Classrooms feel weird these days.
In the before time, prior to smartphones and Chromebooks, teachers began each day trying to tame a barely controlled chaos—chatting, joking, roughhousing, the kinetic buzz of students loudly bonding before the books came out. Maureen Mulvaney remembers those moments wistfully.
"I can't tell you how creepy it is to walk into a classroom on a Monday morning,” the veteran AP English and literature teacher at Minneapolis’s Washburn High School says. “Twenty years ago I'd have trouble getting the class's attention. The past couple years I walk in, and it's dead silence because everyone's on their phone.”
Mulvaney didn’t need a change to district policy, a new statewide law, or a time machine to course-correct what she views as “a generation of kids who have no stamina for learning or critical thinking.” She just needed reams of loose leaf and stacks of pointy No. 2 pencils.
Ahead of the 2025 school year, Mulvaney hatched a plan to eliminate all tech from her classroom. She received 100% support from her principal, and 98% of parents were on board with the experiment. The students, some of them forced to write by hand for the first time in years, proved more apprehensive. Grading would take longer, Mulvaney reasoned, but for the first time in recent memory she’d be certain she wouldn’t be parsing copy produced by Claude, ChatGPT, or Gemini. She wasn't worried about flouting district tech mandates, either—"I'm old, they don't mess with me," she laughs.
By this past February, survey results from her old-school experiment began pouring in: Over 95% of surveyed students said ditching screens had a positive impact on their learning, while 83% said they interacted more with their classmates.
"It doesn't give you any excuses to just quick do something else," student Liam Skrypek told KARE 11. "You're just focused. The only thing that's in front of you is a sheet of paper and it's a really wonderful thing."
The punk-rock insurgency of a scofflaw English teacher isn’t a scalable solution, to borrow language from the quarter-zip-clad Silicon Valley crowd. The forces that animated Mulvaney into sweeping action, however, are inspiring parental revolt against the encroachment of Big Tech in schools around the U.S.
Just last month the two largest school districts in the country, New York City and Los Angeles, banned generative AI for this school year. The L.A. moratorium spans all grade levels, while New York's impacts pre-K through eighth grade. Chicago could be next.
“The tech industry wants us to believe that AI-powered early education is not only inevitable, but necessary,” New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani says via press. “We do not see it that way.”
The stakes—the future of our children and, thus, civililation—couldn’t be higher; the power imbalance—the largest companies on Earth vs. concerned moms and dads—appears daunting. But in our conversations with local teachers, parents, organizers, lawmakers, union officials, and school board candidates, a sense of hopefulness bubbled beneath every dire observation about the state of AI and screens in schools.
The movement, as they see it, is bipartisan and building, a populist groundswell against turning students into guinea pigs for AI products.
Grant Eustice, a public high school teacher and co-founder of the advocacy group MN Unplugged, compares Big Tech to Big Tobacco and Big Pharma, “nasty” industries whose profiteering begets the suffering of their customers. He cops to feeling powerless at times—Google's systematic "stronghold" is too tight; district leadership is too captured by the tech giant’s influence.
But, he says with the optimistic twinkle of an educator and father to three grade-schoolers…
“The stuff happening in New York and Los Angeles is a game-changer—it's a domino effect, and other small districts are going to follow along. I think five years from now our public schools will look much different.”
Crisis Capitalism: Covid’s Classroom Computer Creep
In her 2007 bestseller The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, author Naomi Klein argues that the ruling class exploits the widespread shock caused by tumultuous events (economic collapse, war, natural disaster) to re-consolidate the world in ways that entrench their economic interests. In other words, “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste,” as future Obama White House Chief-of-Staff Rahm Emanuel encouraged a crowd of CEOs the following year.
The leaders of Google and Apple may well have taken notes from Rahm. Almost everyone interviewed for this story views Covid as a hingepoint, after which Big Tech inundated the education world. We’re just now beginning to assess what changes the “move fast break things” crowd wrought upon the lumbering bureaucracies of our public school systems.
