Richard learned about YouTube from a teacher at his middle school in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. She introduced it as a way to listen to music while he did his homework. He quickly realized that the site offered far more, and soon he was viewing dozens of YouTube videos a day — all on his school-issued laptop, often while sitting in class. During eighth grade, Richard viewed 4,784 videos during school hours, NBC News found in an analysis of his YouTube history from this past school year. He often started before 8 a.m., clicking on NBA and NFL highlights before moving on to a mix of police chase footage, cats coughing up hairballs and AI-generated animations of a time-traveling skeleton visiting ancient Rome and the Titanic — in between ads for a local health clinic, Old Spice and CarMax. Nearly a quarter of the videos were about sports. Teachers occasionally yelled at him to stay on task, he said, but they also assigned him work that required his laptop, and they often shared links to YouTube videos to watch for class. “You gave us this computer that can do basically anything, and I used it in a way that it was meant to be used: to look up stuff,” said Richard, who recently started ninth grade and whom NBC News is identifying by his middle name at his mother’s request. “That’s why the videos are on there — for people who are curious.” Over the past decade, YouTube has become ubiquitous in the American classroom. Many school districts give students their own laptops and encourage them to watch educational videos on the platform. But districts often struggle to effectively restrict what else students can watch, and YouTube, which has become ingrained in class curricula, does not give schools a way to disable addictive features like autoplay and TikTok-style YouTube Shorts unless they block the website entirely. That means millions of students have access to billions of videos, leaving some endlessly scrolling through targeted recommendations that have nothing to do with school. To understand how much YouTube some students are viewing, NBC News reached out to parents across the country who had raised concerns about the spread of technology in schools and asked them to download their children’s site histories. Eleven agreed, sharing lists of links from students ranging from second to 12th grade. In a first-of-its-kind analysis, reporters examined more than 17,000 videos through a mix of AI and manual review. More than 95% of the videos, which include ads, were not educational. Five of the students viewed between 1,200 and 5,800 YouTube videos during school hours last academic year, and two others viewed more than 500 videos within just two months. (The actual figures are higher, but NBC News limited the analysis to videos that were still available to view on YouTube recently.) Hundreds of the videos contained profanity, sexually suggestive scenes or references to drugs and alcohol. The remaining four students in the analysis viewed far fewer videos, and a greater share were educational: math explainers, science experiments, drawing lessons and historical footage. It’s possible that the students in the analysis watched additional educational videos shared directly by teachers in a specialized player. “Unless we do more to showcase the magnitude of this problem and what is happening to our kids, nothing's going to change,” said Brenda Oswald, whose 10th grade son in Bend, Oregon, viewed 849 YouTube videos in school over six weeks early this year. It’s easy to keep him off YouTube at home, she said, but “impossible” for her to control what he watches at school. Amid a growing grassroots movement to scale back screen time in the classroom — as well as high-profile lawsuits alleging that social platforms are addictive for children — many school districts are debating whether the educational value of YouTube outweighs the distraction it creates. Parents are increasingly calling on administrators to block YouTube entirely, and dozens of districts have done so for at least some grades this year. Parents are also raising questions about whether Google, which owns the platform, is doing enough to protect students. Several students who have struggled with the lure of YouTube told NBC News how it swallowed up the hours they were supposed to be learning. Richard said he felt lighter when his middle school briefly took away his laptop. Oswald’s son is receiving outpatient treatment for screen addiction. Others said they tried to trick themselves into avoiding YouTube but a stream of AI-generated slop irresistibly drew them back in. Google saw the benefits of students learning about its products, according to internal presentations revealed in court, which described the company’s work in schools as a way to create a “pipeline of future users.” Beyond NBC News’ analysis of 11 students, there are other indications that YouTube can become a distraction. A recent survey of 2,024 current high school students and recent graduates for the Fordham Institute, an education policy think tank, found 33% visited YouTube at school daily for entertainment. A separate report on 610,000 pre-K-12 students from the filtering software Securly found that most spent less than