Something to Phone Home About

2023-2024 National Case Set

Jul 17

Written By NHSEB

In recent years, much attention has been paid to students’ smartphone usage and its impact on their social and academic development. Since roughly 2012, smartphones and social media have become a fixture of social life for America’s teenagers. In the years since, researchers like Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist, have presented data showing that student well-being has dropped substantially in western democracies across several measures. Many, including Haidt, see these things as not only correlated, but causally connected. They encourage parents to curtail students’ social media usage, and have recently started to seek bans on smartphone usage in schools.

Available data has certainly noted correlations between an always-connected lifestyle and teens’ mental health outcomes. The CDC’s most recent Youth Risk Behavior Survey detailing behavioral trends from 2011-2021 shows that American teens (teenage girls, in particular) suffer from substantial mental health afflictions at a higher rate, including social and generalized anxiety, persistent sadness or hopelessness typically indicative of depression, and consideration of suicide. A study in the UK found yet more connections, linking excessive social media usage with disruption to sleep patterns, experiences of cyberbullying, and the correlated disruption of self-esteem, satisfaction with body image, etc. Whether these correlations amount to poor outcomes being causally attributable to smartphone and social media usage, however, is a subject of ongoing debates. One thing is agreed upon by nearly all parties—more research into what is still a comparatively new phenomenon is needed.

Those who would seek to ban smartphones in school note that existing rules regulating usage are insufficient and seldom followed consistently by students. Many now advocate barring students’ physical possession of a phone during the school day, due to the purported effects on students’ health, learning, and development. They suggest that students’ academic performance and socialization suffer as much as their mental health. A recent open letter to Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona urging bans for these reasons has been signed by over 100 academics, educational leaders, and others. Editorial Boards from Bloomberg and The Washington Post have joined the debate as well. As Haidt offers, “all children deserve schools that will help them learn, cultivate deep friendships, and develop into mentally healthy young adults… All children deserve phone-free schools.” Limited smartphone bans with similar justifications have already gone into effect in France and China. In February 2024, the UK Government announced a “crackdown” on phones at school, providing guidance to teachers around the country on preventing student usage during instructional time.

Critics of such policies point to a dearth of research on the phenomenon, and a lack of clarity about where the data we do have points us. And many of the people implicated by such bans offer their own doubts. Many cite problems with enforcement and accountability—in short, recognizing that teachers don’t desire to spend their time policing phone usage, as such interactions can be awkward and infantilizing, to say nothing of the potential for escalation. Many parents and guardians insist that always-on channels of communication are necessary in an era of increased tension and threats of gun or physical violence at school. Others, seeing smartphone usage emerge as a site for punishment by school officials, cite well-documented worries about significant disparities in the administration of school discipline along vectors of race, class, and other demographic categories.

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

Under what circumstances, if any, should schools be able to ban smartphone usage by students?
Should parents’ wishes be given consideration in debates over school smartphone bans?
Can smartphones be used to good educational effect in classrooms? What would that look like?