The Journal. - How YouTube Took Over the American Classroom

Episode Date: May 22, 2026

American classrooms are awash with YouTube. One survey showed that 94% of teachers have used YouTube in their roles. A WSJ investigation reveals the business strategy behind Google’s push to bring the technology to schools and looks at how YouTube is affecting children. WSJ’s Shalini Ramachandran lays out her reporting, and Jessica Mendoza talks with a math teacher who has been wrestling with YouTube in his classroom. Further Listening: - The New Legal Strategy That Beat Social Media - Judge Rules ‘Google Is a Monopolist’ Sign up for WSJ’s free What’s News newsletter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Earlier this week, I hopped on a call with a middle school teacher. I'm David Taylor. I'm a National Board Certified Math teacher with almost 34 years of classroom experience. It was the end of the school day, and David was calling from his classroom. He was wearing a Pirates jersey. I'm also the father of an 18-year-old who's just going to be graduating in two weeks. Oh, congratulations. And as you can tell by my shirt, I live. close to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. But we weren't there to talk baseball. I wanted to talk to David about technology

and what it looks like in classrooms like his. David was a tech director back in the day. It was his job to make sure that his school had access to the latest technology. I can tell you without any doubt whatsoever that technology enhances what I'm able to do in my classroom with my students, and makes it more dynamic for me to teach.

And over the past decade, one tech platform that has taken over classrooms across the country is YouTube. As a teaching tool, David has seen how great YouTube can be. But at home, he'd always tried to limit how much his son used it. Then, a few years ago, when his son was still in middle school, David realized something. I walked into the dining room one day

when he was supposed to be doing his work, and he's watching videos. I'm like, how are you doing that? And he's like, well, I'm just in through my school account. And I went, what? And then that's when it clicked. I was trying to do something as a parent to restrict his use and make sure that he was doing his schoolwork.

And he was using the school account to get around doing his work and accessing YouTube and other things. And it wasn't until then that I realized, I really ought to pay better attention to this in class because I don't want to turn off YouTube as a teacher. As a parent, sometimes I want to turn off YouTube. So, like, I've got two eyes and I can see out of both of them, and it's hard.

David was one of dozens of teachers and parents that my colleague Shalani Ramachandran spoke with. She's been looking into this increasingly blurred line between YouTube for school and YouTube for fun. What blew me away was the scale of YouTube viewing? Google has trained a different. eyes on children in American classrooms as a major entry point for a lot of their software. And the number one thing I heard as I talked to people was, oh my God, my kid is on YouTube during class. His grades were falling. Her grades were falling. There's problems with just how much they're being shown. And then as I just started looking through the documents, it was more clear to

me just how vast this issue is. Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Jessica Mendoza. It's Friday, May 22nd. Coming up on the show, how YouTube took over the American classroom. This episode is brought to you by IG Private Wealth. When your financial life gets more complex, having a clear plan matters. IG advisors build personalized, integrated financial plans that connect your investments, tax strategies,

retirement income and estate planning into one coordinated plan. They will help you make confident decisions about your wealth and your future. Get financial advice that puts you at the center. Visit IGPrivatewealth.com to find an advisor near you. The Madamy Holmes bike for brain health supporting Baycrest returns on May 31st

for its fifth anniversary with a new start and finish at the Aga Khan Museum. Join thousands of cyclists as we take over the DVP and Gardner Expressway in support of dementia research and brain health. Riders of all abilities are welcome, and both regular bikes and e-bikes can participate. Bring your friends, family, or corporate team, and make an impact. Register today at bikeforbrainhealth.ca. As of 2024, 94% of teachers have used YouTube in their roles, according to a survey touted by company executives. And YouTube's dominance in American schools partly started when Google identified

a problem. About a decade ago, the company found that it's its internet audience was missing a key demographic. They talked about how children under 13 were the world's fastest growing internet audience. And we saw documents where it said YouTube was trying to close what they described as an 80 million hours per day viewing gap between school days and weekends. And they're saying there was a quote in this that said, increasing usage in schools Monday through Friday could decrease this gap. The documents show that capturing the attention of these kids while they were at school, was a way for Google to start building lifelong brand loyalty. So the company clearly saw children in schools

