District leader insights: Dr. Angélica Ramsey

Dr. Angélica Ramsey has spent 25 years in classrooms and district leadership – as a teacher, a curriculum director, a deputy superintendent, a superintendent, and a chief academic officer. She has sat in board meetings where technology policy got made, and in PLCs where teachers figured out how to work around it. She knows both rooms. And she starts with a fact every administrator knows but rarely says out loud.

In 25 years, I’ve never found an instructional material adoption that actually meets every standard that you need to teach. So you have to supplement.

That supplement has always existed. The question is whether the district has any control over what it is. When YouTube was open, teachers filled the gap there. It worked instructionally. It also created real problems of students finding workarounds, inappropriate content surfacing, pop-up ads appearing mid-lesson. The ban was a response to those problems. But it solved the wrong one.

Think about a teacher thousands of miles from the ocean, teaching a unit that includes Jacques Cousteau. The textbook has an illustration. The students have never seen the ocean. The illustration doesn’t build the mental model the lesson requires. A 30-second clip from a whale watch does. Three clips from three different locations so students see different species. Then a short Cousteau segment – because the reading is about him, and now he’s a person, not a name on a page.

Now you have the students hooked. Their engagement then leads to them having motivation to read and comprehend and want to learn more. You’ve just brought in science, and oceanography, everything else that you cannot do if you just take the reading.

Then she adds the detail that reframes the whole argument: “Which, by the way, is usually on a smart board. So there’s already technology.” The ban didn’t remove technology from the lesson. It removed the part that was working.

The stated rationale for most YouTube bans is screen time. But the math doesn’t hold. The same districts banning YouTube are often still running 45 minutes of Tier 2 intervention software daily on a device, for every student. If screen time were the real concern, that would go first. The concern was never really screen time. It was uncontrolled access. And that has a different solution.

When boards and communities push back, Dr. Ramsey doesn’t argue the policy. She demonstrates the thing itself. Her board in Pleasant Valley couldn’t engage with a governance concept through documents or slides. So she made a two-minute video. They got it immediately.

If I ask you about a book you read in seventh grade, you’re not going to remember. But if I ask you about the first time they wheeled in the TV, and what you watched, you remember the images and lesson – and that’s why we need to provide that as an instructional tool for our students.

The people deciding whether to restrict video are themselves most persuaded by it.

Which brings her back to the actual question administrators should be asking.

So is the reason you’re doing it because it’s unsafe? Great – I have a way where you can continue providing that instructional tool to students and teachers, but in a way that’s safe, in a closed system, where you’re not exposed to content that has no place in a classroom.

The answer isn’t less video. It’s video that a teacher can defend to a principal, a principal can defend to a superintendent, and a superintendent can defend to a board – because it was selected for a reason, tied to a standard, and part of a larger lesson rather than a standalone screen. The core adoption will never cover everything. It never has. The question is whether the supplement a teacher reaches for when the textbook runs out is something the district controls – or a personal VPN and a workaround.

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About Dr. Angélica Ramsey