The Friction Audit · Participant Takeaway

Policy-to-Practice Crosswalk

One decision, traced across three device contexts. Illinois Public Act 104-0657 regulates the first column, exempts the second, and does not mention the third. The inconsistencies you find reading across a row are the actual policy.

PD365 · October 27, 2026Micah Miner, M.Ed., Ed.S., CETLBring to a cabinet meeting

The matrix

8 questions × 3 channels

Read a column to see what you know about one channel. Read a row to find where your district answers the same question three different ways. The two shaded rows are where districts most often discover they have no answer at all.

Question
Column APersonal phones & wearables
Column BDistrict-issued devices
Column CGenerative AI features
01Status under PA 104-0657
Regulated. Bell-to-bell, with an optional high school carve-out for lunch and passing periods. Districts with a qualifying policy already in place before July 28, 2026 may hold it through 2030–31 before conforming.
Exempt by definition. The ISBE definition sweeps in laptops, tablets, and gaming devices, but the statute excludes any device a district or teacher has issued to, provided for, or required a student to use for educational purposes.
Silent. The law regulates devices, not software. Nothing in it reaches a feature inside an approved platform.
02Who actually decides
The board, on a public vote, working from the ISBE template. There is a record and a date.
Technology and curriculum, usually through procurement and refresh cycles rather than policy. No public vote.
Frequently a vendor. A feature ships enabled in an update, and no one in the district made a decision at all.
03The stated problem
Distraction and attention. Pew found 72 percent of high school teachers call it a major classroom problem, and NCES found 52 percent of school leaders reporting negative academic effects. The concern is well founded.
Usually none is stated, though ISBE’s own model policy reports that teachers estimate 1 in 3 students use laptops for nonacademic purposes at school. The state named the problem in the same document that tells you to solve a different one.
Usually framed as academic integrity, which is the wrong frame. The problem is a credible artifact produced without the reasoning it was meant to develop.
04What the intervention changes
Immediate access, notification frequency, enforcement consistency, and visible norms. It changes the noise floor of a room, which is real.
Nothing changed on adoption day. The device is still open on the desk during the class the phone was removed from.
Nothing, unless someone configures it. The default state persists through the policy vote untouched.
05Where the bypass appears
Rarely on the phone itself once a policy is enforced. The behavior does not stop; it relocates.
This is where it relocates to. Cognitive offloading reroutes onto district hardware within days, and the policy has no visibility into it.
At the default. A tool that opens with a suggested thesis has already performed the task’s central intellectual work before the student typed anything.
06Who risks being blocked
The statute names medical need, IEP and 504 plans, English learners needing translation, and student caregivers. Everyone it did not name is your problem to find.
Students who depend on the district device for text-to-speech, translation, or organization, if a restriction is drawn broadly enough to sweep them in.
Students whose legitimate accommodations resemble AI use, and students told to avoid a tool their classmates use freely at home.
07The check nobody has run
Whether requesting an exception requires a student to disclose their circumstances in front of a classroom.
Whether the instructional rationale that justified the 1-to-1 program still describes what happens on it.
Opening the approved platform as a student and watching what it offers first. This takes about four minutes and almost nobody has done it.
08Evidence that would count
Confiscations, enforcement time, exception patterns, staff experience. All of it measures implementation, and none of it measures learning. Note that the statute removes your punitive instruments: no fees, fines, suspensions, expulsions, or SRO involvement for a device violation alone.
What tasks the device is used for. Not minutes of screen time, not logins, not license utilization.
What a student can explain about a decision they made. Not a detector score and not a revision log.

Three ways to read it

In a meeting
Down a column

What do we actually know about this channel?

The fastest audit. If you cannot fill eight cells for a column, that column is running on assumption rather than decision. Column B and C are usually where the blanks are.

Across a row

Where do we answer the same question three ways?

Row 02 is the sharpest. A board votes on phones, a department buys the platform, and a vendor enables the AI feature. Three different decision-makers, three different levels of scrutiny, one student experience.

