How to Ban Phones in School
Phones in schools are bad news. It’s intuitively obvious. There are studies documenting it. There are so many stories of schools ditching them and students and teachers saying everything got better – and essentially no stories of schools ditching them and regretting it.
So, why aren’t phone-free schools already the norm? Because parents oppose phone bans and, it turns out, there are actually very good reasons why they do. And those reasons point to a grand policy bargain that state legislatures could make.
The first reason is bullying and violence. More than half of our school have adopted the lenient, critical-race-theory-derived “restorative justice” approach to discipline. Teachers can’t exert authority because they know if they send a kid to the office, they’ll be the ones getting in trouble. Administrators oversee a rise in bullying and violence, claiming credit because they don’t punish anything, and therefore suspensions are down.
In this context, phones are the best protection and insurance against bullying and violence. Without them, parents would have literally no window into the school environment. They only find out about fights because of phones. Redress for bullying might only be possible if they have video evidence.
The second reason, related to the first, is the fear of school shootings. As was the case in Parkland, Florida, Oxford, Michigan, and Newport News, Virginia, the “restorative justice” approach to safety encourages administrators to cover up alarming behavior from potentially dangerous students. If a parent’s worst nightmare comes true, they want to be able to reach their child during those terrifying moments. Indeed, given the problems we’ve seen with school camera systems and delays in police communications, phones in classrooms can provide a tactical advantage.
The third reason parents aren’t comfortable with removing phones from classrooms is the rise of ideological indoctrination. Think of all the teacher videos you’ve seen on Libs of TikTok. All those videos were taken with phones. Before the summer of Floyd, teachers knew that if they started preaching their politics from the chalkboard, a parent would complain and they’d have an unpleasant meeting with the principal. After that summer, far too many administrators dropped their commitment to ideological neutrality.
The threat of a parent complaining to the principal doesn’t carry as far as it used to. But the threat of being put on blast on social media based on a video recording still does. Indeed, one can’t help but feel that phones in classrooms are holding back a deluge of indoctrination that you’d otherwise never know was happening.
That’s not all to say that phones in classrooms are the ideal policy solution to the above problems. But it is to say that any policy initiative to remove them would need to cure the problems that phones are band-aiding. Phone bans, then, should come with the following policy changes.
First, a phone ban must be accompanied by a zero-tolerance policy for phone usage. Policymakers can’t ask teachers to enforce a phone ban while administrators punish them for issuing consequences. That’s simply a recipe for the further undermining of teacher authority.
Second, a phone ban must be accompanied by a shift away from restorative justice more broadly. Schools should be required to conduct discipline and safety audits that allow teachers and students open-ended, anonymous, public responses on questions about safety and order. School accountability systems must no longer encourage schools to decrease suspension rates. Principals should be held accountable, instead, by how effectively their teachers say that they support them on discipline and safety matters.
Third, a phone ban must be accompanied by training for school staff to conduct threat assessments on potentially dangerous students. Florida has done this extremely effectively in the wake of the Parkland school shooting and should be a model for other states. Furthermore, states should encourage schools to take sensible school-hardening measures and increase funding for either school resource officers or guardians, to hedge against the nightmare scenario.
Finally, teachers serve in the public trust and should sense that the public is watching. Shortly after parents saw into the classroom on Zoom, there was a public policy outcry for cameras in classrooms. Those cries went nowhere, and for good reason – neither parents nor policymakers truly wanted to turn schools into perpetual panopticons. Yet there was a reasonable compromise position that was never floated: a parent trigger for temporary recordings. If, say, a third of parents complain to a principal, that could trigger a week of classroom recording. This would be enough to provide a sense that the public could be watching without the cameras constantly rolling.
This grand bargain on phones in classrooms would need to come from state legislatures, rather than local school boards. The latter are, unfortunately, far too captured by teachers unions, which have proven eager to sacrifice student and teacher safety, and certainly learning quality, on the altar of social justice. State legislatures should act. If they approach the issue correctly, they could not only make classrooms more focused and less anti-social, but also safer and less ideologically charged.
