Coffee. YouTube. Cellphones. AI-powered glasses. It has been a productive few weeks for the list of things students aren't supposed to bring to class.

Last year, Education Week was asking whether reusable water bottles had become a classroom menace. This month, an upstate New York senior was suspended on the first day of school after deliberately bringing coffee to class to protest a new ban on outside food and drinks. The district later acknowledged that it had failed to properly announce a public hearing before adopting the policy.

Districts are beginning to fold AI-powered smart glasses into cellphone bans because students can use them to text, record and interact with AI without ever pulling out a phone. In New York City, two City Council members are calling for schools to block YouTube, eliminate individual devices in kindergarten through fifth grade and return standardized testing to paper and pencil.

There are good reasons for caution. The Los Angeles Times reviews a still-limited body of research suggesting that students can use generative AI to bypass the cognitive work learning requires. In one study, students using a general-purpose AI tool outperformed peers on practice questions, then scored 17 percent lower when the AI was taken away for an offline test. That gap is the measure the American Psychological Association says schools should be using: not minutes on a screen, but what students can do once the tool is gone.

But the backlash can get ahead of the evidence, too. Natalie Wexler argues in Minding the Gap that schools risk throwing useful technology out with the harmful stuff. Her distinction is a helpful one: tools that let students outsource thinking deserve more skepticism than tools that help teachers or require students to keep doing the cognitive work themselves.

Parents seem to be drawing a similar line. Polling reported on by Chalkbeat found that more than 80 percent of parents support laptops in school, while just 1 percent of parents who favor screen-time limits want no screen time at all. A majority also said learning to use AI matters for students' future careers.

"It's not anti-technology," Eric Dinowitz, a former teacher who chairs the council's Education Committee, told the Journal. "It's pro-learning." Everyone in this debate would say the same thing. The list of bans may keep getting longer. The harder work is sorting the technologies that interfere with learning from the ones that improve it, and writing policy around the evidence rather than the category.

— Thomas

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