At McPherson Middle School in central Kansas, students handed in their school-issued Chromebooks in late 2025. The school had banned cell phones four years earlier, but administrators held onto the laptops – until December, when it asked its 480 students to give those up too. The laptops didn’t disappear from the building. They now sit in carts at the back of classrooms, mostly unused, while students take notes the old-fashioned way: pen and paper.
Administrators had found that without phones, students were simply using the school laptops for distracting activities like watching YouTube or playing games. The problem wasn’t the phones specifically. It was the screens. And McPherson isn’t alone in figuring that out. Across the US and internationally, schools are pulling back from classroom technology at a pace that would have seemed unthinkable a decade ago – and the early results of pen and paper learning are forcing educators to rethink some deeply held assumptions about digital tools in classrooms.
Schools in states including North Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, and Michigan are rethinking their one-to-one laptop programs as studies show that technology implementation in schools has coincided with either declining test scores or no academic progress at all. The data is accumulating on student behavior, brain activity, academic performance, and mental health – and even tech-forward education systems are changing course.
What Laptops Actually Did to Learning
Fortune’s April 2026 coverage of this trend noted that McPherson’s principal Inge Esping – who won Kansas’s middle school Principal of the Year award for 2025 – summarized the problem plainly: “This technology can be a tool. It is not the answer to education.”
Burke County Public Schools in North Carolina unanimously approved a resolution to forego technology as much as possible during classroom instruction, stating that pen-and-paper instruction should be the primary mode of learning, particularly for note-taking, reading comprehension, writing, and assessments. Their resolution cited a specific finding: research consistently shows that handwriting and reading from paper materials enhance comprehension, memory retention, and cognitive engagement compared to reading or writing on digital screens. A follow-up review by the district found that K – 5 students saw a 17 percent reduction in screen time after the policy took effect, along with a 26.2 percent drop in office referrals for technology misuse.
At the federal level, the pressure is building too. Alabama signed the Healthy Early Development and Screen Time Act into law in March 2026, limiting electronic screen access in early childhood education programs, while Utah passed its own Classroom Technology Amendments that same session, prohibiting screen time in grades K through 3 with narrow exceptions. Both measures were among 12 bills introduced nationwide in 2026 addressing concerns about replacing teacher-led instruction with digital learning tools. Meanwhile, by October 2025, 31 states and the District of Columbia had required districts to limit or ban cell phone use in K – 12 classrooms, according to the Paragon Institute.
The numbers from school leaders make the academic concern concrete. A February 2025 report from the National Center for Education Statistics found that 53% of school leaders reported cell phone use negatively impacted student academic performance, with 72% citing negative effects on mental health and attention spans. A 2025 systematic review published in Educational Technology Research and Development concluded that digital distraction can significantly hinder the achievement of learning outcomes – a finding that applies not just to phones but to any screen-based environment where off-task browsing is one click away.
What Pen and Paper Learning Does to the Brain
The case for handwriting goes beyond removing a distraction. Writing by hand appears to do something structurally different to the brain than typing. A Norwegian study recording brain electrical activity in 36 university students found that handwriting activates wider connectivity patterns across the brain than typing does, according to a 2024 study published in Frontiers in Psychology. The researchers found that these broader neural connections are the kind associated with learning and memory consolidation. When you type, the motor pattern is identical for every letter – press a key. When you write by hand, each letter requires a unique movement sequence, and that physical variation appears to signal the brain to encode information more deeply.
The classroom implications of that distinction showed up clearly in a 2025 study published in Scientific Reports. Children trained in handwriting achieved higher accuracy across all posttest tasks compared to those trained through typing. The effect was especially pronounced in younger students: those in grades 4 and 5 produced higher-quality handwritten texts with greater spelling accuracy and fewer errors during copying tasks.
Reading proficiency is also tied to the process in ways that matter beyond the classroom. A 2025 study found that reading proficiency is associated with increased school engagement, higher self-esteem, and greater academic confidence – outcomes that compound over time as children who read well engage more readily with new material.
