This week, Thomas Rodgers, W/A's head of K-12 communications and editor of What We’re Reading, is filling in for Ben.

On Tuesday evening, the Los Angeles Unified School Board voted 6-0 to restrict student use of laptops and tablets in class, prohibit devices entirely in first grade and below, and—the detail that interests me most—audit the district's existing edtech contracts. It's the first time a major American school district has taken this step, and the vote followed months of organizing by a parent coalition called Schools Beyond Screens that now counts roughly 2,000 local members.

For anyone tracking this debate from a state policy angle (which, as it happens, has been keeping several of us at W/A busy this spring), the LA vote is the clearest signal yet that the backlash has crossed from legislative pressure into district-level action. At last count, 43 states have enacted some form of cellphone policy and five (Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, South Carolina, and Utah) have signed statewide bans. The newer and more consequential wave—active in the 2026 session in Missouri, Utah, Kansas, Alabama, Virginia, and Tennessee—goes beyond phones to regulate instructional practice itself: capping digital instruction minutes, mandating paper assignments, giving parents opt-out authority. Broad bipartisan alignment on the objective. Real disagreement on the how.

What's striking across the coverage—the February NBC feature on the parent opt-out networks, the EdWeek team's survey of the backlash this week, Matt Barnum's careful Chalkbeat piece interrogating the evidentiary base—is that the public debate is still mostly about quantity. Timers. Hours per day. Minutes per subject. Richard Culatta, CEO of ISTE+ASCD, made the sharpest version of the counter-argument in an op-ed in The 74 on Monday: "The issue is quality, not quantity." Under a Missouri-style bill, he points out, a teacher could replace a high-quality math app with a dot-to-dot worksheet and still satisfy the statute. His closing line: "Banning technology for learning doesn't make us principled—it makes us negligent."

Quality, not quantity. That's the right frame. But it raises the operational question: how does a district actually do quality? What's the mechanism?

The most promising answer I've seen is, as it happens, buried in the LA resolution itself—audit the edtech contracts. Our friends at Digital Promise and at the Center for Outcomes Based Contracting have been researching exactly that: a contracting model where a portion of vendor payment depends on students actually using the tool at agreed-upon dosage and hitting agreed-upon outcomes. Greg Toppo's recent The 74 piece and Emma Kate Fittes' coverage at EdWeek Market Brief walk through the early pilot data: usage rates hit 95% under outcomes based contracting (OBC), against a baseline of roughly 65% of licenses going unused under typical contracts. Districts bought fewer products, not more. Six states—California, Texas, Florida, Arkansas, Indiana, and Louisiana, together representing roughly 28% of national K-12 spending—have launched their own OBC initiatives.

That's the substantive answer for state leaders drafting legislation, and for district leaders facing parents at board meetings: don't just cap minutes. Fix the contracts. Ask harder questions before you buy, and tie payment to whether the tool is actually working for kids.

On April 20, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) published an interim final rule in the Federal Register extending the deadline for public entities, including public schools and institutions of higher education, to comply with new website accessibility standards under Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). 

The extension came just four days before the compliance deadline established in 2024. The late action is not typical and requires the DOJ to assert an exception to the normal Administrative Procedure Act (APA) rulemaking process. The IFR provides an engaging narrative about why this was necessary due to “circumstances outside of the Department's and covered entities' control.” 

ED’s interim final rule pushes the deadline back a year—to April 2027 for jurisdictions with 50K+ people and April 2028 for public entities in smaller jurisdictions (all based on the 2020 U.S. Census). DOJ said it believes that the deadline extensions “will lead to greater predictability and certainty as covered entities work towards accessibility… [and] lead to greater accessibility for individuals with disabilities.”

The deadline extensions come as a major relief for K-12 and higher ed institutions alike. According to the Software and Information Industry Association (SIIA), compliance efforts are a huge investment—involving billions of dollars and countless man hours—and institutions that were at risk of not meeting the original deadline would have been exposed to ADA-based litigation, which includes a private right of action.  

The interim final rule is open for public comment through June 22, 2026. Regardless of the contents of the public comment, DOJ is expected to remain firm on extending its deadlines.

The U.S. Department of Education (ED) took the next step in advancing the One Big Beautiful Bill Act’s (OBBBA) new institutional accountability rules.

On Monday, ED officially published a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking with proposed regulations produced by the Accountability in Higher Education and Access through Demand-driven Workforce Pell (AHEAD) negotiated rulemaking committee.

As we covered when the negotiated rulemaking committee reached consensus back in January 2026, the new regulations would implement a requirement outlined in OBBBA that connects participation in the Title IV federal loan program with earnings outcomes. The earnings outcome test will replace Gainful Employment regulations that have gone back and forth across the Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations. 

The new rules intend to measure whether a graduate is better off after completing a program relative to those who did not pursue a degree. Unlike Gainful Employment, the earnings outcomes apply to all institutions and programs, regardless of type (e.g., public, for-profit, private non-profit, etc.).

As expected, the proposed rules closely follow those the AHEAD Committee achieved consensus on, including:

The regulations are now open for public comment until May 20. As comments are submitted, we’re keeping an eye two issues involving the earnings threshold:

Once the comment period closes, ED will review the comments received for feedback and make any changes it deems necessary before publishing a final set of regulations in the Federal Register. Given that OBBBA sets a deadline for implementation of July 1, 2026, ED is expected to publish the final set of rules at some point on or before that date.

Hosted by ISTE+ASCD and Whiteboard Advisors, the Solutions Summit is a one-day, exclusive event that convenes leaders from across the education ecosystem. This year’s Summit will be held on Sunday, June 28, 2026, from 9 a.m. to 2:30 p.m. and will feature a mix of interactive panels and small-group activities focused on real-world decision-making, product impact, and the future of learning.

Next Tuesday, Education Secretary Linda McMahon is expected to appear before the Senate Appropriations subcommittee to defend the Trump administration’s FY2027 “skinny budget” for the U.S. Department of Education. The hearing is tentatively scheduled for the morning of April 28—and the W/A team will be tuned in.

📰 Look out for a special, mid-week edition of Whiteboard Notes covering the hearing and what’s next. In the meantime, check out our breakdown of the Trump administration’s proposed $76 billion education budget on our blog.

Got questions? Get in touch.

A-Street and Achieve Partners announced more than $1.1 billion in new capital for investment over the past two weeks. A-Street's $675 million Fund II (anchored by the Walton family and the Lego Foundation) will go towards investments in Pre-K-12 businesses of all sizes. Achieve Partners' $450 million Fund II will focus on buyouts of services businesses in high-growth, talent-starved fields like behavioral health, biotech, cloud migration, data centers, and energy, to which the fund will then add apprenticeship programs. The size of these two new investment vehicles marks a dramatic change for the education and workforce investment landscapes, which have otherwise looked pretty bleak recently.

On Monday, Teach Kindness, an initiative of Stand for Children Leadership Center, announced its first-ever Kind School Designation. Awarded to 32 schools spanning 18 states, the Kind School Designation recognizes schools that have made kindness core to their culture through establishing a shared definition of kindness, providing school-wide kindness instruction, and empowering students to lead projects that support the school community. The announcement has been celebrated by communities across the country, from Indianapolis to Atlanta.

Check out W/A Jobs, which features 4,017 career opportunities from 317 organizations across the education industry. A few roles that caught our eye over the past week: