How to (and How NOT to) Mandate Phone-Free Schools
A guide for legislatures looking to make their states’ schools phone-free, and not just during class time
Introduction from Jon Haidt and Zach Rausch:
Of the four new norms prescribed in The Anxious Generation to roll back the phone-based childhood, one of them is being enacted at astonishing speed: phone-free schools. It’s happening across the United States, as we show in this map.
It’s happening across the political spectrum as politicians in “red states” (e.g. South Carolina, Louisiana, Arkansas) and “blue states” (e.g. New York, Massachusetts, Vermont, California) are enacting fully phone-free policies. Laws and policies are being initiated at all levels of governance, from Governors and legislatures through school districts and individual schools. And it's happening around the world. Just in the past year countries such as Brazil, Greece, and Australia have passed legislation or enacted policies to limit or eliminate cell phone usage by students.
In a divided country and a world of diverse nations, how can an education policy spread so fast? Because parents and teachers around the world have seen the damage done to students' attention, education, and mental health when they spend much of the school day on their phones texting, scrolling and posting on social media, watching videos, and playing video games.
Adults who reflect back on their own school days can see how so much learning, friendship, and fun would have been lost if they had each been allowed to bring a small television set to school and watch it all day long, even at lunch and recess.
Many jurisdictions are limiting student phone use only during instructional time, but this approach still allows for students to rush to their phones between classes, at lunch, and during recess, costing them valuable opportunities to connect with one another face-to-face.
A classtime-only rule also doesn’t give teachers as much benefit as they might expect. Research from the National Education Association found that 73% of teachers in schools that allow phone use BETWEEN classes report that phones are disruptive DURING class. In contrast, of the several policies examined, only the phone-free or “away for the day” policy produced good results: only 28% of teachers in such schools said that phones were disruptive during their classes. It’s only when students have 6-7 hours away from their phones that they fully turn to each other and to their teachers.
For all of these reasons, we recommend bell-to-bell phone-free school legislation, like the model bill language you’ll see in this post.
To help schools and states enact better policies, various groups have come together to offer guidance, including the drafting of model bills that can be enacted at the state level. What is remarkable about this effort is that it has often not been led by interest groups or politicians but rather by mothers who have seen the harms of the phone based childhood first hand.
One of those remarkable mothers is Deb Schmill, who has worked tirelessly to prevent what happened to her family from happening to others. She is the founder of the Becca Schmill Foundation and has been working with mothers across the country to push for technology reform, including phone free schools. We are honored to be one of many groups (including Fairplay and the USC Neely Center) supporting their efforts.
— Jon and Zach
How to (and How NOT to) Mandate Phone-Free Schools
Children need a break from exposure to online and digital products. Many states are now tackling this issue, but not all efforts tackle the issue effectively. Many schools have well-meaning policies that don’t fully solve the problem. The Becca Schmill Foundation recommends a strong state-wide “bell to bell” phone separation policy, and in consultation with Fairplay, the USC Neely Center, and the Phone-Free Schools movement, we have developed model state legislation to help these efforts.
My daughter, Becca Schmill, would have turned 24 this October. Becca was a beautiful, caring person, whose smile melted my heart. She had hopes and dreams but never had a chance to see them come true. Before she could begin her first year at the University of Richmond, Becca ingested drugs that had been laced with fentanyl and she died. She was 18.
Fentanyl may have been the official cause of Becca’s death, but the path that led her to that terrible day in September of 2020, was paved by social media. Through a series of traumatic experiences driven by her use of social media, including cyberbullying and sexual predation, she learned that she could temporarily relieve the pain of those experiences by using Snapchat to find drugs.
My husband and I tried to prevent Becca from having a smartphone and access to social media platforms. But when Becca was 13, all her friends had phones, and after-school activities were using social media to communicate with kids. I also learned that Becca and other students were spending time between classes on their phones instead of engaging in face to face conversation. I reached out to the school committee about this but never received a response. Smartphones and social media permeated all aspects of school life, and there seemed to be nothing that we could do about it.
