BY STEVE NUZUM
Some states, including South Carolina, are moving to create policies that formally ban cellphones from public schools.
In May 2023, according to the New York Times, Florida passed a law banning phones in schools during class time statewide, although some schools chose to ban the devices for the entire school day. While many parents and students supported the in-class bans, they also that students “should be able to contact [parents] directly during free periods”.
The second largest school district in the country, in Los Angeles, also voted recently to ban cellphones; California’s governor is also mulling a statewide ban. According to NPR, the response has been very similar to that in Florida:
In interviews, a dozen Orange County parents and students all said they supported the no-phone rules during class. But they objected to their district’s stricter, daylong ban.
Parents said their children should be able to contact them directly during free periods, while students described the all-day ban as unfair and infantilizing.
South Carolina’s legislature just used a budget proviso banning phones in schools for the entire school day, starting in January 2025.
Why ban phones?
According to one recent survey from EdWeek, about 25% of teachers support total bans. But as an administrator quoted in the article said, “I’m convinced that you can’t just put it on the teacher. Teachers are already burned out. We already have a shortage. And we’re asking them to have these great relationships with students.”
Phones and other electronic devices often made my life as a teacher miserable. Because devices have become such a deeply-woven part of our daily and emotional lives, requests for students to put away phones could result in unpleasant standoffs and confrontations. And while parents were often frustrated with the results of student distraction in class, some were not supportive once it came down to confiscating phones or requiring students to put them away.
I taught one student during my last year whose grades declined throughout the semester. He often had his phone out, but there were other issues as well.
Our relationship deteriorated throughout the year, and, after a serious incident in which he threatened staff members, I asked for a parent conference.
During the conference, the student was quiet, tearful, and closed off. He and his mother seemed to be processing some deep emotions.
When began to discuss what was going on as a team, the student immediately locked in on a few times when I had either asked him to put his phone away or asked him to give me the phone to hold during class so it wouldn’t be a distraction. For him, these incidents seemed to represent something much deeper than they had for me. He suggested I had targeted him out of personal dislike, that he was the only student to whom the district-wide policy restricting phones during class was being applied.
Of course, I don’t know what else this student was bringing into the classroom each day. And perhaps I should have chosen my battles. But I think this student’s behavior partly illustrates both why so many people support these bans and why in real life those bans are likely to be difficult to implement.
“Parental rights”
The phone ban is, frankly, an odd look for states like Florida and South Carolina, which for the past several years have gone deeply in on of “parental rights”. It seems like “parental rights” politicians didn’t get the memo that parents necessarily drive the majority of cellphone use in schools. If nothing else, the majority of student phones are provided and paid for by parents. And in my own experience, many parents ask their children to keep their phones on, and even to respond to texts and calls from their parents while in class.
My guess is that anxiety— on the part of both students and parents— explains a lot of this behavior. School violence, including mass shootings, regularly makes the news. In fact, according to the New York Times, “In the early 2000s, after the Columbine High School massacre in Colorado and the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, schools began reversing their cellphone bans for safety reasons — to allow students to contact their parents during emergencies.” Parents may feel they need their students to be accessible at all times so that they know what’s going on and can help.
Superintendent Ellen Weaver got this response from a constituent after making a Facebook post that had nothing to do with phones (or schools), on July 4:
Freedom? While you promote removing the freedom of choice for parents to have direct communication with THEIR children while in care of the failed school establishments [sic]
I think this comment encapsulates what “parental rights” officials are up against when they ban phones: they’ve spent years claiming parents have exclusive and complete “rights” over their children (often framing children as property being disputed by parents and “the state”), but now are telling parents they can’t decide for themselves when to call their own kids. (It would be interesting to know how many parents support book removals and restrictions but not cellphone removals and restrictions.)
And then, of course, there’s the question of whether bans are even beneficial. The same New York Times article also pointed to “mixed results” from studies of phone bans, including this federal study which found that “Schools that did not allow their students to use cell phones had a reportedly higher rate of daily/weekly cyberbullying (16.4 percent of schools) than did schools that allowed cell phone use (9.7 percent of schools)”. Without further statistical information, this is one of those chicken-or-egg problems: did cellphone bans somehow increase cyberbullying, did the perception of cyberbullying lead to the bans? But it may be a question we want to settle before we default to total bans.
If we could all put aside extremes— if we could acknowledge that parents, students, school staff, and communities all have an interest in making schools run effectively, and in balancing student learning and mental health with student rights and autonomy— we could probably make progress on phones, or on any number of other issues facing schools.
Policymakers understandably tend to focus on using policies to solve problems, but in many districts, implementation, not policy, is probably the problem. Some parents complain about existing phone restrictions— a lot. Teachers at one of my old schools were at times held financially responsible for confiscated phones, and eventually the school created sort of a ghost policy where teachers would not receive any support if they confiscated a device, but were also expected to enforce the district restriction on phones during instructional time. So implementation went out the window. The policy, whatever it was on paper, in practice became something like Ask the student over and over again to put the phone away. If they don’t, put it in writing, and maybe administration will take some kind of action in the future— but probably not.
It remains to be seen whether Weaver’s Department of Education will provide the support it claims it is going to provide when the law goes into effect in January. But I wouldn’t hold my breath.
Weaver pushed through perhaps the most sweeping book censorship regulation in the country a few weeks back (mostly through a technical glitch in the way the legislature was supposed to conduct its oversight), but as far as many librarians I’ve spoken with know, her department has offered no guidance to districts as to how they should go about the yearly business of buying books and other instructional materials, despite the fact that the regulation heavily implicates which of those books and materials may be removed at the whim of an individual parent.
This suggests a policy agenda not dominated by practical reality, but by scoring political points, and I’m concerned that’s what we’ll get with the cellphone ban— which, after all, comes from the same legislature that called schoolwide mask mandates during the pandemic a tyrannical overreach that violated— you guessed it— “parental rights”.
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