The K-12 Techlash Moment

Education is in the throes of a well-deserved “techlash.” That much is clear. Less clear is whether the public is as fed up as the rush of legislation might suggest.


School cellphone bans are everywhere. At the start of 2026, at least 35 states had adopted statewide limits on phones in school. Most of those policies were “bell-to-bell” bans.

Broader screen bans are now gaining traction. This spring, six states enacted screen time legislation for schools, seeking to limit the time students spend using school-issued Chromebooks, iPads, learning software, and digital tools. Iowa’s bill caps digital instruction at 60 minutes a day in grades K–5; Alabama’s directs school officials to develop guidelines. Similar bills have been introduced in many more states. The restrictions can be clumsy and are dotted with loopholes, but they still amount to a notable shift.

It’s clear enough that Jonathan Haidt, author of The Anxious Generation, is having a moment. There’s been a surge of attention to the negative impact of phones and social media on children’s literacy, mental health, and social well-being. Parent groups trade tips on how to keep kids off phones, and there’s growing interest in device-free classical education. When both teacher unions and Moms for Liberty are taking on Big Tech, it feels like an inflection point.

All of this is in stark contrast to a decade ago, when classroom technology was regarded as an unmitigated good—when each new device was seen as evidence that school leaders were innovative and “future-forward.” Education leaders and “reformers” talked longingly of “one-to-one” devices as the event horizon, insisting that getting a device in the hands of every student was the key to educational transformation.

The faith in the magic of technology was striking. In 2012, The Washington Post lauded the “ultra-wired” Flint Hill School for giving “each child a device—starting with an iPad for every preschooler.” The school’s dean of faculty explained, “Tech is like oxygen. It’s all around us, so why wouldn’t we try to get our children started early?” In 2013, Brookings political scientist Darrell West explained that, since students “love mobile technology,” schools should welcome phones and “harness” them to “transform instruction.” In 2014, in “Why Cell Phones Belong in the Classroom,” Columbia’s Julie Warner cheered the “rich literacy practices” of kids using phones and deemed it “irresponsible” for schools to “eschew the powerful tools that travel with youth throughout their daily lives.” I could list hundreds and hundreds of similar examples.

Whoops.

The sentiment was everywhere. In 2015, Bill Gates told the Microsoft Faculty Summit that American education was “broken” and that digital tools would be a crucial part of the solution. On the campaign trail that year, Jeb Bush explained that education’s big challenge was figuring out “how to redesign education around what technology allows us to do.”

Don’t get me wrong. It’s wholly reasonable to see the possibilities of technology in schools. After all, pencils, paper, calculators, whiteboards, and buses are all technologies, too. Finding a way to make sensible use of new tools is part and parcel of every profession.

But every healthy impulse can easily be corrupted by schlock-peddling vendors, ed school fixations, quick-fix reformers, and assorted grifters. This is education’s evergreen problem, and we now see the result: a flood of dubious ed tech that washed over teachers ill-equipped to navigate the tide. Students were distracted, and teachers were left at sea, even as the wave of Chromebooks, tablets, and learning management systems helped normalize screens at home and in school.

Is Techlash a Parent-Powered Phenomenon?

It’s tempting to view the recent techlash as a well-deserved comeuppance for years of thoughtless, overenthusiastic ed tech initiatives.

There’s more to the story, though. As with other frustrating trends in K–12, the ed tech problem is about more than dubious decisions by educators and education “experts.” In the case of school discipline, for instance, too many school officials have embraced fuzzy-headed nonsense, but that’s a rational response when strict discipline is less likely to elicit gratitude than accusations of bias. Similarly, teachers have learned that rigorous grading is more likely to prompt parental complaints than a pat on the back.

Today, school officials are taking justifiable heat for subjecting young learners to lots of low-quality screen time. But this is a tale of shared culpability. The public hasn’t asked educators to resist the allure of ed tech; if anything, it’s welcomed devices in children’s pockets and classrooms. Indeed, most parents are just fine with screens in classrooms. Earlier this summer, EdChoice reported that 86 percent of parents support using laptops in class, 84 percent support the use of online learning platforms, 80 percent support the use of online learning games, and 60 percent support the use of AI in class.

Hart Research has found that 74 percent of parents describe ed tech as positive for their child’s learning and 54 percent say they want their school to use more technology going forward. Heck, the hottest thing in K–12 right now may be Alpha School, with its promise of accelerated, AI-delivered instruction. And while two-thirds of parents do support banning the use of phones during class, just one-third support “bell-to-bell” phone bans.


The techlash moment conflates a lot of things—school practices, private conduct, shoddy software, and more. But what advocates have right now is a K-12 policy hammer, so there’s a temptation to approach all these problems as a series of schoolhouse nails.

It’s become routine for kids to spend a large chunk of their day on screens. Common Sense Media has found that 8-to-12-year-olds are on screens for five and a half hours a day, a figure that rises to more than eight and a half hours a day for 13-to-18-year-olds. Eighty-eight percent of teens have their own phones. Pew has reported that, among parents with a child 12 or younger, half say their child watches YouTube videos daily.

