Pros and Cons, Current Status of Smart Phones in Schools
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improve learning and reduce bullying, but others
say they are still a useful tool for student safety.
Pros and Cons, Current Status of SmartPhones in Schools
Pros of banning cellphones in schools:
1. Improved learning and reduced distractions in the classroom
2. Better student focus and engagement
3. Potential reduction in bullying and social media-related issues
4. Positive impact on students' mental health
5. Encourages deeper engagement with academic material
Cons of banning cellphones in schools:
1. Potential safety concerns, as phones can be useful for emergencies
2. Loss of opportunities to teach responsible technology use and digital literacy
3. Difficulty in enforcing bans consistently
4. Disruption of students' sense of connection, especially post-pandemic
5. Potential missed opportunities for using phones as learning tools
Current status:
1. Growing trend: There's a broader push by officials in various states to limit cellphone use in schools.
2. State-level actions:
- At least 11 states have passed laws or enacted policies that ban or restrict students' use of cellphones in schools statewide or recommend local districts enact their own bans or restrictive policies.
- California's governor is urging school districts to restrict student cellphone use on campus.
- South Carolina's State Board of Education is expected to approve guidelines on limiting student phone access.
- Other states like Utah, Florida, and Louisiana are also considering similar measures.
3. School district policies:
- Some large school districts, such as Los Angeles Unified and New York City, are implementing policies to keep phones from students during class time.
- As of 2020, 77% of U.S. schools had moved to prohibit cellphones for nonacademic purposes.
4. International context:
- France outlawed cellphone use for schoolchildren under 15 in 2018.
- China banned phones country-wide for schoolchildren in 2023.
5. Ongoing debate:
- While there's a trend towards more restrictions, there's still debate about the best approach.
- Some experts argue for integrating phones as learning tools rather than outright bans.
- Others suggest classroom-by-classroom strategies may be more effective than blanket bans.
The issue remains complex, with policymakers, educators, and experts continuing to weigh the benefits and drawbacks of cellphone use in educational settings.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom nudges school districts to restrict student cellphone use – San Diego Union-Tribune
By SOPHIE AUSTIN
SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — California and South Carolina could become the next states to limit cellphone use in schools, with state officials planning to take up the issue Tuesday.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom is sending letters to school districts, urging them to restrict students’ use of smartphones on campus. And the South Carolina State Board of Education is expected to approve guidelines Tuesday on limiting student phone access.
The efforts mark a broader push by officials in Utah, Florida, Louisiana and elsewhere to try to limit cellphone use in schools in order to reduce distractions in the classroom — and address the impacts of social media on the mental health of children and teens.
But progress can be challenging. Cellphone bans are already in place at many schools, but they aren’t always enforced.
Districts should “act now” to help students focus at school by restricting their smartphone use, Newsom said in the letter. He also cited risks to the well-being of young people, a subject which garnered renewed attention in June after U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy called on Congress to require warning labels on social media platforms.
“Every classroom should be a place of focus, learning, and growth,” the Democrat said in his letter. “Working together, educators, administrators, and parents can create an environment where students are fully engaged in their education, free from the distractions on the phones and pressures of social media.”
Newsom said earlier this summer that he was planning to address student smartphone use, and his letter says he is working on it with the state Legislature. Tuesday’s announcement is not a mandate but nudges districts to act.
Newsom signed a law in 2019 granting districts the authority to regulate student smartphone access during school hours.
The debate over banning cellphones in schools to improve academic outcomes is not new. But officials often resort to bans as a solution rather than find ways to integrate digital devices as tools for learning, said Antero Garcia, a professor at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education.
“What I’m struck by is society’s inability to kind of move forward and find other kinds of solutions other than perpetually going back to this ‘Should we ban devices?’ conversation as the primary solution to something that hasn’t worked,” Garcia said.
“Suggesting curtailing cellphone use in schools is a great thing to say,” he added. “What that means for the middle school teacher come next week when many schools start is a very different picture.”
Some schools and districts in California have already taken action. The Santa Barbara Unified and Los Angeles Unified school districts passed bans on student cellphone use in recent years.
But some school board advocates say the state should not go further by passing a blanket ban on cellphone use. That decision should be left up to districts, said Troy Flint, spokesperson for the California School Boards Association.
“Cellphone usage and social media usage on campus is certainly a serious issue and one that deserves a close examination,” Flint said. “But those decisions are very specific to certain schools and certain communities, and they need to be made at a local level.”
There is no cure-all for protecting students from the risks posed by smartphones, but the state is “opening up a conversation” on how districts could act, said David Goldberg, president of the California Teachers Association.
