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May 15 marks one year since Governor Kathy Hochul enacted a “bell-to-bell” ban on personal phones in public schools, impacting almost a million children in K-12 public and charter schools across the state.
Teachers who spoke to The Post all say the ban has had an overwhelmingly postive impact on their schools.
“I think that the cell phone ban has been remarkable,” Dr. Jessica Chock-Goldman, director of clinical services at Bard High School Early College of Manhattan on the Lower East Side, told The Post. “I’ve been astounded by how much of a shift it has been.”
“Kids actually talk to each other in school. They sit in the hallway, they engage, they laugh, they study. They play games,” she said.
“I actually saw a card game in the hall recently, which was jaw dropping. I’ve been working in schools now for 12 years, and I have never seen that.”
As the school year comes to a close, teachers tell The Post that their students appear totally transformed.
Before the ban, 8th grade social studies teacher Michael Simmon says it felt like “you could be in a classroom with 25 students and still feel that you’re by yourself.”
But without the constant distraction of devices, he reports, kids are finally present again: “Students used to get a vibration on their phone or they try to hide the phone and check it. They no longer have that luxury. So now they’re focused on the lesson, on the assignment, on the task.”
In eleven years of teaching, he also says he’s never seen kids so locked in as they have been this year.
“They tell me the work has become easier, that it’s easier for them to focus,” Simmon, who works at IN-Tech Academy in the Bronx, said. “It’s cut down on bathroom breaks. It’s cutting down on a lot of chatter in the classroom.”
But it’s not just in the classroom. When he walks by the cafeteria during lunch, it’s now full of energy.
“They’re talking with each other instead of just looking down at their phones,” he marveled. “Now they have to communicate, they have to socialize. They have to talk, find out how their day is going, what’s going on, what class do you have next, did you do last night’s homework?”
Chock-Goldman has similar reports from Bard High School Early College. She’s noticed more students talking about plans and says many more of her students are socializing together on the weekends.
“Because kids are engaging all day long [during the school week], they’re able to develop deeper relationships, meaningful friendships, and therefore I think they have more of a desire to socialize outside of school,” she said.
While she reports teachers were unanimously in support of the ban, kids were a little more reluctant. She recalls “moaning and groaning” from students who are no longer able to hide behind their phones.
“Phones can be a little protective, meaning that you have something to engage with if you are a little anxious about socializing,” she explained. “They don’t have that protective tool anymore. They are required now to develop social skills in a way that they hadn’t been before.”
Elizabeth Stosich is a professor at Fordham University, where she runs the educational doctorate program. Her students are school leaders, principals, assistant principals, and superintendents.
Before the phone ban, she says teachers felt completely out of control.
“Students [were] less engaged during the school day, they [were] engaging in problematic behavior — fights [were] breaking out in the bathroom,” she said. “Many teachers were fighting students every day, having to enforce their own phone policies.”
But now the top-down ban takes the onus off the teachers.
“It takes the guesswork out of whether or not smartphones are allowed. [Having a ban lets] teachers focus on teaching kids,” she said. “We can’t control what happens outside of school, but we can control what happens during the school day.
“It’s just created such a relief and just opened up space for real world relationships and just fun and engagement in schools again.”
Stosich is also the leader of a chapter of Mothers Against Media Addiction in Brooklyn, where her 6- and 9-year-old go to public school. Though they’re still too young to have cell phones, she says the bans have changed how parents of younger children are approaching technology.
“Especially in New York City, when kids are walking around the city on their own and taking public transportation, there’s been this idea that this is just the way things are, that kids have to have a smartphone to get around,” she explained.
“This has really changed the narrative about whether kids, quote unquote, need a phone.”
Only one widescale study on cell phone use has been conducted, which looked at 40,000 schools over the last seven years. The report, published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, found teachers and students at schools with strict cell phone bans reacted positively to them, but that test scores did not remarkably improve compared to schools with different approaches.
Also, not every teacher says the ban was the fix they were expecting. Christina Montera, a high school social studies teacher in the South Bronx, says that “implementation became inconsistent” over the course of the school year.
At her school, students put their phones in locked pouches, but “some students figured out ways around the system,” like putting old phones in the pouches and keeping their primary ones.
“The policy was introduced with good intentions… but schools were largely left to figure out their own implementation,” she explained. “Honestly, to do this well, schools need dedicated resources—possibly even staff—to manage it.”
She’s hoping her school figures out a more permanent solution, because the initial days of the ban seemed so promising.
“Students were more social, conversations came back, fewer kids were isolating themselves with headphones, and there was a real improvement in focus during class,” she said.
“You could see it in their work completion and even in their grades. Especially coming out of COVID, that increase in face-to-face interaction mattered.”
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