By Lukman Seyal
Recent changes in technology, curriculum, accessibility and school safety have affected the way students learn – and the way teachers work.
Inside Joseph A Foran High School in Milford, teachers say that they’re seeing many of those trends firsthand.
World language teacher Wendy Valleau said that the single biggest change she has witnessed in the 16 years she has been teaching has been the rise of cell phone distraction use among students.
“I would say the use of cell phones is probably top of the list,” she said. “It’s a huge change in terms of how the students are engaged, how they respond, their attention spans. Their literacy has gone down the tubes.”
Valleau explained that students today often struggle to focus on reading and written instructions because of students being more accustomed to fast-paced digital content. She said students have trouble comprehending written English, making it even more difficult to teach a language that students don’t know.
“The deterioration of students’ engagement, attention span and literacy make it difficult to teach another language,” she said. “Students have a hard time even reading English and comprehending what they’re reading. In high school, I studied French for my 7th to 12th grades, and I came out totally fluent in French. Completely fluent.”
Her concerns regarding students’ behavior are similar to those of national researchers. A major assessment of national education trends that came out in May showed reading and math scores have been steadily declining across the country since 2013.
The Education Scorecard, conducted by researchers from Harvard, Stanford and Dartmouth, pointed to several possible causes for the widespread declines, including the rise of smartphones, social media and widespread digital learning.
The annual Education Scorecard noted that test scores had been increasing since 1990 before abruptly reversing in the mid-2010s, right when smart mobile technologies started to proliferate.
This was also when the No Child Left Behind Act was replaced with the Every Student Succeeds Act, which the researchers also point to as a possible factor in changing learning outcomes. They describe the last decade as a “learning recession” affecting students across different income levels and regions of the country.
Chelsea Green, a sixth-year English teacher who began teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic, says that modern technology upended teaching completely in only a short period of time.
“The biggest changes I’ve seen are from technology. How it’s grown and become more consuming in teaching in general,” Green said. “PowerSchool, Google Classroom, smartphones, Chromebooks, it’s all become much more developed and easier to access.”
However, Green said that the most dramatic change has been the rapid growth of artificial intelligence.
“In my last year of college, I actually wrote my thesis on AI. But I didn’t expect it to get this crazy this fast,” she said.
Unlike some teachers who may disapprove of AI in the classroom, Green believes it can have productive uses when it’s carefully implemented.
“I’m very pro-AI,” she said. “I teach AI classes, I’m involved with the district AI committee and I think it absolutely has a place in the classroom. But there has to be a balance between technology and more traditional styles of learning.”
Megan Hosking, a second-year health and physical education teacher, agreed that AI has been reshaping classrooms, but is more concerned about how students rely on it academically.
“The ease in which we can get information limits the amount of work your brain has to do,” she said. “Especially with AI introduction, if I don’t want to think, I don’t have to.”
Hosking said that the rise of AI has also increased how dishonest students are, as students can now create a simple prompt and get a chatbot to generate an assignment for them.
“Once students realize they can have ChatGPT do their assignment and they don’t want to do it, why try?” she asked.
Some teachers have integrated AI into their own assignments in controlled ways. An article in EducationWeek notes that in 2023, a little more than 34 percent said they used AI “at one time or another.” By 2025 there was a huge increase, with 61 percent saying they used the technology in their work in some capacity.
Waymond Jackson, president of the nonprofit Ed Farm, which is focused on expanding digital skills through tech-focused learning programs across the Southeast, also said in the EducationWeek article that “Another factor that likely explains the increase is that AI is now embedded in common tools – teachers don’t have to go looking for it.”
Although some teachers implement AI into their workload, Hosking remains skeptical.
“I personally don’t think there are many responsible ways to use AI if you’re trying to further your education,” she said. “At the same time, as a teacher, I sit there and think you should be able to write an email.”
Both Green and Hosking acknowledged that technology itself isn’t totally negative. Hosking noted that classrooms today are often more interactive than the learn-heavy environments she experienced as a student.
“A lot of lectures when I was in high school. Now there’s more interactive learning, getting up to the boards, walking around classes, turn-and-talk activities. I think that’s a plus,” she said.
Michael DeGrego, a longtime substitute teacher across both New York and Connecticut and previous three-term Milford Board of Education member, praised how schools have been implementing Chromebooks and digital learning resources into everyday use.
“I marvel at the Chromebook,” he said. “Everybody’s on the same page now. You don’t have to worry about forgetting your book at school.”
Nevertheless, Green and Hosking warned that phones and social media continue to negatively impact students’ focus and mental health.
“I’ve seen students go from really happy and social to suddenly withdrawn because of something they saw online,” Green said. “We have so much research on cell phones with adolescents, and none of it says it’s good for them.”
