When Lila Byock's oldest son started spending hours a day on his school-issued iPad, she asked a simple question: why? The school couldn't really tell her. As she recently told NPR, there was no clear justification for why the screen was better. The devices had arrived during COVID, and everyone had simply kept using them. Byock isn't alone: parents in districts across the country are raising the same concern, and several states have passed laws this year to rein in classroom screen time. It's a worry we've shared before too — more and more of the school day now happens on a screen, and families are asking whether all of it is actually helping their kids learn.

Below we explore how this reckoning is playing out differently for different age groups. And we'll also tell you about some unique ways we address it in our own Programs.

In today’s issue:

Parent concerns about in-school screen time are valid, but we believe the answer isn't to fully ban technology from the education landscape. Rather, it's to make sure the technology kids use is actually working toward something. That's a question we've thought hard about. We've taught live online reading classes with expert teachers since 2013, and we've spent years building interactive skill lessons, because used well, in service of real learning, technology can do a great deal to support a young reader's academic success.

But ever since we opened our doors in 1970, we've also known that skill-building for its own sake isn't the whole story. Getting lost in a good book, and wanting to live the adventure again and again after reaching the last page, is where a love of reading begins. That love is what actually motivates kids to keep reading, learning, and succeeding all through school and long after. It's why, over the past few years, we set our curriculum team to writing original stories for our students: complete books, each one intentionally leveled, with online lessons built alongside them to bring every story to life while making new skills stick.

We've witnessed the effectiveness of our online instruction firsthand. But we can also admit without hesitation that there's something a screen can't give a child: a story they can hold, carry to the couch, and pull off the shelf to read again a year later. So starting this fall, we're putting these stories where they belong — in kids' hands. Our eBooks and online lessons aren't going anywhere. We're simply adding the real thing: the same stories our lessons teach, now in print, so a parent can watch everything their child has been learning online come to life at bedtime, one page read aloud at a time.

For the youngest readers, the screen worry is loudest — and it's easy to see why. In California and beyond, parents have organized after watching their kindergartners come home talking about tablet characters instead of stories, convinced that too much of the school day now happens on a device. The instinct to count the hours and cap them is understandable.

But this year, the American Academy of Pediatrics changed the conversation. After a decade of recommending strict daily time limits, its 2026 guidance dropped the hour counts almost entirely. The better questions, the AAP now says, aren't about how long a child is on a screen, but about what's on it: Is the content high quality? Is the child actively engaged, or passively watching? Is the screen crowding out sleep, play, and real-world connection? Quantity was never really the point. Quality was.

That's exactly the standard we hold our own lessons to. A young child isn't parked in front of ours to be entertained; they're tapping, sounding out, answering, and trying again — actively doing the work of learning to read, in short bursts built for a short attention span. Then the screen steps back, and the skill goes with them.

A four-year-old puzzling through a picture book on the couch, a first grader proudly reading an Easy Reader aloud to a grandparent — that's where the skills we teach can take root and the love of reading begins.

This spring, the nation's second-largest school district decided its students were spending too much of the day on screens. Los Angeles Unified set new limits that cap screen use at just 20 to 30 minutes a day for late elementary school students, and ban devices outright for its youngest children. The resolution's sponsor was careful to add that technology "can be a powerful tool in the classroom." The goal wasn't zero screens. It was ending the kind of screen use that wasn't helping anyone learn.

That's the right target, but it's a hard one to hit precisely. As one recent Education Week essay warned, a district that pulls devices to quiet the noise can also, without meaning to, pull the individualized support some readers count on: the tutoring, the timely feedback, the tools that help a child keep moving forward. Cutting screen time with too broad a brush doesn't just remove distraction. It can remove help.

This is the balance we've always tried to strike. Our lessons teach real reading skills directly, and just as importantly, a short weekly check turns what your child is learning into something you can actually see. It’s a rare window for parents at an age when so much of your child's reading has moved out of view.

Because by this age, so much of reading happens where a parent can't follow: longer books, denser assignments, more of it done silently and alone. The skills we teach are what a child carries into all of it, plus the quiet confidence of knowing they can handle whatever comes next.

For older students, the worry sounds different. It's less about never building foundational skills because of a weak app, and more about a teenager who disappears into the screen entirely — hours vanishing into a scroll, with nothing to show for them. That fear isn't unfounded. In recent testimony before the U.S. Senate, neuroscientist Jared Cooney Horvath pointed to a sobering pattern: more school screen time has tracked with lower test scores across dozens of countries, and today's teenagers are, by some measures, the first modern generation to test below the one before them.

But Horvath's actual conclusion wasn't "ban the screens." As reported by Fortune, his point was subtler: this was never a debate about rejecting technology, but about aligning it with how learning actually works. The problem isn't the screen. It's screen time that asks nothing of the mind behind it.

That's the whole idea behind how we teach older readers. Our middle and high school classes are live and online, but not a minute of them is passive. Every session is a real conversation with a real teacher — the kind that pushes a fourteen-year-old to defend an interpretation, notice what a writer is doing, or work out what a dense passage is really saying.

And the texts are the point. Teenagers who can only read one kind of writing struggle the moment school asks for more. So our students work across the range they'll actually face: novels and poetry, yes, but also the primary sources, arguments, and nonfiction that history, science, and every other subject demand. A screen delivers the class. The teacher, and the thinking, are what make it count.

See live program options for older readers →