Ninety-five percent of educators say that their school or district has an official policy restricting students’ access to their cellphones during school hours, according to a new EdWeek Research Center survey cited in an Education Week article.
Teachers, principals, and district leaders report mostly positive results from cellphone restrictions, especially in improving classroom behavior and student engagement. Seven in 10 educators say cellphone limits have had a positive impact in those two areas.
Educators are also more likely to say cellphone restrictions have positively affected social-emotional development and well-being.
“The survey also made it clear to me that having a policy is not the same thing as implementing it well. How the policy is designed and how consistently it’s enforced really seem to matter a lot” says Bridgette Whaley, an associate professor of education at West Texas A&M University
Attendance is the one area where most educators say that cellphone restrictions have not affected students’ behavior: 7 in 10 report that cellphone restrictions had neither a positive nor negative effect.
The survey was conducted from mid-February to mid-March and included 596 teachers and school and district leaders.
At least 37 states and the District of Columbia require school districts to ban or restrict students’ use of cellphones in schools, according to Education Week. Other states are either incentivizing or recommending that local districts enact their own bans or restrictive policies.
Most educators report that their schools have official rules restricting cellphones, but there remains much variability in what these policies look like and how they’re enforced—if at all.
Based on survey data, many schools do not require students to lock their phones away in lockers or in pouches, says Whaley.
“They seem to be relying more on compliance-based approaches, like keeping [phones] turned off or placed in backpacks or maybe somewhere else in the classroom,” she says. “It suggests that many schools may have restrictions on paper, but the actual enforcement often depends on the people rather than the policy or the structure.”
Are cellphone rules consistently enforced? According to the survey, 64% of educators said yes; 36% said no.
Teachers (41%) are more likely than school leaders (20%) and district leaders (34%) to say that the policies are not consistently enforced.
Whaley says the differences in perception are not surprising.
“A policy can look consistent from a leadership perspective, but not be as consistent in classrooms,” she says. “That’s why I think that the teacher perspective matters so much to the conversation.”
New research about the effectiveness of cellphone policies is emerging. Two-thirds of educators say their school or district’s policy applies to the entire school day; a little less than a third say their policies apply to instructional time only. (Five percent say their school or district does not have a policy restricting students’ cellphone use.)
Many educators are reporting early benefits to cellphone restrictions, but it’s too soon to say which type of cellphone policy works best—or if any will work in the long run.
In a study of a district in Florida, researchers from the University of Rochester and RAND Corp. found that student test scores and attendance improved in the second year of the state’s law restricting cellphones in schools. There was also an increase in student suspensions in the short term, particularly among Black students.
Preliminary results from another ongoing study are examining survey data from teachers. Early findings suggest that stricter rules around storing cellphones lead to more focused classroom environments.
Education Week
