After decades in the classroom, award-winning teacher Steve Gardiner, of Billings, Montana, became acutely aware of a new problem making it difficult for his high-school students to learn.
Ironically, it was the so-called smartphone.
“The phones were disruptive and distracting—the most disruptive and distracting thing in the classroom in my 38 years of teaching,” Mr. Gardiner, now retired, told The Epoch Times.
“Students could not stop looking at them. And when they weren’t looking at them, they were thinking about looking at them. I called it an addiction.”
Experts now are calling attention to how smartphone use in the classroom can have negative effects on learning and safety at school. They show evidence that suggests allowing students to keep the devices with them during the school day leads to poorer academic performance, and sometimes even compromised safety and an increased chance of devastating consequences of bullying.
Mr. Gardiner takes teaching—and impediments to it—seriously. He holds a doctorate in education, served three years on the board of directors of the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards. He was Montana’s Teacher of the Year in 2008.
While teaching English at Billings Senior High School, he was so concerned about the impact of phones on learning that he conducted an informal survey. He asked eight business owners in town how they addressed employee use of cell phones on the job.
“It was amazing,” Mr. Gardiner said. “All but one had a variation of the same policy, and that was that texting on the job was not allowed, and an employee would be given two warnings, if caught texting, and after that, he would be terminated.”
Teens Tethered to Phones
As the government response to the COVID-19 pandemic caused social isolation and prolonged absences from school, children’s time online increased dramatically.
Even as quarantine restrictions were reversed, the authors wrote, “screen use remains persistently elevated.”
Almost all students have smartphones now.
“Getting a smartphone is now a rite of passage for most children and adolescents in the United States,” states Common Sense Media in its 2023 study titled “Constant Companion: A Week in the Life of a Young Person’s Smartphone Use.”
The study notes that “about half of U.S. children get their smartphone by age 11.”
Common Sense Media—citing its own data and research from Peggy Rideout and the Pew Research Center—reported that 88 percent to 95 percent of teens (aged 13 to 18) have their own smartphone.
Shortly after Apple introduced the iPhone in 2007, almost all schools implemented some sort of ban on phones.
But the breadth of the ban has fluctuated over the years.
In 2009, 90 percent of U.S. schools had bans on cell phones in class, according to the National Education Association (NEA).
By 2015, only 67 percent of schools had cell phone bans.
In 2020, the number of schools banning smartphones had jumped back up to 77 percent of schools, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.
Of the teens surveyed, 62 percent said they could have their phones in school but not in class, and 24 percent were not allowed to have phones on school property. Of those who attended a school with a total ban, 65 percent brought their phones to school anyway, and 58 percent texted in class.
While in class, 64 percent of teens said they had texted, and 25 percent had made or received a call, researchers found.
Growing Opposition to Phones in School
Arnold Glass understands well the lure and attraction of the phone to students.Mr. Glass, a professor of cognitive psychology at Rutgers University, led a team that, in 2018, published the first academic study documenting how cell phones in classrooms lower student test scores.
“The negative effects of cell phones in the classroom were immediately obvious, which led to the initial bans,” Mr. Glass told The Epoch Times.
“However, there was pushback from parents and school boards, and principals caved in to what they knew was a destructive policy” and allowed students to bring them to school.
“Now school boards are being sued by parents for outcomes—including bullying—that are consequences of permitting cell phones in schools,” he said. “So, the self-protective bans are being reinstated.”
And in Florida, the school board of Orange County Public Schools (OCPS)—the eighth largest public school district in the country—instituted an even more restrictive cell phone policy than the state law.
Under the new regulations, approved in August, students are prohibited, except in an emergency, from using their phones at any time during the school day. Students are allowed to have their phones on them, as long as they’re kept in a backpack.
OCPS now is conducting a survey asking students, parents, and teachers about the policy and how it can be improved. The survey results will be released after winter break.
Yet already there is positive feedback on the phone restrictions, OCPS media relations manager Michael Ollendorff told The Epoch Times.
“Anecdotally, we are seeing an improvement in grades, and more positive in-person interactions among students,” Mr. Ollendorff said.
“We are also finding that during lunchtime—when in the past kids were busy on their phones—they’re now playing games, including pickleball and cornhole.”
Lawmakers in Congress also are considering the topic of cell phones in school.
China, the United Kingdom, France, the Netherlands, and other nations have established variations of bans on phones in class.
Proof of the Problem
“Dividing attention in the classroom reduces exam performance,” Mr. Glass showed in a 2017 study published in the academic journal Educational Psychology. He co-authored the work with Mengxue Kang, a fellow professor of cognitive psychology at Rutgers.The study is often referenced by those advocating for bans or curtailed access to phones in school.
“I’ve studied learning and memory for over 50 years,” Mr. Glass said. One of his main pursuits has been “to create instruction tools to improve performance in the classroom.”
Research and analysis of the academic performance of his students from 2005 through 2010 showed that the technology and tools he implemented in his teaching and in the classroom environment were producing positive results, he said.
“The students were doing better in their exams every year until 2010, when we hit a ceiling, and then marks started falling, and I needed to see why,” Mr. Glass said.
