The answer, as usual, is inertia. School districts love buying shiny technology with public money. Chromebook contracts, iPad rollouts, EdTech subscriptions — it all looks great in a budget presentation and terrible in practice when you watch a five-year-old tap through a reading app instead of actually learning to hold a pencil.

The research isn't ambiguous here. Study after study shows that heavy screen exposure in early childhood correlates with reduced attention spans, weaker fine motor skills, and lower reading comprehension. We're not talking about banning calculators from algebra class. We're talking about whether kindergartners need a personal device to learn the alphabet. They don't.

Parents across the Bay Area seem to agree. One local parent put it bluntly: "All the iPad learning is worthless. Bring back pencil and paper." An early learning interventionist echoed the sentiment: "Little kids on Chromebooks are not learning much other than how to plug into a screen. Pencils and paper for the win."

Another Bay Area parent nailed the broader context: "Kids get enough screen time at home, on weekends, after school. Give teachers a chance. Help them help us make kids smarter."

That last point is key. This isn't some Luddite crusade. It's a recognition that classrooms are one of the few remaining environments where kids can be fully present with a human being who's trying to teach them something. Every dollar spent on early-grade tablet programs is a dollar that could fund smaller class sizes, better materials, or — radical idea — more teachers.

Parents in Sunnyvale, Mountain View, and Los Altos are already organizing around upcoming school board meetings. Good. This is exactly how local government is supposed to work: taxpayers showing up, demanding accountability, and questioning whether the money being spent on their kids' education is actually educating their kids.

Districts that spent big on early-grade tech owe parents an honest accounting. What were the outcomes? Did reading scores improve? Did the vendor get a better deal than the students?

If the answer is what most parents already suspect, the fix is simple. Pull the screens. Pick up the pencils. Let kids be kids.