The equity blind spot in school screen-time policies

Ahead of students returning to the classroom in the fall, the majority of states have advanced restrictions or bans on cellphones or personal devices in K-12 schools. A smaller but growing body of legislation is beginning to impose similar restrictions on artificial intelligence (AI).

These policy surges reflect genuine and well-documented concerns among educators, parents, and lawmakers about attention, adolescent mental health, and the volume of time that young people spend on their devices. However, as these policies move from legislatures into classrooms, their distributional consequences merit closer scrutiny. The question of whether device restrictions will serve a legitimate pedagogical purpose is a central one and should exist alongside whether the costs and benefits of that purpose will be distributed evenly across student populations.

The trend toward restrictions

The scale of these legislative shifts are considerable, especially since states and districts invested upwards of hundreds of millions of dollars to improve digital access during the COVID-19 pandemic. According to Brookings internal research trackers on these new edtech-related policies, nearly 40 states and the District of Columbia have enacted some form of device restriction, divided between broad personal electronic device bans that cover laptops, tablets, and smart watches, and narrower policies aimed specifically at cellphones. Enforcement mechanisms vary with some states imposing “bell-to-bell” prohibitions to keep devices locked away for the entire school day, while other districts are restricting use during instructional time periods.

A parallel legislative track is targeting younger grades. Iowa has capped digital instruction at 60 minutes a day for kindergarten through fifth grade; Utah has directed its board of education to develop grade-specific technology rules and prohibit one-device-per-student ratios in elementary school; and Tennessee and Alabama have adopted comparable age-based digital limits. Corresponding proposals in Missouri and Oklahoma stalled in their respective legislatures amid opposition from technology-industry trade group, the Software and Industry Association, warning that unfunded mandates—such as caps on screen time—would strain district resources.

District-level policy is moving along a similar trajectory. The Los Angeles Unified School District—the nation’s second largest—now imposes systemwide, grade-by-grade instructional screen limits, ranging from zero minutes for kindergarteners and first graders to 90 minutes per subject per week for high school students.

Racial equity implications

While this legislative wave is typically framed around student attention and screen time, it less visibly leans into the impact of these restrictions on racial equity, a dimension that deserves fuller consideration in the policy discourse received to date.  

Consider discipline outcomes. In examining Florida’s statewide phone ban, the National Bureau of Economic Research found that the policy’s first year of implementation coincided with a marked rise in suspensions that were unevenly distributed across demographics. In-school suspensions increased substantially overall, but that increase was concentrated almost entirely among Black students, while white and Hispanic students experienced no significant change in discipline rates. While this pattern is difficult to explain as a function of behavioral differences between groups, it is more likely a function of enforcement—specifically, who receives a verbal warning when phones are present versus who is formally disciplined when the application of the restriction depends on discretionary judgement exercised in real time.

That discretion does not operate in a vacuum. More than 70% of the national K-12 teaching workforce is white, and a substantial body of research documents how implicit, largely unconscious assumptions about Black students’ behavior and academic potential shape disciplinary decision-making. A policy that is seemingly race-neutral, like restrictions on devices, can still produce disparate outcomes once it is filtered through classroom dynamics shaped by these assumptions.

Scholars of school belonging have also described this dynamic through the framework of “opportunity structures”: the interpersonal relationships, instructional design choices, and institutional policies that either affirm or undermine a student’s sense of belonging within the school community. Viewed through this lens, a device policy can function as more than a rule about hardware. It operates as an institutional signal with downstream effects on how students experience their relationships with teachers and administrators and their standing within the school.

A second, less examined equity dimension concerns disability and access. Black students are overrepresented in special education placements, and assistive technology often plays a central role in how these students access instructional content. Regardless of the contested question of what drives that overrepresentation, a device policy without carefully constructed exceptions for assistive and accommodated use risks withdrawing tools that some students need to simply participate in instruction. The Los Angeles school district’s policy, along with those in New York, Michigan, Tennessee, and Illinois, offer models worth noting in this regard, explicitly exempting students in individualized education programs (IEPs) that call for device use from their screen-time limits.

The meaning that a device holds for students is another consideration that merits attention. For many families, a personal device functions as a mechanism for safety and connection. Given the frequency of lockdown drills and legitimate concerns about school violence, the capacity to reach a child during an emergency carries considerable weight and “bell-to-bell” locker pouch systems that remove phones for the entirety of the school day have generated documented parental anxiety. For students in underserved or historically marginalized communities, personal devices also frequently serve as a connective link to social and cultural networks beyond a school environment that may not always feel welcoming. Consistent with these concerns, Pew Research Center found that Black teenagers expressed comparatively lower levels of support for all-day restrictions relative to peers, a finding that policymakers should take into account.

The evidence concerning excessive, unstructured device use is substantial; thus, this is not an argument against managing screen time or refocusing classroom attention on instruction. There is growing unease about overreliance on classroom technology. However, designing policy built primarily around timestamps discounts culturally informed nuances. For example, 10 minutes spent passively scrolling bears little resemblance, pedagogically, to 10 minutes spent using a device for research, accessibility, accommodation, or creative production, and time-cap policies are poorly positioned to make this distinction.

Lastly, a related and longer-standing concern is the digital divide. Research on technology and educational inequality documents a persistent pattern in which students from wealthier backgrounds accumulate generative, skill-building experiences with technology, while students from underserved communities more frequently encounter technology primarily through restriction and surveillance. Blanket bans risk reinforcing this pattern, allowing more affluent students to continue building digital fluency and literacy while other students lose access altogether.

Moving toward a more calibrated policy

One productive, more calibrated, framework for understanding the overall policy issue is targeted universalism, recently extended to education policy by scholars Royel Johnson and colleagues. The approach involves establishing a shared universal goal—in this context, for example, sustained attention and sense of belonging for every student—and pursuing that goal through strategies calibrated to the specific barriers different groups face, rather than through a single undifferentiated rule applied uniformly. Operationalized, this framework suggests several concrete design principles: replacing subjective, in-the-moment teacher discretion with clear and consistently applied enforcement standards, so that identical behavior yields identical consequences regardless of who exhibits it; preserving explicit exceptions for assistive technology, medical needs, and emergency communication; and investing in digital literacy instruction that teaches students to regulate their own technology use, rather than relying primarily on confiscation and discipline as the operative mechanism.

States and districts are taking positive steps by treating screen time and student attention seriously, and recognizing, through the devolution of implementation decisions to the local level, that districts’ needs are not identical. That recognition, however, warrants extension one level further: Schools within a given district are themselves heterogeneous, and the staffing, resources, and disciplinary cultures that determine how a policy is actually implemented continue to track closely along racial lines. The students walking back into classrooms this fall inherit a set of rules built for a universal problem; the task ahead is making sure those rules were built with a particular understanding of who bears their weight, Black students among them.