glitchy haze of digital notifications and maddening logins was, just 20 years ago, presented with handwritten—if perhaps disheartening—clarity. The school experience for both students and parents has metastasized into a digital disease that hollows out both brains and souls, all under the guise of “21st Century education.”
Let me paint a scene that conveys this missing magic. Many of us remember going up to the teacher’s desk for help in the ancient and pre-digital days. The teacher’s desk was an adult territory containing paper clips, a big set of keys, a teacher-themed coffee mug, and a black vinyl notebook known as the “grade book.” It held a kind of authority and mystery that the new apps can’t touch. Full of pages with names, dates and rows of red-ink grades, it recorded the truth about your progress; those vinyl notebooks held the dirty academic secrets of an entire classroom. The grade book was sort of like Revelation’s “book of life,” but for teachers—something sacred, top-secret.
One of my kids maintains that he recently spotted such a notebook on a teacher’s desk, but I cannot confirm this. What I can confirm is that for years now, my kids’ grades have been buried in a maddening array of online repositories, all with forgotten passwords that must be reset before I can see any grades. My youngest boy recently asked me what his grade was in history. Ha! I wondered, too—and I also wondered what my “Infinite Campus” user ID and password was. (If you’re wondering what makes this system infinite, it’s more along the lines of “interminable” and less like “boundless.”)
If, like most humans, you’re confounded by the many app names, congratulations—you’re now privy to the “lived experience” of school parents in 2024. Schools now occupy a much larger portion of parents’ day, thanks to these apps and their around-the-clock digital firepower. For each child, there is now a proliferation of emails and notifications; we have long weekly and monthly missives known as the “principle’s letter” and “headmaster’s letter,” plus daily messages (through the other apps—duh!) from multiple teachers reminding us of everything from online “donut day” payments to upcoming math tests.
To be a skilled user of all the school technology, you must have a photographic memory and enjoy computer science as a hobby. That way, you’re more likely to keep apace of the constantly-changing menu of failing technology vendors that will only be replaced by next fall’s new “seamless” and “improved” vendors. Each school uses several different technology platforms, allowing for a single family to have upwards of nine different “streamlined” communication systems for three kids. It’s the educational version of having three different remotes to control the same TV.
Back to my little grade book story, though—the grading app is now where I go to find out my younger kids’ grades, but all questions about those grades must occur through the other app. A point of distinction must be made, though. The grading app is a little more high-tech; if you mistype something, a grey box sometimes appears, informing you of your “invalid token.” The Y2K computing term is one way of warning users that they are entering the government-quality work zone.
If I wanted to waste my valuable time just for fun, I could also open the ParentSquare app to ask the teacher for help—but first, I’d need to track down the password I set up six months ago. This requires that I request a regular email allowing me to reset my password. Somehow, the regular email part seems comforting. In the end, however, if I want to communicate with a teacher, I still need to do so through the special app. Brilliant!
For helicopter parents and tiger moms (and I salute the latter, truly), this must be an agonizing routine. Only the most nimble over-achievers can manage the multiple logins and puzzling redundancies. I don’t enjoy agony, so I take a different approach. With multiple kids in school—and with my Gen-X sensibilities to guide me—I assume that those who desire to achieve, will; for the others, there is always the school of hard knocks.
Looking on the bright side, I can rejoice in one thing: my kids attend schools that still assign real grades to students’ work. According to leading education experts and conference speakers, grades are just social constructs that—quite unjustly—treat dunces and the nascent criminal element as “the other”. (If you don’t know what “the other” means, you’ve probably been otherizing others!) You see, grades make it possible for diligent students to succeed, and that makes slackers, weed-smokers and “the other” feel bad about themselves. Some schools are taking this advice to heart and eliminating the traditional grading system altogether, ensuring that their products will be more confidently stupid than ever.
Schools are not the only places enamored with the latest app. My employer has instituted so many new third-party programs, none of which talk to each other, that I have no choice but to keep a handwritten list of passwords by my desk…a major security no-no. Of course all of these passwords expire at various times making my list a crossed-out and re-scribbled mess. I ask the question, in all sincerity: has all of this tech actually made us better at our jobs? I tell my younger coworkers that with all of the time spent wrestling with new apps and passwords including continuous security testing as the hacking threat grows, we are experiencing the Law of Diminishing Returns in real time. The future, I assert, is pencil and paper.
Well stated. Our local school system cannot stop "investing" in the children. The last $240M bond issue promised "Safer, Stronger, Smarter" with $101M of the total going to interest over a seven year period and the remainder to new buildings, football stadium locker rooms, busses and physical lock down systems. Not sure how this makes anyone stronger or smarter. Until we get full school choice with following tax dollars, I shall have mostly contempt for our public school systems. Don't even get me started on the teachers unions especially in Chicago and LA with what they did during Covid. Gotta run, getting myself spooled up. Thanks for your good work.