Education's YouTube Crisis
Decades of turning a blind eye to a serious problem
Last week, there was a controversial story in the Wall Street Journal: How YouTube Took Over the American Classroom. The author posted to her LinkedIn a good summary (bold is mine):
The granular data that parents provided me showed the eye-popping scale of it all. A second-grader in New York watched more than 700 videos in two months during school hours, including one featuring pole dancing. A tenth-grader in Oregon scrolled through more than 200 between 9 and 11:40 a.m. on March 6. Some have experienced harms, parents said: increased body image anxiety, newfound fears, based on what they watched on YouTube at school, on their school devices--sometimes after their class was rewarded YouTube for good behavior by a teacher.
The article details the overall technology crisis facing parents and educators.
The concern about YouTube arrives during a crisis in education. American math and reading scores have slid to their lowest point in decades. Many educators, families and learning scientists say they can no longer blame pandemic learning loss; the decline has coincided with a dramatic increase in school screen time, turbocharged by the embrace of 1:1 devices by more than 88% of public schools, according to government survey data. YouTube and Meta recently lost a landmark social-media addiction trial, with a jury finding the companies negligent for operating products that harmed children. YouTube said it’s appealing the ruling.
There’s a lot to unpack here. First, a major topic in the technology business writ large: KGM vs Meta. This verdict was the first of its kind: parents of a 17-year-old child (“KGM”) sued Meta (and Google/YouTube, TikTok, Snapchat), alleging product deficiency. They argued that the algorithm itself (infinite scroll, autoplay videos, etc) led to addiction and mental health consequences. This case was notable because it made no claims about the content of the speech, avoiding First Amendment and Section 230 protections.
A jury found in favor of KGM, awarding $6 million.
After the ruling, cases have started lining up against Meta and other companies: approximately 1,600+ other plaintiffs. The Wikipedia page claims that there are 800 school districts and 40 states’ attorney generals up too, but I couldn’t verify that information. It’s going to be a big mess and is already extending into education technology. My friends over at the Edtech Law Center (they litigated the PowerSchool Class Action Suit) have started looking for plaintiffs.
Second, the Wall Street Journal notes that 88% of public schools have 1:1 device policies. This includes District 65, who reaffirmed their 1:1 policy in March 2026. While District 65 was spending half a million dollars on iPads, other Districts have started hitting reverse. In April 2026, the Los Angeles Public Schools (the 2nd largest school district in the US) passed a resolution limiting screen time. You can read the LAUSD resolution where they did the following:
Eliminate student device use for early education through 1st grade with exceptions for assessments
Prohibit elementary and middle school device use during passing periods, lunch, and recess (with limited teacher-approved exceptions)
Blocked student-led YouTube and video streaming on District devices
Set maximum daily and weekly in-school screen time limits by grade level (the resolution gives "no more than one hour total a day or 5 total hours per week for 3rd–5th graders" as an example, not a binding number)
Per-application opt-in on the Consent to Use Digital Tools form, replacing the current blanket opt-in.
It also included some softer directives:
Consider prohibiting Roblox, Fortnite, and similar non-instructional gaming
Encourage laptop carts/computer labs for 2nd–5th grade over 1:1 devices
Encourage paper-and-pen assignments, physical textbooks, off-screen homework
It’s worth noting that the LAUSD isn’t exactly a paragon of good tech governance — their Superintendent’s home was raided by the FBI in March for technology-related purchases:
Eyewitness News learned the FBI conducted an additional raid at a Florida home that records show belongs to a woman believed to be a consultant for the failed AI education startup AllHere, which provided an AI app to LAUSD but ended up dropping the tool shortly after.
Other places have started considering similar technology bans including Missouri, Vermont and the nation of Sweden. Meanwhile, here in Illinois, the legislature can’t even get a ban on cellphones over the finish line. Despite this, ETHS and District 65 both banned personal devices during school hours in 2025.
I personally love YouTube — it’s a fantastic educational resource. There are some strong educational channels there - Veritasium (physics), Electroboom (electrical engineering), Khan Academy (everything), and I just watched a fantastic video on the Soviet Venera Program to Venus. Where else can you watch Stanford lectures on general relativity from Leonard Susskind?
YouTube has created probably the greatest repository of learning materials in the history of mankind — but they just cannot help themselves from trying to algorithmically monetize every last eyeball, even on accounts they know are being used by students. None of this is new — the New York Times had a great podcast on the pre-2020 YouTube algorithm radicalizing young men to the alt-right. They mostly fixed that bug, but now the current algorithm directs users to the TikTok-like YouTube Shorts, which is an infinite feed of “slop”. It took YouTube decades to even add basic parental controls — it was so notable that even I wrote about it in 2023 - and the current controls are lackluster, at best.
This is so frustrating.
Almost as soon as that WSJ/YouTube article came out, Ed Tech companies immediately started denying there’s a problem. i-Ready, the company that makes the technology-heavy math curriculum used by District 65 and the LAUSD, started claiming that their software “MyPath” wasn’t a huge part of the curriculum.
At Curriculum Associates, this isn’t a pivot—it’s a principle we’ve held from the beginning. We are, first and always, a curriculum and instruction company (yes, it’s in our name). For more than 50 years, we’ve focused on strong curriculum, skilled teaching, formative assessment, and meaningful student engagement, whether through print materials, discussion, or guided practice.
Only two years ago, both the District and i-Ready were all-in on bragging about MyPath as an integral part of the curriculum that enabled differentiated learning.
District 65 blocked YouTube at the start of the 2025-26 year but an entire generation of students went through our schools with very little monitoring. You can view District 65’s current technology policy on these board slides from March 2026.
Let me know what you think in the comments - where do we go from here?