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This post is cross-posted at The Atlantic ( here), with one section cut: the section urging parents to give "dumb phones" (or "basic phones") as first phones, until high school. It is otherwise identical. I'm pleased to announce that my next book has been listed on the website of Penguin Press, with the title: The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. It is available for pre-order now, and will be released in March of 2024. So now I really need to finish writing it.
In May 2019, I was invited to give a lecture at my old high school in Scarsdale, New York. Before the talk, I met with the principal and his top administrators. I heard that the school, like most high schools in America, was struggling with a large and recent increase in mental illness among its students. The primary diagnoses were depression and anxiety disorders, including increasing rates of self-harm; girls were particularly vulnerable. I was told that the mental- health problems were already baked in when students arrived for ninth grade. Coming out of middle school, many students were already anxious and depressed. Many were also already addicted to their phones.

Ten months later, I was invited to give a talk at Scarsdale Middle School. There, too, I met with the principal and her top administrators, and I heard the same thing: Mental- health problems had recently gotten much worse. Even when students arrived for sixth grade, coming out of elementary school, many of them were already anxious and depressed. And many, already, were addicted to their phones.

To the teachers and administrators I spoke with, this wasn't merely a coincidence. They saw clear links between rising phone addiction and declining mental health, to say nothing of declining academic performance. A common theme in my conversations with them was: We all hate the phones. Keeping students off of them during class was a constant struggle. Getting students' attention was harder because they seemed permanently distracted and congenitally distractible. Drama, conflict, bullying, and scandal played out continually during the school day on platforms to which the staff had no access. I asked why they couldn't just ban phones during school hours. They said too many parents would be upset if they could not reach their children during the school day.

A lot has changed since 2019. The case for phone-free schools is much stronger now. As Zach Rausch and I have documented here at the After Babel Substack, evidence of an international epidemic of mental illness, which started around 2012, has continued to accumulate. So, too, has evidence that it was caused in part by social media and the sudden move to smartphones in the early 2010s. Many parents now see the addiction and distraction these devices cause in their own children; most of us have heard harrowing stories of self-harming behavior and suicide attempts among our friends' children. Two weeks ago, the United States Surgeon General issued an advisory warning that social media can carry "a profound risk of harm to the mental health and well-being of children and adolescents."

We now also have more precedents: many more examples of schools that have gone entirely phone-free during the school day. So the time is right for parents and educators to ask: Should we make the school day phone-free? Would that reduce rates of depression, anxiety, and self-harm? Would it improve educational outcomes? I believe that the answer to all of these questions is yes.

Think about how hard it is for you to stay on task and sustain a train of thought while working on your computer. Email, texts, and alerts of all kinds continually present you with opportunities to do something easier and more fun than what you're doing now. If you are over age 25, you have a fully mature frontal cortex to help you resist temptation and maintain focus, and yet you probably still have difficulties doing so. Now imagine a phone in a child's pocket, buzzing every few minutes with an invitation to do something other than pay attention. There's no mature frontal cortex to help them stay on task.

Whatever rules a school may have in place against it, many studies have established that students check their phone a lot during class, and that they receive and send texts if they can get away with it. Their focus is often and easily derailed by interruptions from their devices. One study from 2016 found that 97 percent of college students said that they sometimes use their phones during class for non-educational purposes. Nearly 60 percent of students said that they spend more than 10 percent of class time on their phones, mostly texting. 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.

One way that phones have hurt our relationships is through "phubbing" (a contraction of " phone snubbing"), when a person breaks away from a conversation to look at their screen. Research shows that it interferes with the intimacy and perceived quality of social interactions. People who are more addicted to their phones are, unsurprisingly, the biggest phubbers, which may explain why people who are the heaviest users of phones and/or social media are also the most depressed and lonely.

Once some students start phubbing others, then the others feel pressure to pull out their own phones, and in a flash, the culture of the entire school has changed. Jean Twenge and I analyzed the international PISA data set (part of an ongoing study on education) and found a global increase in loneliness at school beginning after 2012 (See Figure 1).
Figure 1. Percent of students in each of four cultural groupings that scored above a cutoff indicating high levels on the average of 6 items in the PISA study that asked about loneliness and friendship at school. From Twenge, Haidt, Blake, McAllister, Lemon, & Le Roy (2021). Graph reprinted from The New York Times.
Students around the world became less likely to agree with items such as "I feel like I belong at school," and more likely to agree with items such as "I feel lonely at school." That's roughly when teens went from mostly using flip phones to mostly using smartphones. It's also when Instagram caught fire with girls and young women globally, following its acquisition by Facebook. If we must pick a date for the start of selfie culture and its poisonous levels of visual social comparison, I'd say it's 2012.

If you have any doubt that phones in school stunt social connections, just talk to students about what happens at lunch time. My undergraduate students at NYU tell me that it is often difficult to have real conversations, because most of their fellow students keep their phones on the table and frequently break away to check or respond to notifications. A 2018 study by the social psychologists Ryan Dwyer, Kostadin Kushlev, and Elizabeth Dunn tested my students' intuition. They invited hundreds of college students and community members to share meals at a restaurant, with family or friends. They randomly assigned participants in each small group to either put their phones on the table, or to put them away. The results? "When phones were present (vs. absent), participants felt more distracted, which reduced how much they enjoyed spending time with their friends/family."

I've been studying and writing about the effects of smartphones and social media on teens' behavior, development, and mental health for six years now. To help organize the existing research on these topics, while I write my next book, I've created a series of open-source Google documents, which I've curated with Rausch, my lead researcher. We recently created a phone-free schools collaborative review doc, cataloging the studies I've noted in this article and many more.

Consider the words of the MIT professor Sherry Turkle in her book Reclaiming Conversation: Because of our phones, she writes, " we are forever elsewhere." If we want children to be present, learn well, make friends, and feel like they belong at school, we should keep smartphones and social media out of the school day for as long as possible.

According the National Center for Education Statistics, as of 2020, "cellphone bans were in place in 77% of U.S. schools." But this high number seems to refer to a very low bar: It includes any school that tells students they should not use their phones while in class - unless the use is related to class. That's not really a ban; it's more of an unenforceable wish. Such a policy guarantees struggle between teachers and students, and it means that there are always kids looking at phones hidden in their laps or books, especially in the classes where the teacher has grown exhausted by the never-ending game of phone policing. As long as some kids are posting and texting during the school day, that raises the pressure on everyone else to check their phones during the school day. Nobody wants to be the last person to know the thing that everyone else is texting about.

Other countries are ahead of the U.S. on phone policy. France banned the use of mobile phones on school grounds through grade nine in 2018 (though the law allows students to keep their phones in their bags or pockets, so students still use their phones stealthily). In New South Wales, Australia, the use of mobile phones has been banned in elementary schools and will soon be banned in high schools, although schools can decide how to implement the bans.

