States Shouldn’t Ban Smartphones in Schools

Anxiety, Fear, and the Importance of Listening

Over the weekend, I visited the aquarium with my daughters. When it was time to feed the harbor seals, one of the staff members told us some facts about the seals, including this gem:

Just as children don't learn at the same rate and the same way, the same is true for harbor seals. They learn their behaviors—dancing, spinning, giving high fives—through different means and different rates.

If only most schools organized around this reality.

The day before, a fellow parent complained to me about the math curriculum at his child’s school. His main observation was that the entire class was repeating the same concepts over and over again, but in many different ways. Although he understood how this could benefit a child who hadn’t yet understood a math standard, his child wasn’t in that boat. She already understood the concepts and was more than ready to move on. Instead, she sat with the rest of the class and kept repeating the same things over and over.

If you’re a subscriber to the newsletter, you likely know that we don’t have to accept that status quo. We can change it.

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Are you sick and tired of the status quo of schooling? You don’t have to settle for school being the same old or just “OK.” There are better ways—for each and every child.

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Should Schools Ban Smartphones?

A blockbuster headline arrived in my in-box June 6. Written by one of my favorite Substack writers, Jon Haidt’s

After Babel

, the headline read:

The Case for Phone-Free Schools

First, some background. Haidt and his colleagues have been publishing some of the most important research on how social media harms the mental health of teens. I’m persuaded by a lot of what they’ve written, although I think

Emily Oster

offered important links to some important counterpoints showing where social media can be useful here:

How to Manage Your Family's Relationship With Social Media and Smartphones

The question as I dove into Haidt’s piece was would I change my mind? Several months back I wrote a piece in Education Next headlined “Ban the Cellphone Ban” in which I argued that blanket policies ignore the potential of mobile learning.

On June 13, I joined WBUR’s On Point for a show headlined “Should schools ban smartphones in the classroom?” to talk through the issue.

The short answer is I find Haidt’s case lacking because it ignores the innovation educators are doing on the ground to create new learning models. Haidt is wrong when he asserts that “Other countries are ahead of the U.S. on phone policy,” while citing France as a prime example with its smartphone ban in schools.

I argued on air that individual schools should have the ability and infrastructure (having things like Yondr pouches, lockers, and more) in place to effectively ban smartphones. But educators and schools should also be able to do the opposite if smartphones are ideal for their learning models.

In the traditional one-size-fits-all classroom I described at the beginning of this newsletter, I don’t think smartphones make much sense either. Haidt is generally right here. They’re often distracting and harmful. But if educators change the learning models themselves such that smartphones are helpful in engaging students, then they should have the freedom to do so. The problem with blanket bans, like the one in France, is that it eliminates the opportunity for innovation on behalf of students by enterprising educators on the ground. Those who argue for the blanket bans seem to be ignoring the variation in how smartphones can be used in classrooms, nor does it seem that they are familiar with innovative learning models. 

You can listen to my full takes in the show itself (or read them here), in which I take a third-way view in between blanket bans and students having unbridled access to smartphones. As usual, my take is consistent with my belief that policymakers shouldn’t micromanage the inputs of how schools operate, but should instead focus their attention on student outcomes.

Here are two of my points from the show:

Instead of assuming that all students should be looking at the teacher in the front of the room, marching in lockstep [with] various levels of engagement… you can imagine that each student is on their own [path]. It might be Khan Academy, it might be Duolingo, it might be Quizlet to get reinforcement. And they’re going at their own personalized path and pace through the learning, actively working on problems, and then joining in on projects to do deeper learning with other students. And so the cell phones become part of the way to actually learn as opposed to a distraction, which I agree with, in a whole class model can be really, really unfortunate.

So why phones?

There’s an accessibility question, in many cases. There’s a question of affordability and making sure that people have access. And many times smartphones are the ways that we make this more democratized for more students. I’ll give you one more example, though, which is I often love when classes get outside their classroom, they go into nature, they go to the nearby pond, and they do scientific study and stuff like that. Well, having a smartphone with you to take water samples or things of that nature can be a really powerful use of a mobile device that you couldn’t necessarily do with the laptops… or even in some cases, the tablets. And so having that ability to be purpose-driven, I think, is incredibly important as an option, not necessarily… the default.

Anxiety, Fear, and the Importance of Listening

On our last episode of Class Disrupted before we take a summer break, Diane Tavenner and I delved into the role fear and anxiety may be playing behind the community outbursts that have bedeviled so many school leaders.

The episode was sparked from a conversation I had recently with a head of school over coffee. She shared stories with me about how much her schooling community had changed from pre-COVID to now. Parents don’t communicate with the school anymore, she said. They instead just talk to each other and work themselves in a frenzy over everything that happens, whether it’s big or small—and from school security, which we discussed on a past show—to gender issues.

The parents, whether it’s in small communities or bigger social media forums, egg each other on, she said. The head of school then told me an awful story of how she and her staff got bullied online. But what I heard beneath this story is that this is really a story of fear and anxiety—on all sides. 

How do we curb the bad behaviors? And how do we help the parents?

Fear, or a perception of threat or anxiety, drives paralysis. Whether it’s Amanda Ripley’s work in the book High Conflict, Bob Moesta’s Jobs-To-be-Done framework, Clark Gilbert’s work on threat rigidity, or Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky’s Nobel Prize-winning work on loss aversion, all these bodies of research show that fear, anxiety, and perception of threat, can cause someone to anchor in their current position.

So what do we do about it? I think the answer starts with empathy. And deep listening. The people who have concerns likely aren’t crazy. They do need to be understood. Our full advice and set of thoughts are here.

As always, thank you for reading, writing, and listening.