Tyler McBride walked about his middle school classroom in rural Arkansas years ago during a period of silent reading as students sat in quiet, fixated on the texts before them.
But hunched behind one book propped upright on a desk was a student fixated on something else, a smartphone positioned just so it was hidden. It wasn’t hidden quite well enough.
“I can remember the first few years I taught eighth grade and a lot of my students did not have cell phones,” said McBride, now a sixth-grade teacher and the senior policy fellow with Teach Plus Arkansas, who began his career in 2012. “Now, I taught eighth grade a couple of years ago, and there were maybe five eighth-graders out of 90 who did not have a smartphone.”
Long gone are the days when few students had smartphones and their internet-capable counterparts in school, such as smartwatches and tablets. The devices have become as commonplace inside classrooms as pencils and paper.
And, with some measure of majority agreement, they’ve become a major distraction. It spurred action beyond policy implementation at individual school buildings and districts; many state governments adopted phone laws with bipartisan support.
Some form of legislation addressing students’ use of smartphones in schools is in place in at least 40 states plus Washington D.C., according to multiple online sources and news stories.
Twenty-eight states plus Washington D.C. instituted a bell-to-bell ban, restricting access during the school day with some exemptions for use and access, generally for students with special needs and also during emergencies, according to Education Week.
Florida was the first state to adopt a law, doing so in 2023 and strengthening it to a full-day ban in 2025. Some states limit the ban to instructional time, allowing for use during lunch or between classes, for example. A handful of the bans are limited to grades K-8.
Legislation adopted in the remaining states varies in requiring local school boards to enact policies concerning use and access. Additionally, legislation is pending adoption in at least five other states: Connecticut, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania.
“I 100 percent believe a bell-to-bell ban is the most impactful,” said Lisa Tabb, a co-producer and director of the documentary series, “Screenagers.”
The filmmakers behind the award-winning series about youth mental health, screen time and digital wellness offer community screenings of the movies, engaging local educators, parents and students in broad discussions about the intrusion of mobile technology into everyday life. It spawned the Away for the Day movement, an advocacy effort that urges bell-to-bell phone bans in schools nationwide.
Social, emotional impact
The biggest issue concerning phones in school, Tabb said, is the social-emotional impacts posts on social media can have, particularly unwanted attention — bullying, fight videos, unflattering photos taken without permission.
At awayfortheday.org, dozens of studies and surveys are linked that explore the impact of smartphones on teens’ emotions, social interactions and mental health.
One study, “Adolescent Smartphone Use During School Hours” published in 2025, found that American adolescents spend 90 minutes, on average, using their own smartphones during a 6 1/2-hour school day. It links to the 2021 Common Sense Census that found teens from ages 13 to 18 were in front of screens for about 8 1/2 hours daily.
A Pew Research Center survey conducted in fall 2023 found that 7 in 10 participating high school teachers found that smartphones were a major problem in the classroom. A study exploring time spent on social media and how it relates to depression in adolescents, published in 2022, found that more time spent on social media correlated with elevated risk of depression symptoms, particularly with adolescent girls.
“I could not get kids to look up from their phones, even if I told them to put them away. It was very hard to get them to engage with me let alone with each other,” Marissa Tanner, a seventh-grade social studies teacher from Indiana, said of the post-COVID return to in-person learning.
Tanner teaches seventh grade social studies and is the policy fellow this year for Teach Plus Indiana. Her school district implemented a strict policy three years ago, with students risking confiscation of phones on sight. That was before state lawmakers enacted a law mandating that devices be kept away during instructional time, which will expand beginning next school year with a full-on ban.
Tanner said she’s seeing far fewer students on phones in school now. Initial pushback from families has relented, too. She said the ban resulted in better interaction during lessons and between students during downtime.
“We see kids actually talking to each other more,” she said, adding that she’s grateful for the return of “trouble” like passing notes and chit-chatting.
“Taking cell phones out of the classroom allows them to be kids in the way we were allowed to be kids. If we can go back in time and make school a place where kids are learning and not worried about the outside world, it’s going to be better for everyone else,” Tanner said.
Parents’ role
McBride, the Arkansas teacher, said his middle school began a building-wide ban in 2019, years before the statewide ban kicked in this year. It helped eliminate a lot of issues that sparked through social media, he said. Parents were mixed on the policy at first, but he said they gradually bought in as they learned their kids used phones less.
Adults play an important role in the matter, he added. In myriad ways, kids mimic adults’ behavior, McBride said, and that includes using cellphones. He encouraged adults, particularly parents, to mind their own online behaviors and to simply put the phone down and engage with their kids.
“Kids didn’t just go out to the store and buy their own iPads and iPhones and use them all the time. Adults are responsible for the situation our world is in right now,” McBride said before speaking to the advice he’s shared with friends who are parents. “I always tell them, ‘Focus on your kids.’ Everything I read, even down to babies needing eye contact to see your facial expressions as you’re talking for their brain development, there’s so much smartphones can get in the way of if we’re not careful.”
The effort to keep smartphones out of classrooms has evolved to a broader pushback against the use of technology in education, particularly in the elementary and middle school years.
At least five states — Kansas, Missouri, Tennessee, Virginia and West Virginia — are pursuing legislation that would curtail or prohibit educational technology in schools, according to K-12 Dive, an online publication dedicated to education news.
A bill in Tennessee proposes banning public schools from using digital devices in K-5 classes. The ban would extend to teachers in those grades, prohibiting such use even for instructional purposes.
In West Virginia, a bill was introduced that would enact a similar ban in grades K-3, preventing tech use for instruction and testing. A bill offered in Kansas would similarly mandate instructional materials be exclusively in print from K-5. Restrictions in some of the legislation extend to high schools, too, but on a much more limited basis such as restricting how much time laptops and such are used.
Gerald LeTendre, the Harry L. Batschelet Professor of Educational Administration at Penn State University, said educators must be discerning in using technology for instruction.
He spoke of observing two early elementary classrooms while he taught in Japan almost a decade ago. Both were engaged in lessons about shapes. In one classroom, students used digital tablets to draw circles, triangles and more. In the other, students used scissors to cut out varied shapes. He said students were far more engaged in the hands-on lesson while there were struggles and tech-related hiccups in the digital lesson.
“It has to be used in an age-appropriate manner and it has to be directed by a competent educator,” LeTendre said of the use of ed tech. “If you just throw tech in, it can make it worse at times.”