Ninety-five percent of educators say that their school or district has an official policy restricting students’ access to their cellphones during school hours, according to a new EdWeek Research Center survey.
But how well are those policies addressing some of the common problems afflicting schools? Fairly well, according to educators.
Overall, teachers, principals, and district leaders report largely positive results from their cellphone restrictions, especially when it comes to improving classroom behavior and student engagement. Seven in 10 educators say cellphone limits have had a positive impact in those two areas.
Although the improvements are not as pronounced, educators are also more likely to say cellphone restrictions have had a positive effect on students’ learning, social-emotional development, and well-being than not.
“A lot of educators are seeing benefits from the cellphone restrictions on engagement, behavior, well-being, and learning,” said Brigette Whaley, an associate professor of education at West Texas A&M University. “But the survey also made it clear to me that having a policy is not the same thing as implementing it well. How the policy is designed and how consistently it’s enforced really seem to matter a lot.”
(Whaley was not involved in the EdWeek Research Center survey.)
Attendance, however, is the one area where most educators say that cellphone restrictions have not affected students’ behavior: 7 in 10 report that cellphone restrictions had neither a positive nor negative effect.
In the survey, hundreds of educators weighed in with more detail on how cellphone policies are affecting their schools.
“Our state recently mandated a cellphone policy that restricts the usage of personal devices during the school day,” said a district-level administrator in Oklahoma in an open-response section of the survey. “It has been a game changer regarding student engagement, focus, and minimizing poor student behavior.”
“The state, district, and school policies have helped to foster more person-to-person interaction and people skills,” commented a high school teacher in Tennessee. “The policies have also focused student attention more on learning content.”
The survey, which was conducted from mid-February to mid-March, included 596 teachers and school and district leaders.
Nationally, there’s been a rapid shift toward restricting cellphones from classrooms in recent years as state lawmakers from both parties have moved decisively to limit student cellphone use in schools.
At least 37 states and the District of Columbia require school districts to ban or restrict students’ use of cellphones in schools, according to Education Week, which tracks those policies. Some other states are either incentivizing or recommending that local districts enact their own bans or restrictive policies.
Many educators say school cellphone policies are not consistently enforced
While most educators report that their schools have official rules restricting cellphones, there remains a lot of variability in what these policies look like and how they’re enforced—if at all.
Based on this survey data, many schools do not require students to lock their phones away in lockers or in pouches, said Whaley.
“Instead, they seem to be relying more on compliance-based approaches, like keeping [phones] turned off or placed in backpacks or maybe somewhere else in the classroom,” she said. “And that really matters because it suggests that many schools may have restrictions on paper, but the actual enforcement often depends on the people rather than the policy or the structure.”
When it comes to whether cellphone rules are consistently enforced, 64% of educators said they were, while 36% said they were not.
Teachers (41%) were more likely than school leaders (20%) and district leaders (34%) to say that the policies are not consistently enforced.
Whaley said the differences in perception are not surprising.
“A policy can look consistent from a leadership perspective, but not be as consistent in classrooms,” she said. “That’s why I think that the teacher perspective matters so much to the conversation.”
Several teachers weighed in on the enforcement issue in the survey.
Said one high school teacher in California: “While the school rule is no cellphone use in the classroom except for at the teacher’s discretion, not all teachers enforce this rule. Last year, fed up with fighting students’ cellphone use, I bought and began using cellphone pockets. For the most part, this has eradicated the cellphone distraction in my class, but not all teachers do this.”
“We are starting to make changes to reduce technology usage across the district and implementing a stricter cellphone policy due to parent [and] community requests,” said a Minnesota high school teacher. “The enforcement is what is the most difficult. We are not consistent in classrooms.”
New research about the effectiveness of cellphone policies is emerging
Two-thirds of educators say that their school or district’s policy applies to the entire school day, while a little less than a third say their policies apply to instructional time only. (Five percent say their school or district does not have a policy restricting students’ cellphone use.)
Cellphone restrictions, however, are not a cure-all, as some survey respondents pointed out.
“With our cellphone policy, we see very few cellphones in classes, but many students still don’t turn them in like they are supposed to,” said a school leader of a middle school in Massachusetts. “I think students are still definitely using phones in the bathroom and during breaks. One of the biggest challenges that I see with phones is what happens outside of the school building that then is brought in here.”
Even though many educators are reporting early benefits to cellphone restrictions, it’s too soon to say definitively which type of cellphone policy works best—or if any will work in the long run.
These policies are new, and research on them is only just emerging.
In a study of a district in Florida, researchers from the University of Rochester and RAND Corp. found that student test scores and attendance improved in the second year of the state’s law restricting cellphones in schools. There was also an increase in student suspensions in the short term, particularly among Black students.
Preliminary results from another ongoing study, led by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and Stanford University, is examining survey data from teachers. Early findings suggest that stricter rules around storing cellphones lead to more focused classroom environments.
Data analysis for this article was provided by the EdWeek Research Center. Learn more about the center’s work.
