My School Banned Phones for the Year. Here's What Happened

I didn't have to say, "get off your phone," once...

Intro from Zach Rausch:

Today, we’re sharing one of the most compelling and entertaining essays we’ve read on what happens when a school goes phone-free. The essay is written by Gilbert Schuerch, a veteran high school teacher in Harlem, NYC. He is also the writer of the Substack, Fit To Teach, where he shares stories from inner city public education and muses on the nature of teaching.

In this piece, Gilbert shares how he and his colleagues figured out that simple classroom phone bans weren’t enough—so they implemented a bell-to-bell phone free policy requiring students to lock their phones away at the start of the school day. The result is a enticing glimpse of what is possible when adults hold the line and how, pretty quickly, kids can rediscover life without a distraction machine in their pockets.

– Zach

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My School Banned Phones for the Year. Here's What Happened

By Gilbert Schuerch

[This essay is republished from the Fit to Teach Substack.]

“Screen time check!” I barked out at my health class.

They sighed, took out their phones, and opened up their screen tracking applications.

“Patricia, how much yesterday?”

Patricia said, “12 hours.”

I whistled. “Okay, how about you Larry?”

Larry said, “8 hours. See. I’m way better than Patricia.”

“Shut up!” Patricia replied.

I patted the air with my hands to indicate they should calm down. “What about you Manuela?”

“17 hours.”

“What?”

“17 hours. Yeah, mista, it was a Sunday. I didn’t have much else to do.”

I sighed and went around the room getting a quick read on how much screen time each student had accumulated. The class average neared 11 hours.

I said, “Guys. Guys. Let’s suppose you sleep 8 hours a day. That means you're awake for 16 hours a day. If you’re on your phone for 12 hours, that means you only spend 4 hours not looking at a two by four inch screen…Is that really how you want to spend your life?”

Most of the kids just shrugged.

Then one kid said, “What else is there to do?”

That’s how I know we’re in deep trouble.

That exchange happened around two years ago, back when our school had “banned” phones, but kids were still allowed to carry them in their pocket. The policy was effectively useless. The moment a teenager felt a vibration in their pocket a command from Satan himself wouldn’t stop that kid from checking their screen.

The year after that we tried Yondr Pouches. Some company called Yondr had created an “unbreakable" pouch that we required students to slip their cell phones into. Then we would use a magnet to engage a locking mechanism so they couldn’t access them. The students would carry the pouches around with them and we would unlock them at the end of the day. This way students could still “have” their phones, but they couldn’t access them.

This worked initially. The first day of school a senior mentioned to me that he had “resigned himself to a year of boredom.” He had said this while idly looking at his pouched phone. For three days, teachers enjoyed bliss. The ability to teach without saying the words, “put your phone away,” was something some teachers hadn’t experienced in over a decade.

Then the kids started getting creative.

The “fool proof” Yondr pouches and the infamous magnet that opened them.

You see, even though they couldn’t access their phone, they still felt the dopamine burst whenever they felt a vibration go off in the pouch. They had to know. They had to see. It drove them mad. Students started taking pens and stabbing through the fake Kevlar pouches, other kids started using their keys to saw the locking mechanism off. Others would bring two phones to school. They would let the dean watch them pop their old phone into the pouch at entry, and keep their main phone in their backpack until the coast was clear.

One kid even got entrepreneurial about it. He went on Amazon and bought the magnet that unlocked the phone pouches for 50 bucks. Then he charged kids a dollar every time they wanted to unlock their phone. The kid had made a tidy profit by the time we confiscated the magnet. Silicon Valley has made a product so addictive a kid created a new economy within our school to help kids manage that addiction. (Shout out to that kid though, every hustler can smile at that one.)

Luckily, this school year has been different. This school year, students must hand in their phones at entry or we immediately call their parents. The phones are put into safe boxes that the students aren’t allowed to access until the final bell has rung. There are no constant vibrations reminding you you’re missing out on something, and there are no pouches to rip.

Consequences for smuggling your phone past entry are high. Immediate detention, call home to parents, and a personal visit from the dean mid class. There was some push-back in the beginning, but we teachers stuck to our guns. Every staff member made an immediate phone call to the dean-team the moment they saw any kid with tech—that included Airpods, Apple watches, iPads, and anything kids could use to connect to the internet.

