When nine-year-old Sunny entered second grade at his Los Angeles public school three years ago, a surprise awaited him: a personal Google Chromebook to use in his classes and take home each afternoon. “Everyone was obsessed with the Chromebooks,” he recalls. Sunny was excited too, “but then it started to get boring.”

At the time, principals and teachers in the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) were under pressure from Superintendent Alberto Carvalho to increase engagement with MyPath, a component of a widely used (and widely loathed) digital product called i-Ready. MyPath was meant to prepare students for their i-Ready assessments, which would supposedly predict scores on California standardized tests. In exchange for their MyPath minutes, students like Sunny could earn digital coins to spend on i-Ready video games.

“It became this thing of just racking up minutes in the program,” explains Kate Brody, an LAUSD parent who fought for and recently won classroom screen-time limits with the grassroots Schools Beyond Screens coalition. “An ouroboros of psychotic time-wasting minutes.”