Are parents supporting student learning when they send their kids to school with personal devices?
The Progressive insurance commercials about not becoming your parents make me laugh, particularly as I age. Just the other day, my daughter was complaining about an argument on the bus where she wanted to play ‘her’ songs from her personal device that no one else wanted to listen to. This scenario wasn’t even possible when I was a kid. We listened to what was on the radio–commercials and all.
Now, every student has a device in their hands. Technology has transformed not only the way kids interact with each other on the bus but also how they behave in the classroom. School has transformed in ways I couldn’t have imagined a decade ago when I stopped teaching. Technology has opened up incredible possibilities for learning. But it’s also brought some serious headaches that teachers, administrators, and parents all need to figure out together.
When Every Device Becomes a Distraction
Here’s the thing few parents want to admit: Our kids are constantly fighting the pull of their devices. Yes, that includes mine–and yours. But most of us want to think it’s someone else’s kid who’s guilty of scrolling during class.
According to the 2022 Program for International Student Assessment (side notes, the most recent study will be coming out this year) about two-thirds of U.S. students reported getting distracted by using digital devices in class, with another 54% saying they get distracted by other students using them.
No one should be surprised. We ask kids to use the same device for algebra homework that they use to chat with friends, scroll through TikTok or Pinterest, and play Roblox. In an April 2025 EdWeek survey one high school teacher said, “Giving some students a device is like asking an alcoholic to hold a drink—it’s just too tempting.” That might sound harsh, but it captures the struggle going on in classrooms across the country today.
The irony is that we need technology to prepare students for their futures, but more than half of educators (56%) said student behavior on laptops, tablets, or desktops gets off task, creating a major source of distraction that cuts into students’ learning time. In 2014, it was exhausting for me trying to teach a lesson while also monitoring who’s actually on the assignment and who’s shopping online or scrolling through social media. I can’t imagine how teachers are navigating that challenge in 2026.
Some schools are trying device bans, but we can’t prepare students for a digital world by keeping them away from digital tools. Instead, we’re stuck in this messy middle ground, trying to find the balance between access and accountability. Being a classroom teacher now also means you are a tech support specialist and digital citizenship counselor. Most classroom teachers only signed up for one of those jobs, and they haven’t received quality training for the others.
The Budget Reality Nobody Talks About
Here’s a big problem: The Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) funding program, which provided pandemic recovery funds that many districts used to invest in educational software and systems, ended in September 2024. For a lot of districts, that means a major loss of resources. Dan Schwartz, dean of Stanford Graduate School of Education, said, “Technology is a game-changer for education—it offers the prospect of universal access to high-quality learning experiences, and it creates fundamentally new ways of teaching. But there are a lot of ways we teach that aren’t great, and a big fear with AI in particular is that we just get more efficient at teaching badly.”
What does this mean for today’s classroom? It means the $300 projected to make the SmartBoard light up might not be in the budget or that software licenses might not get renewed. It means IT departments are stretched even thinner than before, and when the Chromebook cart stops working, the teacher might be waiting a while for help.
The math is pretty sobering. K-12 education technology spending reached $30 billion in 2024, and it’s projected to nearly double by 2033. A lot of that spending goes to replacing devices that break, dealing with outdated infrastructure, and juggling multiple platforms that don’t talk to each other. It’s not exactly the sci-fi classroom of the future many imagined when starting down this path.
So What Do We Do?
Sometimes I pray that the internet just completely goes dark and we all go back to pen and paper, reading my lamplight. But unless or until that happens, we’re all in this together, figuring it out one day at a time. I often say, “technology is great when it works.” And it is. Technology makes many jobs easier and many classroom lessons more engaging. But then there are those days when you get a Teams notification that Jira is down, and it feels like we’re fighting a losing battle stuck in a holding pattern of trying to be productive without access to critical files.
The key is not to give up on technology altogether, but to use it more intentionally. Schools need to set clear expectations with students about device use. Teachers should also build in tech-free moments during their lessons and advocate loudly for the resources and training they need. And maybe most importantly, parents should give teachers some grace and maybe even encourage their kids to leave their personal devices at home. It’s not the teachers who are failing if students get distracted by their devices. They are just teaching in 2026.