Senator Gounardes testifies on FOCUS Act and ed tech oversight

Yep.

Well, is it on now?

There we go.

Yes.

There we go.

Good afternoon, everyone.

Thank you to Chairs Krishnan and Chair Dinowitz and members of both committees for holding this hearing and for the opportunity to testify.

I am State Senator Andrew Gernardis, representing the 26th Senate District in Brooklyn.

I have spent much of my time in the legislature working on the question that this hearing asks.

What obligations do we owe children in a world built by companies that profit from their attention?

I want to start by giving credit to where credit is due to Mayor Ramdani and Chancellor Samuels.

Two weeks ago, they did announce a one-year moratorium on student-facing generative AI for students through eighth grade, restrictions on individual screen times for our youngest learners, and daily screen time limits for elementary school students.

This policy will reach roughly 600,000 children.

It is one of, but not the largest, action that any district in the country has taken, and it came about because parents, educators, community education councils, and members of this council pushed hard for it.

That pressure worked, and the administration listened.

I'm not going to spend my time here today telling you that New York City got this wrong, but I do want to stress that what New York has built so far is a policy and that policies can be rewritten, policies can be quietly revised, policies can have glaring loopholes.

And that left unforced can slowly erode.

What families deserve and what our students deserve is a floor that does not move.

Let's talk about how we arrived here.

Last year, New York became the largest state in the nation to adopt bell-to-bell cell phone restrictions, smartphone restrictions in K-12 schools.

The results of this first year were not ambiguous.

Teachers reported better classroom behavior, stronger engagement, and students talking to each other again.

Lunchrooms got loud.

Bullying incidents fell.

I was proud to support that law and prouder still of the educators who made it work.

But that law only reaches the phone in a student's pocket.

It says nothing about the laptop or the screen that schools hand that same student at the start of the year.

Nearly nine in 10 American public schools now run a one-to-one program issuing every student a device.

And the evidence connecting more classroom screen exposure to better learning outcomes is thin to non-existent.

I think there's a reason why we heard earlier that there aren't a lot of independent reviewed studies justifying the use of these platforms and these schools because there is a lack of them.

An OECD study spanning 31 countries found that students who use computers more often in schools scored lower on reading and math tests than students who use them less.

Sweden, once amongst the most aggressive adopters of classroom tablets, has spent tens of millions of dollars buying back paper textbooks after their reading scores declined.

Earlier this year, we learned that reading scores on the third grade state exam plummeted in New York City by nearly 14 points.

Surely the fact that eight-year-olds were mandated to take the exam on a computer and not with paper and pencil, as is appropriate for their age and cognitive development, contributed to this drop.

A study spanning 50 countries found that the use of artificial intelligence in education can undermine children's foundational development.

The researchers pointed to a specific mechanism.

Students who offload their thinking onto AI tools skip the cognitive struggle that produces real learning, so the skill never gets built in the first place.

We told kids to put their phones away and then in too many classrooms, handed them a screen and called it instruction.

Many of us grew up with the mantra that learning should be fun, and it should be.

But making learning fun by creatively creating the friction necessary for cognitive growth and making learning like playing a video game are two different things.

One works and the other clearly does not.

That is the gap of legislation that I've introduced over the summer.

The Fostering Optimal Classroom Use of Screens Act is meant to close.

And I would ask this council to consider several things that state law can do and that city guidance cannot.

This is not meant to be a ban on tech, but guardrails on the intentional use of technology in our schools.

First, the FOCUS Act sets age-appropriate limits with the force of statute.

Students in pre-K through fifth grade would learn primarily face-to-face.

and on paper.

Sixth through eighth graders would access devices through a shared cart or lab model, and high schoolers would have cart access or one-to-one access with a parent's opt-in.

These are limits, not recommendations, and they don't expire after a year.

Second, the bill creates a right to analog learning, including, yes, Chair Dinowitz, the right to take your exams using paper and pencil.

Schools would be required to assign work that can be completed without a screen whenever it is feasible, and families could opt out of digital assignments where a reasonable alternative exists.

I have heard from parents across the state who tried to opt their children out and were treated as a nuisance rather than the decision makers of their children's education that they are.

A right that a principal can decline to honor is not a right.

Third, this bill regulates the vendors, not just the classrooms.

Ed tech companies would have to register with the Attorney General before selling to a school district, demonstrate compliance with federal and state student privacy laws,

show that their products do not contain distracting features unrelated to learning, and point to at least one independent study showing their product annually improves academic performance.

Products that cannot clear this bar cannot be installed and should not be installed on school-issued devices.

And this is the piece I want to underline for this council because it speaks directly to your oversight authority and to some of the questions that were asked earlier.

The state comptroller produced an audit earlier this year finding that New York City public schools do not consistently follow the laws governing student data.

and identified real weaknesses in transparency and technical safeguards.

A district managing millions of student records across dozens of outside vendors needs more than a purchasing process.

It needs a standard of proof.

Lastly, the bill requires that school-issued devices be free of social media, gaming, and direct messaging apps, chatbots, and generative AI platforms and cameras.

And it requires the state education department to update our digital fluency standards that have not been touched since 2020, before the advent of ChatGPT and Claude and other types of AI tools.

So that students can actually learn about the effects of excessive screen use and how to navigate these platforms safely.