Get Smartphones Out of School
Many schools are finally banning phones. Not just in class, but throughout the school day. Let's bring this common sense policy to every school. Here is a compilation of arguments to help.
Hello Bar-Setters!
In the last few months, Great Britain has announced that mobile phones will be prohibited in all public schools across England, Los Angeles United School District (the nation’s second largest school district) voted to prohibit cellphone and social media use throughout the entire school day, and, last Tuesday ,Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin issued an executive order to ban phones throughout the school day for all Virginia public school students.
Allowing smartphones throughout the school day has never made sense and, finally, the tide seems to be turning. In hopes of keeping the momentum going, I’ve compiled some evidence and some arguments.
The Further You are From Your Phone, The Better Your Thinking
Many studies show that students who use their phones during class learn less and get lower grades.
You might be thinking that these are correlational findings; maybe the smarter students are just better able to resist temptation? Perhaps, but experiments using random assignment likewise show that using or just seeing a phone or receiving an alert causes students to underperform.
For example, consider this study, aptly titled “Brain Drain: The Mere Presence of One’s Own Smartphone Reduces Available Cognitive Capacity.” The students involved in the study came into a lab and took tests that are commonly used to measure memory capacity and intelligence. They were randomly assigned to one of three groups, given the following instructions: (1) Put your phone on your desk, (2) leave it in your pocket or bag, or (3) leave it out in another room. None of these conditions involve active phone use—just the potential distraction of knowing your phone is there, with texts and social-media posts waiting. The results were clear: The closer the phone was to students’ awareness, the worse they performed on the tests. Even just having a phone in one’s pocket sapped students’ abilities.
The problem is not just transient distraction, though any distraction in the classroom will impede learning. Heavy phone or social-media use may also have a cumulative, enduring, and deleterious effect on adolescents’ abilities to focus and apply themselves. Nearly half of American teens say that they are online “almost constantly,” and such continuous administration of small pleasures can produce sustained changes in the brain’s reward system, including a reduction of dopamine receptors. This shifts users’ general mood toward irritability and anxiety when separated from their phones, and it reduces their ability to focus. That may be one reason why heavy phone users have lower GPAs. As the neuroscientists Jaan Aru and Dmitri Rozgonjuk put it in a recent review of the literature: “Smartphone use can be disruptively habitual, with the main detrimental consequence being an inability to exert prolonged mental effort.”
But smartphones don’t just pull students away from schoolwork; they pull them away from one another, too.”
Source: The Case for Phone-Free Schools, Jonathan Haidt
Obviously, students learn much better when they don’t have their phones on them.
Obviously, students cheat more when smartphones are accessible.
Obviously, students are much more likely to develop social skills and build deeper relationships when they aren’t on their phones all day.
Obviously, youth development and mental health have been harmed by the smartphone.
And, although this last piece is often overlooked, obviously, the quality of the people we are developing has been diminished by the smartphone.
Much of the credit for those schools who have done the obvious thing has to go to Dr. Jonathan Haidt whose prolific writing and speaking have made the obvious case even more overwhelming. I highly recommend his latest book, The Anxious Generation, and his After Babel newsletter.
And all parents and educators really should watch this amazing presentation from Dr. Haidt:
Moving on…
Last year, my local school district passed a ban on all smartphones and smartwatches in the classroom. It isn’t enough. We need to ban phones throughout the entire school day, not just in the classroom. But it is a start. Before it passed, I spoke at my local school board meeting in favor of the policy. Here is that statement:
My Testimony on Why We Need to Ban Smartphones From School
Good evening and thank you for the opportunity to speak. My name is Shane Trotter and I’m here today to speak in support of the new phone policy.
There is only one problem with this policy, as far as I can see and that is that it should not have taken this long to come about. School districts across the country have been slow to fully appreciate the social revolution that has taken hold of our society. We’ve been slow to realize that test scores were falling prior to Covid-19 and that our unprecedented mental health epidemic began nearly a decade prior to Covid-19.
Since 2010, there has been an over 150% increase in major teen depression, there has been over a 120% increase in suicides among adolescents between 10 and 14, the number of students claiming to be lonely while at school has more than tripled, and the average time teens spend with friends has decreased from over 130 minutes per day to less than 50.
Step into our schools and the real culprit is obvious.
In the current school environment, our students walk through the halls staring at their phones, they come into class staring at their phones, and they are constantly sneaking peeks at their phone throughout instruction—scanning their phone intermittently as they work, and rushing through assignments so that they can get back to their phones as quickly as possible.
Students expect to be on their phones for hours throughout the school day. When they are asked to put their phone away, many respond with a clear sense of indignation. And nearly all these students will resume trying to use their phone once they think the teacher’s attention is elsewhere.
But I’m not here to blame the students. Adolescents are at a developmental stage where they are most susceptible to their phone’s brain-hacking and they’ve been allowed to believe that their behaviors are normal and acceptable. They’ve been handed an impossibly addictive technology designed by the world’s most brilliant minds to keep us scrolling and checking each app as much as possible.
Rather than help students adapt to this revolutionary temptation, our school environment has only made matters worse. We’ve created an environment where students expect to be on their phones all day. We’ve maintained an environment where students feel a very real pressure to constantly engage with chat groups, social media, and online games. Students' minds are always pulled away— always processing the last message they received. Thinking through their next clever response. Anticipating another response. Worrying about social media comments. Worrying about whether they’re posts are receiving likes. Or, for boys especially, they are always clamoring to get back to group online games.
Even when students aren’t on their phones, they are distracted by the knowledge that, at all times, many of their friends will be actively engaged in smartphone-based activities.
As teachers quickly found out in those first years of our iPad initiative, there is no black list that can stop this. Students will always find alternate apps and clever tricks to work around the firewalls we throw up. Our current policies create a constant psychic toll that makes it nearly impossible for students to focus deeply.
