At least 39 states have passed legislation restricting student cellphone use since 2023. According to a new white paper from Learning.com and Whiteboard Advisors, device restrictions can reduce distractions during school hours; however, they don’t necessarily equip kids with the skills they need to manage attention, social pressure, or algorithm-driven content outside the classroom.
Drawing on interviews with superintendents, state edtech directors, researchers, and practitioners, Beyond the Smartphone Ban surfaces a set of tensions worth sitting with.
Key Findings
Cellphone bans don’t solve the cellphone problem: According to Julia Fallon, executive director of SETDA, 3 out of 4 state education leaders have adopted device restrictions or are considering them, but only 60% reported that their state is actively supporting digital citizenship education for students. “A cellphone policy can reclaim attention during the hours students are in school, but it cannot do the rest of the work on its own,” said Fallon.
Learning.com CEO Lisa O’Masta puts the challenge in even starker terms: “Bans can’t be the end. They have to be the beginning of the conversation. When you do finally get your phone back in your hands, how are you going to react to it?”
The most effective digital literacy instruction happens in 15 minutes, not 15 weeks: The paper makes clear that schools can’t wait for a dedicated course or curriculum overhaul to start building student digital skills. What’s working is instruction that’s fast, integrated, and immediately relevant.
O’Masta described one classroom activity that illustrates the point: a teacher has students download TikTok’s license agreement, feeds it into ChatGPT, and asks the AI to summarize how the platform uses their data. In a single lesson, students learn how to write a prompt, understand what a license agreement actually says, and discover that the app is collecting far more than they realized. The outcome: nearly half of students remove TikTok from their phones after the lesson.
Schools need a partner that can keep up: Technology, the white paper notes, will always outpace curriculum. Generative AI tools update constantly; so does the landscape of threats students face, from deepfakes to data exploitation to weaponized misinformation.
The paper lays out a framework for what districts should look for in a digital literacy partner: alignment with ISTE and state standards, a full-stack solution that evolves in real time, flexibility for lessons of varying lengths, compatibility across learning management platforms, and meaningful reporting for accountability. As one district technology leader put it, what teachers ultimately want is “some type of framework or guidance with resources they can deliver that isn’t a heavy lift.”