six minutes a day on YouTube. But about 10% of students averaged more than 26 minutes of YouTube per day. And the report found some concerning outliers: 911 elementary school students viewed over five hours of videos each day, and more than 2,800 middle and high schoolers averaged at least 2 1/2 hours a day. “Even if this is just 1% of students, it's still troubling that this is happening,” said Scott Haden Church, an associate communications professor at Brigham Young University who has studied how early adolescents use YouTube. “It's something that needs to be understood and regulated.” Google says that it offers schools ways of limiting students’ access. One option is a restricted mode that hides comments and filters videos at two levels: a “strict” setting for G-rated content and “moderate” for material closer to a PG-13 rating, though those filters do not ensure that the videos are educational. Since 2018, Google has turned off YouTube access by default for schools that use its education software and also requires administrators to obtain parents’ permission annually before enabling it. And Google created a specialized educational player in 2022 that allows teachers to share YouTube videos without ads or autoplay. “Our tools allow administrators to block the platform entirely or restrict access to teacher-assigned videos only, with no ads, recommendations, or browsing,” Jack Malon, a Google spokesman, said in a statement. “If schools choose to enable browsing for students, we require them to get permission from parents first.” But the distraction-free educational player is only available to schools that subscribe to Google’s education software or to a handful of other technology companies that pay Google for the player. (Google says it does not profit from these third-party subscriptions and passes on the fees to creators whose videos no longer feature ads because they are in the player.) And the player’s protections disappear when a student visits YouTube through a web browser. Malon said Google’s tools for subscribers allow school districts and teachers “full control over how YouTube is accessed in the classroom.” “Schools that choose not to use our Workspace for Education administrative tools can decide how students can or cannot access YouTube using their own management solutions,” he said. Google also has some restrictions on personal YouTube accounts created by children, including disabling autoplay by default for 13- to 17-year-olds, though teens can easily turn it back on. In interviews with more than 50 people — including parents, students, teachers, child safety advocates, education researchers, consultants, school administrators and school board members — a consensus emerged: YouTube should do more to limit ads, autoplay and algorithmic recommendations for student accounts. “I don't think that the onus should be put on either young people or schools for the faulty design of products that are meant to manufacture attention,” said Sebastian Mahal, co-chair of Design It for Us, a youth advocacy organization. Many argue for a simple way to ensure children stay on task: Take away students’ laptops and put them back on carts until they’re needed for a particular lesson. Otherwise, the lure of YouTube is too tempting, said Michael Petrilli, the Fordham Institute’s president. “We've just made it too easy for them to do anything but focus on learning,” he said. When Richard was in seventh grade, his middle school confiscated his Windows laptop for two weeks after he searched for videos about rappers’ deaths on YouTube, tripping a district filter. It was a welcome reprieve. He got his schoolwork done during class, so instead of staying up late to complete it, he spent his evenings watching movies with his family and playing soccer. “I went to bed at a good time. I’d go to school happier,” he said. “I felt less load on my shoulders.” But once he got his laptop back, he returned to YouTube. “I’d just make up a lie and make myself believe it — like, ‘Oh, I'm gonna do it later,’ and then I just scroll and watch whatever,” he said. Last year, Maria, Richard’s mother, noticed his grades slipping. She checked Lightspeed, the filtering and monitoring software that the Central Bucks School District uses, and discovered he spent up to four hours a day on YouTube. She also learned that Richard had created a secret Google account on his school laptop so he could watch what he wanted without his parents knowing. She asked administrators to block the platform, but they said too many teachers used it for instruction and the district couldn’t restrict it solely for Richard. The interaction left her “absolutely exasperated,” she said. “Why can’t you see what this is doing?” Maria wondered. “This constant, immediate gratification on a screen all day long, instead of healthy interactions being taught by a teacher, is so unhealthy.” The district declined to comment on Richard’s case, citing student privacy, but said it was working with Richard’s parents. Michael Petitti, a district spokesman, said over email that Lightspeed blocks “mature and non-educational videos” so that the district can keep YouTube available “as an instructional resource.” School districts could block