May 3, 2026

LA Johnson/NPR

Happy Sunday,

Sequoia Carrillo, here! I’m one of the K-12 reporters on the team, and for the last year or so I’ve been following the rapid adoption and rollout of cellphone bans in schools around the country. In writing those stories and visiting classrooms, it became apparent that eliminating cellphones may not be the end goal, but the first step, in a larger reimagining of technology in classrooms. I talked with researchers, teachers and parents who hinted at bubbling discontent with the narrow scope of these bans.

One of those parents is Lila Byock, a mom of two in Los Angeles who helped form Schools Beyond Screens, once a local advocacy group that has expanded nationwide to include thousands of parents. She says whenever she talks to parents they all have the same question: “This is an emergency. What can we do about it?”

Enter 2026: Since January, Alabama, Tennessee, Utah and Virginia have passed some form of legislation telling school districts to rethink how they use technology in teaching and testing, and about a dozen other states are considering similar restrictions.

The flurry of state movement was capped off last week with a unanimous vote from the Los Angeles school board to start the fall with new tech restrictions. The move is an about-face for the country’s second-largest district that, since the pandemic, has focused on bringing technology into the classroom.

There’s a lot more to talk about. Timelines for these proposed restrictions vary; many of these measures are open to interpretation by districts; and of course, technology experts have a lot to say about these rapid changes.

Experts say rushing to broadly ban screen time in schools is rash: “It's sort of throwing the baby out with the bath water,” said Tracy Weeks, the senior director of education policy and strategy at the education technology company Instructure.

You can read the full story here, and if you have any thoughts on the subject reach out to me: scarrillo@npr.org

‘Til next time,

— Sequoia Carrillo, Reporter, NPR Ed

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In other news...

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And here's something to make you smile...

Welcome to 'Anxietyland' theme park, where the rides are no fun.

From the Emotional Roller Coaster to the Worry-go-round, cartoonist Gemma Correll walks us through her brain's not-so-amusing amusement park in a darkly funny memoir.

It's 2018 and cartoonist Gemma Correll is not doing well. In the midst of a week-long panic attack, she is trying everything to get her nervous system to calm down. She tries long walks through her Northern California neighborhood, meditation apps, magnesium and all the liquor in her home. Lying on the ground in the fetal position is her choice method. But nothing works.

Instead, she lies awake at night, gags at the sight of food and since she can't get her eyes to focus, ignores work deadlines. One week turns into several. She is unraveling.

Her spiral takes her down a rickety wooden roller coaster into "The Abyss" of exhaustion and she begins to give up. Sitting on the floor crying to her husband, she says she needs to go to the hospital. Her husband agrees.

This is where Correll's new graphic memoir Anxietyland begins — but it's not where her relationship with anxiety begins. For that, she takes us back to her childhood and walks us through her life living in a terrible theme park called Anxietyland.