Teachers Divided on Hochul’s Plan to Ban Smartphones in New York Schools

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul signs a bill in New York on June 20, 2024. Office of the New York Governor via AP

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul has begun a series of meetings with parents, students, and teachers as part of her campaign aimed at curbing the use of smartphones in schools in the state. The governor blames the devices for waning attention spans and learning deficits.

“When it comes to smartphones in our schools, the status quo just isn’t working. I’m listening to educators, parents, and students across our state to ensure we take on this challenge and help our young people succeed,” the governor wrote on social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter, on July 15.

Ms. Hochul said she hopes to raise awareness about the mental, emotional, and social ills that she says stem directly from immersion in social media and the constant use of smartphones.

In taking these actions, the governor is bringing New York in line with other states that have acted to end or limit cellphone use among students. In July 2023, Florida implemented a ban on cellphone use in classrooms. Since then, the governors of Ohio and Indiana have signed bills limiting cellphone use, and similar legislation is on the table in other states.

But teachers in New York are divided on the merits of the governor’s plan, with some calling it overdue and others arguing that it will violate students’ basic freedoms and deprive them of a critical means of keeping up with news of the world and urgent family and personal matters.

Governor Makes Her Case

To kick off the tour, Ms. Hochul met with education officials from the Albany area and delivered an address at Guilderland High School, just outside the state Capitol.

During the address, the governor went to some lengths to depict the youth of today as in thrall to social media at the expense of schools’ traditional role of educating children with as few distractions as possible.

The governor referred to the psychosocial condition known as fear of missing out (FOMO) as a driver of teens’ habits.

Given the intense pressures children face to fit in, make friends, and keep abreast of gossip and banter in their social circles, a dependency on cellphones has become endemic, with deleterious effects on mental health, she said.

“This generation, more than others, is being subjected to distractions that never existed the way they are now. There’s a screen flashing in their face. They’re experiencing FOMO—are they missing out on something at this very moment?” Ms. Hochul said.

The governor cited a Pew Research poll showing that 72 percent of high school teachers think that cellphones pose a major distraction for the students they seek to educate. In contrast, only 33 percent of middle school teachers and 6 percent of elementary school teachers identify this as a concern, the poll found.

While many of the schools and districts participating in the survey have one or another policy on the books that, in theory, should limit cellphone use, 30 percent of the teachers in the districts in question say the policies are hard if not impossible to enforce, the survey noted.

All told, about 95 percent of U.S. students in the 13 to 17 age range have access to smartphones, a separate Pew Research study found.

Ms. Hochul, who, in her July 15 address, described herself as “hardwired” to show concern about young people because she herself is a devoted mother, has made addressing the pervasive immersion in social media a centerpiece of her agenda for the state. Her listening tour comes on the heels of a legislative package she signed in June, enacting a pair of far-reaching laws.

The Stop Addictive Feeds Exploitation (SAFE) For Kids Act forces social media companies to limit feeds classified as addictive for users younger than the age of 18 unless they have parental consent.

The other major piece of legislation, the New York Child Data Protection Act, bars online platforms from collecting and sharing the personal data of users younger than 18 unless they can demonstrate informed consent or that the gathering and dissemination of such data is absolutely essential to the site’s nature and purpose.

nimito/Shutterstock

Teachers React

For some school officials, the governor’s statewide campaign to raise awareness about cellphone use is consistent in spirit with plans they have pursued at a local school district level, even if they have not yet reached the same conclusions as the governor.

Joseph Hochreiter, superintendent of schools for the City District of Albany, noted that he and his colleagues have launched a Cell Phone Task Force that aims to track and study the use of smartphones among students as soon as the new school year gets underway.

But the task force is not committed to one outcome over another. Mr. Hochreiter described it as objective and open to seeing where its research leads.

“We are looking forward to the committee’s work over the next many months, as well as feedback from our students and families that will help inform this process,” Mr. Hochreiter told The Epoch Times.

