Emma (not her real name) was failing her high school English class, and her teacher, Bob Warner, suspected phone addiction was to blame. So one day Warner told Emma to put her phone away. Emma’s eyes filled with tears, then she turned her phone over and began petting the back of it, as if it were precious, or possibly alive. Emma was “phantom scrolling” for comfort, Warner’s niece later told him. She wasn’t using the phone, but her hand moved as if it was. “It was so disturbing,” Warner recalls.
Many teachers can describe their “Emma” moments—the times they realized that phones in schools had gotten out of hand: when middle schoolers let loose for recess turn to screens instead of one another, when kids in a class still don’t know each other’s names come year’s end. Such moments track with a fast-evolving national conversation about how screens and social media are impacting the way young people think, learn, and relate. For teachers, this conversation is personal: “It’s demoralizing to look out at a classroom of kids scrolling on their phones,” economist and professor Emily Oster wrote in the New York Times.
It’s for all these reasons that last year, New York State, home to the country’s largest school district, passed a law to ban phones, smartwatches, and other internet-connected personal devices in schools, joining a growing number of states with “bell-to-bell” phone bans. The hope was to reclaim students’ attention while freeing teachers and principals from spending precious school time tussling over devices.
No one thought it would be easy. Parents were used to reaching their kids 24/7; teachers used lesson plans that assumed students had devices on hand; some kids saw listening to music on earbuds as practically their constitutional right. But this spring, when we spoke with teachers, students, and parents about how New York’s First Phone-Free Year played out, what we heard was (mostly) a collective sigh of relief.
Life returns to the classroom
“There’s better energy in school, a little more personality and bubbliness,” says Mike Zacchio, a social studies teacher at Hudson Valley P-TECH in Piermont.
“They look less like zombies and spaced out,” says Dalia Angrand, a Brooklyn middle school teacher.
New York’s first year without phones kicked off with plenty of kinks—unwieldy cafeteria lines to store and then retrieve devices, or confusion over what to do when kids violated the ban or pretended to not own a phone. Amanda Smith, a New York City mom with teens in three different high schools, received a call at work from one of her kid’s schools asking whether her child really had left their phone at home. Smith had no clue. “Is this really a good use of your time?” she blurted.
But within a few weeks, schools had hit a kind of rhythm with managing phone storage, and teachers noticed the change. Classes were notably louder and chattier, but in a good way. “They’re almost forced to socialize now,” says Zacchio, who noticed previously shy students “come out of their shell” and participate in class. “They’re more connected,” Angrand notes.
High schoolers in Amy Mojulescu’s Brooklyn English classes once used class downtime to scroll. Now they were “raucously playing Uno” during breaks. Analog devices quickly became cool at Hunter College High School in Manhattan, says ninth-grader Helena (not her real name), where kids had fun with walkie-talkies and began carrying card decks to whip out during breaks and lunch. “Everyone talks about how much they hate the ban, but people seem a little happier,” she says.
“It’s like prison,” says a Brooklyn 14-year-old who opts for basketball at lunch. “You get creative to make the most of a bad situation.”
Nicolę Lehoczky, a college and career readiness teacher at Peekskill Middle School in Westchester, has seen some positive effects spilling out of schools. At her son’s little league baseball games, siblings who used to sit in the bleachers slouched over their screens now gather on the sidelines to kick a hacky sack around. An employee at G.Willikers, a toy store in Saratoga Springs, thinks it’s no coincidence that teens have turned obsessed with squishy toys like NeeDohs, which she suspects satisfy the urge to fidget when they can’t scroll.
So far, there’s no clear consensus in the data on whether or how the phone ban is impacting learning, but several teachers said that more students are completing assignments. “Before you would sometimes get blank assignments,” Angrand says. Now, very few kids “turn in nothing.” Angrand especially loves that she can easily “spot-check” how students are doing with both their classwork and emotions, something that was really hard to do when kids hid behind screens with “a glazed look on their face.”
“Everything is more evident,” she says. “I know what I’m working with.”
Phone bans cause inconveniences
This isn’t to say that everyone is a ban fan. Some of the same teachers who love the ban also say that personal device-free classes can feel messier, even more chaotic than before. Assignments turned in on paper instead of through phones and computers are sometimes crumpled and barely legible. “Giving feedback on writing was easier when kids were doing everything on computers,” Angrand says.
And in a time of school shootings, extreme storms, and violent immigration crackdowns, many parents and students want to be able to reach each other at a moment’s notice. The ban is “a blunt instrument to solve a lot of nuanced problems,” says Smith, the mom of three teens.
With pay phones now belonging to a near-mythic past and cash purchases approaching extinction, letting teenagers off-campus for lunch without a phone in their pocket can feel precarious, some parents say. Cell phones, after all, function not just as communication devices but as watches, planners, payment systems, maps, and more. One teen complained that he has become lost and then late for school while searching for food without his phone’s clock and map app.
Other students complain that with the ban, they can no longer use lunch periods to work on college applications or homework, something especially arduous if you’re, say, a film student who has no choice but to do homework on a screen. And for a wave of teens who spent months of the pandemic dialing into remote school from beds, the idea that teachers deserve their undivided attention can feel downright antiquated.
Rita, a 15-year-old at Frank Sinatra School of the Arts High School in Queens, says she’s grateful that the ban “forced us to talk to each other and make friends” when she was new to the school, but she also thinks it makes class itself less fun. Rita says she has several teachers who “are hard to pay attention to because the content isn’t interesting” and that checking the time on her phone or listening to music “in one ear quietly” would make those classes easier to sit through. “I would feel a little more independent and a little less like I’m being forced to listen,” she says. “It feels like more of a chore when I’m being told, ‘Your phone must be away and you must be sitting here looking up, paying attention, writing notes for the whole day.’”
But teachers counter that’s exactly the point: “I don’t have to be worried that they’re looking at their phone and texting people, and they aren’t worried that they’re missing something,” Mojulescu says.
Long before spring arrived, many students had found workarounds to the ban. For a class assignment, one teen brazenly turned in a video about all the ways kids can unlock their irritating phone pouches. At Hunter, which uses an honor system for phones, students began forming human “shields” on demand to hide device use from teachers. Some teens have begun carrying dummy phones while others have recruited conflicted parents to sign false statements about their not owning phones. But none of that has changed the fact that phones remain contraband in the classroom, and teachers say that has made for a permanently transformed experience.
As the weather warmed and the last day of school grew near, several seniors at Warner’s large high school in Queens had grown bold, hovering over barely concealed phones even in class, and Warner felt the familiar, tired power struggle return. But in other, important ways, the dynamics were completely different from the previous spring. For one, his students all knew one another’s names. Some had become friends and they enjoyed spending time in class with each other. When Warner stood before them each morning—no screens between them—he sensed their curiosity and anticipation as they waited to hear the day’s agenda. It felt almost like the old-old days, back more than 20 years ago, when Warner was a young teacher falling in love with the profession and all its shared sense of discovery and adventure, only without the newbie’s nervousness. “It’s a really good feeling,” he said. “They’re there for the game.”
