The Push to Ban Phones in School
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My colleague Natasha Singer on the growing crackdown and the contentious debate that it has prompted. It's Tuesday, September 3rd.

Natasha, welcome back to the show. Thanks so much for having me back. So, Natasha, as longtime listeners of the show will know, you cover technology in schools. And we wanted to have you back on the show today because this is the week that many kids across the country, including here in New York, are going back to school. And you've been reporting on a growing debate that's really become the talk of the new school year. Tell us about it.

We're seeing this incredible wave of one state after another trying to crack down on student cell phone use in schools. And because so many states are passing these laws so quickly, it has become the back-to-school story, students and cell phones. And it started last year when Florida was the first state to pass a law that barred students from using their phones during class time.

And this year, we've seen at least eight states, both red states like Indiana and blue states like Minnesota, pass laws that either restrict student use of phones, like ban them during class, ban them during the entire school day, or require school districts to limit student use of the phones. Teachers say students are spending so much time on their phone that it detracts from learning, and that teachers are spending so much time getting kids to put down their phone that it detracts from teaching.

So this is really the education world really starting to try to get its head around, you know, what has really become kind of a scourge in American life, which is phone addiction and, you know, this problem that we all in some ways struggle with. You know, we had the Surgeon General on a few months ago, and he thought kids' access to the Internet and to social media had become so pernicious that he was actually recommending warning labels.

I think it definitely taps into mounting anxiety in the United States that cell phones are contributing to mental health problems among young people. And there are certainly studies showing that kids who spend an unhealthy amount of time online, compulsive use of social media and phones is associated with depression and isolation and thoughts of self-harm. I don't think we have evidence that it's actually causal.

So I think there's a major question here as we're putting these phone bans in effect. But the practical problem in schools is the phones are detracting from learning. And that is something that every teacher says. I mean, honestly, this seems kind of like a no brainer. I mean, banning phones in school seems basically like something that for the most part, everybody would agree with. It does seem like a no brainer.

And there are a lot of folks in favor of it, but there's also a lot of debate. And so, for example, we see that the majority of parents in surveys say that they agree that cell phone use should be limited, but 50% of parents say that there should be some cell phone access during school. And while the laws are happening really quickly, the larger discussion is far from resolved. And that's why we're all talking about it, because people have such strong views on all sides.

Okay, so these bans are becoming law really quickly, just over the past year. But these debates over kids and cell phones and technology in schools have been happening for a very long time. What's the historical precedent here? It starts in the 1980s when there's a boom in the illegal drug trade and kids are using pagers and phones to sell and buy drugs.

And you see schools in the 1980s begin to ban students from bringing pagers and cell phones to school premises, right? It's not like you keep it in your bag. You can't bring it into school. And then as more and more kids get phones in the 90s, they're ringing in class. They're beeping in class and it becomes a distraction. And so on top of the drug stuff, you see schools ban them as a distraction.

And then in 1999, there's the mass shooting at Columbine High School in Colorado and students are killed and it's devastating. And it's really the first mass school shooting that is on the radar of American culture and education changes dramatically.

And school security changes. And along with that, parents now want to be able to get hold of their kids during an emergency. And schools lift the cell phone bans because suddenly every parent wanted to be able to reach their child in an emergency. And that made perfect sense to everybody. And then cell phones change, right?

Suddenly they become these powerful mini computers. And so you have kids walking around school with these powerful devices and they are completely fixated. They're scrolling, they're clicking, they're liking photos, they're filming, they're posting photos. And it becomes another major issue in schools.

So this is where we start to see the pushback over tech. This is starting to sound familiar, right? In our current time, concerns over screen time, how addictive these phones really are, and a growing concern over what that means for young people. I think that's absolutely true. The iPhone and social media change everything. And in the middle of that concern increasing, the pandemic happens. And because

We were isolated. And because many schools were closed, now you have a whole generation of elementary, middle and high school kids at home, essentially left to their devices. Schools are ever more reliant on technology and kids, their parents may be working, their parents may be somewhere else. They are using their phones more often.

to entertain themselves, to talk to each other, they become much more virtually dependent. And then when the pandemic is over, they come back to school with a different relationship to technology and a much more virtual life than they had before the pandemic. Okay, so the pandemic supercharges this connection between kids and their technology. What's the result of all of this? What happens?

