SMARTPHONES and SCHOOLS?  No.

• Not Wired for This - Students’ brains are works in progress and managing the distractions a cell phone presents in the classroom, hallways and cafeterias is not fair. Phones block a student from doing what they should being doing throughout the school day: practicing and learning through in person, reciprocal interactions with their peers and teachers.

• Easy Stuff Wins - Teachers and the academic environment present critical academic and social challenges to students. Engaging with a smartphone is the easier option and, naturally, an adolescent will choose their phone over academics or trickier in person social practice.  

• Not My Kid - Tech executives in Silicon Valley significantly delay and limit their children’s access to technology and send their kids to schools that don’t allow smartphones and have limited educational technology. They know the goal of the products they create and what they do to their child’s learning brain. 

• No Lighting Up - The current crisis with smartphones has been compared to the fight against big tobacco. Adolescents used to be able to smoke cigarettes at school. When schools know better, they do better. 

• Secondhand Smoke - Studies show that a smartphone in classrooms, hallways and cafeterias impacts ALL students’ attention, working memory and fluid intelligence; it creates distraction, no matter whose phone it is or where it is. 

• It’s Too Quiet in Here - Studies show and educators observe that spontaneous interaction, engagement, and in-person socialization decrease sharply when phones are present. Adolescent brains NEED this social practice and experience and their brains EXPECT it. A principal of a Colorado school with a phone ban visited a school without one and reported that it was “like the zombie apocalypse.”