In early 2020, around 45% of public schools issued take-home devices like Chromebooks and iPads to students, per data from the National Center for Education Statistics. By the 2021-22 school year, as the Covid pandemic upended in-person learning, that number shot up to 96%.
"With Covid, everybody got a Chromebook; we were handing 'em out like cookies," says Field Elementary fourth-grade teacher Christopher Coffey, who's been teaching within MPS since 2017. "That was a paradigm shift for us at Field, almost overnight: Chromebooks all the time. As a district we never really had a bigger conversation about what's best-practice with all this tech, and all of that was prior to AI."
You’ve seen Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, you can track the Trojan Horse metaphor from there. ChatGPT debuted in 2022, setting off an AI arms race (or bubble) that’s being relentlessly marketed from the White House on down; President Trump signed an executive order last year that tells schools to start “foundational AI literacy” in kindergarten. And all those classroom devices, including 30,000 inside Minneapolis Public Schools? They come preloaded with the AI tech on which the U.S. stock market now depends.
For 150 million students and educators, that means using Google Classroom, a platform that Forbes recently described as the tech company’s "most ambitious AI push in schools yet.” (Minneapolis Public Schools deploys a suite of e-learning programs including Classroom, DreamBox, and Lexia.)
The pitch to schools and parents should sound familiar to anyone with memories that extend back to the second Obama term: Prepare kids for the jobs of tomorrow by teaching them today’s latest tech. Around 2012, the learn-to-code drumbeat began thudding from Silicon Valley. “Coding,” Apple CEO Tim Cook told President Trump in 2017, “should be a requirement in every public school.” By late last year, the movement was deemed dead, killed off as Big Tech’s next advancement, AI, renders many coders obsolete. Hold that football down tighter this time, Lucy!
Your kid’s AI and screen diet will be determined not just by which of Minnesota’s 325ish school districts they’re in, but also by the policies of their exact school and, often, specific teachers within that building. The three largest districts in the state—Anoka-Hennepin School District, Saint Paul Public Schools, and Minneapolis Public Schools—each take different approaches.
Justin Wewers, Anoka-Hennepin’s technology coordinator, became his district’s "AI guy" four years ago. Across the district there’s no AI access for elementary school learners, he says, and one-to-one devices aren't issued at those grade levels. "I mean, I'm a tech guy and I still think tech is pushed too much, inside and outside of school," he says, adding that AI is a powerful tool that, when used thoughtfully, benefits teachers and students. Anoka-Hennepin is in the process of revamping its AI policy, and Wewers doesn’t expect any controversial outcomes.
Rachel Larson, executive director of St. Paul Public Schools' Office of Teaching and Learning, says kindergartners and first graders in her district are exposed to iPads at teachers’ discretion, iPad carts are wheeled in for elementary schoolers, and middle and high schools receive take-home iPads. AI use is restricted at every grade level below high school. "From parents we're hearing that, after Covid, we need to recalibrate the use of technology for learning—keep our students safe, monitor screentime, but also prepare them to use the emerging technologies they need," Larson says. SPPS is currently cooking up an AI policy in collaboration with the school board and stakeholders, she says. It's due by the 2027-28 school year.
Because the PR department for Minneapolis Public Schools didn’t respond to Racket’s interview request, we don’t have access to anyone with district-wide expertise on AI and screen policies. (Multiple sources chuckled at this unresponsiveness being on-brand; several others noted that MPS has, uh, bigger, insolvency-related fish to fry at the moment.) The district website states that iPads are available from pre-K to second grade, and after that each student receives their own Chromebook.
While stressing that he speaks strictly to his experience at Field Elementary, Coffey says his students encounter Google’s AI Overview during most internet searches on their Chromebooks; coworkers have shared anecdotes about third graders attempting to cheat on tests using AI. “That’s an outlier… but wow,” he says.