The result is that you have students coming back to school, many of whom are more comfortable on their phones, talking to each other through group text message, more comfortable learning online than in person. And that worries parents and child psychologists and teachers because you not only see more distraction, but you

One of the things that happens is there's a growing concern that there has been technology overuse and that the two together, phones in school are combustible and a detriment to learning. And so you see a pushback among teachers, among some parents to try to limit phone use or take away the phones in school.

to enable kids to concentrate more on their schoolwork and have more in-person experiences. Okay, so it sounds like this is the beginning of the movement to ban phones. Where does it start?

It started last year in Florida, where a Republican state lawmaker named Brad Yeager started worrying about what cell phones and social media might be doing to kids. I have children of my own and teenage sons, so I see it day in and day out. My wife has worked with youth for 10 years in this high school system, so we see it in and out.

And he has five kids and he'd been reading studies about how much time students are spending on their phones and how many notifications they're getting during the school day. And we know that there's addiction issues with social media. Psychologists across the country time and time again report the negative effects of social media on our youth. And he wanted to do something. And so he introduced this bill. I think this is a common sense, bipartisan approach to this. I think that, you know. And even in a Republican state like Florida, it is a really popular bipartisan issue.

Rep Yeager's bill passed the Florida House and the Florida Senate unanimously, and it becomes a lighthouse state for other states and governors wanting to pass similar laws. So when do things start to happen in those other states? So what happened this year was this spring. Parents, listen up. A cell phone ban during class time now coming to your child's school. The governor just signed that measure in the last week.

resembling Florida's. A new law prohibits students from having cell phones on their person during the school day. A ban on cell phone use is now a part of South Carolina's state budget. Louisiana passes a law and South Carolina passes a law. There is a growing list of lawmakers that are pushing for restrictions to cell phone usage in Pennsylvania schools. Pennsylvania and Delaware and Minnesota and Ohio passed laws also. The state of Virginia is

Cracking down on students using cell phones in public schools with a half million dollar initiative. And then it's become an issue for governors. Governor Glenn Youngkin has issued an executive order to establish cell phone free education. Glenn Youngkin, the governor of Virginia, issued an executive order.

that will require state agencies to create cell phone free education policies for schools to adopt by the start of next year. California Governor Gavin Newsom putting out the call to all school districts to restrict cell phones in the classroom. And then also other governors. Now I'd like to take a moment to talk about

Cell phones in our schools... ...including the governors of California and New York, are rushing in to say they too are going to work with their state legislatures. It's hard enough for adults to pull themselves away from cell phones. I can't imagine how hard it is for these young people as well. ...to pass their own state laws restricting cell phone use in schools. The status quo is not working for our children in particular. It's time to start figuring out solutions here.

Okay, so this is really happening. It is now a gathering trend. But Natasha, how are states actually doing it? Like, how do you go about banning a kid from using their phone all day and enforcing that? I think that that is the crucial question, and it is really complicated.

It's one thing for a state to announce kids can't use their phones at school. And it's a whole other thing for schools to actually stop kids from using their phones during class. We'll be right back.

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Different states have implemented different rules. And then even from school district to school district, there are these differences. One of the main differences is in some states and schools, students are not allowed to use their phone during class, right? So they walk into the classroom and they cannot use their phone during instructional time.

In other places, kids cannot use their phones from the moment they get to school to the moment they leave. So maybe they're allowed to use it on the school bus, but when they arrive at school, no more phone until the end of the day. And different kinds of rules end up with different kinds of enforcement. So I went last year after Florida passed this new law to see how it was going.

And I went specifically to Orange County Public Schools, which is in the Orlando area, because they went further than Florida and banned student cell phone use during the entire school day. Oh, wow. And I wanted to see what that would look like. And I went to visit the school Timber Creek High School, which has several thousand students. It's a huge school. And they all eat lunch in a communal outdoor space.

