Teachers believe entertainment is harming their students’ education, according to a study by Common Sense Media Research. About 71 percent of teachers polled believe entertainment is hurting their kids’ attention spans, and nearly 50 percent believe it’s keeping them from doing their homework well. The study—which classifies texting and spending time on social networks as entertainment, alongside watching television, playing videogames and listening to music—found that a majority of teachers believe that entertainment media also is hurting students’ ability to write coherently (58%) and communicate face to face (59%), and 42 percent of educators say entertainment and technology is impairing critical thinking. Wrote one elementary school teacher for the study, “Attention spans seem to be decreasing, as does students’ abilities to persist through difficult tasks. (They’d rather just push restart and start over.)” (Common Sense Media)