Some schools in the U.S. have now taken similarly uncompromising stances on phones. For example, the author Mark Oppenheimer wrote earlier this year in The Atlantic about St. Andrew's, a small boarding school in Delaware that allows students to use their phones only when in their dorm rooms, not when anywhere else on campus-a move that some students initially resisted, but now has widespread student support.

More American schools-arguably all schools-should make themselves into genuinely phone-free zones. How would that look, in practice? I think it's helpful to think of phone restrictions on a scale from 1 to 5, as follows:

Level 1: Students can take their phones out during class, but only to use them for class purposes.

Level 2: Students can hold onto their phones but are not supposed to take them out of their pockets or backpacks at all during class time.

Level 3: Phone caddies in classrooms: Students put their phones into a wall pocket or storage unit at the start of each class, and then pick them up at the end of that class.

These three levels seem to be the ones most commonly employed by American schools today. I believe that the first two are nearly useless. Many students do not have the impulse control to stop themselves from checking their phone during class time if the phone is within reach. One teacher at Scarsdale High School told me that even when a ban on using phones during class is enforced, some students will say that they need to use the bathroom in order to check their phones.

Phone caddies are a little better for learning, because they get the phone out of the students's pocket, but their effect on school social life may be worse: A likely result of the practice could be that all times between classes will be dominated by kids looking down silently at their phones, getting the fix they were denied for 50 minutes during class. When they do talk with friends, they'll give those friends only a fraction of their full attention.

So let's move on:

Level 4: Lockable pouches (such as those made by Yondr). Students are required to put their phone into their own personal pouch when they arrive at school, which is then locked with a magnetic pin (like the anti-theft tags used in clothing stores). Students keep the pouch with them but cannot unlock it until the end of the school day, when they are given access to a magnetic unlocking device.

Level 5: Phone lockers. Students lock their phones into a secure unit with many small compartments when they arrive at school. They keep their key and get access to the phone lockers again only when they leave school.

Both of these practices put any student seen using a phone during the school day in clear violation of policy. They are the only two policies that can create phone-free schools. They are the policies most likely to produce substantial educational, social, and mental-health benefits, because they are the only approaches that give students six or seven hours a day of time away from their phone.

Lockable pouches are low-cost and easy-to-implement. However, I have heard from some students that their classmates (aided by YouTube videos) find ways to open their pouches and use their phones whenever they think no adult is watching. (A Yondr employee told me that the company is working to improve its pouch lock, and also said that schools should do regular pouch checks, which would reveal the damage from the most common methods of illicit unlocking.)

Phone lockers may be more complicated to put in place, logistically-especially at larger schools. But they are the most reliable way to separate students from their phones for the duration of the school day and would therefore deliver the greatest benefits.

A school that goes phone-free would still have to figure out what to do about laptops, tablets, and computers in the classroom. Students would surely use any internet-connected device to send and receive texts, and to reach their social-media accounts. Last year, I banned all screens-even laptops for taking notes-from all of my undergraduate and MBA classes, and at the end of each semester, students strongly agreed that this improved the class for them. But even absent a laptop ban, these larger devices are more easily managed, and are not as likely as smartphones to disrupt social interactions outside of class.

Those who oppose phone bans raise a number of objections. Smartphones can be useful teaching tools, for instance, and may make it easier for some teachers to create engaging lesson plans. That's true, but any increase in engagement during a lesson may be offset by students following off-ramps during the same lesson. When we add in the costs to all other teachers and the loss of social connection between classes, it's hard to see how the marginal benefit of a phone-based lesson outweighs the costs of a phone-focused student body.

A more common argument comes from parents, many of whom are afraid that something might go wrong at school, and want to ensure that they can reach their children at all times. These fears are understandable, but are also part of the causes of Gen Z's mental-health problems. In his book " Paranoid Parenting," the sociologist Frank Furedi describes how a new style of protective parenting swept through British and American society in the 1990s, in response to the perception that risks to children were rising. When parents believe that everything is risky and they can't trust other adults to protect their children, they take a more defensive approach to parenting. They try to protect their children from all risks, even when that deprives their children of valuable experiences of independence.

But today's parents, who grew up during a period when crime rates were much higher than they are now, generally have fond memories of walking or biking to school with other kids, or just having time away from parental supervision to hang out with friends. I believe that children and teens would benefit developmentally if they were to go six or seven hours each day out of contact with their parents.

What about school shootings? I'm the father of two high-school students, and of course I would want to connect with my children in such a nightmare scenario. But would a school where every student has a smartphone be safer than one in which only the adults had smartphones? Ken Trump, the president of National School Safety and Security Services, cautions that cellphone use during emergencies can actually increase safety risks. "During a lockdown, students should be listening to the adults in the school who are giving life-saving instructions," Trump explains. "Phones can distract from that. Silence can also be key, so you also don't want that phone noise attracting attention." In addition, it seems to me that 300 parents rushing to the school in 300 cars would probably make things more difficult for first responders.

Communication is generally a good thing. When cell phones became common in the 1990s, Millennial teens adopted them with gusto. These phones are now referred to as "flip phones" or as "dumb phones," because they lacked an internet browser or internet-enabled apps. We might also call them "communication phones," because they were designed to help people communicate with other people. And that's what Millennials used them for: to call and text their friends, often about how and when to get together in person. When the Millennials were teens, their mental health was fine-slightly better than that of Gen X, before them, and much better than Gen Z, after them (as Twenge reports in her new book Generations). Dumb phones are helpful, not harmful.

Smartphones are very different. They can be used for communication, but they have a thousand other applications, many of which are carefully designed to attract and keep a child's attention. I believe it is unwise and unnecessary to give children smartphones as their first phones.

Americans generally give children their own phones in late elementary and early middle school, and for good reasons: we want to be able to reach our children to arrange activities, and we want them to be able to reach us if something goes wrong. So let's give our kids dumb phones or dumb watches! They do just what you want, and don't do the things you most fear (providing 24-hour access to addictive social media, and video gaming, and more). My wife and I gave our daughter a Gizmo Watch when she turned 9. She could call only three numbers with it, and we (the 3 family members) could call her. It was the perfect communication device for a girl who was now walking to school, running errands, and meeting up with a friend in a nearby park. And it enabled my daughter to have more experiences than we would have permitted her without the watch.

You can find a list of dumb phones and watches here, at the website for Wait Until 8th. That's a group that helps parents in each school come together and sign a pledge that they will not give their child a smartphone until 8th grade. I strongly support the organization's central idea: to help parents work together so that their children will not be the "only one" who doesn't have a smartphone. I would only suggest that the goal be "wait until 9th." Middle schools usually run from 6th to 8th grade, so it would be a mess if all 8th graders have smartphones and the younger kids don't. I think it's better to keep smartphones entirely out of the lives of children until high school.

