There are few things most politicians in the US seem to agree upon, but banning mobile phones in classrooms seems to be one of them. Based on the experience of some schools that have required students to prioritize learning over TikTok scrolling, there is also a welcome side benefit: less conflict and more “hellos.”
When school starts this fall, students in most US states and Washington will be required by law to turn over or turn off their smartphones during all or most of the school day, according to an Education Week tally.
Florida, Louisiana, South Carolina and Utah have statewide bans. Another 24 states have adopted rules or laws that require restrictions on mobile phones, but leave it up to school districts to decide whether to ban them or not. Two states offer districts incentives to restrict phones. Another seven recommend local districts enact their own restrictions.
Illustration: Mountain People
The methods and policy details vary widely between states, but the reasons for silencing phones are pretty universal. A growing body of research has found that the more time children and their developing brains spend on smartphones, the greater the risk of negative mental health outcomes — from depression, to cyberbullying, to an inability to focus and learn.
Social media is intentionally designed “to expose users to an endless stream of content,” which makes it addictive, said Carol Vidal, a child and adolescent psychiatrist at the Johns Hopkins Children’s Center.
That is especially risky for children and teens, she said, “because their brains are still developing and they have less control over their impulses.”
The laws are spurred in part by the research discussed in the book published last year by Jonathan Haidt The Anxious Generation.
The New York University professor elevated this theory after reviewing dozens of recent studies linking social media and smartphone use by kids and teens to the explosive increase in rates of anxiety among young people, including emergency room visits for self-harm.
The idea of severing the phone from the classroom not only has legislators and governors in states across party lines giving it near-unanimous support, a survey last year by Pew Research found that 68 percent of US adults support a ban on smartphone use among middle and high-school students during class.
However, a ban in theory is not the same as putting it into practice, especially for the large numbers of parents worried about being unable to contact their children during the school day.
That is something that principal Inge Esping noticed when she barred phones from classrooms at McPherson Middle School in Kansas, an hour north of Wichita. In 2022, when Esping started as the school’s principal, she noticed that the spike in online bullying among students was happening during the school day.
“Middle schoolers are a little notorious for when they’re trying to make fun of someone,” she told me. “They’ll take a picture of the person that they’re making fun of and share that via social media — especially during lunchtime.”
Absences and suspensions were rising, with too many students staying home either because they feared confronting their bullies or because they were bullying others. She and her staff imposed a rule in the 2022-2023 school year requiring students to turn off their phones and store them in their lockers from the first bell to the last.
With few exceptions, children who had grown up with mobile phones “simply accepted it,” Esping said.
It was their parents who protested.
“I don’t think we really realized how much parents were reaching out to their students during the school day,” Esping said.
Many parents feared being unable to communicate with their children during school hours, particularly in an era of school shootings.
Others did not trust the school to notify them when their child needed them, she said.
She and her colleagues then embarked on an ambitious plan to persuade parents of the value of keeping phones out of reach during school hours. She organized back-to-school events to increase communication, engaged more parents in volunteer and visiting opportunities, and refined the school’s alert system that notifies families when there is an emergency.
As parents grew to accept the new system, the results for their children were dramatic. In the first year, the school saw a 5 percent increase in their state assessment scores in reading and math. School suspensions dropped 70 percent by Christmas and have remained at half the rate they were before the ban. And absenteeism went down from 39 percent to 11 percent — because taking phones away prevented many of the harmful social media comments that kept bullied kids from coming to school.
Other school districts with mobile phone restrictions reported similar results in student discipline. A year after the Orange County School District in Florida implemented its phone ban in 2023, fighting went down 31 percent and “serious misconduct” issues decreased by 21 percent, school superintendent Maria Vazquez told Florida lawmakers in January.
Results like that are, in part, what have spurred elected officials to act.
“Arkansas’ phone-free schools’ program isn’t about taking anything away,” Arkansas Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders said when she signed the state’s mobile phone ban earlier this year. “It’s about giving kids the freedom to learn without distractions.”
The idea is getting some traction in Washington, too. One of the final acts of the US Department of Education during the administration of former US president Joe Biden was to issue a recommendation that all states and districts adopt measures to manage smartphone use in schools.
In February, US senators Tim Kaine from Virginia and Tom Cotton from Arkansas introduced legislation to study the effects of mobile phone use in schools. And this week, US Senator Elise Slotkin of Michigan called for a ban on “social media and cell phones in every K-12 classroom in America.” She blamed technology for interfering in “problem-solving skills that will be valuable in the future economy.”
However, for teachers, the most tangible difference has been the “huge vibe change,” said Esping, who was named Kansas Middle School Principal of the Year in April.
Teachers reported that students were now more engaged — in the classroom and school corridors.
“The year before the phone ban, you’d say ‘hello’ to a student and they would ignore you and move on because they’re so tied to their cell phone,” Esping said.
However, after the ban, “kids were looking up and talking to one another,” especially in the lunchroom and as students transitioned between classes, she said.
“When you’d say, ‘good morning’ to them, they’d say ‘good morning’ back,” she added.
As always, students might be teaching the rest of the nation something here. Maybe more smartphone bans are exactly is needed.
Mary Ellen Klas is a politics and policy columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. A former capital bureau chief for the Miami Herald, she has covered politics and government for more than three decades. This column reflects the personal views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
In the past month, two important developments are poised to equip Taiwan with expanded capabilities to play foreign policy offense in an age where Taiwan’s diplomatic space is seriously constricted by a hegemonic Beijing. Taiwan Foreign Minister Lin Chia-lung (林佳龍) led a delegation of Taiwan and US companies to the Philippines to promote trilateral economic cooperation between the three countries. Additionally, in the past two weeks, Taiwan has placed chip export controls on South Africa in an escalating standoff over the placing of its diplomatic mission in Pretoria, causing the South Africans to pause and ask for consultations to resolve
An altercation involving a 73-year-old woman and a younger person broke out on a Taipei MRT train last week, with videos of the incident going viral online, sparking wide discussions about the controversial priority seats and social norms. In the video, the elderly woman, surnamed Tseng (曾), approached a passenger in a priority seat and demanded that she get up, and after she refused, she swung her bag, hitting her on the knees and calves several times. In return, the commuter asked a nearby passenger to hold her bag, stood up and kicked Tseng, causing her to fall backward and
In South Korea, the medical cosmetic industry is fiercely competitive and prices are low, attracting beauty enthusiasts from Taiwan. However, basic medical risks are often overlooked. While sharing a meal with friends recently, I heard one mention that his daughter would be going to South Korea for a cosmetic skincare procedure. I felt a twinge of unease at the time, but seeing as it was just a casual conversation among friends, I simply reminded him to prioritize safety. I never thought that, not long after, I would actually encounter a patient in my clinic with a similar situation. She had
A recent trio of opinion articles in this newspaper reflects the growing anxiety surrounding Washington’s reported request for Taiwan to shift up to 50 percent of its semiconductor production abroad — a process likely to take 10 years, even under the most serious and coordinated effort. Simon H. Tang (湯先鈍) issued a sharp warning (“US trade threatens silicon shield,” Oct. 4, page 8), calling the move a threat to Taiwan’s “silicon shield,” which he argues deters aggression by making Taiwan indispensable. On the same day, Hsiao Hsi-huei (蕭錫惠) (“Responding to US semiconductor policy shift,” Oct. 4, page 8) focused on
RSS