By Shalini Ramachandran

AMY WARREN'S "mom siren" went off when her seventh-grader in Wichita, Kan., seemed to know too much about Fortnite, a battling-and-shooting videogame he is barred from playing.

When Warren signed into his school Google account, she was aghast: Her son Ben had accessed more than 13,000 YouTube videos during school hours from December 2024 through February 2025, according to viewing data she provided the Journal.

His feed was rife with inappropriate content. Videos glorifying gun culture, asking about silencers on Nerf guns, "head shots" where children realistically portray being killed, a video with sexually explicit jokes about neighbors sleeping together.

YouTube had served up "shorts" -- video after video that it algorithmically determined that he might like.

"It made me cry," Warren said. "All of a sudden it's this kind of gun slop, by no fault of his own. " She later ran for school board and won in November, eager to galvanize change.

American public schools are awash in YouTube. According to more than 45 families, school administrators, clinicians and educators across the country interviewed by The Wall Street Journal, schools' overreliance on the Google-owned platform for educational content has created a gateway for students to get sucked into an infinite scroll of videos on school-issued devices.

YouTube during snack time, dismissal and indoor recess. YouTube to teach drawing to first-graders. YouTube to read a book to class. YouTube under the covers at night, watching hamster videos on school-issued Chromebooks. A survey touted by YouTube executives shows that 94% of teachers have used YouTube in their roles.

Granular data provided by parents highlight the scale: A second-grader in New York watched more than 700 in two months during school hours, including one featuring pole dancing. A tenth-grader in Oregon scrolled through more than 200 between 9 and 11:40 a.m. on March 6.

The concern about YouTube arrives during a crisis in education. American math and reading scores have slid to their lowest point in decades. Many educators, families and learning scientists say they can no longer blame pandemic learning loss; the decline has coincided with a dramatic increase in school screen time, turbocharged by the embrace of 1:1 devices by more than 88% of public schools, according to government survey data. YouTube and Meta recently lost a landmark social-media addiction trial, with a jury finding the companies negligent for operating products that harmed children. YouTube said it's appealing the ruling.

Chromebooks -- primed for Google software and YouTube -- have about 60% of the K-12 mobile device market, according to Futuresource Consulting. Apple iPads are also a popular school device. YouTube is a top-viewed website on school devices, sometimes accounting for half of student traffic, according to administrators and web-filtering companies.

YouTube says school administrators control what students watch at school, and it supports districts deciding what's best for their children. "Our tools allow administrators to block the platform entirely or restrict access to teacher-assigned videos only, with no ads, recommendations, or browsing," said YouTube spokesperson José Castañeda. But some districts and teachers said Google's tools and content filters haven't met their needs for a variety of reasons.

In some school districts, including Wichita, efforts to block all or part of the platform proved futile. Students found workarounds: logging out of their district accounts, sharing YouTube links in Google Slides and Docs and other backdoors in, parents, teachers and students say. Google says it's fixed the Slides and Docs bug.

When Warren asked about blocking YouTube altogether from student devices last spring, she heard back that teachers depended on it for parts of lesson plans.

Wichita Public Schools is "working to restrict open YouTube browsing," a spokeswoman said, after learning over time that the platform's own "restricted" content-filtering mode "isn't sufficient for the way algorithms and short-form content have evolved."

In Ben Warren's science class, nearly all educational content has been on the iPad: instead of live science experiments, the teacher showed a YouTube video . "Everything is a simulated experience," the now-eighth grader says. "I would rather use paper and pencil. It's easier to focus."

WHEN GOOGLE brought Chromebooks into classrooms early last decade, they were heralded as a boon for bringing low-income students online. School districts adopted the devices and with them, Google's suite of workplace software. Chromebooks quickly became used for everything from gamified math practice to standardized tests.

To Google, the K-to-12 market and Chromebooks were a critical entry point for building lifelong brand loyalty, according to internal documents released during the social media trials. The company trained its eyes on children under 13 as the world's fastest-growing internet audience. YouTube sought to close the 80 million-hour-per-day viewing gap between school days and weekends , according to a 2016 document entitled "YouTube edu opportunities": "Increasing usage in schools M-F could decrease this gap!"

