School Phone Bans Are Spreading. But Are They Working?

**Imani Moise** (0:00)
You're either all in on this model, or maybe you're building with another.

**Julie Jargon** (0:03)
You're either speed, or is it security?

**Imani Moise** (0:06)
Or, you're AWS AI.

**Owen Tucker-Smith** (0:12)
AWS AI is how.

**Imani Moise** (0:19)
Welcome to Tech News Briefing. It's Tuesday, September 1st. I'm Imani Moise for the Wall Street Journal.
The debate over banning phones in schools has divided parents for years. But now, for the first time, public opinion is moving in favor of all-day phone bans in schools. But does taking phones out of the classroom really help kids learn? The latest research might surprise you.
Then, as tourism stalls, Hawaii state officials are looking to the tech industry to help revive its economy. Past attempts to turn the islands into the next Silicon Valley have fallen flat. But this time around, a new strategy could give Hawaii the boost it needs.
But first, it's back-to-school season, and this year, a growing number of students are roaming the halls without their favorite accessory, their phones. More than two-thirds of states now have laws or policies requiring school districts to restrict phone use. Parents are warming up to the idea, too. For the first time, more Americans support all-day school phone bans than oppose them. Wall Street Journal family and tech columnist, Julie Jargon, joins me now to explain what we're learning about life at school without phones. Julie, what do these bans look like in practice? Are schools taking phones away, locking them up, or just telling students not to use them?

**Julie Jargon** (1:48)
There are a variety of different practices that school districts use. A lot of them do lock kids' phones up in pouches during the day, and these are magnetic pouches that kids can keep their phones with them, but they can't unlock them from the pouches until the end of the school day. Other districts have, within the classrooms themselves, they have different little portals where kids can drop their phones and then take them with them when they go to the next class. And then a lot of districts just have a blanket policy of keep your phones in your locker or in your backpack during the school day.
So it's kind of a hodgepodge of policies across the country.

**Imani Moise** (2:23)
How did phone bans go from controversial to this widely embraced?

**Julie Jargon** (2:27)
I think right after COVID as kids were going back to school, there was a lot of parental angst about separating from kids again.
And there was a lot of concern that if there was some sort of emergency for parents that they wouldn't be able to reach their kids. But as more data came out about the harmful effects of phone use and social media in particular, parents relented a little bit. And also, of course, educators were seeing the effects of school phone use. And the tide began to turn more in favor of banning phones during the school day.

**Imani Moise** (2:59)
Do bans actually work at getting kids off their phones though?

**Julie Jargon** (3:03)
There was just recently a very large study done of about 5,000 schools that have adopted the yonder lockable pouches. And they found that even though kids can sometimes find work arounds and cut into the pouches or find other ways to hack that kind of situation, that it really did curb personal phone use during the day. The percentage of students who used phones in class for personal reasons dropped from 61% to 13%.
So these bans do typically have an effect, but that was only looking at a policy where the pouches locked up the phones. Less is known about how effective phone bans are when kids are just told to keep them out of sight during class time.

**Imani Moise** (3:48)
How have students typically responded to these bans?

**Julie Jargon** (3:50)
A lot of students initially resisted because they're so used to having their phones during the day and so some research has found that in the first year after phone bans are enacted, disciplinary problems actually go up and educators and researchers attribute that to kids trying to find workarounds and using their phones anyway and then they get in trouble for it. But after a period of time, usually after that first year, things kind of go back to pre-phone ban times. I've talked to a lot of students over the last couple of years who actually find it a relief to not have their phone out during the school day. Because when other kids don't have their phones and they don't feel the pressure to check social media, they just feel more comfortable and more free to be able to talk to each other.