This is a cautionary tale.
Cards on the table: I get a little eye-rolly when I see a call from folks like Jon Haidt or Scott Galloway (or anyone who’s not in the classroom) to make schools phone-free. Something like this, when it’s stated as a foregone conclusion that only knuckle-draggers would oppose…
…and the audience cheers in response.
Don’t get me wrong —I love Haidt and Galloway and think they’re doing important work. But I’ve been on a journey to make my school (or schools or even district) go phone-free for over a year. The road’s not been easy, and I have zero results. If you want the TL;DR version from the very start, it’s simple:
Don’t go it alone.
Don’t expect research or data to play as big a role as you think it should.
Expect resistance from all corners.
Beginnings…
My phone-free school journey started in the summer of 2022 when I tried to understand how my students differed after the pandemic. After a year of being in a classroom with them again, it was clear that something was off.
I read widely in developmental psychology and the start of the research surrounding learning loss, social and developmental issues with being out of school, mental health challenges, and more. And like others, I noticed that my kids were addicted to their phones. It was bad before, but now, after being functionally out of school for two years, they were straight-up addicted.
A little about me. I just wrapped my 15th year of teaching. I started before the smartphone invasion. Early on, I saw it like James Cagney saw motion pictures in Footlight Parade. It was a fad. Education will be education like it always has been.
Yeah, oops.
In the years since, the changeover to phone-based schools is nearly complete. I did and still do try to play nice with phones and use them in class (there are tremendous physics apps that use the myriad of sensors baked into your phone), but it’s a losing battle. The idea that phones could be used in the classroom to enhance student learning? The people saying that want to sell you apps.
I’ve seen fights break out over what a student posted on social media during school, I’ve known of nudes (let’s be clear with our terms, it’s child pornography when students are involved) being passed around, of teachers filmed without their knowledge, music always being played (with and without headphones), inappropriate videos, wholesale cheating, everything.
I’ve also endured milquetoast district and school “policies” to keep phones out of student's hands during class. The quotes that claim “80% of public schools in the United States prohibit students from using phones during class?” Let me explain. There is a school policy that says that, for sure. But classrooms are silos, policies rarely have any teeth, students know how to game every rule placed in front of them, and no one in a school building wants to deal with a screaming parent over a $800 piece of technology they own.
The “policies” are not enforced uniformly across the board. I don’t care what your school says the policy is; unless it physically separates kids from their phones, they have their phones in class—and are using them.
After the pandemic, their use of phones was worse—brazen, even. There are a lot of other issues that must be addressed post-pandemic, but phones—my god, the phones.
So many issues seemed to revolve around phones. “If we could just get them out of their hands for the schooldays,” I naively thought, “We’d be able to start making some positive changes.”
Joe and Matt…
In this hunt for information, I found Screen Schooled: Two Veteran Teachers Expose How Technology Overuse Is Making Our Kids Dumber by Joe Clement and Matt Miles.
Oh my god.
As I describe it to anyone who will listen, Joe and Matt’s book is like the videotape people receive in The Ring. You won’t die after you read it, but it will make you furious. The blind, unquestioning adoption of screens (and EdTech) by schools, despite the lack of evidence it’s working, and mounting evidence that more screen time has deleterious effects on our kids…your mileage may vary, but I could only read a chapter at a time, at most. I wanted to throw the book across the room many times.
I’ll write about Screen Schooled later, but you need to read it if you’re fighting to make schools phone-free. My tattered, highlighted, and bookmarked copy is on my bookshelf beside Jon Haidt’s books, and honestly, I hold it in higher regard for my journey.
Get it. Read it. But remember:
Maybe plan meditation time or a nice walk in nature afterward?
Enter the Yondr…
I first learned of Yondr pouches through Joe and Matt’s work. When I reached out to them a little over a year ago, they were on the cusp of becoming the YONDR they are today.
If you haven’t heard about Yondr — here’s the quick version: They make neoprene bags with magnetic locks (think the anti-shoplifting devices put on clothing in stores). Students put their phones in them upon arriving at school in the morning and “unlock” them on their way out of school in the afternoon.
It’s simple, and it’s pretty secure. Kids carry their phones in a pouch with them all day, so there’s no threat or worry about them being stolen or searched while out of their possession. Yes, research has shown that the mere presence of a phone in the same room as a student can raise their anxiety levels. Also, FOMO is real—a whole world is happening right there on their phone…that’s locked away in neoprene.
Yondr’s not a perfect solution, but it’s the best of a group of crappy solutions to get ourselves out of this crappy problem that we allowed to happen.
I called Yondr, talked to their Education Partnerships Lead, and quickly became a full-on convert. This was the way to go.
Yondr is not cheap. It’s a lease system with an annual per-pouch cost. The support is great—as many unlocking base units as needed, replacements for damaged pouches, guidance (and sample letters) for communicating the plan with parents and students, a wealth of testimonials, and company representatives coming to your school when you start implementation. They know it’s a tough sell, and their revenue would take a hit if a school dropped it at the first bumps in the road, so they’re financially incentivized to ensure things go smoothly.
I should say that I’m not, nor have I ever been, an employee of Yondr or received any compensation from Yondr.
Okay—Yondr. Phone-free schools. The changes we’d see in a year made my head go all swimmy.
I was optimistic.
That was a mistake.
Gathering Allies and Receipts
Early on, I figured that whatever I did would be useless without dates, documentation, and the support of folks who shared the vision and could help from their side. I was doing all of this to cover bases and sweeten the pot when it came time to present my idea to … whoever would listen.
If you’re keeping track of dates, this was late spring/early summer of 2023.
Receipts:
I went into heavy research mode. I’m a science teacher. It’s what I do.
