EDITORIAL: Students get smarter without smart phones

Schools in Ozaukee County and all over the country are banning cell phones in classrooms.  It’s about time.

It has been obvious for quite a while that smart phones interfere with classroom learning, but school authorities had reason to be hesitant—today’s students have never known a world without cell phones. The devices are like an appendage to their bodies. As the Cedar Grove-Belgium High School principal told an Ozaukee Press reporter, “Taking a device away from a student is like removing their arm.”

Separation of the devices from students can be a fraught process because today’s adolescents and teenagers as a group are the most adept users in the world of smart phones and all of the wonders crammed into those mini computers. Unlike older generations that had to crawl laboriously up the technology learning curve, they were born into a high-tech world with instinctive ability to operate computer technology.

Port Washington, Grafton and Cedar Grove-Belgium high schools began restricting cell phones this school year with rules requiring students to place their phones in a holder when entering a classroom. Teachers are relieved.

Limiting cell phone use in K-12 schools is a national trend. Los Angeles schools are preparing to impose a blanket ban on cell phones—no student phones allowed at all in schools. The New York City school district, the largest in the nation, is expected to follow suit.

Lawmakers are joining the crackdown. More than a dozen states have enacted legislation requiring cell phone restrictions in schools.

Cell phones in classrooms get in the way of teaching and learning, of course, but the rationale for restricting them goes beyond that. A warning from the U.S. surgeon general that compulsive use of social media platforms can cause depression, anxiety and self-esteem issues for adolescents and teenagers is often cited. Cyber bullying and the emotional injury that can be inflicted by student phones are also given as reasons for bans.

Nick DeBaker, principal of Thomas Jefferson Middle School in Port Washington, explained, “You may have an incident at school, maybe it’s a fight, and it’s recorded on cell phones and posted on social media and the kids who were involved and already embarrassed and traumatized have to go through that again.”

As for the distraction element, it’s pretty obvious cell phones don’t belong in classrooms simply because teachers should not have to compete for the attention of students with TikTok or Instagram or any of the myriad of entertainments available on the devices.

There was a time when a surreptitiously passed note or a whispered mocking comment about the teacher or another student were classroom distractions. How quaint.

In the cell phone era, the distractions are an electronic barrage—text messages, photos (some taken during classes), games, incoming social media notifications and various other digital diversions.

The media research group Common Sense

Media found that adolescents receive a median of 237 notifications daily, about a quarter of them during school hours.

The restrictions are working. Few students are happy about them, but it seems most have realized their digital social lives will survive this inconvenience.

Teachers are delighted, of course, but the same cannot be said about all parents. In some school districts, they have objected to policies that require their children to be without their cell phone at any time while at school. Mostly, this is motivated by the fear of being out of touch with their children during emergencies.

Cell phones have taken so-called helicopter parenting—hovering over every aspect of their children’s lives—to a new level of overprotection. Still, the anxiety generated by school shootings and bomb threats is an unavoidable fact of life that should be considered in school phone restrictions. Allowing students to bring phones to school, but to be used only under strict limitations and never during classes, as is seen in Ozaukee schools now, is preferable to blanket bans.

School cell phone rules should mainly relate to their effect on education. It’s not the responsibility of schools to deal with the overall issue of smart phone use that can affect the emotional and mental health of adolescents. That’s a job for parents.