https://www.afterbabel.com/ Jonathan Haidt
“Schools should ensure that classroom learning and social time are phone-free experiences.”
— U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy
“Cell phone use in schools has gotten out of control. It’s gotten to the point that students don’t talk face to face, but instead text one another when they’re sitting right next to each other! …research tells us what we already know: excessive cell phone use impacts students’ mental health and academic performance. It’s time to update our policy [to ban cell phones] and make it a district-wide responsibility.”
— Jackie Goldberg, Los Angeles Unified School District Board President
“It’s 2024 – and all families rely on cell phones to stay connected and communicate now more than ever…parents want to be able to have clear and open channels of communication with their own children. Banning cell phones outright in school or treating them like contraband instead of using effective classroom management is entirely unreasonable and not grounded in the reality we will live in.”
— Keri Rodrigues, President of the National Parents Union
It’s back-to-school season, and you know what that means! We’re talking about school cell phone bans.
Should schools ban phones outright? Are there other options? Is there any research on this?
This is a big topic, so I cover it in two parts. In this post, I discuss the research on phone bans. In the second post, I talk about specific policies, and how schools can implement them.
So, please, grab a seat, put away your cell phone (in your backpack, out of sight, for the duration of this period), and let’s get to it!
Wait, what’s going on?