Connecticut has been attempting to find ways to get students off the screens. The state legislature debated a statewide bell-to-bell cellphone ban in schools earlier this year. The proposed bill received bipartisan support and was backed by Gov. Ned Lamont, but failed to pass before the legislative session ended on May 6. Lawmakers have said that they may bring this bill back up next year, but in the meantime, many districts have introduced different restrictions on cellphone use in schools.
Green has experimented with limiting phone use in her classrooms with “tech-free days,” where students must put their phones in a basket and interact with others.
“At first, students were really agitated,” she said. “But after a while, they actually started asking for more tech-free days.”
Valleau agreed with Green, explaining that the state of New York has banned the use of cell phones entirely in public schools. Her son, a teacher in Brooklyn, has noticed significant improvements in student engagement since the ban.
“They pushed back a little bit in the beginning. The kids were hostile and angry about it. But the change in their attention spans, in their focus, in their scores has been tremendous,” she said. “We’re actually doing a tremendous service. And it actually makes people happy when they can master a certain body of knowledge. Then you feel empowered, and you feel like, oh, that was a good day. I learned something. So, yeah, I think they’re happier.”
The transition into a more tech-heavy classroom – giving each student a Chromebook and charger – has put financial pressures on Milford. Milford’s Board of Alderman approved a 4.3 percent increase in the education budget for the 2026-2027 fiscal year this May. Budget documents show that Milford’s schools have deferred or reduced spending on numerous programs and initiatives over recent years in order to control the costs of technology, curriculum changes and staffing.
Other changes have also affected the school system in recent years. Green mentioned how districts have become significantly better at identifying and supporting students with disabilities as one positive step.
“The district is much better about identifying learning disabilities and giving students the accommodations they need to succeed,” she said.
DeGrego said that the inclusion of special education students into regular classrooms is one of the most important educational changes he’s witnessed.
“Back in the early 1990s, special education students were mostly separated,” he said. “Now they’re included in classrooms with everybody else, and I think that’s much better.”
At the same time, Milford schools are also adapting to the Right or Read Act, adopted by the state legislature in 2021. This law requires districts to shift toward reading instruction based on the “science of reading,” which emphasizes phonics, structures in literacy and evidence-based teaching methods.
Multiple states have shifted to the science of reading in recent years in an attempt to improve reading scores, having seen success among early adopters like Mississippi and Louisiana. In what has been dubbed the “Mississippi miracle,” that state’s reading scores rose from 49th in the country to on par or above the national average after it switched to the science of reading in 2013.
Still, adjusting to this updated curriculum has required the district to spend more money on new materials and training for the teachers.
Valleau strongly supports that transition, arguing that older forms of direct instruction, methods she experienced as a schoolgirl, are more effective than constantly changing how students learn.
“When we learned to read, we learned phonics,” she said. “We understood grammar. We knew how to take a sentence apart and put it back together.”
Green, meanwhile, said she would love to see more improvements in the curriculum.
“Continuing to adjust it, making sure it’s focused on the skills we really want to teach students, and ensure that it’s only things that are beneficial rather than doing something because we’ve always done it,” she said.
Teachers also reflected on how dramatically school safety has changed over the past couple of decades, particularly after the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in 2012 which killed 20 children and six adults in Newtown.
According to Valleau, lockdown drills and increased security measures became common after the tragedy. Hosking agreed, noting how schools now have far more visible security compared to when she attended high school not too long ago.
“We constantly have teachers in the hallways, security guards serving. The increase in security, at least here, is apparent,” she said.
DeGrego served on Milford’s Board of Education shortly after Sandy Hook. He said that the tragedy directly influenced district decisions regarding school security and safety.
“One of the first things we voted for was the greeter system,” he said. “The greeter is at the door to get buzzed in. She has to see your ID, this and that, and then they’ll buzz you in. It’s like an extra set of eyes on the door. Before it was the secretary who let you in, besides their many other duties.”
DeGrego, who also served as a Ground Zero rescue worker following the September 11 terrorist attacks, said that modern schools are now designed with far more attention toward safety.
“These schools are some of the safest buildings in the world,” he said.
Safety measures may be important, but they also increase costs. One of the largest increases in the most recent Milford school budget was for about $576,000 to add armed security officers to the eight elementary schools and The Academy, plus a lead officer. The middle and high schools already have security officers.
One thing all the teachers agreed on was that improvements could be made in their teaching conditions.
“I like to collaborate with other teachers,” Hosking said, “Funny enough, I really like working within the history department and kind of finding those cross-curricular things. So more opportunities for that across the building.”
For Valleau, the abundant distractions in class are the biggest problem.
“Cell phone use. If we could get a really strong policy where there would be no use of cell phones in the classroom. I don’t think they need them for instruction…there’s a lot of research that students learn better with older technology (books, papers, pencils),” she said.
DeGrego believes no improvements need to be made right now.
“It’s hard to do better than perfect,” he said.