Kalirisa Las Ramirez on screen time, iReady, and cognitive development

Good afternoon.

Thank you, Chair Genowitz and Chair De La Rosa.

My name is Kalirisa Las Ramirez, pronounced she, her, ella.

I am going to speak a little bit in the first minute about the work that the Community Education Council and District 4

have been doing around providing feedback and policy recommendations for the Department of Education, not just around AI, which we have explicitly asked for a two-year moratorium.

In addition, we are also asking for a reduction in screen time in our schools, as well as an audit on iReady, which also has AI embedded, but we have found that it is an ineffective tool that we have spent over $100 million

in in contracts to be able to do screeners and assessments in our students that, again, are not informing us of proficiency and growth.

And so in turn, when thinking about, again, the investments that we make in our students and trying to understand what helps students thrive, these tools, quote unquote tools,

Department of Education claims to use to assess our kids are ineffective.

And that has been shown by the work of Dr.

Jared Horvath, who continues to advocate for the fact that ed tech and the implementation of ed tech into our schools in the last 10 years have significantly harmed our students.

I want to highlight also the work that, and so I'm going to shift from CEC to Dr.

Galiri Salas, neuroscientist and developmental behavioral neuroscientist, to say that now we know that adolescence has been extended until the age of 30.

The reason for that is because we are implementing these computers and ed tech into our classrooms and not giving students the opportunity

to engage in experiential learning and engage in the science of learning, which means that we need to take them away from screens and give them the experiences that they need and the relationships with their teachers and their community

to develop the appropriate cognitive processes to be ready for an adult world.

And unfortunately, we're not doing that in our classrooms by not providing with them the appropriate resources to do that, in addition to implementing a tool that is racially biased and impacting the diversity of our New York City public school students.

Thank you.

Thank you so much for your testimony.

We will now...

That concludes the in-person portion of our public testimony.

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