Coffey tries to limit his students’ time on computers, and he's grateful that the district "finally” firewalled YouTube last year, because the distraction proved "debilitating" for young learners. "They couldn't do anything” with “brainrot” YouTube videos a click away in the classroom, he says. (NBC News recently explored the brainrotting pervasiveness of YouTube in American classrooms.)
“At a district level I feel like we’re often playing from behind,” Coffey says. “I don’t think there’s any doubt students enjoyed better educational outcomes before [Chromebook proliferation]. Teaching critical thinking and interpersonal skills are more important to what we do as schools than to be training grounds for a new tech future. The technology? You can always figure that out; it's a tool that's optimized for us.”
On the national labor front, Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, has said that students are "are drowning in tech" and "the robots can’t be in charge." Closer to home, Marty Fridgen, VP of Education Minnesota, avoids language that colorful, instead stating that her union is "working on our platform" when it comes to AI and screens.
Parent Pushback
Nationally, public school teachers are mixed on tech. A recent Gallup poll found that while 61% believe kids spend too much time on devices, 59% think digital tools and apps help with learning and, complicating everything, around half say devices create equal parts good and bad outcomes.
Early research on the subject is less ambiguous.
“The risks of utilizing AI in education overshadow its benefits,” according to a recent Brookings Institution report. Students who jotted down notes achieved better reading comprehension compared to those who solicited help from chatbots, a recent study from Cambridge University Press & Assessment and Microsoft Research found. A new study of 27,000 Chinese students found that AI users scored 18% higher on homework assignments than non-users, but when exams rolled around the AI crowd scored 20% lower than their classmates who avoided the chatbots. In a 2025 student survey from Rand, over two-thirds of respondents agreed that as AI use increases, critical thinking skills decrease.
From the Pope to the U.S. Surgeon General's Office, warnings about tech’s negative impact on humanity seem to be amplifying. (And that’s saying nothing of the predictions that runaway AI might outright end humanity.) And Silicon Valley moguls? They’re sending their kids to “anti-tech schools,” according to Business Insider.
Several local and national tech-concerned parent groups have read those studies, observed that polling, and noticed their own kids’ magnetic pull toward mindlessly scrolling touchscreens.
Grant Eustice, the public high school teacher who co-founded MN Unplugged, says his 350ish-member group came together two years ago to rally behind phone-free schools. Today, Minnesota's leading gubernatorial candidate, U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar, includes banning cellphones from classrooms as part of her platform.
MN Unplugged’s advocacy has expanded to include no devices for grades kindergarten through third, a computer-lab model for fourth and fifth, and a cart model for sixth through 12th. The group opposes students using generative AI at all grade levels.
"Ed tech is really just Big Tech in a sweater vest," Eustice says. "We've not been trained on how to leverage this technology so it's effective, legal, safe, and better than a human, right? Google just decides. We have no say."
And MN Unplugged has expanded itself. The national network now spiderwebs across 25+ states, and Minnesota's chapter represents a coalition of 13 hyper-local affiliates.
One of them is Intentional Tech Minneapolis, whose co-founder Rebecca Hesse is a mother to three kids, two of whom attend Minneapolis Public Schools. The district will supposedly soon conduct a tech audit, but Tech Intentional Minneapolis can't get officials to offer specifics. Enacting change within a giant, cash-strapped, unresponsive bureaucracy hasn’t proven easy, she reports.
"It's been a bit of a struggle when we've tried to talk to our technology director, he seems to know less about what students can access than we know." she says. “We've gotten a few school board members to respond to us, but not in a substantive way yet."
Hesse loves public schools, but had to make the tough choice to send one of her kids to a screen-free Montessori school. "It's hard not to defend our public schools, but [tech] has definitely been an issue that parents leave public schools over, myself included,” she says. Scan local Reddit forums, and you’ll find plenty of nervous young parents (myself included) searching for lower-tech public schools yet only finding those settings in the private and charter realms.
Olivia Dropps, marketing and outreach director with Waldorf Minnesota, says the admissions department at her screen-free private school hears more and more from anxious, fed-up parents who don't want their little ones swallowed by screens. "We're a huge breath of fresh air for parents," she says, adding that she hopes Waldorf's 45-year-old screen-free policy can inspire public schools, like the one her daughter attends.