“It makes sense for us as adults to be looking and trying to take care of students and allow them to have safe spaces to learn,” he said. “How we do it is also very important — that we make sure that we bring students into these conversations and educators into these conversations.”
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Austin is a corps member for The Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues. Follow Austin on X: @sophieadanna
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Originally Published:
Which States Ban or Restrict Cellphones in Schools?
The iPhone debuted 17 years ago on June 29, 2007, launching the modern smartphone era that virtually every current K-12 student has been born into.
But students’ access to their devices during the school day stands to be dramatically curtailed. A growing wave of education leaders and policymakers are adopting new cellphone policies, with the debate swinging decidedly in favor of tighter restrictions. Limiting access, they argue, will benefit students’ mental health and learning.
At least 11 states have passed laws or enacted policies that ban or restrict students’ use of cellphones in schools statewide or recommend local districts enact their own bans or restrictive policies, according to an Education Week analysis.
There's plenty of other action, too. Leaders in the two largest school districts—Los Angeles and New York—are pushing forward with policies to keep phones from students during classtime in the school year ahead, with other small and mid-size districts doing something similar.
Governors from both parties have called for bans, and in a few states, they’ve already signed legislation that requires schools to crack down on students’ phone use during the school day. Bills to limit students’ use of cellphones in schools are pending in a few additional states.
Do phones belong in schools?
Bans may help protect classroom focus, but districts need to stay mindful of students’ sense of connection, experts say
Students around the world are being separated from their phones.
In 2020, the National Center for Education Statistics reported that 77 percent of U.S. schools had moved to prohibit cellphones for nonacademic purposes. In September 2018, French lawmakers outlawed cellphone use for schoolchildren under the age of 15. In China, phones were banned country-wide for schoolchildren last year.
Supporters of these initiatives have cited links between smartphone use and bullying and social isolation and the need to keep students focused on schoolwork.
77% Of U.S. schools moved to ban cellphones for nonacademic purposes as of 2020, according to the National Center for Education Statistics
But some Harvard experts say instructors and administrators should consider learning how to teach with tech instead of against it, in part because so many students are still coping with academic and social disruptions caused by the pandemic. At home, many young people were free to choose how and when to use their phones during learning hours. Now, they face a school environment seeking to take away their main source of connection.
“Returning back to in-person, I think it was hard to break the habit,” said Victor Pereira, a lecturer on education and co-chair of the Teaching and Teaching Leadership Program at the Graduate School of Education.
Through their students, he and others with experience both in the classroom and in clinical settings have seen interactions with technology blossom into important social connections that defy a one-size-fits-all mindset. “Schools have been coming back, trying to figure out, how do we readjust our expectations?” Pereira added.
It’s a hard question, especially in the face of research suggesting that the mere presence of a smartphone can undercut learning.
Michael Rich, an associate professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School and an associate professor of social and behavioral sciences at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, says that phones and school don’t mix: Students can’t meaningfully absorb information while also texting, scrolling, or watching YouTube videos.
“The human brain is incapable of thinking more than one thing at a time,” he said. “And so what we think of as multitasking is actually rapid-switch-tasking. And the problem with that is that switch-tasking may cover a lot of ground in terms of different subjects, but it doesn’t go deeply into any of them.”
Pereira’s approach is to step back — and to ask whether a student who can’t resist the phone is a signal that the teacher needs to work harder on making a connection. “Two things I try to share with my new teachers are, one, why is that student on the phone? What’s triggering getting on your cell phone versus jumping into our class discussion, or whatever it may be? And then that leads to the second part, which is essentially classroom management.
“Design better learning activities, design learning activities where you consider how all of your students might want to engage and what their interests are,” he said. He added that allowing phones to be accessible can enrich lessons and provide opportunities to use technology for school-related purposes.
Mesfin Awoke Bekalu, a research scientist in the Lee Kum Sheung Center for Health and Happiness at the Chan School, argues that more flexible classroom policies can create opportunities for teaching tech-literacy and self-regulation.
“There is a huge, growing body of literature showing that social media platforms are particularly helpful for people who need resources or who need support of some kind, beyond their proximate environment,” he said. A study he co-authored by Rachel McCloud and Vish Viswanath for the Lee Kum Sheung Center for Health and Happiness shows that this is especially true for marginalized groups such as students of color and LGBTQ students. But the findings do not support a free-rein policy, Bekalu stressed.
In the end, Rich, who noted the particular challenges faced by his patients with attention-deficit disorders and other neurological conditions, favors a classroom-by-classroom strategy. “It can be managed in a very local way,” he said, adding: “It’s important for parents, teachers, and the kids to remember what they are doing at any point in time and focus on that. It’s really only in mono-tasking that we do very well at things.”
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