A Google user experience team two years later detailed ills affecting viewer well-being, based on external research. Among them: addictive gaming content was being sought out by "inappropriately-aged children," children were entering therapy after watching sexually graphic content, and overexposure to videos "decreased attention spans."

By 2019, the company was aware "the YouTube experience in K-12 schools is broken" due to ads and inappropriate content. A restricted mode used to police content was under-resourced and "trivially easy for students to bypass," internal exchanges said.

An effort that year to regulate YouTube on children's privacy grounds by the Federal Trade Commission was halfhearted due in part to its importance in education, ending in "absolute regulatory failure," said Erie Meyer, former chief technologist at the FTC.

The pandemic enmeshed YouTube deeper into schools. Chromebook shipments exploded, driven by schools spending federal Covid aid on the devices.

In the meantime, YouTube campaigned to "normalize" itself in classrooms in part by cozying up to Parent Teacher Associations, school districts alleged in a lawsuit .

YouTube said it regularly engages with experts on how to improve and is proud of its PTA partnership. The company said plaintiff lawyers were cherry-picking claims from outdated documents to "mischaracterize our work." The documents "represent the work that went into building a better product -- listening to schools, identifying gaps, and solving problems."

Over the years, it offered up solutions for schools. It disabled student browsing on YouTube by default for Google software-partnered districts, asking administrators and parents to opt in. In 2022, it released a "Player for Education" embedding tool that allows teachers to assign videos stripped of ads and recommendations.

While the feature is free for Google-partnered districts, others must pay. There are also administrative hurdles, such as teachers having to manually whitelist content and incompatibility with certain learning management systems districts use, some school officials said.

And for school districts that want to let students browse YouTube for educational purposes, the feature doesn't help. They've had to rely on YouTube's restricted modes or third-party software for filtering content, which officials said has proven inadequate.

Today, YouTube's revenue is upward of $60 billion, rivaling Disney's media arm , Wall Street firm MoffettNathanson estimates. It rakes in the greatest portion of ad money directed at children 12 and under compared with other tech companies, according to a 2023 paper by Harvard public health researchers.

A 2025 internal document spotlighted YouTube's "two biggest challenges" for teen well-being: low-quality recommendations that can "normalize unhealthy beliefs" and "prolonged unintentional use." YouTube CEO Neal Mohan recently told Time Magazine he limits his own children's YouTube use.

David Taylor, a math teacher of over 30 years, appreciates YouTube as a modern upgrade to the overhead projector, useful for catching up absentees and teaching tough-to-illustrate mathematical concepts with help from Khan Academy. But he's witnessed the downsides: his son spent double the time on homework due to watching YouTube on his school device. "I don't want them to restrict YouTube in my district," he said, "but Google doesn't make it very easy" to filter out distractions.

Other teachers like Elizabeth Kline in Pennsylvania say YouTube is overused to inject personality into lessons. "Instead of the teacher singing, it's the kids staring at a screen and the teacher standing to the side," Kline said. That, plus students' off-task viewing, result in children often seeing YouTube ads at school, from anti-immigration political ads to those for Hot Wheels, Squishmallows and GMC Trucks, families and teachers said.

The content they come across can be harmful. Sarah Gaboury, who has strict limits at home, said her daughter's body image anxiety worsened with the stream of cheer and makeup videos she watched when her fifth-grade class earned YouTube for good behavior last year.

Shannyn De Arman of Massachusetts over Thanksgiving break found her second-grader crying in the bathroom, scared of zombies chasing children -- something he'd seen on YouTube at school. And in March, Anna Segur's sixth-grader in Boulder, Colo. searched "going to epstein island" on YouTube, his most-accessed site, his records show.

THE YOUTUBE OVERLOAD runs counter to what is clear in several scientific studies: Learning analog is better than digital.

Neuroscientist Tzipi Horowitz-Kraus, who has co-wrote several studies on screen use and child brain development, said introducing digital tools too early to children may prevent basic neural networks related to executive functions and language abilities from building. Her research has shown that screen-based learning can interfere with children's attention. "You know how to push buttons really fast but don't have the attention level to focus on your teacher," said Horowitz-Kraus, head of the educational neuroimaging group at Technion, an Israeli university.

