Gunter ISD Superintendent Dr. Brandon Enos is pushing back on Gov. Greg Abbott's call to pull screens out of classrooms, arguing in a newspaper column this week that the state's own testing rules are what keep young students on computers.
The column ran Friday, Oct. 9, in the Kerrville Daily Times and the Waco Tribune-Herald. Enos, who also chairs the Texas Rural Education Association's legislative committee, writes a recurring column on state education policy.
What Abbott proposed
In August, Abbott unveiled a proposal to limit laptops, tablets and other devices during classroom instruction and to lean on physical materials, phonics, handwriting and direct teaching instead.
"My solution is to create a learning environment that prioritizes physical materials and supports our teachers, not replaces them," the governor said in an Aug. 13 announcement from his campaign, calling the phone-free classroom law he signed last year "a powerful first step." That announcement did not address state testing.
The superintendent's argument
Enos writes that the proposal sounds sensible until a visitor sees a third-grade classroom, where, he says, children use screens because state rules require their STAAR tests to be taken online. He says the Student Success Tool, the testing system the state plans to start in 2027-28, keeps that online format.
To pass the third-grade reading and math tests, Enos writes, an 8-year-old has to work a mouse, scroll through long passages, drag and drop answers and type written responses into boxes.
Teachers who skip keyboard practice risk seeing students fail for lack of computer skills rather than reading or math ability, in his view, and because school ratings, funding and evaluations depend on those scores, he describes screen time as a matter of survival for campuses.