The diagonal

Follow the bypass.

Row 05 read left to right is the whole argument in three cells. Restrict the phone, the offloading moves to the Chromebook, and the platform default finishes the job. Nothing in the statute touches steps two or three.

The six questions behind the matrix

From The Pouch and the Bypass

The crosswalk is a working surface for the district audit protocol in The Pouch and the Bypass. If you want the argument rather than the instrument, that piece is where it lives, and it is the right thing to send a board member who asks why you are auditing a policy the state already wrote for you.

  1. What educational problem, and which technology, is actually implicated? Row 03. Naming the problem precisely is what keeps a phone policy from expanding into a general retreat from digital learning.
  2. What evidence connects this policy to that problem? Rows 03 and 08. A policy announcement documents what a system intends to change. It is not evidence that learning improved.
  3. How do the changes reach personal phones, school devices, platforms, and take-home access? The three columns, plus the take-home question the crosswalk folds into Column B.
  4. Which students benefit, and which face new barriers? Row 06. The statute names five groups. Your district will find others.
  5. What learning design fills the space the restriction creates? The question the matrix cannot answer for you, and the reason Row 07 exists.
  6. How will you measure learning improvement rather than compliance? Row 08, and the hardest commitment to keep once confiscation counts start falling.
The distinction that organizes all six

A restriction on personally owned phones, a school-issued device access model, an instructional-use policy, an analogue investment, and an evaluation framework are five different policy types, not one rollback. Districts collapse them and then argue past each other. A classroom cart changes when and where a device is available and can still put one device per student in front of a lesson.

Where the four dimensions sit

Friction framework

The crosswalk is the infrastructural dimension made visible. The other three describe what you are trying to protect; the fourth describes whether you have created conditions in which protecting them is possible.

The evidence for spending your effort here

Tamim and colleagues pooled 25 meta-analyses across 1,055 primary studies and found an overall effect of 0.35 for classroom technology. Split by how the technology was used: 0.42 where it supported students in constructing understanding, 0.31 where it delivered or drilled content.

Both are moderate positive effects, so this is not evidence that direct instruction fails. It is evidence that how a task uses the device matters more than whether the device is in the room, which is precisely what a device policy cannot reach. The corpus predates smartphones and generative AI, so it speaks to instructional design and not to phone policy.

The head

Noetic

The synthesis and meaning-making that must happen inside the learner. Row 05 is where it leaks out.

The room

Rhetorical

Real dialogue that resists and disagrees. A quieter room makes it possible; it does not produce it.

The world

Existential

Claims tied to claimants. Row 08 is the only row that tests for it.

The system

Infrastructural

Policy, procurement, evaluation, and professional learning. Rows 02 and 07 live here, and so do you.

Running it with a cabinet

40 minutes
  1. Assign the columns, not the rows. One person owns each channel and fills all eight cells before the meeting. Rows filled by committee produce consensus language and no findings.
  2. Read row 05 out loud first. It is the shortest path to agreement that a phone policy alone does not finish the job, and it does not require anyone to defend a past decision.
  3. Spend real time on row 07. Every cell in that row is a task somebody can complete in under a week. Assign all three before the meeting ends.
  4. Do not fill row 08 aspirationally. Write what you will actually collect, then read it back and ask whether it measures implementation, access, or learning. Most districts write three implementation measures and call it an evaluation plan.
  5. Leave with names and dates in row 07 and a return date on the calendar. A crosswalk that produces no owner is a well-organized description of a problem.
The claim to avoid

This crosswalk will not tell you whether your phone policy worked, and nothing else will either for at least a year. Keep three questions apart: is the restriction workable, can students participate, and what can students explain or do? Falling confiscation counts answer the first well and say nothing about the third.

One redesigned assessment cannot show that a phone policy caused an instructional outcome. Make claims no stronger than the evidence permits; you will be quoted on them.