Jared Cooney Horvath, a neuroscientist and educator who recently testified before Congress, found in an analysis that as states switched over to digital testing between 2011 and 2019, national test scores for reading and math slid in the ensuing years through 2024, even excluding the pandemic year test. This "digital lock-in" forced more screen time and distraction into the classroom, he theorizes.

"The impact of 1:1 Chromebooks on learning is incredibly bad," Horvath said.

Some researchers note other potential factors behind declines: looser federal requirements around school achievement and the rise of smartphones and social media among them. Moreover, some studies have found children just do worse on online tests versus paper.

Rajen Sheth, the former Google executive known as the father of Google apps who led the school Chromebook push, argues that pandemic fallout -- not tech -- is behind the recent test-score decline. He says he's witnessed many goosebumps-raising moments of how Chromebooks can be a "huge force" for personalized learning, provided schools manage them well.

However, he acknowledged YouTube is a particular quandary: its shifting sea of content makes real-time filtering nearly impossible, for Google or school districts. This leaves schools stuck between blocking or enabling it, a dilemma where "neither scenario is great for students. It's very tough to figure out," said Sheth, now CEO of Kyron Learning, an AI-education company.

Gavin Farmer, a computer science teacher in North Carolina, said teachers struggle to monitor kids' screens, using janky software showing tiny versions of their screens on their laptops to spot off-task behavior -- all while teaching.

He said unlike generations past, today's students can flip to basketball highlights or even pornography during math class (which actually happened, he said). "We have given these kids an endless opportunity to get off task and go over to YouTube."

For kids with ADHD, the allure of YouTube on school devices can be especially challenging, several parents said. The school that Brenda Oswald's son attends in Oregon requires iPad use for district-mandated digital curriculum. His grades have fluctuated wildly; he made the honor roll when the iPad was briefly removed, only to slide back as his school-day viewing surged to as much as 240 minutes in a single day.

"He feels like a failure," Oswald said. She said an escalating regimen of ADHD medications have proven no match for YouTube Shorts.

"I'm just entranced," her 16-year-old said. "I feel good when I'm watching it but when I'm off, I feel horrible." He's beginning specialized treatment for internet addiction at Boston Children's Hospital.

School health professionals and therapists observe a generation with worse fine motor skills, constantly fiending for the "dopamine drip" of screens. "It's really hard for me to determine which students actually have ADHD and which students are addicted to screens," said Natalie Bizzarro, a school psychologist in a Philadelphia suburb.

TO FIGHT BACK, parents are turning into data sleuths and activists. When his middle-schooler began falling behind late last year, Massachusetts data scientist Jason Merkin sought her usage from her school district. They declined. He resorted to screenshotting her daily Chrome history and analyzing it with AI.

He discovered his daughter spent some 40% of her computer time on noneducational sites at school, including accessing more than 1,000 YouTube videos in about 50 days.

Watertown Public Schools said Merkin's and others' feedback -- as well as a realization that YouTube's filters "increasingly proved ineffective" -- led to a districtwide block by January.

In Bend, Oregon, grassroots parents group Well Wired surveyed nearly 1,000 parents and found 82% supported removing YouTube from school iPads. The group made a dossier of inappropriate content accessed and sent a letter signed by 135 healthcare clinicians to district officials. The district blocked YouTube for lower grades in 2024 and is reviewing access for high schools, where it's the most-used app.

The irony, says Nick Melvoin, board member at the Los Angeles Unified School District, is that devices meant to be equalizers are now exacerbating class differences: children whose parents work late are more likely on their school devices watching YouTube, which he said leads to worse outcomes. Last week, the district passed a resolution he spearheaded to limit screen time and block student-led use of YouTube.

Stan Winborne, superintendent of Granville County Public Schools in North Carolina, blanched to find YouTube was a top-accessed site in an audit he commissioned. His district calculated that "distracted" screen time was costing students up to 31 instructional days per year.

Now he's implemented "Tech-Free" Tuesdays and Thursdays, which required teachers to reinvent their lesson plans. He is phasing out 1:1 Chromebooks for elementary students and has decided to block YouTube for the upcoming school year.

His hands are somewhat tied on a rollback of devices entirely, given that state assessments are digital. "But if I had the choice, I'd say bubble sheets please."

Write to Shalini Ramachandran at Shalini.Ramachandran@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

April 29, 2026 12:01 ET (16:01 GMT)

Copyright (c) 2026 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.