YouTube entirely, but many don’t because curriculum publishers incorporate its videos into lessons and students use it for research. In interviews, many school administrators said they want to give students autonomy in exploring their interests and learning to manage their time. Teachers said they look for relevant YouTube clips to make their lessons feel more real and engaging. Many school districts use monitoring software that allows teachers to see what’s on every student’s screen, and some can lock down students’ laptops. “But it’s another thing on the teacher's plate to juggle,” said Ross Gorman, a high school history teacher and past president of the teachers union in East Lansing, Michigan, who believes students shouldn’t be assigned their own laptops. “Am I keeping track of what's on every kid's screen, or am I actually helping another kid learn?” Standardized test scores for American children have fallen since 2012, a trend exacerbated by the Covid pandemic. The cause of the drop is heavily debated, and while many factors are likely at play, some — including the United Nations’ education agency — have argued the technology that has flooded classrooms may contribute, or at least hasn’t helped. Parents, in turn, have complained to school officials that the more time students spend on laptops and tablets, the greater chance they’ll be distracted by websites like YouTube. At least 30 school districts — ranging from the nation’s largest in Los Angeles and New York to smaller ones in Plano, Texas, and Prince William County, Virginia — announced sweeping restrictions blocking YouTube browsing on at least some students’ devices this year, usually with carveouts for teachers to show videos in class. The change has been hard for some students to accept; in San Diego, the district blocked student attempts to access YouTube 5.8 million times in the first seven weeks after the ban took effect. "Students make a sport of trying to figure out, 'How do I get around these blocks?'" said TJ McCray, deputy superintendent in Madison, Wisconsin, where the district recently blocked students in eighth grade and younger from browsing YouTube. Bend-La Pine Schools in Oregon — where Brenda Oswald’s son viewed hundreds of videos about games like “Minecraft” and “Spider-Man 2” during school hours, and hundreds of parents signed a letter urging less screen time — built an app this year to limit YouTube access. It now blocks YouTube on all student iPads except for specific videos that teachers approve and place in a specialized player that removes ads and suggested content, similar to the player Google offers subscribers. “YouTube is really powerful for learning in a lot of ways because there's a high level of ease of use,” said Lisa Birk, a deputy superintendent of Bend-La Pine Schools. “But what makes it challenging is that algorithmic part — here's your next video, here's the new things that are being pushed your way.” Oswald’s son, who is now in 11th grade, said in an interview that YouTube should get rid of features like autoplay and recommended videos for children. “It would mean I would have had to make a conscious decision to open a video instead of just letting it play,” he said. “I feel like YouTube was making it harder for me to stop.” Hundreds of districts and families are suing YouTube and other social media companies, arguing that they’re addictive. In the first bellwether case this year, a Los Angeles jury found that YouTube is designed to hook children; the company is appealing. Internal Google presentations disclosed in the litigation mused that schools could one day shift textbook funding to YouTube subscriptions. Malon, the Google spokesman, said the “documents mischaracterize our work” and that the company does not directly market YouTube to schools. School officials portrayed YouTube, along with other social media, as a persistent nuisance in court filings, requiring them to deploy extra staff and subscribe to software to keep up. One district in New Jersey reported a student interrupting standardized testing to check YouTube notifications. “Some of the content inside of YouTube might not be as bad as other things they might see in other places, but I'm deeply concerned about algorithms that suck them in,” said Grant Rivera, the superintendent of Marietta City Schools in Georgia, one of the districts that sued YouTube. “And then what happens, we battle that the whole school day.” Leah Leonard’s son received his first Chromebook from school in first grade — and it unleashed chaos. If she and her husband put the laptop away, she said, he’d throw toys and pillows and cry. He awoke in the middle of the night or early in the morning to find it. He tried to hide it. The battle continued until teachers agreed in fourth grade to keep the Chromebook at school. After her son began seventh grade in Boulder, Colorado, Leonard used the school’s monitoring software to see that he visited YouTube frequently, including during lunch and recess. “It's just not something that ever occurred to me that in school there would even be the option for my child to go take a device and hide out somewhere private, watching YouTube Shorts, while other kids are outside playing football,” she