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A bipartisan wave of legislation is pulling phones and devices out of classrooms across the U.S.

Generative AI already shapes how students search, write, and consume information outside school walls.

In 2026 alone, 134 bills requiring AI literacy have been introduced across 31 states.

The edtech backlash is an opportunity to put teachers—not screens—at the center of learning.

Years ago, my husband and I enrolled our children in a public charter Waldorf school — a pedagogy well-known for limiting screens in the classroom and encouraging families to do the same at home. Then I launched a digital literacy curriculum inside its walls.

You might wonder: Why teach kids about technology in a place built on keeping it out?

The answer, which seemed obvious to me then, feels absolutely urgent today: restriction without education doesn’t work. My kids didn’t need to be on screens all day to learn how to think critically about a digital world waiting for them outside the school door. But they absolutely did need to learn how to use screens wisely. So they got both—screen-free time to build important social-emotional capacities and a robust digital literacy education.

That experience taught me something instructive for today: banning screens and teaching kids about them don’t have to be, and shouldn’t be, mutually exclusive.

Across the country, schools have been banning cellphones from classrooms with a hair-on-fire urgency. By early 2026, twenty-six states had mandated full bans; at least thirty-seven states and Washington, D.C., have enacted some form of cellphone restriction. But phones, it turns out, were just the beginning.

Now the ban has........

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