States and school districts are rushing to restrict student smartphone use. But is it the right move?
Many educators, researchers, and policymakers say student cellphone use is getting in the way of classroom instruction and is a major reason for students’ worsening social-emotional and mental health.
Some skeptics of cellphone bans, however, have raised concerns about enforcement, missed opportunities to teach about healthy tech habits, and a lack of research on the effectiveness of these policies.
In separate interviews with Education Week, Emily Boddy, who’s on the leadership council at Smartphone Free Childhood U.S. and part of the Distraction Free Schools Policy Project in Massachusetts, and Annette Campbell Anderson, the deputy director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Safe and Healthy Schools, discuss their views on restrictions on student cellphone use during the school day.
The interviews have been edited for length and clarity.
What are the benefits of a cellphone-free school day?
School is a great opportunity for kids to have independence. We hear overwhelmingly from kids whose schools go phone-free [say], “I’m so glad my dad can’t text me all day.” There’s this feeling of like, “OK, now I’m an independent, autonomous person. I get to navigate the world without constant input from my parents.”
There’s also an aspect of resilience building. If you have a child with a phone, and they have an uncomfortable interaction with a classmate—I’m not talking about serious bullying. I’m just talking about, like, “Gosh, my friend said something mean,” or whatever. If, right away, you get to go to your phone and talk about it and deal with it [with input from other people], you’re losing that opportunity to realize that if that happens at 9 o’clock in the morning, by 10:30, it’s past. You start to realize that feelings, experiences, they can come—and then, without anybody else’s input, you have the capacity to move through it.
One of the reasons that we advocate for a bell-to-bell policy versus instructional time only is that if kids know that there are other kids who have access to their phones, whether it’s passing time or they’ve left class to go to the bathroom, there’s always a part of their attention that’s like, “What am I missing on Snapchat? Who’s texting? Am I being targeted? What am I missing?”
If all the kids know that all the phones are away, they’re able to settle into the day without FOMO [fear of missing out].
You have a lot of cyberbullying that’s happening in school and out of school, but if you can cut off six to seven hours a day where kids are just settled into the fact that they know it’s not happening during that period, ... it’s a less anxious experience for kids.
Do you think cellphones should be banned in schools?
No, with a caveat. I feel like we haven’t done enough to understand whether cellphone bans are making kids safer. Will banning cellphones make schools operate better? Maybe marginally. The bigger issue that I have is, are these cellphones really changing how our kids will learn how to negotiate life, how they will learn how to make friends? Will they be more isolated? Will they be less likely to be able to develop strong friendships?
We can’t just look at this skimmed-level issue, which is cellphones in schools. We have to take on the whole enchilada, which is, should kids have cellphones at all?
I feel very strongly that trying to say that we should ban them in school is passing along the responsibility of cellphone usage to school administrators, who are already overloaded with so many other things, and it takes the onus off of the parents to be responsible in legislating their kids’ cellphone use.
We’ve got to take on this bigger issue [of how cellphones are changing our attention span] and not just think about the issue of cellphones in schools. It’s like a panacea for a much bigger issue. We should not ban cellphones in schools until we have a better understanding of the effect that cellphones are having on the mental health and the well-being of kids for 24 hours, not just for that six-hour window.
Why do you think we should wait for that research?
Our cellphones have become so addictive. I mean, if you said to someone you can’t smoke in school between the hours of 8:30 and 2:30, OK, they’re not going to smoke between 8:30 and 2:30, but they’re going to leave school and smoke. If these addictive behaviors are there, are we really addressing that public health issue?
There’s a greater public health issue that is looming about the use of these cellphones, and we’re not addressing that at all. If we really care about the health and well-being of our children, we should be thinking beyond just the school day.
The other issue for me is, who’s [monitoring] this? Is it the principal who’s going to have to be monitoring cellphone use? Is it the [school resource officer]? Is it classroom teachers? There’s inconsistency around who’s responsible for managing cellphone use, and none of those three parties that I’ve just named are really the right people to do it.
To what extent should better cellphone behavior be the school’s responsibility?
First of all, I’d say you don’t need the device to learn about [healthy] use. We are not telling kids to go have sex when we teach them sex ed. We are not telling them to use marijuana when we’re teaching them about drug [abuse]. Generally, we have to be better about digital wellness and digital citizenship in schools.
I would also say that when you think about an addictive habit, there’s a dopamine thing happening. When you give this break for six to seven hours a day, you’re creating a new habit, you’re creating a new norm around use, and you’re enabling the child to be able to focus, to be able to healthily develop the prefrontal cortex, to develop executive functioning skills … that are going to enable a healthier relationship with technology when they are using it.
We have health ed., sex ed. Now we need to have technology education, so that kids understand what safe and healthy cellphone use looks like and what [cellphone] addiction looks like. Where are the signs of cellphone addiction? We need to have those kinds of sessions for kids, so [they] can pick up on the warning signs [and] understand that cellphone addiction is a mental health challenge.
There are morality issues around this that schools do have a responsibility to address. We have to teach our young people kindness and fairness, just like we teach people how to take turns in kindergarten, we teach young people how to line up and how to be actively pro-social in the classroom. We need to teach pro-social cellphone behaviors, and we have not done that.
A cellphone ban, in and of itself, does not solve that problem.
How can schools and parents partner to address this challenge?
Schools feel really uncomfortable about dictating to parents what they should do at home. This is why phone-free schools really excite me as an inroad, because the schools can use that as a way to educate parents around why they’re implementing a policy, and all of the things they’re educating the parents around apply to any [tech] use. … That’s the bridge, without explicitly telling them not to let their kid do this or that.
Schools and parents need to gather and have ongoing conversations about cellphone use. Schools need to hear from parents about how cellphones are interfering with learning, and parents need to hear from schools about how cellphones are interfering with learning.
There needs to be an individual identified at the school level who is responsible for this. If you’re going to have these bans, there needs to be a cellphone czar, or someone managing this, because there needs to be a collection of some data around this.
Explore our coverage around students’ use of cellphones in schools:
> Guide to setting a policy: Here’s a decisionmaking tool for educators to map out the different potential outcomes when putting cellphone policies in play.
> Cellphone bans and restrictions: See which states are requiring cellphone restrictions or bans in schools in our tracker. Explore our tracker.
> Nuisance or teaching tool? How teachers are turning an ubiquitous and growing class nuisance—the smartphone—into a tool for learning.
> Cellphone policies, explained: Education Week breaks down the different ways schools are addressing cellphone use, and the factors to weigh before adopting or changing the rules. Check out our explainer.
> Tips from teens & teachers: Teenagers offer 6 tips on how schools should manage students’ cellphone use, and educators share their tips on policing cellphone use in classrooms.
> Then & now: How the “sexting” panic previewed today’s debate about kids’ cellphone use.
