Should schools ban cell phones?

Schools that don’t prohibit cell phones are missing out on a tremendous opportunity to positively support their students’ learning, focus, and mental health.

Originally published in the Moultrie News.

Should students be banned from bringing cell phones into school?

Schools that don’t prohibit cell phones are missing out on a tremendous opportunity to positively support their students’ learning, focus, and mental health.

I’ve written often about the negative effects of phones on kids. Science has generously given us ample research to show that phones are addictive, harmful to mental health, and damaging to attention.

Notice I referred to phones’ negative effects—not “side” effects. That’s because many of their adverse traits are intentional. Social media companies purposefully pursue algorithms to keep kids scrolling forever. Pornography apps are seeking the opposite of a positive, healthy attitude toward love, relationships, and sexuality. Game engineers create experiences to capture kids in their online milieus. My students tell me the intentions of such programs are so transparent that even kids recognize they’re being exploited—yet it continues.

I’ve seen phones spark similar behaviors as illicit drugs do. Kids whose phones have died get a form of the “jitters.” Parents who try to take away a child’s phone are met with responses ranging from emotional manipulation to physical violence. Students assault teachers for trying to confiscate their phones.

Education’s fixation on test scores and achievement gaps should lead all administrators to follow the science on phones. A study published in Labour Economics found that prohibiting phones in high schools led to a 6.4 percent increase in test scores—the equivalent of adding five days to the school year—with nearly all the gains coming from low-achieving students. Other studies show similar results across the world.

Of course, if adults doubt phones’ detrimental effect on kids’ focus and behavior, we need only examine our own. Next to our dinner plates, you’ll see a knife, spoon, fork, and smartphone, with the phone getting picked up more than the fork. At stoplights, look at the car next to you, and you’re apt to see the driver looking at a phone. Some adults literally strap a tiny phone to their wrist so they won’t miss a single incoming text. Whatever compels adults to do those things is even more influential to kids.

I teach at a school that disallows phones, yet many students can’t help themselves. They sneak them out to text their friends or look up answers during tests. They use video to film fights, embarrass their classmates, or share sexually explicit acts filmed in the bathrooms.

Educators concerned about students’ mental health should be beating the drum the loudest for prohibiting phones in school. As a teacher, I’ve seen girls racked with mental anguish because they were humiliated by boys using phones to solicit, coerce and share private sexual media. When phones used to be allowed at lunch and recess, shy students would frequently just sit there, glued to their screens for the entire hour; now they laugh and talk with their peers.

But why listen to anecdotal experiences when you can have scientific research? An alarming 2020 study by the Canadian Medical Association concluded the following about kids and phones:

• Smartphone and social media use leads to an increase in mental distress, self-harm, and suicide.

• Social media has a negative effect on self-perception and relationships through social comparison and negative interactions like cyberbullying.

• High proportions of youth experience chronic sleep deprivation and poorer cognitive control, academic performance, and socioemotional functioning due to heavy phone use.

The study’s authors say there’s a need for schools to create environments that help kids navigate today’s challenges. That’s important. We’re becoming an indifferent, “What’s the big deal?” culture. We don’t allow ourselves to see that depriving our children of something now can provide them with long-term advantages. Many parents and principals look at phones and say, “Meh, what’s wrong with them?”

A lot, actually. But even if there weren’t, it would be much wiser to ask, “What’s right about them?” The test of what behavior we encourage in schools shouldn’t be how much damage it might do, but how much good it can accomplish. Every indicator that matters seems to show us that phones offer schools nothing of lasting value.

Read the original column here.