If most parents would delay giving their child a smartphone until high school, providing only dumb phones until then, it would amplify the benefits of locking up phones in K-8 schools. It would mean that when a middle school lets out and kids are reunited with their phones, most of them would use those phones to call or text their friends and family, rather than devoting the next hour to scrolling through Instagram posts.

As the teen mental-health crisis rolls on and rates of depression, anxiety, and self-harm continue to rise, we are not helpless. It would be great if social- media platforms enforced their own minimum age of 13 to open accounts, but all signs indicate that they won't unless compelled by Congress. It would be great if Congress would compel them, and in fact several bills are being considered right now toward that end. It would be better still if the minimum age for using social media were raised to at least 16. The solutions to this crisis are wide-ranging, and some may need to involve the federal government.

But parents, teachers, and school administrators can take meaningful action, too, this year. Parents who have not yet given their children a smartphone can resolve to provide only dumb phones until high school, and they can coordinate with the parents of their children's friends, making that choice easier for all families involved. Schools that are using the lower levels of phone restriction can resolve to move up to lockable pouches or phone lockers, and many schools could implement these changes by September. My hope as a researcher is that a farsighted governor or school-district superintendent will implement these changes experimentally, by randomly assigning some middle schools to implement these changes as soon as possible, and other schools to do so a year later. That way we could gain high-quality experimental evidence as to whether phone-free schools really confer the benefits I have predicted based on the research.

"It helped me a lot," one student at San Mateo High School in California told NBC News after her school started using lockable pouches. "Before, I would usually just like curl over in the side of my desk, and, like, check my phone and text everyone. But now there's no other thing for us to look at or do except for talk to our teacher or pay attention."

All children deserve schools that will help them learn, cultivate deep friendships, and develop into mentally healthy young adults. All children deserve phone-free schools.

Notes after initial publication:

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The research is clear: Smartphones undermine attention, learning, relationships, and belonging.

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Commentary: Phone-free schools protect kids during emergencies

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Kids accessing phones during school day not only distracts from learning but also from paying attention to emergency instructions

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This post is cross-posted at The Atlantic ( here), with one section cut: the section urging parents to give "dumb phones" (or "basic phones") as first phones, until high school. It is otherwise identical. I'm pleased to announce that my next book has been listed on the website of Penguin Press, with the title: The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness. It is available for pre-order now, and will be released in March of 2024. So now I really need to finish writing it.
In May 2019, I was invited to give a lecture at my old high school in Scarsdale, New York. Before the talk, I met with the principal and his top administrators. I heard that the school, like most high schools in America, was struggling with a large and recent increase in mental illness among its students. The primary diagnoses were depression and anxiety disorders, including increasing rates of self-harm; girls were particularly vulnerable. I was told that the mental- health problems were already baked in when students arrived for ninth grade. Coming out of middle school, many students were already anxious and depressed. Many were also already addicted to their phones.

Ten months later, I was invited to give a talk at Scarsdale Middle School. There, too, I met with the principal and her top administrators, and I heard the same thing: Mental- health problems had recently gotten much worse. Even when students arrived for sixth grade, coming out of elementary school, many of them were already anxious and depressed. And many, already, were addicted to their phones.

To the teachers and administrators I spoke with, this wasn't merely a coincidence. They saw clear links between rising phone addiction and declining mental health, to say nothing of declining academic performance. A common theme in my conversations with them was: We all hate the phones. Keeping students off of them during class was a constant struggle. Getting students' attention was harder because they seemed permanently distracted and congenitally distractible. Drama, conflict, bullying, and scandal played out continually during the school day on platforms to which the staff had no access. I asked why they couldn't just ban phones during school hours. They said too many parents would be upset if they could not reach their children during the school day.

A lot has changed since 2019. The case for phone-free schools is much stronger now. As Zach Rausch and I have documented here at the After Babel Substack, evidence of an international epidemic of mental illness, which started around 2012, has continued to accumulate. So, too, has evidence that it was caused in part by social media and the sudden move to smartphones in the early 2010s. Many parents now see the addiction and distraction these devices cause in their own children; most of us have heard harrowing stories of self-harming behavior and suicide attempts among our friends' children. Two weeks ago, the United States Surgeon General issued an advisory warning that social media can carry "a profound risk of harm to the mental health and well-being of children and adolescents."

We now also have more precedents: many more examples of schools that have gone entirely phone-free during the school day. So the time is right for parents and educators to ask: Should we make the school day phone-free? Would that reduce rates of depression, anxiety, and self-harm? Would it improve educational outcomes? I believe that the answer to all of these questions is yes.

Think about how hard it is for you to stay on task and sustain a train of thought while working on your computer. Email, texts, and alerts of all kinds continually present you with opportunities to do something easier and more fun than what you're doing now. If you are over age 25, you have a fully mature frontal cortex to help you resist temptation and maintain focus, and yet you probably still have difficulties doing so. Now imagine a phone in a child's pocket, buzzing every few minutes with an invitation to do something other than pay attention. There's no mature frontal cortex to help them stay on task.

Whatever rules a school may have in place against it, many studies have established that students check their phone a lot during class, and that they receive and send texts if they can get away with it. Their focus is often and easily derailed by interruptions from their devices. One study from 2016 found that 97 percent of college students said that they sometimes use their phones during class for non-educational purposes. Nearly 60 percent of students said that they spend more than 10 percent of class time on their phones, mostly texting. 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.

One way that phones have hurt our relationships is through "phubbing" (a contraction of " phone snubbing"), when a person breaks away from a conversation to look at their screen. Research shows that it interferes with the intimacy and perceived quality of social interactions. People who are more addicted to their phones are, unsurprisingly, the biggest phubbers, which may explain why people who are the heaviest users of phones and/or social media are also the most depressed and lonely.

Once some students start phubbing others, then the others feel pressure to pull out their own phones, and in a flash, the culture of the entire school has changed. Jean Twenge and I analyzed the international PISA data set (part of an ongoing study on education) and found a global increase in loneliness at school beginning after 2012 (See Figure 1).
Figure 1. Percent of students in each of four cultural groupings that scored above a cutoff indicating high levels on the average of 6 items in the PISA study that asked about loneliness and friendship at school. From Twenge, Haidt, Blake, McAllister, Lemon, & Le Roy (2021). Graph reprinted from The New York Times.
Students around the world became less likely to agree with items such as "I feel like I belong at school," and more likely to agree with items such as "I feel lonely at school." That's roughly when teens went from mostly using flip phones to mostly using smartphones. It's also when Instagram caught fire with girls and young women globally, following its acquisition by Facebook. If we must pick a date for the start of selfie culture and its poisonous levels of visual social comparison, I'd say it's 2012.

