States, districts, and schools across the country are struggling to figure out how to best handle the reality of phones in schools, setting a range of policies with the aim of minimizing disruptions to learning and supporting healthy school climates. University of Pennsylvania Professor Angela Duckworth and an interdisciplinary team of researchers across the country are studying this problem, with the goal of demonstrating the impact of emerging cell phone policies on student outcomes.
Through the Phones in Focus initiative, the researchers have launched a nationwide survey of educators to map current cell phone policies and determine their impact on students and schools. FutureEd Associate Director Maureen Tracey-Mooney spoke to Duckworth about the initiative and the results they are seeing so far. Their conversation has been edited for length.
What inspired you to launch Phones in Focus?
Over a year ago, I became interested in what the science said on teen mental health and social media. I found there was one particular hole in the scientific literature, which is school cell phone policies. What should they be, and what evidence do we have about the policies that work best for students? I teamed up with a group of economists, and we spent a lot of time talking to teachers, principals, superintendents, and some teenagers.
We found that they too had no idea what worked and were craving evidence. We discovered that it’s universally important to educators that schools get this right.
We decided to develop evidence around the different policies schools are using. If we know what the policies are and how they’ve changed, then we can map changes in policy to changes in test scores, chronic absenteeism, and social and emotional outcomes. We collected information on school phone policies by asking educators about their policy and if, when, and how it has changed. Now about 40,000 educators across the country have answered these questions through the survey that lives at phonesinfocus.org.
What kind of cell phone policies are schools putting in place?
Based on data from 20,000 teachers in 50 states, when it comes to their “when” policy [when students may use their cell phone], three out of four elementary and middle schools prohibited students from using their cell phones from the first bell of the school day to the last bell of the school day [a “bell-to-bell” policy]. At the high school level, only one in four had that strict policy of bell to bell. The remaining schools have less restrictive policies, allowing phone use during passing periods or lunch, or have no formal policy at all.
Teachers were also asked about the consistency of enforcement. Across the board, schools have an official policy that’s not always implemented with fidelity. However, the stricter the policy, the more it is implemented consistently. That means that bell-to-bell policies tend to be implemented more consistently.
As a psychologist who’s been studying delayed gratification, self-control, grit, and goals for 20-plus years, it was very important to ask about schools’ policies regarding where students can keep their phone. I knew from separate research that how far a temptation is from you physically makes an enormous difference in terms of how tempting it is. The farther away something is, the less tempting it is. So, if you put brownies right in front of you, it’s pretty hard to resist. If you put them across the table from you, it is a little less hard to resist. If you put them across the room, well, less tempting still. You put them in another room. You put them on another floor of your house, right? So that’s just an intuitive example because I think everybody has experienced that. They’re like, “Oh, right. Intuitively, we push dessert away.” You’re like, “Don’t let me,” we push things away from us. That principle is sometimes paraphrased as physical distance creates psychological distance.
So, we asked where students are allowed to keep their phones. The most strict policy is that you cannot bring your phone to school at all. Very uncommon, but some schools have that policy. The second most strict is centralized collection. So typically, you have to leave your phone in the main office. But in some large schools, that can mean leaving it in your homeroom. Schools also use Yondr pouches [locked pouches that store cell phones, prohibiting students from using them during the day] or require phones to stay in hallway lockers. Some schools use a classroom collection model where, every period, the teacher collects the phones and then gives them back at the end of the period. And then the next teacher does the same.
Then there’s no-show, which is the most common policy in our national data—it’s nearly half of schools. In that case, students typically keep them in their backpacks or their back pockets.
You can see how you can have a “when” policy that’s crossed with the “where” policy. A school could require phones to be stored in lockers but allow them to be used during breaks. We have almost every combination in the data set. And there are many schools that have a when policy but not a where policy and vice versa.
What kinds of initial outcomes from these policies are you finding?
The striking, interesting finding is that for both these dimensions, when and where, the stricter the policy, the happier the educator and the less in-class distraction they report.
The hallway locker policy did quite well on both of these metrics, which we saw in every state.
As a psychologist who studies psychological distance, it makes sense. As a kid, your phone is not in your pocket or your lap. It’s not in your backpack. It’s not even in the classroom. It’s in your hallway locker, which might be down the hall, could be on another floor. It’s also behind a lock, right?
So those are the emerging findings. The ambition is to do the longitudinal analysis before the end of this coming summer, given how policy urgent it is, and to map all of this data to changes in outcomes. But those preliminary findings are quite provocative.
Are there findings that you’re expecting to see when you look at the longitudinal data?
There’s been a recent working paper by David Figlio and Umut Özek, economists who studied one school district in Florida, showing some small measurable effects on test scores. That district went to a bell-to-bell, no-show policy.
We are expecting that stricter policies are going to lead to better outcomes. We have enough data to look at outlier schools where there’s a consensus among the educators who fill in this anonymous questionnaire that their school phone policy is getting it just right, that their students are on task.
One of these outliers, Skyler Colfax Middle School in Wayne, New Jersey, is a public middle school. Its principal is Heather Weinstein. It’s a bell-to-bell school, and it’s a hallway locker-only school. I went to go see it. At the beginning of the day, the announcement comes over: It’s time for us all to put our phones away. Literally, every kid is putting their phone in their hallway locker for the whole day.
CBS News came and they interviewed some kids who were like, it’s amazing. The librarian said the number of books that are being checked out nearly doubled because the kids don’t have anything else to do. They’re not on their phones, so they’re reading.