The only way to do our duty and create an appropriate learning environment is to eliminate access to these disruptive devices. The smartphone policy that is up for consideration finally does this. It finally offers the sort of wise adaptation that we must begin to make on behalf of our future generations.
Any educator worth his or her salt knows that we have to get smartphones out of the classroom. I’ve talked to many administrators who will admit this. But they all report the same reason that, either, they aren’t brave enough to do what is necessary or why their bosses tell them they can’t do what is necessary: parents.
To be clear, most parents agree with this common sense. But school districts fear that small, loud cohort who will freak out when they can’t have immediate access to their children at every moment of the day.
The trump card, which misguided parents have been quick to seize upon, is the claim that they need constant access to their student as a measure of safety. Parents utter “safety” and school districts yield.
Here is a response to these parents. Schools, please steal this…
An Open Letter to Parents Who Oppose School Smartphone Bans
Dear Parents,
It has come to my attention that some of you are upset about our new cell phone policy, which requires phones to be turned off and locked in a Yondr pouch for the duration of the school day. Most notably, many parents have claimed that this somehow puts their student’s safety at risk. Specifically, I’ve heard parents state some version of: What if there is a Uvalde type of situation?
To that, I’d begin by noting the immense efforts we have made to learn from Uvalde, to hire more people to ensure the security of our students, and to tighten and refine policies so that troubled students are less likely to slip through the cracks and so that safety procedures remain paramount.
But we should be careful not to allow the mere utterance of “safety” to derail thoughtful efforts to do what is best for our students. Before we disregard the experience and collective wisdom of our teachers and administrators and accept the unsubstantiated claim that students are somehow less safe in school when they don’t have access to cell phones, we should hold that claim up to honest scrutiny.
It must be asked: In the event of a terrible active shooter scenario (which we all hope we never have to experience) how would having a smartphone protect students? I can think of many reasons that equipping an entire high-school population with smartphones would make the student population less safe in such a scenario:
Phones would fracture attention, distracting students from vital instruction and attempts to quietly signal students to take a certain course of action.
Phones would add brightly lit screens that reveal student locations in rooms that have been intentionally darkened.
Phones might encourage panic or, shameful as it is, encourage students to attempt to garner status by taking videos that go viral on social media.
I’m sure that there are clever parents out there who could come up with creative justifications for why the phone would actually keep their kid safer in such an awful scenario. But the reality is, we do not know and should not disregard cell phone bans based on the dubious claim that having access to phones makes our students safer. What we do know is that having smartphones on campus has been disastrous for campus discipline and for student focus, connection, and wellbeing. As much as anything else, smartphones have contributed to the staggering rates of mental health disorders that we now see.
What has become clear from many of the conversations I’ve had with parents is that the real root concern here is that many parents want to be able to text their kids throughout the school day. The safety claim seems to be less about keeping kids safe than using the most inflammatory excuse possible to serve these desires.
There is an increasingly common and misguided belief that parents should have access to their son or daughter at every moment. If you are among the parents or guardians who hold this belief, then I encourage you to consider the damage such a worldview is having on your burgeoning adult, and to weigh the significant costs of incessant smartphone distraction on their attention, connection, and wellbeing. Our culture is in a very bad way, indeed, if we seriously believe that our kids are unsafe any time they don’t have access to their own personal phone. That is not healthy.
Nor is it consistent with the expectations that parents hold in many other school scenarios. Parents do not insist that their kids can bring their phone out to football practice or mount it onto their trumpet in the marching band. There is no outcry when students are expected to lock their phones in lockers before PE. In elementary schools, where students are at their most dependent on adult direction, the schools have never allowed students to have smartphones and parents still overwhelmingly accept that common sense.
We ask that parents now accept a similar norm in high-school. It may be an inconvenience to some individuals, but this policy comes from the educated conclusions of our staff about what policies will create the best environment for the collective student body. Based on considerable evidence, we have determined that cell phone use is a significant problem for our schools and, most notably, for our students. We believe it is our duty to help and we hope that you will take the time to learn more about why at this website: (create a website with information and links similar to what can be found here: https://trottershane.com/resources)
Finally, I know the majority of you reading this already support the cell phone ban. For that, I’d like to express my deepest gratitude. As with all policies, there will be trade-offs and quirks to work out. Please be patient and keep in mind that the most profound benefits can only be gained when we commit to endure occasional inconveniences on behalf of a greater end.
Sincerely,
Your name here
A Final Plea
I’ll end this post with a final plea to school administrators and teachers: You cannot please all parents and it is not your job to try. Yes you should strive for cordial relationships, but appeasing every parental temper tantrum is not serving your community—it is subjecting the community to a pervasive modern form of tyranny: Temper Tantrum Tyranny. Your job is not to be so neutral and spineless that no individual parent can ever find fault with you. Your job isn’t to default to inaction and the absence of opinion so that no action or opinion can ever be called into question—so that you can always defer blame. Your job isn’t to be completely value neutral and nonjudgmental.
Your job is to exercise good judgment (which is the definition of wisdom). Your job is to create the right environment—good soil within which students can thrive. Your job is to be the educational experts that, based on a constant pursuit of mastery in the field of human development, can provide the expertise our parents and communities need to navigate this exceptionally novel world.
The modern environment is littered with hypernormal stimuli and saturated in marketer manipulation. As a consequence, a host of dysfunctional norms have taken hold of our communities. Do not be an unwitting purveyor of human degradation. Stand against it. Fight for a vision that is more inspiring and fulfilling than the current ethos of mindless self-promotion and superficial gratification. Our kids deserve better.
Thank you very much for reading and sharing
Carry the fire!
Shane