"Just because technology is everywhere doesn't mean that it belongs everywhere."
We don't entirely disagree with this, and we recognize that there's plenty of ed tech out there that deserves scrutiny. There are companion chatbots and generative AI tools that write essays for students. There are apps designed to keep kids scrolling at the expense of learning. Parents and educators are right to be concerned and to push back.
But our concern is that severely limiting technology use isn't the same as understanding what it does. New York City has thousands of kids who learn and play chess on screens every week. We think that those kids deserve a policy that can tell the difference.
Pick any weekend in New York City and you'll find that there are multiple scholastic chess tournaments running throughout the five boroughs, some with hundreds of kids participating. Over the past 30 years, thousands of New York City kids have learned chess through school programs. New York City school teams regularly dominate national scholastic chess championships. Chess is woven into the fabric of this city's schools in such a unique way that you won't find anywhere else in the country.
You've probably heard of Tani Adewumi. He and his family came to New York City as refugees, spent time in a homeless shelter in Harlem, and within a year of learning chess at his school's club, won the New York State Scholastic Championship. His story was shared by the New York Times and it’s a reminder of what chess does for kids when you give them access to it.
Schools like PS.166 on the Upper West Side have built programs where kids are winning city and national titles year after year. Programs like Nest+m in Manhattan send dozens of students to compete at the NYC championship every year. Washington Square Park has been a gathering place for chess players for decades.
A significant number of these kids learn and practice chess on apps like ChessKid. A chess app is not the problem this policy was written to solve.
A screen that generates passive content for a kid is doing something completely different from one that requires a kid to think for themselves.
When a kid solves a puzzle on ChessKid, they assess a position, consider what might happen several moves ahead, weigh their options, and make a decision. There isn't an algorithm that feeds them the next move or AI that writes an answer for them. What ChessKid does is put a difficult problem in front of a kid and waits for them to make their own conclusion.
Parents understand the difference. In a ChessKid survey of 1,064 U.S. parents conducted this past summer, 53% said screen time feels healthy when their child is actively doing something rather than just watching. And 28% said staying focused and paying attention in class was their single biggest back-to-school worry, more than falling behind academically or test anxiety. When we asked what would change how they feel about screen time, 72% said research-backed guidance would make a difference.
Let’s take a look at the research.
The largest chess-in-schools study in U.S. history tracked nearly 800 students over three years. More than 90% of classroom teachers in that study used ChessKid as their primary tool, and the gains they measured in critical thinking, problem-solving and decision-making came from screen-based chess specifically. A study published in Procedia found that kids with ADHD who played chess showed improvement in concentration and listening scores.
A federally funded study from the 1980s found that chess outperformed most other enrichment programs, including computer programs and creative writing, for developing critical and creative thinking. The researchers didn't have AI in mind when they ran that study, because AI didn't even exist back then. What they were trying to figure out was what made kids better thinkers, and it turned out to be chess.
If you want to understand more about what research says about screen time and kids, we've been writing about this topic.
We know that ChessKid is a tech platform, and we're not here to argue that all screens are fine or that kids should be able to use every ed tech tool without limits. What we're asking for is a framework that can tell the difference between technology that works for a kid's brain and technology that works around it.
The question to ask is not how many minutes. We believe the better question is, "What is this screen asking of my kid while they're on it?"
Chess has always had a clear answer to that.
Mayor Mamdani, try ChessKid for 30 minutes. Then tell us it belongs in the same category as a chatbot.