Nearly half of teachers, principals, and district leaders say that parents are texting and emailing their children during class at least daily, according to a survey by the EdWeek Research Center.
The fact that parents are frequently the cause of the dings and buzzes that distract students could complicate schools’ efforts to restrict or curb student cellphone use. Parents are important allies in making school cellphone policies work, but many of them like having access to their children during the school day, other polling has found. That can put them at loggerheads with educators over policies to restrict students’ cellphone use.
But, as educators reported in the EdWeek Research Center survey, when parents message students during class time it can set up a clash between authority figures in a student’s life and, at times, undermine teachers.
“The biggest problem in my classes are students on their cellphones, especially when parents call their child during class instruction time,” said a high school social science teacher in Massachusetts.
“Cellphone use by students has become a major disruption including use by parents,” said a high school science teacher in Rhode Island. “Students will often say, ‘I have to answer, my mom is texting me.’”
At a middle school in New Jersey, an English/language arts teacher shared that students in their school must keep cellphones in their lockers. “Despite this school rule, some parents INSIST students keep their phones with them, telling them it is OK to break school rules.”
And finally, a high school teacher in Tennessee said: “Parents not understanding the impact of their communication during school hours is disrespectful and perpetuates that disrespect in their student.”
Those are a small sampling of the concerns teachers, principals, and district leaders shared on this subject in the survey.
A smaller, but also notable phenomenon that came out of the EdWeek Research Center survey is the number of educators who say parents are remotely monitoring their children’s progress on their laptops during class. While only small percentages of educators say this is happening on frequent basis, 27 percent indicated that it is taking place. Technologies exist that allow parents to monitor their children’s online activity or even remotely watch the screens of their kids’ school-issued laptops during the school day. Some parents use these technologies to make sure their kids are staying focused on their schoolwork.
Educators are growing increasingly frustrated with many parents’ need to be in constant contact with their kids. One third of educators in the survey said that parents are disrupting class once or multiple times a day messaging their children on cellphones about various concerns, including what they are seeing while remotely monitoring their kids’ laptop use.
How to get parent buy-in for school cellphone restrictions
So, what are schools to do about this situation? A good first step is for teachers and school leaders to hear directly from parents and students, said Aaron Pallas, a professor of sociology and education at Teachers College, Columbia University.
Parental buy-in is an important part of making any school policy around personal devices work, he said, and school and district leaders must understand why parents are messaging their children during the school day or remotely monitoring their laptops.
“The advice I would give to school leaders is to convene listening sessions with parents and with students to try to figure out exactly what their concerns are,” he said.
In a recent poll of parents by the National Parent Union, 78 percent of those who allow their kids to take their cellphones to school said it was so their children can use the devices in an emergency. Fifty-eight percent said it was so they could find out where their child was when needed. Other common reasons parents gave for wanting their children to have their cellphones at school: coordinating transportation to and from school, checking in on their children’s mental health and other needs during the school day, and communicating about appointments they need to leave school for during the day.
“I think a lot of it has to do with figuring out what parents’ concerns are and trying to develop realistic and feasible alternatives,” Pallas said. That will look different for every school, he said, depending upon the issues parents raise in a particular school community.
That might mean requiring students to store their phones in locked pouches throughout the school day. But bans won’t necessarily be the answer for every school, Pallas said. If parents are concerned about reaching their kids in an emergency, school leaders may need to develop a comprehensive plan to communicate with parents in emergencies—or even just when rumors of emergencies are circulating on social media—and share those plans with parents.
“All these things, I think, do have direct costs associated with them,” he said, whether it’s purchasing storage pouches for phones or dedicating staff time to conducting listening sessions or communicating with parents. “And a lot depends on the judgments about just how disruptive school professionals believe it is for kids to be on their phones during instructional time.”
Data analysis for this article was provided by the EdWeek Research Center. Learn more about the center’s work.
