Smartphones in schools are bad

The narrow case against phones in school is clearly right

Like many people my age, I had a TI-86 programmable graphing calculator in high school.

It was quite useful for learning high school math. But even though the device is built specifically for math use, it’s a general purpose computer. So enterprising people managed to write games for it, of which by far the best was Drug Wars.

In Drug Wars, you played a drug dealer who needed to move around the city, buying and selling different drugs at different price points, trying to make a profit while evading the cops and violence at the hands of the competition. The content of the game occasionally scandalized some members of the adult community, but my school had a pretty chill, permissive vibe and most people didn’t care. The larger issue was that while students were supposed to use their graphing calculators during math class, they were not supposed to be playing video games.

One attitude you could have toward this is that if a kid is sitting in class playing Drug Wars (or Snake or whatever else) rather than paying attention to the teacher, that’s their business. They’ll get bad grades, do poorly on the AP test, bear the consequences. It’s up to them.

In practice, though, schools normally take a more paternalistic attitude toward their charges. Part of the school’s job is to teach you, but part of the job is to make you learn. We also worry about peer effects in this context. Some kids are very studious, others less so. Some are in the middle. If the people at the less-disciplined end of the spectrum act out — playing Drug Wars in class, for example — that tends to pull the behavior of the kids in the middle in their direction. I frankly don’t remember exactly how this was handled as a question of school discipline, just that there was some tension around it. The calculator is useful, but having hand-held gaming devices in the classroom is distracting. And I’m told that later, more advanced calculators had color screens and could run full NES emulators, which obviously only intensifies the concern.

I’ve been thinking about this while reading the back-and-forth over Jonathan Haidt’s contention that smartphones have grievously harmed a generation of young Americans.

I think the causal evidence is very suggestive, but hardly conclusive. But if you ask a narrower question, like “are smartphones a huge distraction in schools?” then I think you get a much clearer answer. What if Drug Wars were a much more fun game? And what if my calculator could play dozens of these more engrossing games? And could also pass messages secretly to all my friends? And had access to an enormous library of television shows and movies and also to multiple streams of short-form video algorithmically selected to appeal to me? Separate from any of the big picture stuff about phones and society, this would be a big issue for normal, boring school management reasons.

When I was a kid, my elementary school banned slap bracelets because they were too distracting. Why couldn’t we do the same for smartphones?

Phones are very distracting

A small sample study by Melissa Huey and David Giguere found that when some college students were randomly assigned to have their phones physically removed before class, their mindfulness and comprehension of the course material went up.

The effects were not that large, presumably in part because many of the students who were in possession of their phones still managed not to use them. But another interesting result from the study is that the phone-free students reported somewhat less anxiety. One of the key sticking points in terms of changing policy seems to be a sense that it’s unacceptable or unsafe for teenagers to be uncontactable during the day. But being without a phone actually makes people a little calmer. I think many of us have probably experienced this on a long flight — it can be inconvenient to be out of touch with the world for several hours, but it’s often also kind of freeing.

UNESCO reports that students get distracted by phones, that task-switching is cognitively costly, and that, in particular, weaker students’ problems are compounded by distraction:

The report shows that some technology can support some learning in some contexts, but not when it is over-used or inappropriately used. In particular, the use of smartphones can disrupt learning in classrooms. One study looking at pre-primary through to higher education in 14 countries found that it distracted students from learning. Even just having a mobile phone nearby with notifications coming through is enough to result in students losing their attention from the task at hand.  One study found that it can take students up to 20 minutes to refocus on what they were learning once distracted. 

Removing smartphones from schools in Belgium, Spain and the United Kingdom was found to improve learning outcomes, according to a study cited in the report, especially for students that were not performing as well as their peers.

I think this point about unequal effects is probably a fruitful line of inquiry for people who really want to understand the broad society-level impacts of digital technology. For the smartest and most studious kids, access to all the world’s information probably provides significant benefits via the Matthew Effect. If you’re focused and studious by nature — and especially if you’re focused and studious and also have smart, well-resourced parents who encourage you to explore your interests — the internet extends the reach of your grasp. But if you’re prone to distraction, it’s a big source of distraction.

In school, I don’t think we should be leveling down by denying the brightest kids access to advanced coursework. But we also shouldn’t be making school rules that are geared exclusively to the best-performing most-motivated students. There’s a lot of kids who are not great students. But who can, in fact, be taught to read and write and do math, and who will benefit down the road from doing so. We need to do our best to keep them on track.

The current situation is strange in this regard.

The National Center for Education Statistics reports that as of 2020, there are cell phone bans in 76 percent of classrooms. But this just means there’s a rule that says you shouldn’t use your phone in class unless it’s for coursework. That’s not really a policy, it’s an aspiration.

