The Changing Classroom

The landscape of K-12 education is shifting, and longtime East Lansing teachers say they have watched those changes unfold in their classrooms. Perhaps the most noticeable change is the growing role of technology, which has shortened attention spans and made cheating easier and more widespread.

Technology is only one piece of a much larger debate over the state of modern education, a debate that extends far beyond East Lansing.

A 2024 survey of educators by the Pew Research Center found that 84% of teachers surveyed reported not having enough time during the workday to complete everything expected of them. That same study showed that only 33% of educators reported being highly satisfied with their jobs, compared with 51% of the general public.

Tim Akers started teaching English at East Lansing High School in 2007 after teaching for 16 years in Macomb County. He retired after last school year. 

“The dynamics are more complex than just ‘kids these days,’” he said while contemplating his career. “I think it boils down to three things: the ease of access to technology, the lack of administrative will, and the change in parenting philosophies. Those have been the biggest changes over time.”

Evolving technology made it difficult for Akers and his colleagues to determine what work students actually produced as opposed to work created using artificial intelligence.

Akers said he used Google Classroom for students to work on and submit assignments. The platform allowed him to check the progress of his students and see how their work evolved with each step through a “revision history” feature.

One student, he remembered, completed a six-page essay but spent only 13 seconds on the document.

“It was one major cut and paste,” Akers said. “And the parents were trying to say, ‘No, no, he had worked on it in a different document with his sister, and then he cut and pasted it out of that document.’ I [told them] that’s against my policy, but if you can share those documents with me and prove that he did work on it somewhere else first, then I’ll be glad to reassess the assignment.”

Akers said the student failed to produce the work.

AI has caused students’ intellectual curiosity to diminish, Akers said.

“Their problem-solving skills have diminished,” he said, “but what has improved is they’re always a step ahead of us finding ways to get around the technology.”

Akers said the revision history feature he used has been countered by a Google extension students can add that retypes documents at human speed so they don’t look like they were cut and pasted.

East Lansing Public Schools, or ELPS, has attempted to counter concerns about over-reliance on technology with posters hung in classrooms that Akers likened to the post-Sept. 11, 2001, terror alert color schemes. For example, on red days, AI cannot be used at all. On yellow days, it can be used sparingly.

“But there’s no meaningful instruction for us to learn how to incorporate AI effectively and ethically,” Akers said. “And if we don’t know how to teach the kids how to use it, they’re not gonna know how to use it.”

Akers wants to see the district return to a time when there was a simple computer cart in the classroom and computers weren’t used all the time by students.

“[The district] gave us a program called Securly,” he said. “All I’m doing is monitoring what they’re doing. I don’t know how that’s teaching. I’m running around kicking a kid off a chess game or shutting down a video someone’s watching. That’s not teaching; that’s more like surveillance.”

The reliance on technology is coupled with students’ use of social media, both of which can be detrimental to a child’s ability to reason and think critically.

Jed Magen, chair of the Department of Psychiatry at Michigan State University and a board-certified child and adolescent psychiatrist, has seen how social media use can lead to symptoms of depression, anxiety and sleeping problems. Social media apps are designed to be visually stimulating to draw users in. Content creators, whose livelihood depends on views, also aim to grab viewers’ attention as quickly as possible before they scroll to the next thing.

Magen explained that when someone does something pleasurable, such as scrolling, the brain releases dopamine, a feel-good neurotransmitter.

“The faster that pleasurable sensation gets to your brain, the faster that dopamine goes up,” Magen said.

However, this constant stimulation can distort reality. Magen noted that people often compare their own lives to fabricated online personas.

“What happens is you’re being fed a steady diet of what looks like this wonderful exciting life, which of course is artificial,” he said. “But what they’re trying to do is just make themselves as attractive and wonderful as possible, and so it makes your life in contrast look dull and boring.”

Scrolling also impacts students’ attention spans. Longer, time-consuming tasks such as studying for a test don’t offer the instant reward of dopamine that scrolling does. Magen said that although these tasks are not as stimulating, they are important because they use repetition, which is how the brain learns.

The brain, however, can be retrained to focus. This can be done by putting the phone down, staying off social media, setting boundaries and allotting a limited amount of daily screen time. Recognizing early signs of tech dysfunction, such as social isolation, can prevent these habits from worsening.

“If it’s inhibiting those social relationships because you’re spending five hours sitting alone looking at your phone, or it’s impacting school … your attention is diverted and fragmented in class, that’s dysfunctional,” Magen said.

Screen time also directly impacts rest. As evening arrives, melatonin production in the brain increases, causing people to become sleepy. The blue light emitted by phone screens right before bed disrupts melatonin production.

Beyond social media, Magen shares Akers’ concerns that AI is hurting students’ learning abilities.

Magen explained that while there is no definitive answer to the impact AI is having on learning, deskilling is a risk.

“Deskilling would be [where] you lose the ability to do some function because you’re letting AI do it, or you never learn,” he said. “We don’t really understand that very well at this point.”

Technology was not the only change Akers noticed during his career. He said he was disturbed by trends he observed during his last year of teaching.

Akers said he is alarmed by the number of East Lansing High School freshmen that failed at least three of their core academic courses — social studies, English, math and science — in eighth grade, but were still promoted to ninth grade.

He said the problem became exacerbated during the COVID-19 pandemic, when educators were encouraged to show grace while students did remote learning. Two years ago, Akers said, a graduating class of approximately 300 students had 90 earn their diplomas with a 3.9 grade point average or higher.

“The grade inflation is rampant, and it’s not just us,” Akers said. “It’s nationwide. In fact, Harvard, they just had a vote to limit the number of As professors can give in classes.”

Akers said this loosening of standards is because ELPS administration is quick to appease parents.

“I had one parent who sent an email after the end of the school year,” he said. “[She] said she couldn’t be happier that I retired because of the way I treated her son.”

Claire Floyd, who began her career as a resource teacher in Mason in 1984, saw similar changes over the course of her career. She transitioned to ELPS in 2001 as a special education teacher consultant, a role she retired from in 2025.

She commiserated with Akers, acknowledging the changes she saw in parents of students. She said parents went from being very supportive and receptive to feedback to instead telling her what was best for their child.

“It was a combination of parents thinking their child didn’t do wrong and parents getting their kids off the hook so they wouldn’t have to do certain things,” Floyd said. “They didn’t want to coddle, but they wanted their children to have an easier life at the same time. It was a weird combination of things.

“We all want our kids to succeed and you don’t want them to experience difficulty, but yet, that’s how they become really good adults — resilience.”

But Floyd said the thing that changed the most was respect. It wasn’t shown through pay, and it wasn’t given by the community or administration. Instead, more and more things were heaped onto teachers’ plates.

“Now we’re supposed to teach emotional things that back in the day, 40 years ago,” she said. “We’re being taught by parents at home. Now [we’re teaching] how to be a friend, how to take turns, how to do all that on top of getting these kids to read.”

Floyd added that she comes from a long line of teachers, but she told her own three children not to pursue the profession.

Akers said he retired despite having “a lot of gas” left in the tank. He wanted to teach, but morale was too low and expectations were too high.

The feeling extends across the profession, he said.

“I informally mentor a lot of the younger teachers and they’re burned out already, some of them before they even get to tenure. You got the people who just can’t hold back anymore and bitch and the ones who are toxically positive. You got the people who just stay in their classroom, keep the door closed and keep to themselves.

“It didn’t use to be this way.”