Cellphones in schools: Will banning them help students? | Opinion

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Dani Morris knows that cellphone use in classrooms can be a problem. The Grade 8 student at Featherston Drive Public School told me that a classmate of hers voluntarily removed apps from her phone because her marks were suffering.

A year ago, her class determined that most students spent 30 hours or more on social media each week — almost a full-time job.

So, on its surface, the Ontario government’s recent announcement — largely a re-announcement — that it will ban cellphone use and restrict social media access in schools beginning in September makes sense.

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There are, after all, studies that show the detrimental impact that cellphone use, particularly involving social media sites, can have on student achievement.

But Morris worries that an overly broad ban — she can’t use her phone on school property, even during lunch or between classes, a restriction that will apply to all K-6 students beginning this fall — goes too far.

“If I want to contact my parents, I have to use the phone in the office,” she says. “That’s not necessarily a problem, but sometimes I just want to leave my parents a text, like ‘Football tonight. Can you pick me up at 5?’” But I can get my phone confiscated for that, without even a warning. I think the punishment shouldn’t be ‘I see the phone, I take it immediately.’”

So is a blanket ban the way to go, or is it akin to bringing a gun to a knife fight?

In announcing the measures last month, then-Ontario Education Minister Stephen Lecce wrote, “When it comes to cellphones, Ontario’s policy is: out of sight and out of mind.”

It’s catchy, I suppose, which makes me suspicious. It recalls the failed “Just Say No” anti-drug slogan of the 1980s and ‘90s. Great on T-shirts, but maybe not so good in practice. Besides, a cellphone that’s out of sight is hardly out of mind. Ask any student. Or, for that matter, any adult.

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Meanwhile, when I asked the ministry for the data it used to support the ban, I was sent the results of a study titled “Cell Phone use in Ontario Schools.” This “study” is actually simply a poll, conducted by marketing research and consulting firm Campaign Research (which, founded by former Ontario PC Party president and onetime senior adviser with Rob Ford’s 2010 Toronto mayoral election campaign Richard Ciano, is the same company that landed in hot water in 2011 for misleading Mount Royal voters into believing that Liberal MP Irwin Cotler was stepping down. The firm’s actions, said industry watchdog Market Research and Intelligence Association, “likely caused the Canadian public to lose confidence in marketing research and have tarnished the image of the marketing research profession.” There’s no suggestion it did anything wrong with its cellphone poll.)

At any rate, the survey was conducted online over two days just prior to Lecce’s announcement, and included nearly 1,500 eligible Ontario voters aged 18 and older. Fewer than one-fifth of the respondents had children in elementary school, and only 13 per cent had children in high school.

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They were asked such questions as whether they support restrictions on personal cellphone use by students when they’re at school (74 per cent did); if they thought cellphones in classrooms were a distraction (89 per cent agreed they were); and if they supported tougher enforcement and penalties on students who explicitly and repeatedly ignore teacher direction regarding cellphone use in class (86 per cent strongly or somewhat did).

So it’s not really an informed examination of actual cellphone use in Ontario schools, but rather a look at what Ontario voters, most without school-age children, think is going on in classrooms and what they think ought to be done about it. In other words, it’s market research to determine if voters will support the policy — a time-honoured political manoeuvre, to be sure.

Tellingly, it doesn’t appear that anyone reached out to the students themselves to get their thoughts. So I did.

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Juliette Ruel, a Grade 7 student at Louis Riel Public Secondary School, tells me students are encouraged to keep their phones in their lockers, but the general rule is that students can have the phones with them as long as they’re out of sight and not used during class time. However, many students, she says, have found workarounds: hiding their phones behind their Chromebooks, for example, or in their calculator cases.

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“Some are on their phones when they shouldn’t be,” she says, “but they’re still following the lesson, they still get pretty strong grades.” The students who are distracted, she adds, are the ones who don’t want to pay attention anyway.

In a CTV interview, meanwhile, Lecce explained: “Fundamentally, we’re trying to change the behaviour of young people, to be responsible young adults in our schools.”

But you can’t teach responsibility only through legislation. We understand that theft, for example, is wrong, not because it’s in the criminal code, but because we were taught that by our parents and teachers when we were young.

