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Jessica Mendoza
Earlier this week, I hopped on a call with a middle school teacher.
David Taylor
I'm David Taylor. I'm a national board certified math teacher with almost 34 years of classroom experience.
Jessica Mendoza
It was the end of the school day and David was calling from his classroom. He was wearing a pirate's jersey.
David Taylor
I'm also the father of an 18 year old who's just going to be graduating in two weeks.
Jessica Mendoza
Congratulations.
David Taylor
And as you can tell from my shirt, I live close to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, so.
Jessica Mendoza
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.
David Taylor
I can tell you without any doubt whatsoever that technology enhan is what I'm able to do in my classroom with my students and makes it more dynamic for me to teach.
Jessica Mendoza
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. David realized something.
David Taylor
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? Like. 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.
Jessica Mendoza
David was one of dozens of teachers and parents that my colleague Shalini Ramachandran spoke with. She's been looking into this increasingly blurred line between YouTube for school and YouTube for fun.
Shalini Ramachandran
What blew me away was the scale of YouTube viewing. Google has trained its 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, 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.
Jessica Mendoza
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 Foreign.
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Shalini Ramachandran
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Jessica Mendoza
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 its Internet audience was missing a key demographic.
Shalini Ramachandran
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 schools Monday through Friday could decrease this gap.
Jessica Mendoza
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.
Shalini Ramachandran
So the company clearly saw children in schools as a way to increase Their use of their products.
Jessica Mendoza
For Google, a key entry point into schools was the Chromebook laptops running Google's Chrome operating system.
Shalini Ramachandran
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
Jessica Mendoza
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 LAPT 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.
Shalini Ramachandran
School students are gonna be getting Chrome laptops.
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8th grade class is learning to use a brand new classroom tool, Google Chromebooks.
Shalini Ramachandran
60,000 Chromebooks are gonna be given out to Lee county students. There are some Google executives who kind of had espoused this utopian vision of personalized for children in the classroom. So your teacher could be talking and then there could be a group here learning on Chromebooks at 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 that was one of the things that they really talked about. This could really personalize education.
Jessica Mendoza
And what was in the Chromebook, just to be clear, like what did it come with?
Shalini Ramachandran
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
Jessica Mendoza
so students could use Google Docs, Google Sheets, Google Slides, and then There was also YouTube.
Shalini Ramachandran
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,
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just as I have a dream
Shalini Ramachandran
or be able to find some Khan Academy video that really easily explains an algebra problem.
David Taylor
If I have five of them, five
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X's and I were to take away
David Taylor
two X's, how many X's am I
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going to be left with?
Shalini Ramachandran
So they thought that there was some utility to giving students that access.
Jessica Mendoza
Then the pandemic hit. Students had to start learning from home. And that's when the company's strategy got a major boost.
Shalini Ramachandran
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 an 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 would put on science experiments.
Jessica Mendoza
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 this YouTube use is actually impacting kids.
Shalini Ramachandran
In 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 reading a physical book or being read to with an adult versus versus watching it on a screen, watching a book being read to them on a screen, which is kind of some of the use case for YouTube today in classrooms.
Jessica Mendoza
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 harm children. YouTube has said it will appeal the ruling.
Shalini Ramachandran
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 was 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 1148 on March 6th. So before lunchtime.
Jessica Mendoza
And presumably they're supposed to be, you know, in class at that time learning other stuff.
Shalini Ramachandran
Yes.
Jessica Mendoza
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.
Shalini Ramachandran
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 K12 schools was broken. Like, you know, 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 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.
Jessica Mendoza
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?
David Taylor
Absolutely, absolutely. I mean, I will say, all right, I need you to watch this video about solving absolute value inequalities and try to get your head wrapped around how this works. But that's a good part.
Jessica Mendoza
That's David Taylor again.
David Taylor
The bad part is, 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
Jessica Mendoza
basically whatever they feel like looking at,
David Taylor
they can, whatever they feel like, it really doesn't matter, right?
Jessica Mendoza
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.
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Jessica Mendoza
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.
Shalini Ramachandran
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 like kind of premium tiers from party providers. There's some, 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.
Jessica Mendoza
YouTube says school administrators control what students watch at school, and it supports districts deciding what's best for their children.
David Taylor
I view it as pretty much of an all or nothing type of thing, right?
Jessica Mendoza
David Taylor, the math teacher, has seen firsthand 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
David Taylor
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 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 had to do research papers about the death penalty or something about school shootings or whatever. Are we supposed to shut down everything that says gun and everything that says shooting and every like it's a fact of life.