said. Leonard said she asked the Boulder Valley School District to disable YouTube for her son, but administrators told her it wasn’t feasible. (Malon, the Google spokesman, said any district using Google software can disable YouTube for individual students.) She then asked the district for the YouTube history linked to her son’s student account, so she could see what he was viewing, but administrators told her they were not allowed to share it because of student privacy. Leonard was incredulous. “Am I in an alternate universe?” she thought. In June, she and her husband met a mother through the online community Smartphone Free Childhood who showed them how to get her son’s history through his YouTube account. They discovered he viewed more than 5,700 videos over the previous school year. The vast majority were under two minutes long, NBC News found: He viewed “Top 5 Funniest Chicken Dance Prank” and "Which Car Would You Take To Escape the Monster?" while he sat in math class. During science, he opened “Family Guy” clips, and one day in gym class, he viewed a video uploaded by the user “Sketchy” describing how F1 drivers pee their pants during races. “The idea that we would even bring this ecosystem into a classroom and expect children with developing brains to be able to maintain their focus and attention — and just get used to it and learn to use it as a tool — is preposterous, because it's not designed for education,” Leonard said. Boulder Valley school officials described Leonard’s son as an exceptional situation and said they’re working with the family to find a solution this year. They also defended YouTube’s value. “We're really leaning into the way students learn, and for some it's audio, for some it's visual, for some it's a combination of that,” Lynn Gershman, Boulder Valley’s director of academic services, said in an interview. “There's a limit to scripting education,” she added, “where kids are not doing any self-discovery.” Gershman said the district uses filtering software and YouTube’s restricted mode to limit the type of videos available and encourages teachers to place assigned videos in Google’s specialized education player. The district also used third-party software to block YouTube Shorts, or TikTok-style videos, for students in August, partially because of Leonard’s situation. Parents across the country have become activists and digital sleuths in their battle against YouTube in schools. They’ve shared alarming stories at school board meetings, signed petitions and even built software. Joanna Houston was horrified to discover early this year that her sixth-grade son in Richmond Hill, Georgia, had viewed well over 1,000 videos on his Chromebook in just a few months of school. She plotted her son’s YouTube history against his class schedule and discovered he viewed football highlights in homeroom, YouTube Shorts about “Fortnite” in math and funny mishaps from basketball games during language arts. Houston wanted to help other parents get this information. She teamed with educational researcher Meredith Bouvier to build the Classroom Tech Transparency Project, a website that automates the process of downloading a child’s YouTube history, and launched it in June. "The question we all need to be asking ourselves is: What are the real educational benefits to be gained from allowing student-led YouTube access during school, and what are the risks?" Houston said. The details of what students are watching on YouTube can be convincing. In August, school leaders in Madison, Wisconsin, announced they would block elementary and middle school students from browsing YouTube after discovering that most used it to watch music videos. Elle Fischer recently graduated from high school in Madison and is studying to become a middle school teacher. She thinks the district’s YouTube crackdown is a good start, but she wants schools to go further by assigning students less work on screens. She said she kept YouTube open in a pinned tab throughout high school and procrastinated by watching “Bridgerton” clips or videos of people playing “Roblox.” She felt isolated even when surrounded by her classmates, all tapping away on their Chromebooks. “A big part of learning is being engaged with other people and socializing with classmates, figuring out how to work together on the same problem,” she said. She worries that’s been lost in the modern tech-focused classroom. “Especially after Covid,” she said, “everybody needed that, but none of us were getting it.” Methodology: We reached out to parents across the country who had previously expressed concern about technology in schools during public meetings, online and through advocacy groups. Eleven agreed to download their children’s YouTube histories on their school-issued laptops or tablets and shared PDFs or Excel spreadsheets that included every “watch event,” or every time a student opened a YouTube video, including the video URL and the local timestamp. YouTube histories do not track how much time viewers spent on videos, just that they opened them. If a student watched ads, we counted those in the watch history as separate videos. We counted each “watch event” separately; so, if a student watched the same video five times, we