If you have any doubt that phones in school stunt social connections, just talk to students about what happens at lunch time. My undergraduate students at NYU tell me that it is often difficult to have real conversations, because most of their fellow students keep their phones on the table and frequently break away to check or respond to notifications. A 2018 study by the social psychologists Ryan Dwyer, Kostadin Kushlev, and Elizabeth Dunn tested my students' intuition. They invited hundreds of college students and community members to share meals at a restaurant, with family or friends. They randomly assigned participants in each small group to either put their phones on the table, or to put them away. The results? "When phones were present (vs. absent), participants felt more distracted, which reduced how much they enjoyed spending time with their friends/family."

I've been studying and writing about the effects of smartphones and social media on teens' behavior, development, and mental health for six years now. To help organize the existing research on these topics, while I write my next book, I've created a series of open-source Google documents, which I've curated with Rausch, my lead researcher. We recently created a phone-free schools collaborative review doc, cataloging the studies I've noted in this article and many more.

Consider the words of the MIT professor Sherry Turkle in her book Reclaiming Conversation: Because of our phones, she writes, " we are forever elsewhere." If we want children to be present, learn well, make friends, and feel like they belong at school, we should keep smartphones and social media out of the school day for as long as possible.

According the National Center for Education Statistics, as of 2020, "cellphone bans were in place in 77% of U.S. schools." But this high number seems to refer to a very low bar: It includes any school that tells students they should not use their phones while in class - unless the use is related to class. That's not really a ban; it's more of an unenforceable wish. Such a policy guarantees struggle between teachers and students, and it means that there are always kids looking at phones hidden in their laps or books, especially in the classes where the teacher has grown exhausted by the never-ending game of phone policing. As long as some kids are posting and texting during the school day, that raises the pressure on everyone else to check their phones during the school day. Nobody wants to be the last person to know the thing that everyone else is texting about.

Other countries are ahead of the U.S. on phone policy. France banned the use of mobile phones on school grounds through grade nine in 2018 (though the law allows students to keep their phones in their bags or pockets, so students still use their phones stealthily). In New South Wales, Australia, the use of mobile phones has been banned in elementary schools and will soon be banned in high schools, although schools can decide how to implement the bans.

Some schools in the U.S. have now taken similarly uncompromising stances on phones. For example, the author Mark Oppenheimer wrote earlier this year in The Atlantic about St. Andrew's, a small boarding school in Delaware that allows students to use their phones only when in their dorm rooms, not when anywhere else on campus-a move that some students initially resisted, but now has widespread student support.

More American schools-arguably all schools-should make themselves into genuinely phone-free zones. How would that look, in practice? I think it's helpful to think of phone restrictions on a scale from 1 to 5, as follows:

Level 1: Students can take their phones out during class, but only to use them for class purposes.

Level 2: Students can hold onto their phones but are not supposed to take them out of their pockets or backpacks at all during class time.

Level 3: Phone caddies in classrooms: Students put their phones into a wall pocket or storage unit at the start of each class, and then pick them up at the end of that class.

These three levels seem to be the ones most commonly employed by American schools today. I believe that the first two are nearly useless. Many students do not have the impulse control to stop themselves from checking their phone during class time if the phone is within reach. One teacher at Scarsdale High School told me that even when a ban on using phones during class is enforced, some students will say that they need to use the bathroom in order to check their phones.

Phone caddies are a little better for learning, because they get the phone out of the students's pocket, but their effect on school social life may be worse: A likely result of the practice could be that all times between classes will be dominated by kids looking down silently at their phones, getting the fix they were denied for 50 minutes during class. When they do talk with friends, they'll give those friends only a fraction of their full attention.

So let's move on:

Level 4: Lockable pouches (such as those made by Yondr). Students are required to put their phone into their own personal pouch when they arrive at school, which is then locked with a magnetic pin (like the anti-theft tags used in clothing stores). Students keep the pouch with them but cannot unlock it until the end of the school day, when they are given access to a magnetic unlocking device.

Level 5: Phone lockers. Students lock their phones into a secure unit with many small compartments when they arrive at school. They keep their key and get access to the phone lockers again only when they leave school.

Both of these practices put any student seen using a phone during the school day in clear violation of policy. They are the only two policies that can create phone-free schools. They are the policies most likely to produce substantial educational, social, and mental-health benefits, because they are the only approaches that give students six or seven hours a day of time away from their phone.

Lockable pouches are low-cost and easy-to-implement. However, I have heard from some students that their classmates (aided by YouTube videos) find ways to open their pouches and use their phones whenever they think no adult is watching. (A Yondr employee told me that the company is working to improve its pouch lock, and also said that schools should do regular pouch checks, which would reveal the damage from the most common methods of illicit unlocking.)

Phone lockers may be more complicated to put in place, logistically-especially at larger schools. But they are the most reliable way to separate students from their phones for the duration of the school day and would therefore deliver the greatest benefits.

A school that goes phone-free would still have to figure out what to do about laptops, tablets, and computers in the classroom. Students would surely use any internet-connected device to send and receive texts, and to reach their social-media accounts. Last year, I banned all screens-even laptops for taking notes-from all of my undergraduate and MBA classes, and at the end of each semester, students strongly agreed that this improved the class for them. But even absent a laptop ban, these larger devices are more easily managed, and are not as likely as smartphones to disrupt social interactions outside of class.

Those who oppose phone bans raise a number of objections. Smartphones can be useful teaching tools, for instance, and may make it easier for some teachers to create engaging lesson plans. That's true, but any increase in engagement during a lesson may be offset by students following off-ramps during the same lesson. When we add in the costs to all other teachers and the loss of social connection between classes, it's hard to see how the marginal benefit of a phone-based lesson outweighs the costs of a phone-focused student body.

A more common argument comes from parents, many of whom are afraid that something might go wrong at school, and want to ensure that they can reach their children at all times. These fears are understandable, but are also part of the causes of Gen Z's mental-health problems. In his book " Paranoid Parenting," the sociologist Frank Furedi describes how a new style of protective parenting swept through British and American society in the 1990s, in response to the perception that risks to children were rising. When parents believe that everything is risky and they can't trust other adults to protect their children, they take a more defensive approach to parenting. They try to protect their children from all risks, even when that deprives their children of valuable experiences of independence.

But today's parents, who grew up during a period when crime rates were much higher than they are now, generally have fond memories of walking or biking to school with other kids, or just having time away from parental supervision to hang out with friends. I believe that children and teens would benefit developmentally if they were to go six or seven hours each day out of contact with their parents.