Fine motor skills – the small, precise movements of the hand and fingers that are essential for handwriting – have been quietly eroding. A January 2026 survey by the EdWeek Research Center of 1,163 early educators found that 70% said their students’ fine motor skills had decreased over the previous two years. A 2025 survey of 569 primary school teachers in the UK found that 77% said students today have more difficulty with tasks requiring fine motor skills – such as holding a pencil or using scissors – compared to students in 2000. As screen time displaced handwriting practice, the physical foundation for writing went with it.
The relationship between screen habits and learning outcomes is harder to separate than it first appeared. Phones drew attention away from teachers. Laptops, it turned out, did much the same thing – just with a bigger screen and a productivity veneer.
Teachers Are Noticing the Difference
When phones come out of classrooms, teachers consistently report the same things. Teachers describe increased student engagement and stronger peer interaction when phone distraction is removed, according to the Paragon Institute’s 2025 analysis of school phone policies. A study at a Georgia sixth-grade academy at Kennesaw State University found that 100% of teachers agreed the cell phone ban improved student engagement, classroom management, and peer interaction.
Among teachers who supported phone ban policies, 78% were in favor, with 62% reporting improved student behavior after implementation, according to the same Paragon Institute data. The classroom atmosphere that emerges when screens are removed – students talking to each other, looking up, staying with the material – reflects something that teachers had described anecdotally for years but that is now being documented systematically.
The academic results take longer to appear. Research from a large multi-university study found that while student well-being can worsen in the first year of a phone ban, results become positive by the third year, according to a 2026 working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research. Student test scores improved by roughly 2 to 3 percentile points in the second year following phone bans, according to the same analysis. Schools entering this transition need to set realistic timelines: the benefits are real, but they don’t show up in the first semester.
A Global Rethink
The US is not moving in isolation. Finland implemented a law restricting mobile device use in schools, which came into effect in August 2025, according to NPR’s June 2026 coverage. Denmark passed a national smartphone ban in schools in early 2026, investing millions in physical books at the same time.
Sweden’s reversal is perhaps the most striking case study. By 2023, Sweden’s government and educators were voicing concerns about declining reading comprehension and concentration, and the government officially announced it would scale back digital devices in early grades, with more focus on physical books and handwriting. Sweden had been held up internationally as a model of progressive, technology-forward education. Its willingness to reverse course carries weight.
Los Angeles Unified School District voted in April 2026 to ban screens until second grade and require daily caps on screen time per grade – a policy that puts one of the largest school districts in the country firmly in line with the international trend. As of early 2026, 27 states have passed laws mandating cursive handwriting instruction in elementary and, in some cases, middle grades, according to the National Education Association. The Common Core State Standards had removed cursive from requirements back in 2010. That decision is now being reversed at the state level across much of the country.
What This Means for You
If you have school-age children, the most practical takeaway from this research is to pay attention to what your child’s school is doing with screens – and to advocate for handwriting practice at home if it’s not emphasized in the classroom. Younger children, particularly those in grades 1 through 5, are in the window where handwriting practice has the greatest measurable impact on spelling, reading comprehension, and overall literacy. A daily 10 to 15 minutes of handwritten journaling, letter-forming practice, or even copying from a favorite book is enough to maintain the fine motor habits that the research ties to stronger academic outcomes.
For parents thinking about their own note-taking or learning habits, the brain connectivity evidence applies beyond the classroom. The Norwegian university study found the same pattern in adults: handwriting activates wider neural networks than typing, regardless of age. If you’re trying to retain something – a new skill, a language, a complex idea – writing it out by hand rather than typing it into a notes app is a small, frictionless change with a real neurological basis. The schools are bringing this back for a reason. The science was there all along.
Disclaimer: This information is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment and is for information only. Always seek the advice of your physician or another qualified health provider with any questions about your medical condition and/or current medication. Do not disregard professional medical advice or delay seeking advice or treatment because of something you have read here.
AI Disclaimer: This article was created with the assistance of AI tools and reviewed by a human editor.
Read More: Study Shows Students Learn Better When They Take Handwritten Notes