“I understood that throughout all of classroom history, until about 2010, when students were in the classroom, they basically had three options: pay attention to the teacher, talk to the person next to them, or sleep. And if the teacher insisted on no talking, there were two options: pay attention to the teacher or sleep.”
Just before 2010, Mr. Glass and teachers around the world saw students engaging in a fourth option—spending class time on smartphones.
“Many of the students only occasionally looked up at the teacher,” Mr. Glass said. “I was almost sure that this activity was going to hurt academic performance. But I needed to prove it.”
So, he framed up an experiment that involved two classes of the same course across an entire semester. Each class had about 250 students. One of the classes met on Tuesday, the other on Thursday.
In each class, students were allowed to use their phones during half of the lecture periods and were not allowed to use them during the other half of the periods. For periods in which cell phones were prohibited, proctors helped enforce the ban.
“Sure enough, at the end of the semester, when you look at performances on exams on material taught when the students could look at their phones, those grades were at least a letter grade below,” he said.
The students who looked at their phones not only hurt their own academic performance, but they also seemed to hurt the learning of others, who didn’t look at their phones, he said.
“Students not looking at their phones were distracted by actions of the other students in the class,” he said.
No subsequent studies have contradicted the findings, Mr. Glass said.
A Tool for Bullying
Smartphone use at school has additional negative consequences, Mr. Glass said.“Phones in the classroom and in the hallways and bathrooms are used to supercharge bullying in schools,” he said.
“Before the students carried phones, a kid might have gotten tripped and suffered brief embarrassment, but would then steer clear of the kid or kids who did the tripping.”
Now, he said, acts of bullying are planned and filmed with a phone, “and then video of the kid being tripped and falling down is shared to the entire world online. The humiliation the kid endures, which might be on top of other problems he or she is experiencing, might push the kid to suicide.”
In October, a court ruled that New York City must pay $200,000 to a girl who was formed to perform a sex act on a male, while two others watched, and one of them filmed with his phone. The attack happened in an isolated staircase at Tech Transit High School. The video was posted to TikTok and Snapchat.
“There are many medical and health care professionals and scientists who have identified smartphone addiction as a real addiction, and one that poses many problems and threats to the mental health of young people,” Mr. Glass said.
Japan officially classifies the intense attachment of youth to their phones, especially for the purpose of gaming, as an addiction, he said.
And China has used state power to try to curb the amount of time young people spend on their phones.
Opposition to Bans
Victor Pereira taught for 14 years in Boston public schools before taking on his role as an instructor at the Harvard School of Education.“I certainly see and recognize the many problems that cell phones present in the classroom and understand why schools would default to bans on the devices,” Mr. Pereira, told The Epoch Times.
“And the problems are tied to that during COVID, during a period of isolation, phones became a lifeline for young people. Kids and teens became more dependent on the devices.”
Mr. Pereira believes there’s a place in the classroom for smartphones, and teachers and administrators can manage their use and reduce their negative influence, even enlist phones to help students learn.
“There is a level of convenience and value with this device that fits easily in your pocket and can be quickly and easily accessed and which holds powerful applications that assist students in learning,” he said.
But good policies “must be enforced and consistent across all schools.”
Allowing for controlled use of phones in class can be an exercise in preparing students for the workplace, helping them manage their time, and developing “functioning skills” that will allow them to complete tasks efficiently, even in environments with competing screens.
Some parents also oppose strict restrictions on phones in school, worrying that they will result in severing a needed communication link to their children.
Parents and caregivers who had constant access to their children during remote learning have been reluctant to give that up. Some fear losing touch with their kids during an emergency, such as a school shooting.
Shannon Moser, who has students in 8th and 9th grades in Rochester, New York, said she felt parents were being pushed away when the Greece Central School District began locking away students’ phones this year. There’s a form of accountability, she said, when students are able to record what goes on around them.
“Everything is just so politicized, so divisive,“ Ms. Moser said. ”And I think parents just have a general fear of what’s happening with their kids during the day.”
Phone-Free Classrooms
Those opposed to smartphones in class point out that many students now have school-assigned computers they can use for research and collaboration on assignments.And some argue that having phones in class might make students less safe during an emergency.
One of the nation’s leading experts on school safety said that in the case of an active shooter on campus, students with phones in classrooms can add to the peril of those in the building.
“What students, staff, and parents need to know from a school-safety perspective is, during an emergency, if kids’ attention is on their phones, it is not on the adults who should be giving students very specific directions,” said Kenneth Trump, president of National School Safety and Security Services (no relation to the former president).
In a crisis, children on phones can “create communications challenges for school leaders,” Mr. Trump told The Epoch Times.
Problems arise, he said, “as rumors and misinformation that used to be spread in hours or days is now spread in seconds and minutes, and the misinformation heightens ambiguity, uncertainty, and anxiety in school communities.”
The resulting “communications crisis can become greater than the actual security incident itself,” he said.
Mr. Glass agrees that students on phones can undermine an organized and effective response in an emergency.
Teachers and security staff should “direct students what to do and not to do“ in a crisis, Mr. Glass said. ”You don’t need all these kids using their phones to ping their parents and each other.”
That’s just another reason to remove phones from classrooms “for all grade levels from kindergarten through graduate school,” Mr. Glass said.
“They are never appropriate.”
