Los Angeles Unified, the nation’s second-largest school district, barred educational technology for kindergartners and first graders and set daily limits of one hour for grades 2-5 and two hours for grades 6-12.
Mounting evidence drove the shift: UNESCO’s 2025 review said heavy school-tech dependence often worsened inequality and harm, while studies linked screen-based learning to weaker reading comprehension, lower test scores and more distraction.
30 minutes of daily screen reading was associated with lower standardized reading scores among roughly 300,000 U.S. fourth and eighth graders, with sharper declines in younger students, according to 2023 research cited in the report.
14 states are considering or have passed in-school screen-time limits, signaling a broader policy turn away from the pandemic-era push to put a device in every student’s hands.