What about school shootings? I'm the father of two high-school students, and of course I would want to connect with my children in such a nightmare scenario. But would a school where every student has a smartphone be safer than one in which only the adults had smartphones? Ken Trump, the president of National School Safety and Security Services, cautions that cellphone use during emergencies can actually increase safety risks. "During a lockdown, students should be listening to the adults in the school who are giving life-saving instructions," Trump explains. "Phones can distract from that. Silence can also be key, so you also don't want that phone noise attracting attention." In addition, it seems to me that 300 parents rushing to the school in 300 cars would probably make things more difficult for first responders.

Communication is generally a good thing. When cell phones became common in the 1990s, Millennial teens adopted them with gusto. These phones are now referred to as "flip phones" or as "dumb phones," because they lacked an internet browser or internet-enabled apps. We might also call them "communication phones," because they were designed to help people communicate with other people. And that's what Millennials used them for: to call and text their friends, often about how and when to get together in person. When the Millennials were teens, their mental health was fine-slightly better than that of Gen X, before them, and much better than Gen Z, after them (as Twenge reports in her new book Generations). Dumb phones are helpful, not harmful.

Smartphones are very different. They can be used for communication, but they have a thousand other applications, many of which are carefully designed to attract and keep a child's attention. I believe it is unwise and unnecessary to give children smartphones as their first phones.

Americans generally give children their own phones in late elementary and early middle school, and for good reasons: we want to be able to reach our children to arrange activities, and we want them to be able to reach us if something goes wrong. So let's give our kids dumb phones or dumb watches! They do just what you want, and don't do the things you most fear (providing 24-hour access to addictive social media, and video gaming, and more). My wife and I gave our daughter a Gizmo Watch when she turned 9. She could call only three numbers with it, and we (the 3 family members) could call her. It was the perfect communication device for a girl who was now walking to school, running errands, and meeting up with a friend in a nearby park. And it enabled my daughter to have more experiences than we would have permitted her without the watch.

You can find a list of dumb phones and watches here, at the website for Wait Until 8th. That's a group that helps parents in each school come together and sign a pledge that they will not give their child a smartphone until 8th grade. I strongly support the organization's central idea: to help parents work together so that their children will not be the "only one" who doesn't have a smartphone. I would only suggest that the goal be "wait until 9th." Middle schools usually run from 6th to 8th grade, so it would be a mess if all 8th graders have smartphones and the younger kids don't. I think it's better to keep smartphones entirely out of the lives of children until high school.

If most parents would delay giving their child a smartphone until high school, providing only dumb phones until then, it would amplify the benefits of locking up phones in K-8 schools. It would mean that when a middle school lets out and kids are reunited with their phones, most of them would use those phones to call or text their friends and family, rather than devoting the next hour to scrolling through Instagram posts.

As the teen mental-health crisis rolls on and rates of depression, anxiety, and self-harm continue to rise, we are not helpless. It would be great if social- media platforms enforced their own minimum age of 13 to open accounts, but all signs indicate that they won't unless compelled by Congress. It would be great if Congress would compel them, and in fact several bills are being considered right now toward that end. It would be better still if the minimum age for using social media were raised to at least 16. The solutions to this crisis are wide-ranging, and some may need to involve the federal government.

But parents, teachers, and school administrators can take meaningful action, too, this year. Parents who have not yet given their children a smartphone can resolve to provide only dumb phones until high school, and they can coordinate with the parents of their children's friends, making that choice easier for all families involved. Schools that are using the lower levels of phone restriction can resolve to move up to lockable pouches or phone lockers, and many schools could implement these changes by September. My hope as a researcher is that a farsighted governor or school-district superintendent will implement these changes experimentally, by randomly assigning some middle schools to implement these changes as soon as possible, and other schools to do so a year later. That way we could gain high-quality experimental evidence as to whether phone-free schools really confer the benefits I have predicted based on the research.

"It helped me a lot," one student at San Mateo High School in California told NBC News after her school started using lockable pouches. "Before, I would usually just like curl over in the side of my desk, and, like, check my phone and text everyone. But now there's no other thing for us to look at or do except for talk to our teacher or pay attention."

All children deserve schools that will help them learn, cultivate deep friendships, and develop into mentally healthy young adults. All children deserve phone-free schools.

Notes after initial publication:

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The research is clear: Smartphones undermine attention, learning, relationships, and belonging.

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This has 10 "reasons" with no evidence, published by a company with a "Campus Management Platform" to sell

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Why Cell Phones Should be Allowed in Schools

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The battle between teachers and cell phones is over. Here’s 10 reasons why cell phones should be allowed in schools.

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Editorial in Townsend Harris's school newspaper

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Editorial in Townsend Harris's school newspaper

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Imagine being isolated from the outside world as soon as you step into the school building. With the possibility of a new cell phone ban being implemented, this may become an unfortunate reality for New York City public school students. A policy that would entirely prohibit cell phone usage in schools would make it difficult for students to view important information, messages, and useful educational platforms.

Cell phone bans have been proposed by elected and unelected officials on both the and levels. While details surrounding a citywide ban have been , with different messages throughout the summer from Mayor Eric Adams and NYC Schools Chancellor David Banks , we do know that a plan could be rolled out as soon as next school year.

On the state side, Governor Kathy Hochul has also supported a potential cell phone ban. She has stated that details on her plan would come out later this month .

A cell phone ban bars students from using technology in a way that could benefit their education. Rather than focusing solely on the inconveniences related to cell phone uses, schools should instruct students to self-regulate their usage.

Cell phones have a variety of uses that are crucial to students. For instance, emails, social media, and messages play a pivotal role in official and unofficial communication.

The absence of cell phones would only make it more difficult for students and staff to release information and quickly communicate. Having cell phones allows important messages to reach the student body quickly during unexpected circumstances. For example: the earthquake that occurred last year, the numerous times where the building has been locked down with no explanation, the mace spraying that occurred nearby last school year are all instances where cell phones were needed and used as a means of communication and guidance.

Moreover, given news of recent gun shootings , it is essential to have a fast line of communication between students and their families. Allowing open communication with parents and students via cell phone can ease the worry many parents have for their children throughout the day.

There are also countless useful resources that can be implemented to enhance education for students. Many teachers have allowed students to use their cell phones in class to access online resources to help with obtaining information efficiently and accurately. In addition, many students prefer taking notes on their cell phones. Restricting access to cell phones would be unfair to students who perform better with them and to teachers who use online resources in class.

Schools can have device shortages in classrooms, as exemplified during the school device tracking project during the 2022-23 school year , making cell phones a great backup. Especially in Townsend Harris, where there've been many instances where there aren't enough Chromebooks for all students. In English courses, students also have to use apps such as Google Docs for essays, and often those who don't have a laptop or a tablet have to use their own phones to work online. If the cell phone ban was implemented, then these students would be left to struggle deviceless, and even pen and paper can't always be used as substitutes..