Jessica Mendoza
Another way David's school has tried to control YouTube use is through software that lets teachers monitor students screens so I
David Taylor
can see what they're doing. And then I have the ability to like close a tab or block a certain thing so I can monitor what they're doing when I don't want to hover over them all the time.
Jessica Mendoza
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 backdoors to schools 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.
David Taylor
Every time that we put something into place, there's a workaround. It's a continuous workaround.
Jessica Mendoza
Sounds like a whack A mole almost.
David Taylor
It is a whack a mole.
Jessica Mendoza
Yeah.
David Taylor
It's one of the things that makes teachings 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.
Jessica Mendoza
Remember those?
David Taylor
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 in. But it just causes more exposure and more problems sometimes. Right. So no, I don't want to take it all away, but there's really no good way other than to play whack a mole. Right. It's continuous struggle. It's either all on or all off.
Jessica Mendoza
Shalini, is it even possible for schools to be all off? Like, can they just take YouTube or personal devices away from kids?
Shalini Ramachandran
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.
Jessica Mendoza
But there are a number of school districts that have tried to roll back YouTube use in particular.
Shalini Ramachandran
So Los Angeles recently passed a resolution to block student led use of YouTube.
Jessica Mendoza
Tonight, Los Angeles unified voting to become
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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.
Shalini Ramachandran
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 blocking. Well, 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 rollback student browsing of YouTube.
Jessica Mendoza
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.
Shalini Ramachandran
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 there are learning scientists and educators who say that 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. Social media and smartphones rose in the same time frame. So it's really hard to say, tie a direct line to it. But there is this unmistakable correlation, and some neuroscientists say that's enough for us to all be taking it really seriously.
Jessica Mendoza
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?
David Taylor
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 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 temptation. It's a way for them to escape from the reality of whatever it is that they are actually dealing with. It's just a challenge. I don't want to teach without it, 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, and we have to make choices about what we value and how to best manage all of it.
Jessica Mendoza
David, thank you so much for sharing your thoughts on this.
David Taylor
You're welcome.
Jessica Mendoza
Before we go, we have a question for you. Are you in college or a recent college graduate? 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 thejournalsj.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's made by Evelyn Fajardo Alvarez, Laura Benshoff, Kathryn Brewer, Piaghidkari, Max Green, Sophie Kodner, Ryan Knudson, Matt Kwong, Colin McNulty, Laura Morris, Enrique Perez de la Rosa, Sarah Platt, Alan Rodriguez Espinosa, Heather Rogers, Pier Singhi, Jeevika Verma, Kathryn Whalen, Tatiana Zemis, and me, Jessica Mendoza. Our engineers are Griffin Tanner, Nathan Singapak and Peter Leonard. Our theme music is by so 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.
Podcast: The Journal.
Hosts: Jessica Mendoza & Ryan Knutson (Wall Street Journal & Spotify Studios)
Air Date: May 22, 2026
This episode investigates the remarkable rise of YouTube as a central platform in America’s classrooms, exploring how and why it became so dominant, its educational benefits, and the mounting concerns about student distraction, screen time, and brand loyalty at a young age. Through interviews with teachers, parents, WSJ reporter Shalini Ramachandran, and classroom anecdotes, the episode exposes the tensions between education and technology, and the ongoing struggle to balance access to powerful learning tools with student wellbeing.
“I was trying to do something as a parent to restrict his use... 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...”
"YouTube was trying to close what they described as an 80 million hours per day viewing gap between school days and weekends... increasing usage in schools... could decrease this gap."
“After that, children were playing math video games. YouTube became much more part of brain breaks... teachers would put on a reading of an author reading the book in a YouTube video... they would put on science experiments.”
“It was almost like once they get on those shorts, it’s like they couldn’t look away.”
“Absolutely. I mean, I will say, all right, I need you to watch this video about solving absolute value inequalities... But... they can just switch to a different tab and start watching some music video or… whatever they feel like.”
“I view it as pretty much of an all or nothing type of thing, right?”
“Every time that we put something into place, there’s a workaround. It’s a continuous workaround.”
“We can't only look at [pandemic learning loss]... there is this unmistakable correlation, and some neuroscientists say that's enough for us to all be taking it really seriously.”
“The pro list would be 50 times as long as the con list. But... 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 temptation... I don't want to teach without it, but it's just so hard.”
The episode combines journalistic analysis with personal voices—balancing investigative reporting (WSJ style) with candid, relatable teacher and student stories. Teachers express both hope and frustration, while the producers and reporters maintain a tone of curiosity and concern.
This summary presents a comprehensive look at how YouTube became inextricably woven into American education, why this happened, what it means for children, and how schools, parents, and companies are trying—but often struggling—to manage the consequences.