counted this as five separate video views. The YouTube histories do not include any videos students may have watched through Google’s specialized education player, so it’s possible that students watched additional videos separately. The YouTube histories ranged in length from two months to multiple years. For each student, we analyzed videos from the most recent school year available, which was usually the 2025-26 school year. The next step was fetching metadata for each video from the official YouTube Data API v3 to get the video’s title, channel, description, duration and category. Of the 22,795 videos the 11 students watched, which include videos that students watched more than once, 2,543 were no longer available when we queried YouTube for them, meaning the videos had been deleted, made private, or geoblocked between the moment the student watched it and the moment we tried to process it. We are not counting those videos in our analysis at all; this means that the number of videos each student viewed is generally higher than the numbers reported in this article, in some cases by hundreds of videos. (In our video arrays for two students, some videos are shown as unavailable. These videos became unavailable more recently, after our analysis was completed.) The next step was to transcribe the audio. We downloaded the audio track of every available video and sent it to Google's Gemini 3.5 Flash model. The model returned four things: the detected spoken language, whether the audio contains speech at all, the original transcript in that language, and an English translation if needed. If a video's audio was music-only, silent or unintelligible, the model marked it as "no speech" and we moved on to visual analysis. To do that, we downloaded the video itself and sent the frames to Gemini’s vision model, which describes what it sees and flags concerns that may not have surfaced through an analysis of the transcript alone, such as visible weapons, drug imagery and on-screen slurs. We then classified each available video using Gemini 3.5 Flash to determine: the subject, such as gaming, music or sports; a short summary of what the video contained; whether it was partially or fully educational; whether it was age-appropriate; and if it wasn’t age-appropriate, what the specific concerns were, such as profanity, hate speech, sexual content or violence. This analysis was based on the student’s age within these groups: grades K-2, grades 3-5, middle school and high school. We refined the classifications twice by manually reviewing 5% of the AI analysis’ output for three students and making changes to the instructions in response." To complete the analysis, we filtered for videos that students watched during school hours, including homeroom, classes and lunch and recess. We based this on the school district’s calendar and school hours within each student’s local time zone, removing “watch events” before or after school or on weekends, holidays or school breaks. We did not remove sporadic days when children may have stayed home because of illness. That yielded a total of 17,355 watch events during school hours. We drilled deeper on the analysis of whether videos were educational. Because we had set the analysis to be generous in flagging videos as potentially educational, three journalists reviewed all videos that were marked as “yes” or “partial” for educational content and classified them manually. Two journalists then reviewed all the AI-generated summaries for the videos that had not been classified as educational to check for any that were missed. We counted videos as educational if they: were produced by an academic publisher and included a lesson; showed a book being read aloud; communicated academic content, such as an animation teaching how to add fractions; explained academic topics, such as a content creator describing mythological inaccuracies in Disney’s “Hercules” or an AI-generated video that accurately described a historical event; showed how something worked, such as how a rare musical instrument produces sound; showed how to do something a student might do for class, such as drawing a pumpkin; and/or offered lessons to children, such as how to be polite or how to recycle. We counted videos as educational even if they were very short, as long as they included at least one fact in the video or in the description. We did not count videos as educational if they: included profanity, racist slurs, graphic violence, toilet humor or sexually inappropriate content; included ads or sponsored content woven through the video itself, not just during ad breaks; included clickbait-style exhortations to like and subscribe or else the viewer would receive bad luck or other negative consequences; focused on an academic topic but were clearly inaccurate or offered a mix of “truths and lies” but didn’t distinguish between them; focused on violent hypothetical scenarios, such as how fast a pillow needs to move to kill a person, without academic framing; showed stunts without any scientific value, such as hiding glitter bombs in packages for thieves to steal; and/or showed how to do something that was not directly applicable to school, such as how to beat a video game level.