However, many argue that there is an issue of students taking videos of others without permission. Though this may be true in some cases, it is equally important for students to be able to document potentially unsafe or inappropriate situations. This is necessary for a transparent atmosphere within the school.

Schools should encourage integrity while creating guidelines for students to follow.

There have been concerns about how the cell phone ban would be implemented, as it could force major school policy changes. As The Classic has previously reported , the current cell phone policy restricts students from using their phones in the hallways, bathrooms, and stairwells.

Cell phone use should not be banned but rather limited. There are many other options that give students the freedom to use devices responsibly. For example, placing limits such as demerits and punishment if caught in class, or simply letting administration, students, and parents decide what the best policy is foreach school.

Enforcing these uniform cell phone policies throughout the school would promote learning, self-regulation, and accountability under a monitored approach. Additionally, regulating phones during bathroom visits would limit concerns of distraction and cheating. Students can simply give their phones to teachers or leave them on their desk while using the bathroom..

Overall, the cons of the potential cell phone ban outweigh the pros. In the modern world, technology is so prevalent and has integrated itself into society; this is why the cell phone ban should be reassessed and the advantages of this modern technology should be considered.

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EDITORIAL: The DOE Should Not Implement a Systemwide Cell Phone Ban

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Imagine being isolated from the outside world as soon as you step into the school building. With the possibility of a new cell phone ban being implemented, this may become an unfortunate reality for New York City public school students. A policy that would entirely prohibit cell phone usage in schools would make it difficult...

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Schools don’t want kids on cellphones. Is banning them the solution?

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Some districts have gone as far as prohibiting devices from campus during all school hours. But inconsistent enforcement could only make matters worse.

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The Georgia School Shooting May Accelerate the Backlash to Cellphone Bans

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Emotional texts exchanged during the Apalachee High shooting have reopened the question of cellphones in schools.

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Should Students Have Cell Phones at School?

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The need for a clear policy on phone use in school only grows stronger as the tech develops further. Should students have their cell phones in school?

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Proposed phone ban in schools is a step in the right direction | Opinion

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As one of 64 ninth graders in the inaugural class of the new Cristo Rey Jesuit Seattle High School, in Seattle, Washington, where Katie Seltzer, Ed.M.'22, works and which opened its doors in August 2024, Aniya M. was vaguely aware the school had some sort of cellphone policy. But only after she began texting her mom during lunch - and got what she calls a "very polite" reminder to put her phone away lest it be confiscated - did she understand that phones are banned entirely during the school day.

"I was kind of shocked," says Aniya, 14, who says she enrolled at the Seattle school - the newest in the 40-school Cristo Rey network of private, Catholic, college-preparatory schools exclusively serving students from families of limited economic means - because it offers "a ton of opportunities for my future." [At the school's request, students are being identified only by their first names and last initials.]

Shock aside, within a week or so she discovered something unexpected about ditching her phone. "It is definitely helping me focus more in class," says Aniya, who says she wants to become a psychotherapist someday. "And it's pushing me to reach out more to my peers instead of relying more on my phone, like I did in middle school. I have a bit of social anxiety so don't like connecting with people. But the friends I've made are great, so I'm kind of glad we have that cellphone policy and we're encouraged to talk to each other."

Her classmate Sofia J., who plans to become a pediatrician, was also unaware of the policy. "Now that I'm actually attending Cristo Rey, I feel the cellphone ban is beneficial," she says. "I noticed I was participating more and engaging more in the classes I was taking. Even though I love using my phone, it's not something I need during the school day. My education is more important." As for making friends? "The in-person interactions are definitely more helpful than being on social media," she emphasizes.

Elena J., who plans to become a lawyer, chose Cristo Rey because of its proven success in college acceptance rates and its unique model: students work one day a week at places like Microsoft and the Space Needle through the Corporate Work Study program. "I felt an increase in focus because I don't have to worry about my phone at all," she says. She and her friends are so interested in each other and school they don't miss the devices, she says, adding, "I don't see the need for [phones] in school for any reason. I read a study once on using phones during class, that it takes up to 20 minutes to focus back on the subject you're doing in class. I feel like that is true."

Cristo Rey student Cole M., who hopes to become a pediatrician, says that while smartphones aren't a distraction for him personally, they can be for others and so he understands the rule and has easily adjusted to it. And Sincere B., who wants to become a mental health counselor, agrees that phone use during class is detrimental because "you're not really focused, and you won't get any work done. At a school like Cristo Rey, you need to be doing the best you can so you can succeed." Although she wishes they could use phones during breaks, she admits they are a distraction: "Even when I'm not at school, having my phone makes it harder for me to get up and do what I need to do."

Are other classmates missing their phones, and maybe criticizing the policy? "No, not really," says Aniya. "It really doesn't come up that often because we are encouraged to talk to each other more."

Of course, the opinions of five highly motivated ninth graders at a single high school hardly make for a scientific survey. But these voices present a point of view not widely explored in media reports about phone bans: those of the students themselves. None of the five interviewed here objects to being without their phones during class. A couple said they would like phone access during lunch, but all evinced being relieved, even happy, to not have to exert self-discipline over a device that's as attractive (many would say addictive) as a portable mini computer with internet access.

What the Data Says

What if you could design a school where students are focused on learning during class, engaging fully with each other during recess and lunch, and free (at least during the school day) from cyberbullying, social media, texts, video games, and other distractions?

It's simple: ban smartphones. It's a widespread and growing trend.

More than 75% of public schools in the United States banned cellphone use in one form or another in the 2021-22 school year, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. In 2023, Florida became the first state to ban cellphone use during class time, though districts can decide whether to allow it during lunch and breaks. As of August 2024, eight other states - Louisiana, South Carolina, Indiana, Virginia, Ohio, Minnesota, Delaware, and Pennsylvania - have adopted policies or laws to curtail cellphone use in schools, according to The New York Times. New York Governor Kathy Hochul plans to submit legislation in 2025 to ban smartphones at schools, and in August 2024, California Governor Gavin Newsom urged school districts to limit their use in class. Other states, including Oklahoma, Kansas, and Vermont, are considering similar restrictions.

This accelerating approach across the country is spurred not only by the concerns of frustrated educators - 72% of high school teachers say students distracted by cellphones is a major problem, according to a 2024 study by the Pew Research Center - but a persuasive body of research.

A 2024 report from the Norwegian Institute of Public Health found that among middle schoolers in Norway, a recent cellphone ban "significantly decreased" mental health challenges among girls and improved their grades, and decreased bullying by more than 40% among both boys and girls. These results were even greater for girls from lower socio-economic backgrounds, the report found.

Just having their phone nearby distracts students during class, according to UNESCO's 2023 Global Education Monitoring Repor t, which recommends against technology in classrooms - including smartphones - unless it supports learning outcomes. Indeed, as Elena J. noted in a report she read, it can take up to 20 minutes for a student to refocus on learning once distracted by a phone, while the absence of smartphones improved learning, especially for students who are struggling.

