School Policy Research

Five Levels of Effectiveness - Research on School Phone-Use Policies
​Jonathan Haidt (2023)

Why can't we just collect phones at classroom doors? 

2 main reasons...
​
​#1. Academic Reason = Attention Residue

​"Every time you check your phone there is a cost to your focus and cognitive performance.
Your ability to focus and think deeply is reduced for up to 25 minutes."
-Cal Newport, Deep Work (2016)

"Attention residue is a result of our brain's desire for completion. Because the first task never truly finishes, it remains at the top of your mind, preventing you from becoming fully immersed in your next task."
-Leroy & Bloom, 2018

Yondr tried implementing their system in classrooms only. Due to differences amongst classroom cultures & teacher ideologies, it failed so miserably that Yondr will not partner with schools only wanting to collect phones in classrooms... the data is clear... phone-free classrooms can only work when the entire school is phone-free. 

#2. Social Reason = Mental Health

In order for children to build real, long-lasting friendships, they need long periods of unstructured social time without accessible devices that were created to tempt humans away from each other's eyes and ears. 

We cannot reverse a depression/loneliness epidemic if we only restrict phone restrictions in classrooms & not in unstructured social spaces.

​Why shouldn't teachers be able to give permission for students to use phones for instructional / academic purposes?

#1- It's an inequitable practice.

Some students do not have phones. More and more Clayton parents are following expert advice and delaying smartphones for their children. Some Clayton parents cannot afford to give their children smartphones. Hence, Clayton parents have reported that their children feeling embarrassed, shamed, and/or excluded when the teacher allows or encourages phone use for "instructional purposes." Teachers are (unknowingly) allowing some students to flaunt their status symbol in front of others. 

“My rising 7th grader is in the small minority in his grade with no cell phone. Annoying when a teacher tells them to take out their phones to take a picture of the board and he is one of 3 in the class with no phone.  Hope that they act soon!”                        -Wydown Middle School Parent

#2- Impossible not to get distracted

Phones have too many non-academic distractions. Adults cannot even ignore distractions when trying to focus on a work-related task on their phone. When a teacher says, "You can get your phones out and take a picture of this" or "It's okay to use your phone to look up the definition of a word," it is unrealistic to expect students will only use their phone for the directed academic purpose, and ignore the texts, social media notifications, news alerts, photos, videos, posts, etc.

​“You can try having self-control, but there are a thousand engineers on the other side of the screen working against you."  
​
​                                                        -Tristan Harris , Former Google Designer

But there are some great academic benefits when students can freely access phones in schools...

We acknowledge that there are some benefits to students having access to phones & other devices in schools. We are aware Clayton students have used smartphones to:

• get online and access academic work when Chromebooks don’t work well 
• create innovative, tech-based academic projects
• use teacher-created apps to learn information on field trips

But research shows that these few "academic pros" are heavily outweighed by the cons, such as, increased... 

• distraction
• anxiety
• depression
• self-harm
• suicide

The few benefits are not worth it. To maintain tech innovation, we hope the school district considers:

• computer labs
• district-owned device check-out systems to take video, photos, etc. for projects
• better, stronger laptops for high schoolers
• better, stronger--but smaller collection of*--laptops for middle schoolers

Why can't teachers just get more strict about taking phones away ?

#1- This strategy does not work.

77% of public schools in the United States say they ban phone-use during class time. But 72% of high school teachers say that cell phones are a "major problem" in classrooms (Pew Research, 2024)

"Unless students have a place to lock their phones away, policing becomes a full-time job for teachers. When a teacher is charged with the task of enforcing a phone-free classroom on their own, they spend valuable class time policing, correcting, and managing phones. Valuable instruction time is also lost when students do not comply or beg for an exception." -Jonathan Haidt, 2024

#2- It's too much to put on teachers. Teachers should be focused on educating, not policing.

Quotes from Clayton High School teachers:

“I'm not ok with being responsible for 20+ $1,000 phones hanging on a wall nor the possibility of students grabbing one or another's phone."

"We work SO hard to build relationships with your kids. Taking away their phone is a very big deal. If the expectations aren't the same across the entire school, then I become the bad guy for taking the phone away. They don't understand why I'm taking it away, but their teacher down the hall lets them have it out the whole class. It all really undermines the work I've done to build trust with the student." 

“Teachers might tell administrators that it’s not a problem in their class because that’s like saying to your boss, ‘I don’t have control. I’m not doing my job.’ But the truth is that it’s a big problem."

“It is really hard to be a teacher who is restrictive when they have just come from a class that is not restrictive. It's like the kids are alcoholics and were drinking in their first class and now they are pissed that they are in your class and you took their bottle away.”