It’s not just Becca. The evidence that our children need a break from social media is clear. As the former Surgeon General of the United States, Dr. Vivek Murthy explained, social media platforms, as designed, are not safe for kids. The platforms expose young children to a wide range of preventable and common harms, from cyberbullying and contact by strangers to the loss of sleep, fragmented attention, disrupted learning, and the displacement of time with friends in person.
Bell-to-bell phone-free school policies are an essential and cost-effective solution to reducing the health and safety risks and the educational costs of excessive smartphone and social media use, and increasing the benefits of in-person connection and focused learning. These benefits will be long lasting. As stated by the CDC, “When schools enact health policies and practices, healthy students can grow to be healthy and successful adults.” Why? They note four main reasons:
Schools have direct contact with more than 95% of U.S. youth, aged 5–17 years, for 6 hours a day.
Schools influence 13 critical years of students' social, psychological, physical, and intellectual development.
Schools promote students' health and safety by helping them establish lifelong health patterns.
Healthy students are better learners and academic achievement bears a lifetime of benefits for health.
Although the research on phone-free schools is still preliminary, the harms caused by smartphones and social media on adolescents are significant and well documented. There is also broad agreement from teachers, administrators, and parents that phones in school often disrupt learning, connection, and mental health.
Policymakers should take note of the likely positive impact of bell-to-bell phone and social media free schools on academics, social and emotional health, safety, and finances. No one understands the benefits better than teachers, and 83% of teachers polled by the National Education Association support an all-day phone ban.
The Likely Benefits of Full-Day Phone Bans
1. Academic Benefits
Improved student focus, since students are destined to be distracted by the average of 237 notifications that they receive per day
Improved student grades, since attention-dividing devices detract from student performance.
Students cheat less, since many students admit to using phones to cheat.
Teacher morale and retention improves, since the frustration caused by dealing with smartphones in school has driven teachers to quit.
2. Social and Emotional Health Benefits
Improvements in school connectedness and school cohesion leading to students being less lonely at school and a decrease in bullying and harassment.
Improvements in children’s mental health. A longitudinal study found that, "Each additional hour of total screen time was prospectively associated with 1.09 higher odds of suicidal behaviors at 2-year-follow-up.”
Students learn relationship skills through more face to face contact
Students develop confidence and independence through healthy in-person attachments.
3. Safety Benefits
Access to phones and social media at school makes it harder to keep students safe. Many of the fistfights and beatings that occur in hallways, bathrooms, and playgrounds begin with drama on social media during the school day.
According to school safety experts, phones are a distraction in an emergency. Student attention should be squarely on the adult in charge and what is occurring in real-time.
When phones are removed, bullying decreases.
4. Financial Benefits
Fewer students needing mental health services. More than 500 school districts nationwide are suing the big social media companies, alleging the platforms harm youth mental health and that schools have had to devote more resources to support students.
Schools have started to be sued for negligence in cyberbullying incidence that led to a students suicide.
It’s important to note that students from low socio-economic backgrounds (who already spend more than two additional hours on entertainment screen media than their higher income peers) may benefit the most in all the above categories.
Why Model Legislation?
States across the country are rapidly adopting and introducing policies to restrict phone use in school. South Carolina and Louisiana have enacted some of the strongest legislation and we are excited about current efforts in many places, including Vermont and Massachusetts. However, no best-practice standard has been set and some states are adopting policies that simply restrict phone use during instructional time, which will not solve many of the issues emerging during the school day, as documented by teachers, administrators, and students.
Our model legislation was drafted with fidelity to the research detailed above and the best practices outlined by the Phone-Free Schools Movement. It was written with input from legislators, Fairplay, and the USC Neely Center. While understanding the impact of phone free school policies is a relatively new area of research, we do have many data points about the problem we are trying to solve, which suggest which solutions will and will not address the problem.
The bill ensures that phones are turned off, stored, and locked away from the first bell to the last bell of the school day. It includes 5 important features that we strongly suggest all jurisdictions adopt.
Five Features of The Model Policy
Feature 1. Require all schools in the state to comply.
This eliminates any confusion across districts, sets a norm for an entire community, and allows students to relax, knowing that they will not be missing activity from friends at other schools. It also sets a strong policy now, while the issue has legislators' attention.