In his 2024 New York Times bestselling book, The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt advocates for phone-free schools, and argues that kids shouldn't have smartphones before high school or access to social media before age 16. And in June 2024, U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, noting that social media is an "important contributor" to the current mental health crisis among youth, called for a surgeon general's warning to be applied to social media platforms. He also urged schools to keep social time, in addition to class time, free from phones so that students can interact in person.

With so much data supporting the benefit of phone-free schools, who's arguing in favor of them?

According to a 2024 report by the National Parents Union, 78% of parents think their kids should have access to their cellphones at some points during the school day. In this tragic age of school shootings, many parents and kids feel safer knowing they can get in touch with each other during an emergency at school.

"Schools regularly experience events that are scary, and parents want to communicate with their children at any time [in order to] make sure they are safe," says Victor Pereira, faculty co-chair of the Ed School's Teaching and Teacher Leadership (TTL) Program. For parents, a complete cellphone ban "can be scary," he says, "so schools have to consider how to alleviate that anxiety" - for example, by assuring parents they can always contact the office to reach their child.

Others believe that easily available cellphones actually pose a greater danger to students during such a situation. "It shouldn't be your top priority to use your phone during an emergency," says Elena J. "We'd just go all crazy calling our parents and we wouldn't be paying attention to the teachers" trying to keep them safe.

Another challenge? Students, for whom smartphone use is as pervasive and seemingly natural as breathing, may find it very difficult to do without it. Most teens are on their smartphones more than four hours a day, and they pick up their phones at a median of 51 times per day, with some doing so nearly 500 times a day, according to Common Sense Media. Mental health experts differ on whether overuse of a smartphone is a true addiction, but there's no question it can be very hard to get kids - or anyone else - to ignore their phones.

And is anything positive lost by banning phones at school? Can't they be a learning tool that enhances education? And practically, how can educators institute an effective ban to achieve the results they want?

One School's Approach

The educators who designed Cristo Rey Jesuit Seattle knew they had an opportunity to run an experiment, one they believed would greatly benefit their student body.

In contrast to existing schools trying to implement a new ban among students used to having phones in class and during breaks, "We have a rare opportunity to do things from the start, instead of doing a turnaround with cellphone bans," says Seltzer, who serves as vice president of the school's Corporate Work Study program.

Among the dozens of Cristo Rey schools nationally, 100% of graduates are accepted to four-year colleges, and they graduate from college at two times the rate of their socio-economic peers, Seltzer says, adding, "It's a proven model and a successful model."

But the COVID-19 pandemic severely impacted the educational experience of students everywhere, including the school's first cohort, who were in elementary school when it hit.

As school leaders contemplated how to best help them catch up, removing the distraction of phones seemed like low-hanging fruit.

"[We] need to ensure that our students continue to succeed in their college persistence, knowing they are often tasked with catchup work because they often haven't had access to high-quality and rigorous education prior to coming to our schools," Seltzer says. "The impact on learning or productivity in the classroom or workplace is stark when every minute counts, particularly for students that haven't had the same access to rigorous instruction that some students have access to."

The same with socialization. "If as soon as they leave the classroom, they pull out their phones, they're not there in the hallway with their peers in the same way," says Seltzer, who is on the school's executive leadership team that decided to adopt a no-phone policy. (Not all Cristo Rey schools do so.) "As a faith-based school, it is critical to our beliefs that we are a human family and to connect in person is the best way to create community." A no-phone policy "supports our goal in the uninterrupted focus on our classwork and our professional work in our work-study program."

Cristo Rey Seattle students put phones in their lockers in the morning and don't take them out again until they head home. That means they not only concentrate better in class but build real, in-person relationships during breaks and lunch, school leaders believe.

"This is rooted in research," she emphasizes, including the 2024 Norwegian public health report that notes the disproportionate negative impact of smartphones in schools on girls from lower socio-economic backgrounds.

The school launched in August 2024 with a three-week summer program to introduce students to workplace skills they will use in their corporate placements. Cellphones were excluded. "We got some grumbles," Seltzer says, with some students expressing they'd like access during lunchtime. Seltzer sees that as a measure of success, "a concession of them realizing, 'Maybe I don't need it all day.'"

Still, school leaders are open to seeing how, as the initial cohort adapts to the policy and then graduates to higher grades, they might adjust the no-phone policy for students who demonstrate an ability to use phones appropriately. Eventually, she says, "as our students grow and mature, we will be building opportunities to decide how to use [the phone] for executive functioning and calendaring."

Using Them as Tools

Louis Chugranis, a current student in the Online Master's in Education Program, would agree with that approach. A teacher since 2006 - today, he's a technology teacher at South Orangetown Middle School in Blauvelt, New York - Chugranis considers the smartphone "one of humankind's great inventions," which, with appropriate use, can be an educational asset.

Rather than a blanket ban, "I think we need to think more deliberately and intentionally about how to use smartphones in educational settings with our students," Chugranis says. Although he has ongoing concerns about cyberbullying and other negative aspects, he has also experienced smartphones as a useful tool; for example, for students in design class to photograph structural details in a building that they can model for their own work.

"If people are saying that smartphones should never be used in schools, I think that would be a myopic perspective," he says. "The question is, how do we use smartphones in school with students in an educationally appropriate way while preventing all those other uses?" That, he says, we haven't quite figured out yet.

Chugranis says he hopes to see thought leaders, including educational experts at the Ed School, and neuroscientists, physicians, psychologists, parents, and students, explore how to promote smartphone benefits for kids while minimizing the dangers.

"I think the real problem is not should we use them or not, but how can we use them safely and appropriately to improve learning for students and to improve teaching, because obviously they can be used as powerful teaching devices," he says.

Cole M. agrees that smartphones can be useful in the classroom, especially since school laptops are much slower at accessing educational apps and websites.

Phones "also pose as a great communication tool between students and teachers," he says, "like if you want to know what to do on this assignment, or for impromptu class updates." However, he's "not quite sure" whether the pros outweigh the cons.

Pereira also believes that phones, used properly, can be a useful tool given the enormous number of educational apps and assessment tools available. But whatever a school's policy, it should be consistently and equitably applied, he says. The policy should come from the top, rather than leaving it to individual teachers to administer so that students don't have different rules in different classes. "That can be challenging for teachers to manage," he says.

"We've heard over the last two to three years how hard it is for educators, that, 'We did not choose to give your child a phone and we're now in position of having to be the arbiter and manage it,'" explains Emily Weinstein, Ed.M.'14, Ed.D.'17, co-founder and executive director of the Ed School's new Center for Digital Thriving, a research center under Project Zero focused on developing a nuanced view of tech in our lives. "Because of that, a top-down policy can feel to some teachers like a huge relief because they aren't having to make decisions at the classroom level."