Now, at Timber Creek, students were allowed to carry their phones. They were just supposed to keep them in their backpack or turned off and put away.

To enforce that during lunch, there were security folks who patrolled lunch who sat on these black Yamaha golf carts. And if a guard on a golf cart saw a kid take out their phone and start using it, then the kid would get nabbed by the guard, put on the golf cart, driven to the front office where they have to hand over their phone and put the phone in cell phone jail for the rest of the day. And the student gets like a receipt and then they go off.

So that's some pretty aggressive policing of it. Right. And the security guard told me also that he looked at the videos of the hallways. And if students were using their phone in the hallways, which they weren't supposed to do, he would sometimes go to class and take them out of class and take them to the front office to deposit their phone.

So that is one way of enforcing a ban. And let me just say that the district was really happy with the outcomes because, like, they got pickleball during lunch and ping pong and kids played Twister and talked to each other and had lunch together. And, like, principal was saying to me before the phone ban, kids didn't even talk to each other during lunch, right? They just looked at their phones. And so the school felt like and teachers felt like the outcome was great.

In other districts, there are rules that you have to put your phone in your locker during the school day or you're required to put it in a lockable bag that's magnetically locked. And you like walk up to school and folks are standing out front and they magnetically lock your bag and you carry your phone in a locked bag for the rest of the day. And then there are other districts where teachers can do what they choose, right? They have leeway to ban the phones or not.

And so I spoke to this history teacher in San Antonio, Texas, and he had bought this hanging cell phone container that he put on the wall from Amazon, which has these pockets. And every student has to put their phone in a different numbered pocket at the beginning of class. The pockets are big enough where kids can charge their phone during class. And then at the end of the day, they can collect their phone.

From the pocket on the wall and go off to the next class. So it kind of the other side of the spectrum of restrictiveness. This is just kind of up to the discretion of the teacher. Right. But you also have to understand that I hear from teachers, parents and kids that there's all kinds of ways around these. Like kids have dummy phones that you put in your locker and you carry your other phone around. So for every rule, there's a way around the rule.

So what happens to a kid if they get caught doing that? Again, there are different consequences and different enforcement. In some schools, you get several tries. The first time, you know, you just have to put your phone away. The second time, your phone might be confiscated and put in the central office. It may be that, like, if you are a repeat attacker,

Okay, so it sounds like there's lots of variation with these bans and how they work, which I imagine is part of the reason that there's so much debate about them, as you mentioned. Yeah.

What has been the reaction from students and teachers and parents? What are people telling you?

Well, it's really interesting because we asked readers to weigh in and tell us what they felt about this. And we heard from more than 1,100 parents and teachers and principals and students. And teachers are largely positive, and so are school administrators. They were really clear about harms. So that high school teacher in Texas I told you about wrote in to say that in his school—

kids premeditated fights on their phone. They used text messages to arrange like, we're going to beat up so-and-so. And then their friends would be there on hand to film the beating before the kid even knew that they were going to be attacked, right? And so he said to the school, like, let's have kids turn in their phones before they leave the classroom, before they go to the bathroom or something. And so they can't bring their phone to a fight.

And he told me that this simple change of asking kids who want a bathroom pass to leave their phone on the teacher's desk has apparently already cut down on the amount of fighting in his school. Interesting. So uniformly...

Teachers and administrators were really in favor of limiting student access to cell phones during class, unless it is for a specific educational purpose, because there's all kinds of apps and educational games you can play with phones. And so they did stress that they want kids to be able to access those. And what about parents? It is much more divided among parents. Many parents are concerned about what their kids are doing on their phones. They're concerned about social media. A lot of parents talk to me about

that their kids were bullied or their kids observed bullying, exacerbated by phones. Kids are videotaping each other going to the bathroom, in the bathrooms, and sharing that online. So there are all kinds of reasons parents would like limits on cell phones in school. However, as we talked about earlier, they do want to be able to contact their kids. And then there are some parents who are concerned about what teachers are doing.

or what other kids are doing, and they want kids to be able to videotape their teachers or videotape a fight as evidence of problems. So there are all kinds of reasons that some parents do think that kids should have access to their phones. And then often the kids who have adult responsibilities, they're

grandmother is sick and they take care of them after school or they have a ill sibling or they have to work and they have a job to get to, they are often the ones who need their phones more because their boss is calling them to change their shift. Or, you know, they might have to go to the hospital. They might actually need to know things during the day.