“If any updates to our policies and procedures are recommended through this process, we will consider implementing those changes for the 2025–26 school year.”

Upping the Game

Other teachers say the issue is far more clear-cut and the time for weighing the costs and benefits of cellphone use is long over.

David Blanchard, superintendent of schools for the Schoharie Central School District in central New York, said young people’s all-consuming use of smartphones has been a social disaster. Ms. Hochul’s plans elevate to a statewide level a campaign that he and his colleagues have pursued vigorously in their district.

“Frankly, I think the governor’s approach is really in lockstep with what school districts need to do. Having smartphones in the hands of students when they’re supposedly in the classroom trying to learn is counterintuitive,” he told The Epoch Times.

“Teachers do not want to compete with cellphones, so for nine periods every day, teachers tell students to put their phones away, and students, because they’re so addicted, struggle to do it.”

Mr. Blanchard described the near-universal cellphone use among students as a factor that warps and perverts traditional social interactions almost beyond recognition, opening up young people to a constant barrage of sensory and informational stimuli that affect their moods in ways unrelated to their immediate surroundings.

“You have a smartphone on you, and at any time, a tweet comes out or a message shows up in your inbox and it affects your mood—making you angry or happy or sad. And that happens in the middle of a classroom, where you’re trying to learn and engage with other students,” he said.

Overreliance on digital devices stunts young people’s social development, making them less emotionally intelligent, empathetic, resourceful, and capable in person, according to Mr. Blanchard. Students dividing their time unevenly between their cellphones and those around them are less attuned to their immediate physical surroundings and less able to understand how and why conflicts develop, he said.

For all these reasons, Mr. Blanchard and his colleagues in the Schoharie Central School District decided two years ago to enact strict limits on the use of cellphones, smartwatches, and earplugs in local schools. The results were swift and positive, although not without a period of adjustment, he said.

“We saw things happen immediately,” he said. “More students enrolled in elective classes, because their take was, ‘If I can’t be on my phone, I may as well take this class.’ At the same time, our student counseling office was inundated with students who didn’t know how to resolve a conflict, because they were so used to texting.”

Mr. Blanchard dismissed concerns about the enforceability of such a ban, saying the temptation to text and talk on a cellphone is much lower when a student’s friends are not all doing the same thing. He argued that in an emergency, such as an active shooter situation, phones will not help pupils receive emergency messages and instructions but will be a distraction. Moreover, responding police are likelier to shoot someone mistakenly if they see an object in the person’s hand, he said.

He said Ms. Hochul’s campaign is a necessary measure to address a mental health and educational crisis that addiction to cellphones and social media has created in New York state.

The X logo on a smartphone screen in Los Angeles on July 31, 2023. Chris Delmas/AFP via Getty Images

Cutting Off the Flow

But others in the educational realm strongly oppose the effort to ban smartphone use and explicitly criticize the idea that young people should not have access to these platforms.

Michael Alcazar, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, described the targets of Ms. Hochul’s campaign as the most direct link some people have to what is going on outside a classroom’s walls.

“For many young people, cellphones and social media are their primary means of staying connected to the world. This is their news media. My students don’t watch TV or follow traditional news outlets; instead, they stay updated on current events through social media apps,” he told The Epoch Times.

Mr. Alcazar said it is not hard to turn the argument that cellphones are deleterious to mental health on its head.

“Phones help young people maintain relationships with friends and family and provide easy access to educational resources and information. For my introverted students, cellphones allow them to communicate at their own pace and in their own time, reducing the pressure of face-to-face interaction,” he said.

However, Mr. Alcazar acknowledged the dangers of unchecked immersion in these technologies and media.

“The constant barrage of information and social interactions on social media can be overwhelming and exhausting for young people. Excessive use of cellphones can lead to feelings of isolation and loneliness,” he said.

Ms. Hochul’s office did not respond to a request for comment before publication.