She advises administrators to recognize that dilemma and listen to teachers as a constituent group.

Include the Students

In fact, engaging and listening to stakeholders is key to a successful policy, insist Weinstein and Carrie James, the center's managing director and co-founder. And on issues of technology and the digital world, they care deeply about what young people think. Too often in these discussions, including the smartphone debate, adults make decisions without understanding the perspectives of a younger generation for whom the digital world is second nature.

Over the past decade, Weinstein and James have worked with thousands of students and hundreds of educators on digital and tech topics. They are co-authors of Behind Their Screens: What Teens are Facing (and Adults are Missing), which drew on the insights and viewpoints of 3,500 youth, and, in turn, spurred them to launch the center in the fall of 2023.

For educators considering smartphone and other technology policies, they have strong advice based on their research: make sure to include students. "We're not for or against cellphone bans - we see a lot of wisdom in these efforts - but we've learned that schools that take the time to listen [to students] seem to end up in interesting places," says Weinstein.

For one thing, they suggest holding listening sessions before introducing new policies. Survey students and parents about what is working well - or not - with an existing policy and ask what they wish decisionmakers knew about the pros and cons of any new policy, she advises.

"Carrie and I have found that a youth advisory is truly game changing," Weinstein says, "because there are blind spots we have as adults." Without a youth perspective, she says, "so often we end up missing the mark."

In their work, they've learned from youth "that sometimes adding is as important as subtracting," Weinstein says. "So, if you're subtracting cellphones, it's a natural opportunity to consider what you might need to introduce so you are enriching students' experiences." One school added tether ball sets to the playground. "Or you could add board games in the cafeteria, or you may hear what additional supports students need to feel safe" without phones.

By eliciting community input, educators have the opportunity to understand the reasons for any resistance to new rules; for example, a student may reveal they need a phone because they are the caregiver for a younger sibling. "That doesn't mean you can't go to a policy like a cellphone ban, but it means creating ways for communities to give feedback before the ban occurs or at least as you're gearing up for it," says Weinstein, who also suggests communicating to parents and students how you are dealing with their concerns.

Another piece of wisdom they've learned: when implementing new tech policies, "consistency in the early weeks of school makes a big difference," she says - like the gentle reminder Aniya received to put her cellphone away when she was texting her mom as a new student at Cristo Rey. Though the policy has been an adjustment, when asked if she likes her new school, Aniya smiles broadly. "Yes," she says. "Very much."
Elaine McArdle is a writer based in New York. Her story on chronic absenteeism appeared in the spring/summer 2024 issue

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Is it finally time to ban phones from schools?

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Why School Cellphone Bans Are a Bad Idea (Opinion)

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We cannot ignore the powerful relationship between students and their phones—and what they mean for equity in our most challenged schools.

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Should schools ban cellphones? — Harvard Gazette

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In the Harvard Thinking podcast, experts talk about the growing movement to restrict devices in K-12 classrooms.

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NYC Parents Sound Off About Plan to Ban Cellphones in Schools

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Adams: Social media addiction, student mental health, anonymous nastiness online, teachers as smartphone cops: why families say a ban is a good idea.

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The nation's largest school district could ban cell phones by January | CNN

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Adding to a growing list of school districts banning cell phones, the nation's largest could be moving to do the same as early as January.

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LITTLE ROCK, Ark. (AP) - Arkansas' Republican Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders and California's Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom have little in common ideologically, but the two have both been vocal supporters of an idea that's been rapidly gaining bipartisan ground in the states: Students' cellphones need to be banned during the school day.

At least eight states have enacted such bans over the past two years, and proposals are being considered in several more states this year.

Here is a look at the push by states for such bans.

Why are states banning cellphones at schools?

The push for cellphone bans has been driven by concerns about the impact screen time has on children's mental health and complaints from teachers that cellphones have become a constant distraction in the classroom.

Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy, who has called on Congress to require warning labels on social media platforms about their effects on young people's lives, has said schools need to provide phone-free times.

Nationally, 77% of U.S. schools say they prohibit cellphones at school for non-academic use, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. But that number is misleading. It does not mean students are following those bans or all those schools are enforcing them.

Kim Whitman, co-founder of the Phone Free Schools Movement, said the issue is catching on because parents and teachers in both red and blue states are struggling with the consequences of kids on mobile devices.

"It doesn't matter if you live in a big city or a rural town, urban or suburban, all children are struggling and need that seven-hour break from the pressures of phones and social media during the school day," she said.

What states are enacting bans?

At least eight states - California, Florida, Indiana, Louisiana, Minnesota, Ohio, South Carolina and Virginia - have enacted measures banning or restricting students' use of cellphones in schools.

The policies range widely. Florida was the first state to crack down on phones in school, passing a 2023 law that requires all public schools to ban cellphone use during class time and block access to social media on district Wi-Fi.

A 2024 California law requires the state's nearly 1,000 school districts to create their own cellphone policies by July 2026.

Several other states haven't banned phones, but have encouraged school districts to enact such restrictions or have provided funding to store phones during the day.

Sanders announced a pilot program last year providing grants to schools that adopt phone-free policies, and more than 100 school districts signed on. Sanders said she now wants to require all districts to ban cell phones during the school day, but the proposal will leave it to the districts on how to craft the policy.

"Teachers know (cellphones are) a huge distraction, but much bigger than that is that it is impacting the mental health of so many of our students," Sanders told reporters on Thursday.

Other governors recently calling for bans include Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire, who was sworn in this month, Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds and Nebraska Gov. Jim Pillen. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul has suggested she'll seek a statewide policy, but has not offered specifics.

What is the opposition to the bans?

The cellphone bans have faced opposition from some parents who say they need to be able to contact their children directly in case of emergency.

Some parents have pointed to recent school shootings where having access to cellphones was the only way some students were able to communicate with loved ones for what they thought might be the last time.

But supporters of the bans have noted that students' phones could pose additional dangers during an emergency by distracting students or by revealing their location during an active shooter situation.

Parents opposed to the ban have also said they want their children to have access to their phones for other needs, such as coordinating transportation.

Keri Rodrigues, president of the National Parents Union, said she agrees about the dangers of social media on children but that the bans sought by states are taking too broad of an approach. Banning the devices during the school day is not going to solve underlying issues like bullying or the dangers of social media, she said.

"We have not done our job as grown-ups to try to teach our kids the skills they need to actually navigate this technology," she said. "We've just kicked the can down the road and thrown them into the deep end of the pool when they're by themselves after school."

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Associated Press writers Hannah Fingerhut, Margery Beck, Holly Ramer and Anthony Izaguire contributed to this report.

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