Screen Value Over Screen Time:

After a wave of school cell phone bans over the past five years, states and districts have turned to broader classroom technology restrictions, with six states having passed screen time laws and more expected in the upcoming year.

We asked what parents, teachers, and the public really want to see in schools. We surveyed a nationally representative sample of 1,400 people, split across teachers, parents, and the general public, about technology in the classroom for students in grades Pre-K through 5.

Responses clearly did not call for a ban on technology, but for deliberate classroom use. Across every group, the consensus points to a pedagogy-first approach: use technology where it has real instructional value, and prioritize protecting human instruction and play everywhere else. 

Parents and educators want guardrails, not blanket bans.

Parents and educators overwhelmingly favor clear, developmentally appropriate guardrails over blunt, all-or-nothing device prohibitions. Fewer than 25% of parents oppose technology outright in PreK through fifth grade, and 63% of all respondents believe technology generally enhances learning. While we saw agreement on whether technology should be in the classroom, we saw a larger divide around how it should be integrated into students’ lives. Half of respondents supported a 1:1 model where every student has a personal device; the other half believed students should have access only through computer labs or carts.

Quality beats quantity.

Families draw a hard line between passive screen consumption and active, teacher-guided work. Seventy-five percent of respondents say districts should focus on “screen value,” what the technology does for learning, rather than “screen time,” the minutes a student spends in front of a device. On AI, parents were clear: three in four want schools teaching AI literacy in grades PreK through 5.

People want more transparency over how decisions get made.

Families want visibility into why a given tool was chosen, how student data is protected, and how hands-on play is being preserved. Confidence in data privacy is uneven: slightly more than half of parents and educators trust current safeguards, compared with just 40% of the general public.  There’s broad agreement on accountability. Parents, educators, and the public all place primary responsibility on school districts, not vendors, for making sure the tools students use are safe.

Taken together, these findings show that the public isn’t asking schools to retreat from technology, but rather to be more intentional and clear about when it’s used, why, and how students are kept safe. In practice, that means:

• Measure value, not minutes. Evaluate tools by what they do for learning, and be ready to explain those choices to families.

• Revisit early-grades policy with families. Treat device access in PreK-5 as a decision made with the community, not a default carried forward.

• Make AI literacy part of the plan. Give students the skills to use AI thoughtfully, to understand how it works, including with non-screen lessons in the early years, and give teachers the support to teach them.

• Keep educators in charge of instruction. Be clear about where the tool ends and the instructional decision begins.

• Own student privacy. Set strong standards for the tools you adopt, hold vendors to them, and clearly communicate those protections.