And there are concerns that if you totally block kids from access to their phones, that that information will be slower or not get to them. And Natasha, what about the group that's going to be most affected by this ban, which is the kids? What do they think about this? Just like schools and parents, teens and children have all kinds of different feelings and different answers.

We did hear from dozens of high school students who wrote in, you know, when I asked readers to tell us how they felt. And some of them said they were glad. Some of them said they were taking tough courses and it was really hard to concentrate because other kids were on their phone. Some kids talked about it was really hard to collaborate with their peers because nobody wanted to talk to them on an assignment. They wanted to use their phone. Others felt like it was really paternalistic.

to be required not to use their phone, that it was not allowing them to self-regulate and to choose the moments when they needed to. And I also heard from kids like, there are worse problems in school. Like a high school student wrote to me from Los Angeles and said, there are drugs in my school. Why aren't they banning that? I had other kids say like, this is a necessary step, but I actually don't think it's going to help. So Natasha, this brings us to my big question, which is,

Do these bans actually work? Are they making kids more attentive during class and, you know, reducing the social harms that parents and teachers are all worried about? I think that that is the fundamental question in this snowballing of cell phone bans from school to school and state to state. And I think the answer is we don't know yet. There hasn't been a lot of rigorous research into the outcomes and results of these kinds of bans in school.

And much of the research is much more anecdotal than quantitative. I even got an email this week from a professor at the University of Augsburg in Germany who just published a new paper examining the research on cell phone bans. And he concluded that the bans can definitely, at least modestly, reduce cyberbullying in schools.

But he said we can't yet say whether the bans concretely boost academic results or improve learning. In fact, he said that school smartphone bans right now are based on subjective beliefs and not on real scientific evidence. And so the question is, if the goal is to try to help kids have a healthier, more creative relationship to technology...

then maybe we have to have a bigger, more holistic effort. Maybe we have to do a more intensive job of helping kids think about all these fast-moving digital innovations and what their benefits are and what their drawbacks are and how they can think critically about them and navigate them. ♪

And I think about that personally because in the summers, I teach high school students, I teach a class, and one of the assignments is they have to pick an app. Could be Twitch, could be Instagram, could be TikTok. And they have to both log how much time they spend on them, but also analyze how the apps are designed to keep them spending more time and coming back.

And like, did they have anxiety if they didn't check it? What did they like? Did they feel compelled to like that because it was their friends? Did they really like that? Like, let's think about what if instead of rushing to ban phones, we helped kids think about the ways that they might be useful and the ways that they personally might want to limit their use of apps and phones.

It's much, much harder to think about how we can give children and teenagers more agency over these powerful tools they use and more ability to ask critical questions about how these devices are shaping and shunting their lives. That's a much more complicated ask than just saying, lock up your phone during class. Natasha, thank you. Thank you. We'll be right back.

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On Sunday, the Israeli military announced it had recovered the bodies of six Israeli hostages in a tunnel in Gaza, including a dual American-Israeli citizen, Hirsch Goldberg-Pollen, whose kidnapping by Hamas on October 7th was the subject of a daily episode. The military said that the bodies had been recovered on Saturday and that Hamas had shot them at short range two to three days before they were found.

Hamas blamed Israel and claimed more hostages would be killed if Israel continued to try to free them through military means and not through a ceasefire deal. The news brought months of simmering anger in Israel to a furious boil. Much of it directed at Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whom critics blame for dragging his feet on a ceasefire deal that would bring the hostages back.

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Hirsch, for all these months I have been in such torment and worry about you for every single millisecond of every single day. It was such a specific type of misery that I have never experienced before. I tried hard to suppress the missing you part.

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Finally, my sweet boy, finally, finally, finally, finally you're free. I will love you and I will miss you every single day for the rest of my life. But you're right here. I know you're right here. I just have to teach myself how to feel you in a different way.

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