More states and school districts are forbidding or restricting students’ access to cellphones.
By Laura Meckler, Hannah Natanson and Karina Elwood, The Washington PostStudents at Washington Junior High School in Pennsylvania leaving classes for the day use an unlocking mechanism to open the bags their cellphone were sealed in during the school day.
Pressure on school leaders has come from teachers and parents who see cellphones as a distraction, an impediment to learning and a constant toll on students’ mental health. Other districts ban use of phones during instructional time — or allow teachers to do so in their individual classes — but permit use during lunch or in the hallways.
In Los Angeles, officials are exploring how to implement a cellphone ban that will extend through the entire school day. But in the years since, as some students began to exhibit a dependency on cellular devices, schools started returning to earlier prohibitions. By 2020-2021, the share of all schools barring use reached 77% — although those figures are much lower among high schools.
A study published in 2022 concluded that taking away phones could help learning. It was based on an experiment in which different classrooms of New York Institute of Technology undergraduates spent six weeks learning with and without cellphones. Afterward, researchers surveyed the students on their mindset and what they learned.
That approach worked in Cleveland, where the teachers union successfully pushed for a student cellphone ban in negotiating its recently approved contract. There’s often pushback from students and sometimes from parents when cellphone restrictions are adopted, administrators say.
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