"What does Waldorf charge, I mean 25 grand a year?" asks Washburn High School teacher Maureen Mulvaney, one of several public school boosters who bristled at Racket’s charter/private brain-drain question; it's around $21,000, though Dropps is quick to cite generous assistance programs.
Barreling Into an AI Future
State Sen. Erin Maye Quade (DFL-Apple Valley) has become a champion for AI-skeptical Minnesotans, authoring bills to beat back hyperscale datacenters, ban nudification tech, and establish any semblance of regulation. Interestingly, the lefty lawmaker’s coauthors on these efforts have included right-wing colleagues like Eric Lucero (R-St. Michael), the Satanic panic diagram guy, and Steve Drazkowski (R-Mazeppa), a trans litterbox hoax promoter. Turns out the industry that promised to eliminate everyone’s job somehow created a big tent of haters.
Maye Quade says her 4-year-old daughter has never used touchscreens, and she’s “terrified” by the idea of her being plopped in front of an iPad come kindergarten. When talking with high schoolers in her district, she says there’s a sense of profound nihilism brought on by AI.
"I'm fiercely opposed to the world [AI companies] want to bring about, and the way in which they're doing it is so destructive,” she says. “No kid needs generative AI in school... there should be a full ban. We need them to develop their actual intelligence before offloading that to artificial intelligence."
And that’s why Maye Quade authored a yet-to-be-introduced new bill that would “give children the right to analog learning in the state of Minnesota,” she says. Among its provisions: banning generative AI from pre-K through high school, putting "extreme" limits on ed-tech devices from kindergarten through sixth grade, and, as a nod to former colleague Sen. Ann Rest (DFL-New Hope), reintroducing the lost art of cursive handwriting.
"We have let this tech experiment happen on our kids, and the result is a failure,” Maye Quade says. “We need a reset, and [my bill] kind of returns us to the computer cart, computer lab era.”
Down in Chicago, new school board candidates are leading the charge for a three-year moratorium on generative AI in public schools. Here in Minneapolis, at least two school board candidates, Becca Dryden and Shannon Gibney, express deep concerns over how Minneapolis Public Schools embraces the tech.
"There's work being done on a classroom level, but I haven't seen the district take really decisive action,” says Dryden, who has two kids enrolled in MPS. “It's too much in everyone's faces to ignore anymore, the district will have to boldly address [AI and screens] moving forward. It's definitely a priority for me. I feel strongly about an AI moratorium."
Gibney says that five years ago, when her son was a MPS middle schooler, it was the "Wild Wild West" in terms of screen use. Today, she's happy to report, her 12-year-old daughter learns under a "very strict" tech policy at the same school.
As she runs unopposed for the school board, Gibney comes at AI from three angles: as an English instructor at Minneapolis College, where AI-juiced plagiarism has “completely transformed” the way she teaches; as an accomplished author who’s “pissed” that large-language models may’ve been trained by hoovering up her books; and as a parent who’s uneasy watching her 16-year-old son’s relationship with his iPhone. Like Dryen, she supports an AI moratorium.
"Big Tech is making a ton of money off of these contracts with school districts like ours, right?” Gibney says. “And everybody within MPS is so concerned about money. [Limiting screens and AI] doesn't cost money."
Maureen Mulvaney, the Washburn High School teacher who returned to pencils and looseleaf, floats an ambitious solution: Shut the internet down entirely. If Minnesota schools fall short of flipping that switch, the mega-districts on either coast have already blazed some pretty enticing lower-tech trails.
Christopher Coffey, the fourth-grade teacher at Field Elementary, believes the school of the future will look a lot like the school of 30 years ago—handwritten essays, math workbooks, all the stuff aged Racket readers remember.
"You know, I did it as a student once, long ago," he says with a chuckle. "I think kids still can do it, and I think it'll make happier kids."