And, of course, it poses the Drug Wars problem in a very serious way. You could get a graphic calculator app for iOS or Android that’s way better than a late-1990s graphing calculator. And conditional on already owning a phone, that’s going to be cheaper than getting a purpose-built calculator. But if you have kids using smartphones in the classroom, there’s no tractable way to ensure they’re using them for coursework rather than scrolling or gaming. Kate has a functioning brain and reads books on her phone all the time; but every time I try this, I end up tweeting. You need rules that are workable and enforceable (meaning no use of phones in classrooms at all) and adequate funding for students to have school-provided devices if they need things like calculators.

The counterarguments are weak

Most of the counterarguments I’ve heard involve parents expressing anxiety about their ability to get in touch with their kids in the event of a school shooting or other calamity. The high volume of gun violence in American schools compared to peer countries is really bad, and I fully support policy measures to reduce it.

School shootings, though, are both incredibly awful and incredibly rare. Even considering the entirety of gun homicides afflicting children, the kinds of incidents that terrify middle class families are an exceptionally small share. Overall, American childhood has gotten steadily less deadly over time. A lot of the gap with other OECD countries has to do with traffic safety issues, and teenagers having smartphones is almost certainly making those issues worse, not better.

I’ve also heard from union officials and school administrators who’ve expressed a somewhat nebulous set of equity-related concerns.

One bucket has to do with the logistics of storing phones and is a completely valid point, but one that underscores the need for more policy in this area rather than an assumption that teachers can handle this on their own.

Another, though, touches on a larger set of concerns about school discipline. A lot of rank-and-file educators believe they are under pressure to be softer on a whole range of discipline issues in a way that is aggravating many teachers. In that universe, some people worry about being given a new set of rules to enforce if they’re not going to be supported in imposing consequences on rule breakers. Two different practitioners (not policy people) told me this was downstream of the Biden administration re-instituting a set of student discipline guidelines that Obama put in place in 2014 but were revoked under Trump. This isn’t what actually happened, though. In May 2023 the Biden administration put out new guidelines, and Mike Petrilli, president of the conservative Thomas B. Fordham Institute, was among those who believed the Obama administration went too far in 2014. He was pleased to see that the Biden administration did not fully resurrect the Obama-era guidance, instead opting for what he called a much more nuanced approach.” Leftists, meanwhile, got mad at Biden.

I think it’s possible that in some cases, the actual federal discipline guidelines have gotten a little lost in the game of telephone.

But when Indiana passed a no phones bill, it was endorsed by all the state’s teachers unions. In Wichita, the union is specifically asking for a phone ban. Kentucky’s version of this was developed in consultation with the state’s teachers unions. So I don’t think there is an actual problem here if policymakers bother to work on it. Public sector unions are very much a mixed blessing, but this is exactly the kind of issue where it’s sensible to develop policy in consultation with the relevant unions — the implementation details are supposed to make teachers’ lives easier, not harder. And it seems like it’s working in practice.

The Biden administration should engage on this more

A New York Times article from last year about school phone bans didn’t find any real evidence of a downside to anti-phone rules, but did note that “enforcing the bans could boost harsh disciplinary measures like school suspensions.”

I don’t want to go off on my five-thousandth version of this rant, but if you adopt the view that enforcing rules is per se bad, then it’s just not possible to have functioning public institutions. Obviously nobody wants a world in which tons of kids are getting suspended for illicit phone use. But with prudent levels of monitoring and the swift imposition of mild sanctions, it seems very fixable. Accounts of actual ban implementations seem broadly positive. The most effective strict bans seem to involve the use of Yondr pouches rather than just “leave it in your backpack.” There’s a financial obstacle to implementing that on a universal basis, but it hardly seems insurmountable.

It strikes me that the Biden administration has been totally silent on this topic of intense discussion among parents and teachers, even though in other contexts, they are extremely eager to take on the power of big tech.

It feels like a bit of rigidity where they don’t have their eyes and ears open to the conversations that are actually taking place in the country. Which isn’t to say they can’t also pursue aggressive antitrust cases. But as long as you’re infuriating Apple, you shouldn’t shy away from something that is top of mind for a lot of people.

Randi Weingarten says social media is making teachers’ lives harder, but it’s mostly been Republican politicians leading on this so far. We don’t need the Education Department to do some incredibly polarizing dive into the issue, but acknowledging that students and teachers are having a problem here and convening some stakeholders to discuss action could be helpful. One obvious step would be to call on the tech companies themselves to be part of the solution. My iPhone does lots of location-aware stuff. Maybe all student phones could be automatically put into a “phone calls only” mode while on campus? Or maybe not.

There is plenty of contentious debate around social media and kids, but whatever other problems it may cause, this stuff is just obviously distracting. The point of apps is to promote engagement and use, and the point of school is to not be scrolling on social media apps. You don’t need to buy any of the larger claims to see that there’s a problem here and that politicians should be helping to address it.