POLITICS: AI is Killing High School – USSA News

 

June 24, 2025

By Breton Sheridan

 

American education is in crisis. As Phillip D. Bunn recently pointed out the explosion of student AI use is not simply the latest technological fad, but rather an “unprecedented” challenge that has become a “pernicious and pervasive replacement for every step of student learning.” ChatGPT and other Large Language Models (LLMs) don’t just threaten an instructor’s ability to hold cheaters accountable. They threaten the student’s ability to grow intellectually, subverting the whole purpose of education.

Bunn focuses on the problem in universities. But it’s even worse in our high schools.

For the past twelve years, I’ve taught English at a Title I high school (that is, one with a high percentage of students from low-income households) in Philadelphia. Even before Chat GPT went live in 2022, teachers, pediatricians, and guidance counselors were sounding the alarm about how detrimental teen tech addiction was becoming. The National Institute of Health reports that from 2008, when smartphones were gaining popularity, to 2019, the rate of suicidal behaviors among high schoolers increased by 40%. Rates of teenage anxiety, depression, loneliness, and hopelessness have also ballooned. Teenagers now spend less time with friends, less time in after-school activities, and far more time on their phones.  

Many adults think they understand this problem. We sense our own creeping phone addictions. We feel our attention spans waning. But for teens the colonization of real life by technology is far worse. In many ways, they aren’t living, they are consuming fake experiences passively on their devices.

At schools like mine, this technological dependence has eroded the student-teacher relationship. Like an increasing number of schools, we have a no phone in class policy that seems to address the problem.  The difficulty is that teachers are responsible for enforcement, creating an adversarial relationship with students. Students are better understood as being addicted to their devices than as making decisions about when and how to use them. Addicts don’t respond well to the person restricting their vice.

Conflicts about phones are constant, heated, and exhausting. Each new school year, I ask freshmen to write a journal entry about their favorite day of the summer. Just a few years ago, I would get responses about birthday parties, basketball games, or trips to the Dorney Park water attraction. In recent years, though, many students say their favorite day was when everyone left them alone so they could stay in their room and be on their phone.

So what does this have to do with AI? Students today are already used to looking for the answer before thinking about the answer. Generative AI has exacerbated this tendency at a dizzying pace. Bunn described how university students are using AI to help them write essays. My students are using AI before they learn how to write essays. Students are looking up everything. Students are copying everything. The result is that they’re hardly learning anything. The National Center for Educational Statistics, which administers the NAEP long-term trend (LTT) reading and mathematics assessments to 13-year-old students around the country, reports that reading and math scores have been declining since 2012.

What can be done about conditions with causes far outside the school walls?

Maybe schools just need better phone policies. Or perhaps teachers should be more adaptable. Or maybe schools should abandon conventional writing instruction. After all, if we’re all going to be using Chat GPT for every email, every presentation, and every cover letter, what’s the point of learning to write a five-paragraph essay?

These are fair questions, but the answer can’t be simply to accept the dominance of AI tools. To begin with, we should still teach students not only how to receive information but how to practice reading and writing as forms of thinking. Learning to effectively communicate your ideas, consider alternative viewpoints, and be an active listener are some of the most empowering skills a young person can gain from high school. Learning to identify bias, understand nuance, and consider the rhetorical situation will create more thoughtful citizens and more perceptive citizens.

            We need to mandate phone-free spaces beyond the classroom. This is similar to how we mandated smoking-free spaces decades ago. Asking people to self-regulate their phone use is no longer realistic. Seeing someone scrolling Instagram while driving on a highway should become as absurd as seeing someone puffing a Marlboro on an airplane. Some will see this as limiting personal liberty. Some also saw it as limiting personal liberty when we outlawed drinking while driving. This must include banning phones in schools, not just in class.

At the same time, we need to accept that the era of written homework is over. It is hard to exaggerate the scope of the cheating. Students are using Chat GPT to answer everything, regardless of the topic or wording of the prompt. Writing assignments must be completed in person, with a pen and paper or with a locked laptop. For homework, English teachers should prioritize reading. Sure, many students will read summaries instead of whole chapters, but at least they’re reading something. For the students who do complete the reading, such assignments will help them rebuild their marred attention spans, prepare them for college, and perhaps, instill a love of literature.

In class, English teachers should use Silent Sustained Reading (SSR) with the same goals in mind. As the name suggests, this is when students each read silently and independently. You need to build these cognitive muscles up gradually with a lot of positive encouragement. SSR may begin as a four-minute activity and progress to fifteen or twenty minutes. Teachers should also prioritize oral presentations and debates. These assignments should be designed to get students talking and thinking without the assistance of the internet. They also have the advantage that they can’t be faked.

Some of these ideas may sound like the stubborn last stand of the pen and paper, like Paul Bunyan trying to chop wood faster than a steam-powered mechanical saw. But they don’t preclude exposing students to AI technology after they’ve developed the skills they need to use it appropriately. In most cases, that will be around the end of high school. Despite constant exhortations to teach “21st Century skills”, it doesn’t take years to introduce students to prompt engineering.

Teachers are on the front lines of our nation’s tech addiction. Metaphorically speaking, doctors are still allowed to smoke in the operating room. We need to rethink our small-scale, voluntaristic approach to the problem. This cannot be done by the schools alone. There needs to be a multi-faceted societal shift. When everyone is on their phones constantly, and even parents are texting their teens in class, it’s hard to teach them to put their screens away. If we don’t change course, then, as my students would say, we’re cooked.

 

 Breton Sheridan teaches high school English in Philadelphia.

Source: American Institute Of Economic Research