as a way to increase their use of their products. For Google, a key entry point into schools was the Chromebook, laptops running Google's Chrome operating system. So Chromebooks first came into the classroom early last decade, and the states embraced it to, do their standardized testing. So instead of having bubble sheets, they could do your test

and then immediately see your grade, and then that's it. It didn't hurt that over the next few years, more and more schools across the country embraced one-to-one devices, the idea being that every student would get their own laptop to access the internet. Chromebooks are typically cheaper

than PCs and Apple laptops, and they became the go-to device for many school districts. Google says about 10,000 schools right now use Chromebooks. School students are going to be getting Chrome laptops. Eighth grade class is learning to use a brand new classroom tool. Google Chromebooks. 60,000 Chromebooks are going to be given out to Lee County students. There are some Google executives who kind of had espoused this utopian vision of personalized learning for children in the classroom.

So, you know, your teacher could be talking and then like there could be a group here learning. on Chromebooks at like their level, but then this other group learning on Chromebooks at another level. And then it's not like the teacher has to make sure all 30 kids are teaching to them at the same time on the same level. So like that was one of the things that they really talked about. This could really personalize education. And what was in the Chromebook? Just to be clear, like what did it come with? It's really optimized for Google software. And what schools loved about it is its simplicity. It's, you know, for your browsing the internet, doing your research, writing your papers.

So students could use Google Docs, Google Sheets, Google Slides. And then there was also YouTube. The reason why some schools decided to allow for students to browse YouTube is that they saw this as sort of like a research tool. Like think of Britannica. In a similar light, they thought that a student could go and like watch the, I have a dream speech or find some historical material. Or be able to find some Khan Academy video that really easily explains an algebra problem. If I have five of five X's and I were to take away two X's, how many X am I going to be left with? So they thought that there was some utility to giving students that access.

Then the pandemic hit. Students had to start learning from home. And that's when the company's strategy got a major boost. Lots of schools spent their COVID aid on buying devices, many of those Chromebooks. And curricula kind of changed to incorporate devices into the everyday lives of students after that. Children were playing math video games. YouTube became much more part of brain breaks that they had from a early age. Teachers would put on a reading of an author reading the book in a YouTube video.

rather than read the book physically to the class. They were put on science experiments. According to a recent lawsuit filed by school districts, YouTube campaigned to normalize itself in classrooms, in part by cozying up to parent-teacher associations. YouTube said plaintiff lawyers were cherry-picking claims from outdated documents, to quote, mischaracterize our work. The company also said it regularly engages with experts on how to improve

and is proud of its PTA partnership. The company's strategy seems to have worked. Chromebooks now have the biggest market share in one-to-one devices across schools. In a lot of districts, YouTube is a top-viewed site on school devices. And a Harvard study found that YouTube brings Google the greatest portion of ad revenue from kids 12 and under compared to other tech companies. But since the pandemic, a lot of new data has emerged about how all of the this YouTube use is actually impacting kids.

Talking to a lot of neuroscientists and people who study learning science, it's pretty clear in several scientific studies that learning analog is better than digital. And there have been researchers who studied, you know, what is the difference between a child, you know, reading a physical book or being read to with an adult versus watching it on a screen, watching a book being read to them on the screen, which is kind of some of the, some of the, a use case for YouTube today in classrooms. There's also a growing number of lawsuits against tech companies that allege their products promote internet addiction.

YouTube was one of the companies that lost a landmark social media addiction trial earlier this year. A jury found the company's negligent for operating products that harmed children. YouTube has said it will appeal the ruling. Some of the children I interviewed for the story talked to me about how they were just kind of entranced by watching these YouTube shorts on their devices. It was almost like once they get on those shorts, it's like they couldn't look away. And, you know, one of the children that I talked to is actually beginning specialized treatment for internet addiction at Boston Children's Hospital.