Feature 2. Physically separate students from all personal devices.
The regular use of devices in school is a distraction to students, whether a device is a smartphone or is just used to receive text messages. Young people receive an median of 237 notifications everyday. Free from devices, kids are able to spend more time focusing on teachers and their fellow peers.
Feature 3. Give students the full 6-7 hours of the school day to focus on their teachers and their fellow students.
Social media pulls kids into constant anxiety-producing drama. Kids in phone-free schools sometimes say that after they turn in their phones, it takes a little while for them to forget the drama and turn their attention fully to what’s happening around them. But if the drama is refreshed every 50 minutes, between classes, then many students will spend very little of the school day being fully present.
Feature 4. Stop schools from requiring smartphones and social media use.
Schools should not use social media as a primary communications tool, to allow parents the freedom to make individual choices about whether or not to use social media, both for themselves and their kids.
Feature 5. Include two important exceptions.
While it may be tempting to add many exceptions to placate parent fears, there are only two that we have found to be widely necessary: medical needs, and special education needs. Some students may have a legitimate health or educational need that requires access to their own smartphone. On the other hand, a common exception that gets included in many bills is mandating that students should have access to their phones in case of emergencies. But these exceptions are problematic because while it makes perfect emotional sense for parents to want to talk to kids during an emergency, experts suggest that kids should be focused on listening to instructions during emergencies, not on calling parents.
Sign this letter of support asking your state to adopt our strong “bell to bell” phone separation policy.
What We Are Hearing
Although the research on the impact of bell to bell phone-free schools is still preliminary, we have heard from dozens of educators, parents, and students about the impact. We have never heard of a school that has gone phone-free and regretted it. Here are a just few quotes from those who have tried it:
Pitsa Binnion, principal of McKinnon Secondary College in Melbourne, AU
"I hadn’t anticipated the level of noise," principal Pitsa Binnion said. "There was laughter, people were actually interacting and socialising."
Adam Gelb, assistant principal of San Mateo High School in San Mateo, CA
"For the most part, teachers are loving it, they feel like they got their classrooms back from all these distractions," Adam Gelb said.
Yamalia Marks, 17 y/o senior at Buxton School in Williamstown, MA
“I’m a lot happier being on social media less. I think I’ve been a lot more self-aware,” she says, adding that she expects the benefit to carry into her first year of college.
Ford Chapman, student body co-president at St. Andrew’s boarding school in Middletown, DE
“Walking around on the front lawn, seeing everybody living in the moment, not stuck on their Instagram trying to communicate with friends from home—that is very alluring.”
Conclusion
Going phone free in a world where we all rely on our phones may seem scary, but every district that has earnestly done it has been happy with the results. Some school principals do report emotional distress that some students experience in the initial weeks, akin to the withdrawal symptoms that someone struggling with any kind of addiction might feel. Eventually, though, they report that their once quiet hallways that had been filled with heads-staring-down at phones became lively hallways filled with conversation and laughter.
My daughter would have been grateful for a break from the online world. At 15, Becca was sexually assaulted by a boy she met online and this was followed by a cyberbullying incident that blew up during the school day. The incident was serious enough that the police were called in. The shame and anguish of the assault, compounded by the cruelty of a few peers left Becca feeling empty inside. She soon learned that she could temporarily fill that emptiness by going online and finding drugs.
Although some of my daughter’s experiences were unique, cyberbullying, unwanted advances, easy access to drugs, stolen attention, and stolen time are faced by millions of kids. Social media is designed to steal the attention of kids and teens who are at pivotal stages of their mental development. Like any product designed to addict their users, many of their consumers lose their ability to be in control.
Children need a break from the noise and the drama that is social media. For the foreseeable future, there is only one place where every child can be guaranteed a significant break from the chaos: school.
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So clear! The policy, the benefits. This will get a lot of great laws passed!
While a step in the right direction, we need to follow other nations like France Belgium Cyprus and Israel, who have banned Wi-Fi in their schools. Otherwise smartwatches will still provide massive distraction and harm via wireless radiation.
Food for thought.
Thank you Deb for laying out the groundwork of what can be done here. Distractions kill creativity.