It’s Time to Make Our Schools Phone Free - Horowitz

It’s Time to Make Our Schools Phone Free - Horowitz

The advent and ubiquity of the smartphone is wreaking havoc on American children and teenagers, a mounting body of research confirms.  The combination of text messaging and social media at our kids’ fingertips 24/7 has led to a significant increase in depression and anxiety, facilitated and worsened bullying, and stunted emotional growth.

 

As Jonathan Haidt persuasively argues in “The Anxious Generation,” we have transitioned from a play-based to a phone-based childhood and the consequences have been nothing short of disastrous.  As parents and a society, we now overprotect our kids in the real world, denying them the unsupervised experience they need to make their own mistakes and develop emotionally, and under-protect them online where they are spending hours each day.

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Along with contributing to the general problem the overuse of smartphones creates for our youth, access to phones during school hours is an impediment to quality education. During the school day, the median teen receives more than 50 notifications from apps on their phones and spends 43 minutes using their phone, finds a Common Sense Media study.   As Susan Linn, a psychologist who advocates for phone-free schools, put it in The American Prospect, “…there’s mounting evidence that learning suffers when schools allow students to carry around the digital equivalent of a 21-gun salute and a siren song repeatedly sounding in their head to prevent them from thinking.” 

 

The evidence Ms. Linn points to includes an international study that correlates the distraction caused by students’ use of cell phones during school hours to significantly lower scores on math assessments. Additionally, more than 7-in-10 (72%) American high school teachers view the distraction created by cell phones in their classrooms as a major problem, according to a Pew Research Center survey.

 

More school districts and individual schools around the nation and even a few states are taking this problem to heart, putting in place policies to restrict the use of cell phones.  According to teachers and administrators, however, these policies can be difficult to enforce if students still have access to their phones.  That's why phone-free school advocates push for the centralized removal of phones from students at the beginning of the school day, only to be returned to them at the end of the day.

 

The organization Phone Free spells out what it views as the best practice: “The best practice definition of a phone-free school is a “first bell to last bell” policy that requires all personal electronic devices (cell phones, smart watches, earbuds, AirPods, fitness trackers and Bluetooth connected headphones, etc.) are securely locked away and inaccessible for the entire school day.” Using pouches paid for by the RI Department of Education (RIDE), this is the approach employed since the beginning of the 2023-24 school year for Central Falls middle school and high school students. The results, according to teachers and students, are positive.

 

In the “Anxious Generation” Jonathan Haidt quotes Sherry Turkle’s apt description of life with smartphones, “We are forever elsewhere.”   For our children and teens the cost of being " elsewhere” during class time and throughout the school day are lower school performance and curbed social development.  The time for phone-free schools has arrived.