Cell phone bans are good for kids. They're not enough. | Opinion

American childhood has a screen problem. Many parents and some teachers know it and are reducing kids’ time on digital devices accordingly, in and out of school. Jonathan Haidt has become such an influential public intellectual that his well-substantiated arguments against children’s constant access to iPads and smartphones are increasingly, and rightly, considered simple common sense.

Yet as schools across the country adopt more restrictions on digital devices, the push to return American children to a more off-screen childhood is facing pushback. Why? Because cell phone bans don’t meaningfully raise test scores, which remain alarmingly low.

But that criticism rests on a flawed assumption: that reducing children’s screen time would, by itself, improve academic outcomes. It misunderstands both the deeper problems technology creates and the way learning actually happens.

Cell phone bans, along with reducing time spent on other devices in school, are worthwhile because they improve children’s overall well-being. But that alone is not enough to improve learning.

If we want stronger academic outcomes, we also need more discipline at home and in school, along with renewed attention to the development of actual academic skills.

Learning suffers when schools fail to prioritize order, safety and focus

American students’ test scores rose fairly steadily from 1990 to 2013. A sharp decline began around 2013, accelerated after schools closed during the coronavirus pandemic in 2020, and continues today.

Yes, that decline coincides with the rise of the smartphone. But it also coincides with parenting trends that leave many children too fragile, self-involved and solipsistic to function well in a classroom. Smartphones worsen the problem, but they are not its deepest cause. As Abigail Shrier argues in "Bad Therapy," Israeli children are just as saturated with digital devices as American children are, but stronger parental authority and higher childhood expectations continue to produce capable, competent youth.

The mid-2010s also saw the rise of school disciplinary policies centered on so-called restorative justice, which often make it difficult for teachers to maintain control of their classrooms. As the 1989 film “Lean on Me” illustrated, poor children of color are often the primary victims of lax disciplinary policies masquerading as compassion. Their learning suffers first and fastest when schools fail to prioritize order, safety and focus.

Banning smartphones no doubt makes discipline easier. But if schools remain unwilling to enforce reasonable behavioral standards, academic improvement is likely to remain elusive.

Fixing test scores will take more than smartphone bans

Simply eliminating smartphones in schools is a good thing. Remove addictive dopamine machines from children’s daily lives and you preserve more supple brains that haven’t been fried by algorithms.

But cell phone bans alone will not dramatically boost academic achievement, especially among struggling students. No purely environmental fix can do that.

To move the test score needle, we need to rediscover a basic truth: that learning happens by rote, not by osmosis.

Schools began abandoning phonics decades ago not because it failed, but because it became unfashionable. “Rote learning” turned into a term of ridicule. It felt far more enlightened to create environments that encouraged reading and assume children would absorb literacy naturally through exposure to books.

The problem, of course, is that this approach largely failed. Drilling students on letter sounds and blends may be less exciting, but it is how most children actually learn to read.

If our ill-fated experiment with the “whole language” approach to reading has taught us anything, it is that there is no substitute for the slow, often boring development of academic skills, especially for students whose parents are neither wealthy nor college-educated.

Banning cell phones in schools removes an obstacle to learning and improves children’s overall well-being. We should absolutely continue doing it.

But if we really want to improve American education, we are going to have to add, not just subtract.

Elizabeth Grace Matthew writes about books, politics and culture. Follow her onSubstack.