Why We Need Phone-Free Schools (with Clare Morell)

Welcome to Family Policy Matters, a weekly podcast and radio show produced by the North Carolina Family Policy Council. Hi, I'm John Rustin, President of NC Family. And each week on Family Policy Matters, we welcome experts and policy leaders to discuss topics that impact faith and family here in North Carolina. Our prayer is that this program will help encourage and equip you to be a voice of persuasion for family values in your community, state, and nation. And now here's the host of Family Policy Matters, Tracey Devette Griggs.

Thanks for joining us this week for Family Policy Matters. Many families hope that giving a phone to their school-aged children will help them stay connected to them during the day. However, it might be causing them to disconnect from school. This concern is leading to limits for student use of phones in the classroom. Claire Morrell is a Senior Policy Analyst at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and directs their Technology and Human Flourishing Project. She joins us today to discuss her recently published policy memo entitled Getting Phones Out of Schools. Claire Morrell, welcome to Family Policy Matters.

Thank you so much for having me on. What are the problems that you're seeing with student phones in schools? Just give us an overview. How bad can it be? A growing recognition is that phones are distracting students from learning, and we're seeing academic outcomes really plummet. Reading and math scores in the 2022 national assessments are at an all-time low since the 1970s. And that kind of result is backed up by research on the impacts of children having phones with them in the classroom. There's been studies that have been done that show even the presence of a phone when children aren't on it is mentally distracting because their brain knows there's things happening on the phone.

And so their attention is still divided, even if they're not actively using it. So I think we know that the presence of phones on children during the school day is having a negative impact on their learning environment. And on the academic outcomes. Also, there's a negative impact on the social environment. Children are turning to their phones instead of socializing with their peers in person. And a lot of schools have seen rising levels of discipline concerns related to bullying or to even student altercations being videotaped and spread on social media. Rumors, gossip being spread via text message and social media during the day that are then also having a negative impact on students' mental health, their social relationships, and then even their learning environment because the distractions of those growing social concerns detract from the school day.

And so, you know, we know that school is primarily an academic environment for children, but it's also a social environment. And the phones are interrupting children's normal social development with their peers as well as distracting them from their learning. And it's also a very frustrating experience for teachers because they're constantly having to police students, reminding them to get off their phones. And so it's really important that schools consider going phone free, trying to remove the complete distraction of phones from the school day.

This makes a lot of sense, I think, especially as adults. I mean, we know how addicting phones can be in our own lives, but this is not just speculation, right? I mean, there's a lot of hardcore data behind these claims that are being made. Can you guys just give us an example of the kinds of statistics about how bad the phone use is and about the differences when they're removed from the schools? So just to give a brief overview, some of the data has shown on the negative side that 97%, you know, one survey found of tweens and teens are on their phones during the school day. And so even if, you know, a parent is thinking, I'm sending my kid to school with the phone so I can stay in touch with them, it's still it's a distraction.

Students are constantly picking them up, checking notifications. And so the research does show that children are on their phones during the school day, which is problematic. On the positive side, studies are now being done on schools that have removed phones from the school day and are seeing huge positive results. So one study out of Norway found that students' GPAs rose, their mental health outcomes improved. Also in Europe, this was measuring the middle school students and it found that the schools that had gone phone free, the students were much more likely to get into a very competitive high school track. And so there's clear positive results in terms of academic outcomes and improvements in learning, but also the mental health aspects.

There was a large decrease in the kinds of mental health issues teens were seeing their general practitioner, their doctor for. Other studies out of the UK have found that, again, national test exam scores increased by six percent among the schools, students that went phone free. And here's another really fascinating finding from that study is that the scores improved the most for the students that were most behind. They improved by 14 percent their test results.

And this is a no cost solution. It's just getting rid of the phones can have huge improvements. And again, especially for those two maybe in the most kind of vulnerable situation academically, they're seeing the greatest improvements. Answer some of the concerns that parents might have about their children not having phones in school. You know, one concern is parents really value and prize being in touch with their student throughout the day.

But there are other means to do that. And I think that schools who have implemented these policies have actually been able to do it successfully by working with the parents to assure them that they will be able to get in touch with their student during the day if needed by making sure all their classrooms are equipped with a landline phone. So if a parent needs to relay a message, they can call the office. The office can call that classroom so the teacher can pass that message along to the student, making sure students can access a phone in the main office to call parents as needed. And so they're trying to make sure there are alternative methods of communication available for parents to get in touch with their kids. And then another big concern of parents would be about emergency situations. You know, heaven forbid there would be a school lockdown or an active shooter situation. How am I going to know my child's OK?

How am I going to be able to get in touch with them? And what full security experts say that phones during an emergency event, particularly an active shooter situation, actually make students less safe. They're tempted to be distracted by what's going on on their phone, trying to get in touch with people instead of listening to instructions from teachers or school officials that are trying to keep them safe.

It can also alert dangerous individuals in an active shooter situation to where a student might be. And so contrary to what parents might think, the phones are not making children more safe in those types of emergency situations. And then I would also just add to that the teachers are equipped with cell phones. And so the teachers would be able then in an emergency situation if needed to get in touch with parents, let them know their child is OK. And so I think, again, schools are absolutely trying to keep kids safe.

And there are actually ways to do this by removing the phones. And so it's not going to be an impediment to child safety at school, but hopefully increase their safety. Let's talk about some of the specific policies that you are encouraging schools and districts to consider then. I'm encouraging schools to go phone free. And by that, I mean removing phones from the entire school day, not just classroom or instructional time, but also during passing periods and lunch breaks. Those results I quoted earlier, they really studied policies and looked at the difference between what they would call effective phone bans, which was removing the phone from the entire school day versus classroom level bans that was just prohibited during class. And they found that the outcomes were much greater for removing them from the entire school day. As I mentioned earlier, there's studies that show that even the presence of a phone on a student is distracting, even if they're not on it.