Heavy screen usage has become a daily norm even for very young children. Kids aged 5 to 8 spend three and a half hours a day on screens. (Just one percent of that is schoolwork.) Two-thirds of 8-year-olds have their own tablets. Nearly half of parents with kids 8 and under say they use screens to keep their kids occupied in public, while a quarter use screens to calm kids when they’re “angry or upset.”

Parents aren’t passive victims here. They’re active participants in the rise of the screen-based childhood, buying the devices and failing to set (or enforce) behavioral norms.

The state of public opinion makes it tough to view the angst driving techlash (no matter how richly deserved) as especially deep or durable. So long as parents regard heavy doses of screen time as the norm, it’s hard to picture them embracing a steadfast campaign to limit devices in school. Indeed, it may be that supporters are focused on K–12 because it’s a lot easier to change school policy than to get parents to reset household norms or take away their kids’ phones.

Is Techlash Real?

So, is techlash a big deal? Or a summer storm that’ll soon flit by? My answer tends to vary depending on whether I’m speaking as a parent or a pundit.

As a parent, I’m optimistic that techlash may force schools to rethink their approach to devices. It certainly feels like we’ve reached a point where the costs of ubiquitous screens have become clear. Researchers like Jared Cooney Horvath and Jean Twenge have documented the problems. The Surgeon General is warning about the impacts of excessive screen time on kids’ mental and social well-being. Kids sit on school buses full of doomscrolling peers—pressured to keep up with TikTok videos and group chats for fear of being left out. It’s an exhausting collective action problem. Leaked internal documents make Big Tech look more than a little like Big Tobacco. While parents say they’re cool with ed tech, I can’t help but think that sentiment may rest on a fragile foundation. I can squint and see signs that our long lassitude is finally cracking.

As a pundit, I’m skeptical that the techlash will last. We’ve spent a century watching one generation of disappointing ed tech give way to the next, with none of these cycles doing much to temper enthusiasm for the next big thing. In 1922, Thomas Edison predicted, “The motion picture is destined to revolutionize our education system.” Not so much. In 1932, Benjamin Darrow published Radio: The Assistant Teacher as experts predicted that radios would soon be “as common in the classroom as is the blackboard.” The cycle has played out again and again with filmstrips, TVs, desktop computers, laptops, smartboards, smartphones, and more. Now, we’re poised to swap screens for wearable tech as we enter the “age of agentic AI.” Our habit of memory-holing yesterday’s disappointments augurs against a lasting backlash, as does the bland acceptance of runaway screen time everywhere outside of the schoolhouse.

Look, the techlash moment conflates a lot of things—school practices, private conduct, shoddy software, and more. But what advocates have right now is a K-12 policy hammer, so there’s a temptation to approach all these problems as a series of schoolhouse nails. And I’m the first to agree that getting students to put phones down during class or lunch is good for learning and social well-being. But phone bans won’t dent the wall of texts and influencer updates that await when kids pull out their phones on the bus home (or at 1 a.m.). Lousy computer-assisted tutoring is a real problem, but scrapping it doesn’t stop 8-year-olds from spending long hours watching videos instead of reading.

If techlash is to drive productive change, it can’t be just an in-school project. We’re dealing with a collective action problem—it’s tough for any given family to really limit devices because parents fear it will mean social isolation for their kids. It’s a reasonable concern, given how much tween and teen socialization is fueled by memes, selfies, influencers, group texts, e-gambling, and gaming.

Additionally, it looks like the K-12 policymaking has outrun public support. This is a familiar story, one we’ve seen on everything from test-based accountability to the Common Core. Fundamental change requires engaging and educating, and persuading parents needs to be job one. That’s what made the movement against Big Tobacco so effective, and we’ve seen similar successes with school choice. But persuasion is hard, frustrating, slow work, and it comes with no guarantees of success. Unless and until we see a real appetite for change on the part of parents, it’s hard to see today’s public policy efforts driving much change.

Ultimately, techlash may be more an exasperated yawp than evidence of a shift in public sentiment. Activists have successfully pushed phone bans and screen limits onto the education agenda. That’s a good thing. These policies send a healthy signal and should help at the margins. But I can’t help but think this is an exercise in targeting schools because we have no idea how to combat the larger, more troubling trends. Moreover, the restrictionist impulse sits uneasily alongside the normalization of screen-saturated childhood. Absent a wider shift in norms, these policies are unlikely to stick. Indeed, in a world of ubiquitous devices and omnipresent AI, ham-fisted legislation risks branding restrictionists as unserious reactionaries—potentially inviting a backlash of their own.



Frederick M. Hess is director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute. He is a co-author of Getting Education Right: A Conservative Vision for Improving Early Childhood, K–12, and College (2024).

https://lawliberty.org/the-k-12-techlash-moment/