One kid smuggled three separate school iPads into her backpack, so when she got caught with one, she would wait and just pull out the next. When we discovered her “trick” she received reductions in her classwork grades, phone calls home and several detentions. Every kid who tried to push the boundaries received that kind of pushback from us every single time. We didn’t budge, and the student body eventually accepted their fate. This year they would have to go through school without an entertainment system in their pocket.

The results have been spectacular.

Teachers don’t have to fight an impossible battle against tech. Students talk to each other between classes. The cafeteria has the sound of conversation. Teachers cover material faster. Cyberbullying has fallen. When a fight happens, half the school doesn’t immediately run out of the classroom to watch. Mindless doomscrolling happens on their time, not school time. Boys can’t watch porn in the bathroom (or the cafeteria). I don’t have to fight an impossible war against the greatest human behavioral psychologists Silicon Valley has ever employed.

Seriously.

Here’s a typical scenario in my gymnasium. A student is seated with their back against the wall and they don’t want to participate. I choose one of my various talking points: “You know participation is how you pass my class right?” “You know you have to pass this class to graduate.” “All you have to do is try, I’m not asking for a serious feat of athleticism.” “Exercise is good for the soul, man.” “Your team needs you.” Or my personal favorite exchange.

“Do you like math class?”

“No.”

“But you have to do it right?”

“Yes.”

“Same deal here. You have to do it, even though you don’t want to.”

“But I’m not feelin it.”

“Yeah. I know. But guess what, do you think I was feelin it when my alarm clock went off at 5 in the morning? Do you think I was feelin it when I took an hour twenty commute on the train?”

“What? You love it here though. You're always so loud. You're always so enthusiastic. You're so extra all the time.”

I give a lopsided grin, “That’s because I’m faking it. It’s the most adult skill you have to learn how to do. You have to learn how to do the things you don’t want to do.”

“Ugh.”

“Look. Here’s what I actually want right now. I want to be home, on my couch, watching Netflix, with a girl on my left arm, and a girl on my right. Two chicks. Then I want to cook them dinner. That’s what I want. But here I am, because we have to do the things we don’t want to do.”

This exchange usually gets a laugh, and it usually works—at least this year it has.

Last year I was battling the greatest entertainment system the world ever unleashed. A student would listen to my pleas, say they would get up, and then immediately dive back into their phone again. Why would you play in the gym when you could sit against the wall and watch endless entertainment personally curated for your tastes?

Now I battle boredom, and that’s a winnable fight. Now when I give my two chicks speech, they usually respond by participating. That’s because the other option is boredom. Sit there, do nothing, and look out the non-existent windows our school doesn’t have. I’m not fighting against brilliant social scientists getting paid millions to figure out ways to capture human attention, I’m fighting against sitting on your ass doing nothing. And my class is awesome compared to boredom.

Now don’t get me wrong, this isn’t a magic bullet. Banning phones won’t save Gen-Z. I once watched our dean hand cellphones back to students in the cafeteria. When she rolled the cellphone cart through, it was like watching a crowd of Hyenas catching the scent of stinking flesh. Kids stopped conversations mid-sentence and lifted their heads to watch that cart roll by.

The moment a boy got up from his table, a storm of students jumped to their feet to beat him to the cart. The dean started screaming if you come near me without being called up you’ll go to the back of the line. It took ten full minutes to get everyone seated before she felt comfortable enough to call kids up table by table.

That’s the kind of addiction teachers are dealing with. The kids are not alright whether we ban the phones or not.

But when I compare the 7 years I had battling the cellphone in the classroom, vs almost an entire year of phone free schooling, there is no comparison. Our kids are smarter, more social, and more motivated to do the things they actually want to accomplish in this world when they don’t have a Pavlovian vibration derailing their attention every 20 seconds.

Bring on the phone free school legislation. You wouldn’t let your kid smoke cigarettes in your class, so why are we letting them consume electronic brain cocaine? Make it state-wide, make it nation-wide.

Teachers need it… but the kids need it more.