We’re hoping to paint a richer picture about the outcomes of these policies than is typically done in education. I don’t think test scores present a complete picture of what’s going on with kids. You want to know if they’re reading, if they’re happy, if they have friends, if they are engaged in extracurriculars. So, we are going to try to get data on as many outcomes as possible.
You have a goal of getting 100,000 educators, representing every public school in the country, to participate. How are you partnering with states and districts to meet that ambitious goal?
Teachers were motivated to participate just to have a voice in this debate. They had not been asked for their perspective on this issue, even though they are the ones with kids all day.
We’ve told principals and superintendents that if your school or district can mount five responses to this survey portal this fall, then we will prepare a personalized report on all of your data at the school and the district level.
States will also get reports. They are going to be working with us to provide school-level data, and they’ll tell us which data sets they would like us to analyze for them. They want to have evidence to say that these school policies do matter, and that they are informed and supported by evidence.
Many parents have gotten used to reaching their child whenever they need to and are especially concerned about contacting them in an emergency. What are the successful strategies districts or schools are using to get buy-in from families?
When the school has a policy change that restricts cell phone use, they have already thought in advance that parents are going to want to have that question answered. And many of the schools are saying kind of what it was before, “Call the main office,” right? But they want to have a system where there isn’t a delay if you feel like you do need to get an urgent message to your student.
The other thing that we’re seeing is districts are explaining to parents that 150 calls to 911, God forbid, should there be a shooting, is generally not helpful. You actually, for example, also want students to be paying attention to the educators in the classroom who are telling them what to do, rather than texting their parents.
I’m not an expert in school safety, but I do think that these leaders have thought through safety and everyday communication issues when they make these changes. And we know, because there are schools in the data that have been doing this for a year, and the policies are working.
On a personal note, I’ll just say that I do think that the closeness that parents have with their kids is, of course, laudable. But the idea that you should be able to basically talk to your parents at all times and vice versa may not be developmentally [healthy].
That’s a powerful point. Do we already have data showing that student cell phone use during the day is bad for students?
The absence of such rigorous data is, again, one big reason why we’re doing this. Some of the thinking is common sense. We know from research that multitasking is not a thing. Sequential tasking is a thing. So, students can pay attention to the teacher, and then they can look at Snapchat, and then they can pay attention to the teacher. But you cannot pay attention to the teacher and look at Snapchat at the same time. It’s not possible.
Educators have also asked us to look at the social dimensions of cell phones. Some of the things that we’re learning from educators were not immediately obvious to me. For example, bullying. There are a lot of conflicts that erupt on social media that apparently happen with greater pace and escalation than when offline. And so, we’re hearing from school leaders that stricter policies are improving the social climate in school.
To provide another example of the social consequences of cell phones, a state official told me “You used to go into the cafeteria, and you would just hear kids talking, screaming.” He’s said, “You go into schools where kids are on their cell phone. It’s weird. It’s like ‘Why is this room so quiet?'”
Social skills are exactly that. They are skills. You aren’t born with them. There’s a learning curve, having awkward conversations, having difficult conversations. We want to make room for that.
Going back to the Florida research you mentioned. In addition to the positive effects on student achievement, there were also some short-term increases in suspensions, particularly for Black students. How can schools and districts counteract some of those unintentional consequences?
Well, one nice feature of the Florida study is that there is longitudinal data, we can learn what happens longer term. Researchers anticipate that the effects [of interventions] are not always going to be good from the start, right? I’ll use an analogy. I’m not a golfer, but if your golf coach asks you to change your swing, one of the things that’s well-known is that there’s a dip before there’s a leap. Why? You’re adjusting. You’re disrupting things.
So, it could be that you have to get to a new equilibrium where school is a fun place to be, where there’s a sense of community. But in the short term, there might be some disruption. The students who were quietly on their phone, not disrupting class, might now be more disruptive or irritated.
But my prediction is that in the long term, you can get to an equilibrium where students have gotten back into the habit of being engaged with each other, talking to each other, without being disruptive. And to your point about what you can do to mitigate it, I do hope that positive outliers will show how this can go well.
Why is the “no show” policy less effective? And do you think your survey will show it results in more conflict in the classroom, with teachers trying to enforce it?
I would expect that there would be. Saying to students, “Hey, don’t use your phone, but keep it in your back pocket,” would be like telling a smoker that they should stop smoking, but they should carry a pack of cigarettes in their hand all day. I co-direct the Behavior Change for Good initiative here at The Wharton School at Penn. There are over 180 scientists, Nobel Prize winners, MacArthur Fellows, and National Academy Science Fellows. We all study behavior change. And all of us would say that if you want to do something more, make it easy. If you want to do something less, make it hard.
It’s also a matter of collective situation change. If you’re one 14-year-old who’s trying to manage their impulse to not be on this device that everybody else is, it’s too much. The teachers in our survey are very much saying that they feel like it’s a collective action challenge. And that if you leave it to each individual teacher, each individual student, then it’s an impossible problem to solve. And so, where we’re seeing there to be more success is where there’s a collective school solution, a collective district solution.
You used to teach math. If you were currently a math teacher, what policy would you want your school to have?
I would myself prefer to be in a bell-to-bell school with either lockers only or centralized collection. I don’t think it’s feasible for kids not to bring their phones to school. But I would love to be in a school where my competition was the window. There’s always something happening outside the window. But the challenge is that your phone is a portal to everything.
Educators can take the survey at www.phonesinfocus.org. School districts or states interested in partnering with Phones in Focus can email phonesinfocus@wharton.upenn.edu.