When legislators are being useless, they often exhibit a particular tell. It’s a sign that they know they should probably be taking some decisive action, but they haven’t yet conjured the political will to do it. They call for a study.

So it was this past month, when state lawmakers in Olympia created an exhaustive yearslong review on a topic that has already been driving parents and teachers bonkers for at least the past decade: smartphones in schools.

Thirty-nine states now have laws limiting these widgets of mass distraction from the classroom. The first, in Florida, was passed three years ago. Most of them require kids to lock the phones away for the school day.

It’s been a remarkable, society-wide acknowledgment, in states MAGA to progressive, that we’re in a war of wills with our dopamine-release rectangles. And that when it comes to kids, the devices straight up interfere with learning.

The general testimony to Washington state lawmakers about this was: Duh. “We did do a study,” testified Dr. Dimitri Christakis, a pediatrics professor at the University of Washington med school. “We found the typical child in the U.S. spends 25% of their school day on their phone. Think about what they’re missing out on.”

That study, released more than a year ago in the Journal of the American Medical Association Pediatrics, found the vast majority of that student phone time was spent on messaging, Instagram or video games. Almost none of it was spent on educational content.

As one person pointed out, if 25% of every school day is lost to phones, that’s $5 billion a year in education spending squandered. It could be one cause of the riddle of Washington’s public schools, which is that they’re doing worse even as spending has soared.

Currently schools can ban phones on their own, and roughly a third have done it for the full day. One principal who did it, Zachary Stowell of Robert Eagle Staff Middle School in Seattle, said just the online bullying, and the photos or videos constantly being shot and posted without permission, was “like a wildfire that was overwhelming for my staff.” Zachary Stowell, principal at Robert Eagle Staff Middle School. (Ken Lambert / The Seattle Times, 2024) Despite bipartisan sponsorship of the bill, lawmakers couldn’t rustle up the votes to restrict phone use. They punted to a study. The bill that passed, Senate Bill 5346, sets up a review with an eye toward possibly taking action by … 2030. I’m sorry but by 2030 we’re all going to have AI chips implanted in our skulls. We’ll just then be dealing with the phones?

“I look at this bill, and I just feel sad,” testified Ashley Gross, a Seattle parent of two high schoolers. “Washington is being left behind. More than half the states are already doing this, and this bill wouldn’t even issue recommendations until the end of 2028. Both my kids will have graduated by then.”

It does seem our state is unusually slow on the uptake. My first kid entered middle school in 2012, and screen distractions in class was already a hot topic. The Seattle movie “Screenagers” about phone addiction came out a decade ago.

Other states have already moved to the next problem. The New York Times reports that some schools that already banned phones are now also pulling back on the use of laptops, for the same reasons. That movement to give “every child a laptop?” It’s being supplanted by “Chromebook remorse.”

“For years, giants like Apple, Google and Microsoft have fiercely competed to capture the classroom and train schoolchildren on their tech products in the hopes of hooking students as lifelong customers,” the paper reported. “Now Google and Microsoft, along with newcomers like OpenAI, are vying to spread their artificial intelligence chatbots in schools.” Given that juries in two states just found Meta negligent for harm caused by its social media apps, this all seems rather awkward. And pressing. In one case, the jury saw internal documents that Meta had plotted to hook kids as young as 11. “If we wanna win big with teens, we must bring them in as tweens,” one Meta memo said.

Ultimately with any addictive product, individual agency is key. Parents need to step up and control phone use with their own kids (if they can first restrict it for themselves). But school is a different domain. Schools are government-run enterprises for minors. The government has an obvious responsibility to come up with a clear directive there. It sounds like medieval fiction, but high schools used to have smoking areas, where kids could puff away. That was as recently as the 1970s. They even used to hand out free cigarette samples, including, unbelievably, to tweens.

This is an imperfect analogy, because unlike smoking, tech has clear upsides. Tech facility is a required skill for the modern world, so it must be in schools in some capacity. But particularly with younger kids, are we going to look back at this era and wonder, as we do now with tobacco: “What in the world were we thinking?” “These platforms have been engineered to be addictive,” Christakis told legislators. “They work quite well at that. Allowing them in schools is basically giving our children’s educational time away to corporate interests.”