One day, he scrolled through more than 200 videos between 9 and an 1140 a.m. on March 6th, so before lunchtime. And presumably they're supposed to be, you know, in class at that time, learning other stuff. Yes. Shalini heard stories of students using school devices to watch prank videos and sports highlights with betting odds and videos of other kids playing Fortnite or Roblox and whatever else the algorithm fed them. You know, what's interesting is Google, even prior to the pandemic, was aware there were some problems with the YouTube educational push. Like I saw documents where they fretted about how the YouTube experience in K-12 schools was broken. We saw some internal documents from 2018 and 2019 where there's like a Google user experience

team detailing all the ills that affected viewer well-being on YouTube. And among them they named that addictive gaming content was being sought out by inappropriately aged children. Children were entering therapy after watching sexually graphic content and exposure to videos decreased attention spans. And there's a whole presentation I've seen about that. And they were basically detailing ills affecting viewer well being based on external research. For many teachers, the integration of YouTube in classrooms has become a complicated daily challenge.

Did you see the benefits of having YouTube in class right away? Was that clear to you? Absolutely. Absolutely. I mean, I will say, all right, I need you to watch this. video about solving absolute value and inequalities and try to get your head wrapped around how this works. But that's a good part. That's David Taylor again.

The bad part is when you're working with somebody in class and they can just switch to a different tab and start watching some music video or... Basically whatever they feel like looking at, they can. Whatever they feel like. It really doesn't matter, right? Google has offered up some solutions to schools. But teachers like David say it can be tricky to effectively implement these solutions in the classroom. That's next. Hey, y'all, it's Kelly Clarkson with Wayfair.

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To help schools manage YouTube use, Google has offered things like disabling student browsing by default. for districts they partner with. This makes it so that administrators and parents have to opt in. In 2022, the company also released a feature called Player for Education, which lets teachers assign videos without any ads or recommendations. But there are some hurdles to using it. And when we talk to folks, we heard that it's free for Google Partner districts, but others have to get it through these kind of premium tiers from other third-party providers.

basically there's some administrative hurdles, but it's also about the fact that many of the schools felt like the controls that Google offers and that's offered by third parties isn't enough to tame YouTube. YouTube says school administrators control what students watch at school, and it supports districts deciding what's best for their children. I view it as pretty much of an all-or-nothing type of thing, right? David Taylor, the math teacher, has seen first, hand how difficult these fixes can actually be in class.

He says his school administrators are able to restrict YouTube for students by adding filters for violent or inappropriate content, for example. But these restrictions can have unintended consequences. Because even me putting like an allowed list or a blocked list for my own students inadvertently, and it happened yesterday and today, inadvertently blocks, blocks, valid sites that they need for their history class. Or it blocks something valid that they need for my class. So it's so hard to appropriately filter the worst versus what they need.

Like, I know that over the time that my son's been in school, he's out of do research papers about the death penalty or something about school shootings or, you know, something about school shootings or, whatever. Are we supposed to shut down everything that says gun and everything that says shooting and everything? Like, it's a fact of life. Another way David's school has tried to control YouTube use is through software that lets teachers monitor students' screens. So I can see what they're doing. And then I have the ability to like close a tab or block a certain thing or, you know, so I can monitor what they're doing when, I don't want to hover over them all the time.

But even this monitoring software isn't foolproof because kids have figured out how to get around it. Students have found all kinds of loopholes and back doors to school's attempts at blocking YouTube. They'll log out of their district accounts or share links to videos through Google slides and docs. Google said it's fixed the slides and docs bug. Every time that we put something into place,

there's a workaround. Yeah. You know, it's a continuous workaround. So it sounds like a whack-a-mole almost. It is a whack-a-mole. Yeah. It's one of the things that makes, teaching's not the same that it used to be 34 years ago.

