When Warren signed into his school Google account, she was aghast: Her son Ben had accessed more than 13,000 YouTube videos during school hours from December 2024 through February 2025, according to viewing data she provided the Journal.
YouTube had served up “shorts”—video after video that it algorithmically determined that he might like.
“It made me cry,” Warren said. “All of a sudden it’s this kind of gun slop, by no fault of his own. ” She later ran for school board and won in November, eager to galvanize change.
American public schools are awash in YouTube. According to more than 45 families, school administrators, clinicians and educators across the country interviewed by The Wall Street Journal, schools’ overreliance on the Google-owned platform for educational content has created a gateway for students to get sucked into an infinite scroll of videos on school-issued devices.
YouTube during snack time, dismissal and indoor recess. YouTube to teach drawing to first-graders. YouTube to read a book to class. YouTube under the covers at night, watching hamster videos on school-issued Chromebooks. A survey touted by YouTube executives shows that 94% of teachers have used YouTube in their roles...
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.
Chromebooks—primed for Google software and YouTube—have about 60% of the K-12 mobile device market, according to Futuresource Consulting. Apple iPads are also a popular school device. YouTube is a top-viewed website on school devices, sometimes accounting for half of student traffic, according to administrators and web-filtering companies.
YouTube says school administrators control what students watch at school, and it supports districts deciding what’s best for their children. “Our tools allow administrators to block the platform entirely or restrict access to teacher-assigned videos only, with no ads, recommendations, or browsing,” said YouTube spokesperson José Castañeda. But some districts and teachers said Google’s tools and content filters haven’t met their needs for a variety of reasons.
In some school districts, including Wichita, efforts to block all or part of the platform proved futile. Students found workarounds: logging out of their district accounts, sharing YouTube links in Google Slides and Docs and other backdoors in, parents, teachers and students say. Google says it’s fixed the Slides and Docs bug.
When Warren asked about blocking YouTube altogether from student devices last spring, she heard back that teachers depended on it for parts of lesson plans.
Wichita Public Schools is “working to restrict open YouTube browsing,” a spokeswoman said, after learning over time that the platform’s own “restricted” content-filtering mode “isn’t sufficient for the way algorithms and short-form content have evolved.”
In Ben Warren’s science class, nearly all educational content has been on the iPad: instead of live science experiments, the teacher showed a YouTube video. “Everything is a simulated experience,” the now-eighth grader says. “I would rather use paper and pencil. It’s easier to focus.”
When Google brought Chromebooks into classrooms early last decade, they were heralded as a boon for bringing low-income students online. School districts adopted the devices and with them, Google’s suite of workplace software. Chromebooks quickly became used for everything from gamified math practice to standardized tests.
To Google, the K-to-12 market and Chromebooks were a critical entry point for building lifelong brand loyalty, according to internal documents released during the social media trials. The company trained its eyes on children under 13 as the world’s fastest-growing internet audience. YouTube sought to close the 80 million-hours-per-day viewing gap between school days and weekends, according to a 2016 document entitled “YouTube edu opportunities”: “Increasing usage in schools M-F could decrease this gap!”
A Google user experience team two years later detailed ills affecting viewer well-being, based on external research. Among them: addictive gaming content was being sought out by “inappropriately-aged children,” children were entering therapy after watching sexually graphic content, and overexposure to videos “decreased attention spans.”
By 2019, the company was aware “the YouTube experience in K-12 schools is broken” due to ads and inappropriate content. A restricted mode used to police content was under-resourced and “trivially easy for students to bypass,” internal exchanges said.
An effort that year to regulate YouTube on children’s privacy grounds by the Federal Trade Commission was halfhearted due in part to its importance in education, ending in “absolute regulatory failure,” said Erie Meyer, former chief technologist at the FTC.
The pandemic enmeshed YouTube deeper into schools. Chromebook shipments exploded, driven by schools spending federal Covid aid on the devices.
by Shalini Ramachandran, Wall Street Journal | Read more:
Image: Colin E. Braley for WSJ
[ed. See also: Classroom Cope (The Point) - AI as another teaching tool:]***
"As for outcomes: it is one thing to say that in-class practice is the best we can do in the age of AI; it is quite another to credit AI with “reviving” writing. There is nothing, nothing, to celebrate about teachers and students being forced to resort to degraded forms of learning, practice and assessment. We might as well credit a basketball hoop in the prison yard with reviving organized sports. It’s a good thing that the inmates are given a chance to exercise. It is better than nothing."