And the other issue is enforcement. When it's on individual teachers in these individual classes to try to enforce, it's very difficult for teachers to stay on top of it. Teachers can vary in their levels of enforcement and they're still having to kind of constantly police the classroom for phones. When schools remove the phones from the entire school day with methods like having students deposit their phones in a central location where they check them in at the beginning of the day and check them out at the end of the day, or some schools use an invention called a yonder pouch, which is basically this soft magnetic pouch that the student puts their phone in at the beginning of the day and it gets locked.

And so they actually can't unlock it until at the end of the day on their way out, there's like a demagnetizing strip that they just run the pouch by, opens their phones, they can use it when they leave school. Other schools don't even allow children to bring the phones on the premises of the school grounds. As I mentioned, there's alternative means for staying in touch with parents then instead of the phones. And so all of those types of policies that really protect the entire school day have had the greatest impact.

It also makes it easiest for teachers and school administrators to enforce. And the biggest positive benefit is then children during passing periods and lunch are actually building in-person relationships and creating a healthy social environment, which is difficult, again, with having phones being part of the school day. Even for the parents that try to keep their kids off of phones, they are affected by the entire social dynamic of phones being the medium through which kids are communicating. And so even kids who aren't on their phones are left out. But if you just remove all the phones completely, you create a very healthy in-person social environment for all the kids, as well as an environment that adults can see and speak into. Part of the problem, as I've talked with teachers, is that they cannot see into the virtual world where kids are socializing on their phones.

And so they can't speak in correct issues of bullying or gossip or rumors because the adults are actually not privy to that when the children are all doing that on the phones. And so it's a much healthier environment for the school day when there are phones completely removed and they're able to focus on their academics and socialize in a healthy way in-person. Several states have tried some no-phone policies.

Talk about those and how are they going? Florida was the first state to pass a law trying to get phones out of the school day, and now the state law really only prohibited them from classroom time. But a county in Florida, Orange County, decided to go a step further because of some of this research and because of really discipline issues they were seeing in their district. When I spoke with one of the school board members, she said that they recognized they had a discipline problem and that the phones were behind it after they put together a discipline task force. It was clear that it was the phones. So they decided we're going to have our school districts go completely phone free.

And the results were amazing. She told me the story of just walking through this high school campus, seeing the kids playing pickleball at lunch and talking to each other. She said the use of their libraries increased exponentially.

Kids would go check books out during lunch or use the library to play games or do other things. And so they just saw an instant increase in student social interactions becoming much more positive, as well as more focus in the classroom. And they also really saw the discipline issues decreased dramatically from just taking the phones away. Students were able to engage in those kind of harmful behaviors of cyberbullying or gossip or videotaping things and uploading them to social media. And the students shared that it was a huge positive increase for them. You know, one senior girl shared that it was a stress for her to feel like every day when she went to school, she didn't know if people would be taking photos or videotaping her just during the school day.

And she felt such a pressure then to look and appear perfect and kind of project this perfect image of yourself all the time. And so I think that the phones have just created this environment where there's constant comparison socially and it's really harmful for children's mental health. And so just taking the phones out of the school day, the students themselves actually saw the difference. They may not have liked the kind of policy initially, but several students expressed just how much freer they felt during the school day to be themselves, to interact with friends and to actually like focus on their academics. And I would just add this experience in this county of Florida was very positive. The parents all found that they loved the policy because they recognized their kids not being on phones during the school day really increased their academic focus and some of the behavioral issues they were dealing with. And they had no issues getting in touch with their students, as they may have initially been concerned with. The school board member I spoke to said that she had really very, very little complaints from parents. And actually, she had a lot of parents reaching out to her, thanking her for helping get this policy passed that was having such positive impacts among the students. And so that's just one example from one county in Florida.

But I think that just speaks to the kinds of results that can happen. I understand that our neighbor, South Carolina, is enacting a new law, which is coming up, I guess, in the next year or so. Yes. So I believe it passes part of their state budget. They're asking all the districts to adopt a phone free school day policy, and they've asked for that to go into effect by January of 2025. And so I think some school districts have actually already started in South Carolina. They're trying to implement it from the get go this fall. I think others are maybe taking a little more time to kind of figure out exactly what their policy will look like in terms of what enforcements or consequences there will be for violations, how they'll deal with the phones, what methods they're going to use to kind of secure them away. The goal, though, is that all school districts, in order to consider receiving state funding, have to have a phone free policy in effect by January. Yeah. Very interesting and compelling incentive for them. If you want state money, get rid of the phones. That's great.

Well, we're just about out of time for this week. Before we go, where can our listeners go to follow all of your work and especially your work on this topic? I have a scholar page at the Ethics and Public Policy Center dot org.

So it's just EPPC dot org. You can find my name, Claire Morrell, and all my writing is there. I also have a sub stack where I will be regularly posting this type of content and resources for schools, for parents on tech issues. So if you just Google Claire Morrell sub stack, my sub stack will come up. You can subscribe. And I also have a forthcoming book that's due out next June called The Tech Exit. It's a book directed at parents for how to navigate tech issues. And there's a whole chapter dedicated to schools.

So you can follow me there. Claire Morrell, thank you for being with us today on Family Policy Matters. Thank you for listening to Family Policy Matters. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe to the show and leave us a review. To learn more about NC Family and the work we do to promote and preserve faith and family in North Carolina, visit our website at NC Family dot org. That's NC Family dot org and check us out on social media at NC Family Policy. Thanks and may God bless you and your family.