In the case of cellphones, you do students a disservice by thinking you can teach them responsibility simply by taking from them the opportunity to exercise it.

“A lot of teachers say it’s OK to make mistakes, as long as you learn from them,” says Ruel. “But they’re not letting us have room to make a mistake. And if we do make a mistake, they won’t give us the chance to learn from it. They just take the phone away.”

And who will police the police? While the new guidelines recommend that teachers also abide by the restrictions, Ruel isn’t convinced they will. “If they get a notification on their phones, they’ll check it. Some teachers, when we’re in the middle of a presentation, will answer their phones. I don’t feel they’re just going to stop.”

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Morris, the grade 8 student, agrees that students should be given more responsibility, perhaps beginning in Grade 5 or 6, but with it should come greater direction. “We get a lot of information about cyberbullying, but not a lot about being responsible with our screen time,” she says, adding that she learned about managing her cellphone use from her parents. “There should be more presentations about it since it’s a growing issue, but then you should be able to earn your phone. That teaches kids they can earn it if they’re responsible, but have it taken away if they’re irresponsible.”

There are studies that show the detrimental impact that cellphone use, particularly involving social media sites, can have on student achievement. A pre-COVID study of classes in the United Kingdom, co-authored by Carleton University economics Prof. Louis-Philippe Beland, pointed not only to improvements on test scores after bans were put in place, but showed that the students who benefitted the most were low-achieving and at-risk ones.

More recently, Sara Abrahamsson’s 2023 doctoral thesis at the Norwegian School of Economics indicated that banning smartphones from schools has a significant impact on students’ grades and their likelihood of choosing an academic track at high school, while decreasing reported incidents of bullying.

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Beyhan Farhadi, assistant professor of Educational Policy and Equity at the University of Toronto’s Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, says that a cellphone ban “creates a specific learning environment, and maybe it’s going to lead to an increase in grades, but so does bootcamp.

“And these are kind of bootcamp conditions,” she adds, “highly disciplinary conditions that create a sense of authority and a relationship to authority that has to do with compliance, which in my view intervene with the democratic project of schooling and the preparation that adults are entrusted to convey to students about their freedoms and exercising their freedoms and their responsibilities.”

Until a year ago, Farhadi was a full-time Grade 10 teacher. She allowed students to have their phones in class, but the phones were required to be face-down on a corner of their desk. “And as they would sometimes reach, I would have a loving response, like, ‘Hey, it seems like you’re having trouble there. We’re not using our phones right now.’ And I would have a spot with a lock, and I would say ‘It seems it’s really hard for you to not touch your phone. Would you feel more comfortable putting your phone in this space so that you can actually start to control your impulses?’ And I talked to them about the psychology of the addiction and social media. So they knew I was coming from a place of not trying to control them, but supporting their ability to control themselves.

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“I think that when students feel like you are trying to support them rather than police them, that’s true parenting.”

While the cellphone ban makes accommodations for students with medical conditions, such as those with diabetes using their phones to monitor their glucose levels, and also permits cellphone use for educational purposes, there are lots of grey areas that may not be uniformly considered by teachers who have to enforce the ban, such as students who use their phones for translation purposes, as dictionaries, or for other assistive purposes.

I respect the studies and experts who say that cellphone use in classrooms is an issue that must be dealt with. A teacher friend of mine describes it as an endless series of Groundhog Days, with the same students having their phones taken away and returned at the end of the school day, only to repeat the process the following day.

But perhaps cellphones in classrooms don’t have to be a problem. Maybe they can be used not simply to look up Canada’s prime ministers or the definition of the Fibonacci sequence (or, admittedly, to text friends), but to empower youngsters to be responsible.

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A sweeping and restrictive ban doesn’t instil trust, and doesn’t adequately prepare young people for their digitally connected future. We need to ready them for a world that increasingly includes social media and cellphones, and bans aren’t the way to do that.

At the very least, students should be included in the policy discussion. Politicians should try surveying them for some ideas. They might be surprised by their thoughtfulness.

bdeachman@postmedia.com

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