Using Screen Schooled as a springboard, I found the work of Jon (The Anxious Generation) Haidt, starting with his article in The Atlantic. I devoured his Substack, After Babel, particularly digging into the collaborative research collection (Social Media and Mental Health) he started with Jean (iGen) Twenge and Zach Rausch.
After Haidt, I kept digging. This was me:
This information wasn’t hidden. There were good and bad studies and correlations that hinted at causes, but nothing that countered the larger picture—we introduced phones and social media to preteens and teens without any idea of what effects it would have on them. I quickly amassed a massive folder of articles and news stories I shared with anyone I spoke to.
I also listened to the audiobook (and later bought a physical copy to mark up) of Max Fisher’s The Chaos Engine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World. If Screen Schooled was like watching the videotape from The Ring, The Chaos Engine was like getting a transfusion of Bruce Banner’s gamma-irradiated blood.
My two hottest takes from all of my reading?
Kids didn’t have a chance. Phones and social media were designed explicitly to steal and hold attention. Every psychological trick in the book is thrown at users. What hope does an 11-year-old have? Or a 15-year-old? Or a 3-year-old, trained to beg for mommy’s iPhone, given freely, because it keeps them quiet?
Kids behave exactly as they should, given the world we’ve created for them and what we’ve allowed them access to. We give them screens before they can walk, and we have no idea how that will affect them. We allow them to access social media and the entirety of the internet, to the point, as Haidt says, that most kids experience hardcore pornography and explicit, graphic violence before their first kiss.
Why are we surprised when they act differently than we did, or would in their place? When their social skills are stunted, when they can’t operate without a screen nearby, when they can’t focus, can barely read, can’t write by hand, have an attention span measured in seconds, or when a comment online will send them into a days-long depression or worse? We didn’t know how this would work and blithely abdicated our roles as a generation of parents because everyone else was doing it, too. These aren’t our children anymore; they are the children of the algorithm. It raised and continues to raise them with our tacit blessing.
But I’m not here to fight about that. I was trying to get my school to go phone-free and needed support and rationale for my windmill tilting.
As a district, 2023-2024 would be our year of adopting the tenets of Deeper Learning. We didn’t, for whatever reason, but before I knew the ball would be dropped, I was prepping like a lawyer making opening arguments—Deeper Learning needs focus. You cannot have students focus while phones are in the classroom.
We would also be able to collect data that would allow us to compare End-of-Course (EOC) scores when we were phone-based vs. phone-free, as well as ACT scores, discipline, school attitudes, hints at the mental health and attitudes of our students (measured with the Panorama survey), and other metrics.
This could result in our school and district producing academic journal articles, baby—putting us at the leading edge of phone research in schools. We’d have real data, not anecdotes.
Slam dunk, right? Who wouldn’t want to get on board with this CV-flexing idea?
Allies
I kept my principal in the loop from the start. I told him of my frustrations and concerns, which led me to conclude that phones in classrooms were no longer a state (teacher) issue and had become something that needed to be handled at the federal (his or higher) level.
I said I was looking into solutions and wouldn’t make any major moves without letting him know. He was cool with it, figuratively patted me on the head, and I went into the summer of ‘23 with my side project.
My area of North Carolina is blessed with universities and hospitals. So I leaned on them.
A friend at the Education Department at Wake Forest University was very interested in looking at the EOC and ACT data, student attitudes and discipline. I started talking with Novant (one of our two large hospital chains) about the possibility of looking at phones through the lens of community health, specifically teens' mental health. That was a tougher fit than Wake Forest, but they were interested — it would need some finesse to make a good fit. If they didn’t work, I could go across town to my alma mater, Wake Forest School of Medicine/Atrium Health Wake Forest Baptist, to talk to the psychiatry and neuroscience faculty.
By mid-summer, I was going strong. I contacted the sheriff’s office, which provides the School Resources Offices (a.k.a. school police) for our school, to get their take. Okay, that one was like writing a note on paper and throwing it down a hole, but I waited for a response, anyway.
My Dream Plan:
All swimmy with the idea of imminent success and full to my eyeballs in research, I came up with my plan:
Timeframe: A 2.5-year commitment and support from the district. Beginning in the spring of 2024, we’d implement Yondr pouches. That semester would allow us to smooth the process and deal with the student and parent blowback we’d get. Beginning in 2024-2025, we’d be phone-free and continue this through the ‘25-’26 school year. Even if spring of ‘24 were a wash from the data point of view, we’d have two years of data to compare to earlier years, specifically 22-23 and pre-pandemic. I wouldn’t want to include 21-22, though. Even though we were told everything was back to “normal,” it was nothing resembling normal. Regardless, we’d have a robust data set.
And to help with that angle, my guy at Yondr said they’d be up for discussing a price break if we could share our findings with them (good data makes good PR and marketing).
Funding: The elephant in the room. Having worked in the public education system, I knew there was no way we could get the money from the district, even with lingering ESSER (Elementary and Secondary Schools Emergency Relief) funds, whose clock was running out by the summer of 2023. I crawled all over granting agencies and planned approaches (once the plan was approved) for the city's philanthropists.
Again - the money was nothing to sneeze at, but, largely thanks to my wife moving from the classroom to work for a non-profit, I’d learned that getting the money’s not the issue. Finding it is. I had an idea of who to ask and where to start.
This was going to work. Who could say no to what the data showed about phones in schools, the opportunity to help our students, and the possibility that, by collecting data, we could do some real good for places outside our district to follow along? We would be able to help our kids and our community fundamentally. Everyone would want that help to make that happen, right?
In the narrative trade, that’s called foreshadowing. 15 years under my belt, and I’m still a naive baby.
Next Time: Things start to look good, but then... Yeah, we all cheered when Luke blew up the Death Star, but look at where that got him by the end of the next movie.
See you soon.