You know, I used to use an overhead projector and go to the library. Remember those. You know, exactly, right, with a grease pencil or some type of, you know, overhead marker or whatever. And that worked just fine. But now we added all this other stuff. but it just causes more exposure and more problems sometimes, right? So, no, I don't want to take it all the way, but there's really no good way other than to play whack-a-mole, right?

It's a continuous struggle. It's either all-on or all-off. Shalini, is it even possible for schools to be all-off? Like, can they just take YouTube or personal devices away from kids? What's really hard to roll back is devices entirely in the classroom because of the fact that state assessments are digital. So until those roll back to bubble sheets or paper sheets or whatever. But what's fascinating is there have been some studies

that have shown that kids just do worse on online tests versus paper. But there are a number of school districts that have tried to roll back YouTube use in particular. So Los Angeles recently passed a resolution to block student-led use of YouTube. Tonight, Los Angeles Unified voting to become the first major school district in the country to limit and in some cases ban screen time. It will also restrict student access to YouTube over concerns about the platform's ads and autoplay. There's a school district in North Carolina called Granville County Public Schools where the superintendent just made the decision to block YouTube for the upcoming. year for student browsing, and Watertown Public Schools in Massachusetts put in a district-wide

block. Here at Watertown High School, they're trying out a brand new approach, which is going to aim to limit student screen time in the classroom. So you're starting to see some school districts move to roll back student browsing of YouTube. All of this, Google's efforts to get into classrooms and schools starting to push back, is happening at a time when there's a crisis in education. American math and reading scores have slid to their lowest point in decades. American children and their education is what is at stake here, because a few years ago, everybody pointed to pandemic learning loss as kind of one of the main reasons

test scores were going down. And they're learning scientists and educators who say that, you know, we can't only look at that. We have to look at what's happened since then, which is this dramatic increase in school screen time. And others say, well, look, there's other factors that could be at play, you know, social media and smartphones rose in the same time frame. So it's really hard to tie a direct line to it, but there is this unmistakable correlation. And some neuroscience to say that's enough for us to all be taking it really seriously. For David Taylor, student access to YouTube is still something that he wrestles with all the time. As an educator, if you were to do sort of two columns and pros and cons for your students of YouTube.

What would be under pros and what would be under cons? The pro list would be 50 times as long as the con list. But if you, you know, you weight it, like maybe a weighted average, since I'm a math teacher, the 50 to 5 ratio wouldn't really matter. They'd almost be equal, right? because the things that are bad about it is it interrupts their learning. It's a distraction. It's a temptation.

It's a way for them to escape from the reality of whatever it is that they are actually dealing with. Like, it's just a challenge. I don't want to teach without it, you know, but it's just so hard. I mean, as an educator, yes, it's worth it. As a parent, I wasn't sure all the time. But that's the type of world that we live in anymore, right? It's this dichotomy. It's two sides of the same coin.

We have to make choices about what we value and how to best manage all of it. David, thank you so much for sharing your thoughts on this. You're welcome. Before we go, we have a question for you. Are you in college or a recent college graduate? it? If so, how are you feeling about AI in your career? And why? We'd love to hear from you. Send us a voice memo to The Journal at WSJ.com, and we might include it in an upcoming episode. That's all for today, Friday, May 22nd.

The Journal is a co-production of Spotify and the Wall Street Journal. The show is made by Evelyn Fahardo Alvarez, Laura Benshoff, Catherine Brewer, Piaigandkari, Max Green, Sophie Codner, Ryan Canuteson, Matt Kwong, Colin McNulty, Laura Morris, Enrique Perez de la Rosa, Sarah Platt, Alan Rodriguez-Espinoza, Heather Rogers, Pierce Singey, Jivica Verma, Catherine Waylent, Tatiana Zemise, and me, Jessica Mendoza. Our engineers are Griffin Tanner, Nathan Singapok, and Peter Leonard. Our theme music is by Soe Wiley. Additional music this week from Peter Leonard, Nathan Singapok, So Wiley, and Blue Dot Sessions. fact-checking by Mary Mathis. Thanks for listening. We're out on Monday for Memorial Day. We'll be back on Tuesday.