Cell Phones in School: Overview

Introduction

When cell phones and wireless communication became widely affordable during the 1990s, there was an immediate and powerful effect on the lifestyles of US businesspeople and consumers. Never last to adopt a trend, high school students—and younger students too—began to carry their phones to school. Educators, concerned that cell phones would distract students and disrupt the learning process, pushed many schools to regulate or even completely ban the use of cell phones in schools.

After the 1999 shootings at Columbine High School and the September 2001 terrorist attacks, however, many schools eased restrictions on cell phone use in middle and high schools. These policy changes, driven by safety concerns of both parents and teens, fueled a national debate over whether the safety benefits of cell phones outweighed their potential to create a nuisance that would interfere with learning.

Even where there has been legal support for banning cell phones in classrooms or other school areas, quiet does not reign. When the New York City public school system banned cell phones in early 2005 (a policy later lifted in the 2010s), parents, students, and many teachers became vocal critics, more so when enforcement efforts and surprise student searches were undertaken. Shortly thereafter, a 2006 national survey reported by Business Wire found that 84 percent of parents felt that banning cell phones from school property was unacceptable and that 99 percent wanted their students to be able to call or be called in case of an emergency. Those views continued through the first decades of the twenty-first century, and calls for reversing cell phone bans were often renewed by parents and others after mass shootings in schools occurred, such as those that took place in Parkland, Florida, in 2018, and Uvalde, Texas, in 2022.

Advocates of cell phone use in schools have argued that wireless communication has become a fixture of life in the United States and that the usefulness of cell phones extends well beyond responding to emergency situations. Supporters have pointed out that vast numbers of parents and children depend on cell phones to communicate their daily whereabouts and activities, to coordinate rides and pick-ups, and to update each other on changes in schedule. Such efficient communication, advocates have said, reduces the volume of phone calls a school office staff must field. Advocates have also suggested that when properly used, cell phones can offer educational benefits. Many smartphones offer convenient access to calculator functions, dictionaries, and foreign-language translators, for example. Digital photo or video capabilities also have potential value in the classroom or on field trips. Supporters have contended that these features can even compensate for a lack of technology in some school settings.

Even many opponents of cell phones in school have supported limiting their use rather than banning them outright, seeking to avoid classroom disruptions while still enabling students and parents to communicate by phone in a potential emergency. One solution proposed by critics and implemented by many schools is to require that students turn off phones during class or turn them over to a teacher at the beginning of each class or exam and reclaim them at the end.

On the other side of the debate, some parents and educators have felt students would benefit more from a total cell phone ban. Supporters of these bans have cited significant problems that arise from the use of cell phones, especially amid the explosive growth of social media, such as increased incidences of cheating, cyberbullying, and sexting.

Understanding the Discussion

Cyberbullying: A form of bullying that is done through the electronic posting of mean-spirited messages about a person, often completed anonymously.

Sexting: The act of sending sexually explicit messages, images, or videos by a cell phone.

Smartphone: A cell phone that includes additional functions, such as access to email and internet browsing.

Social media: Forms of electronic communication through which users share information, personal images and videos, and other content. TikTok, Snapchat, and Instagram are popular social media apps used by teenagers.

History

When scientists at Bell Laboratories created a working wireless connection in 1947, they envisioned a technology that would primarily serve the needs of law enforcement officials. They could not have foreseen that just four decades later, the number of cell phone subscribers in the United States would exceed one million, or that by 2023, 97 percent of American adults would own cell phones.

As advances in technology made cell phones increasingly affordable, the business community took everyday phone conversations wireless. Private consumers followed quickly, and the cell phone became an integral feature of American daily life. Teenagers, attracted by the social aspect of cell phones, soon became as attached to the devices as were their parents, or even more so. In turn, many parents, seeing cell phones as a means for keeping tabs on their children, encouraged this trend—much to the displeasure of many teachers, who saw students tuned in to their phones and tuned out of the learning environment.

The first state laws banning cell phone and pager use in schools date back to the early 1990s; these laws were part of a crackdown on communications among drug dealers. But when a sharp drop in price made cell phones widely available to the school-age population, officials had to recognize that the phones had come to serve primarily social and practical purposes, rather than criminal ones. The popularity and convenience of cell phones convinced a number of state legislatures that policing their use in school was impractical.

By the early twenty-first century, several states had already repealed their bans on cell phones in school, though for a very different reason. Two tragedies accelerated the trend: the 1999 massacre at Columbine High School, in which student gunmen killed thirteen people before turning their weapons on themselves, and the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks that left nearly three thousand dead and briefly paralyzed the nation. The inability of frantic parents and young people to communicate with each other as these traumatic events were unfolding spurred the repeal of many more cell phone bans.

Although the United States was initially slow to adopt text messaging, its popularity grew very rapidly during the first decade of the twenty-first century. The 12 million messages per month that US residents sent in mid-2006 had quadrupled to 48 billion by the end of 2007. Many blamed text messaging for causing even greater distractions in the classroom, but text messaging also had positive effects. A national survey funded by Samsung Mobile Corporation in 2008 found that nearly 70 percent of US parents were communicating with their children by text message. Nearly 60 percent of teenagers said they communicated more often with their parents since they began text messaging, and more than half of teenagers who texted their parents said their relationships with them had improved.

As the economic downturn of the late 2000s necessitated funding cuts for many schools, some institutions encouraged students to bring cell phones to school, hoping to harness their educational capabilities without cost to the school. The educational potential of smartphones and tablets was widely acknowledged, and Bring Your Own Technology initiatives proved a cost-effective method for keeping classrooms current without great expense to schools in some districts.

Meanwhile, schools continued to navigate the increasingly political landscape of cell phone use in schools. In one notable case, many New Yorkers were shocked when a New York State appeals court in 2008 found no legal reason to challenge the New York City schools’ ban, instituted three years earlier under the administration of Mayor Michael Bloomberg. However, seven years later, the school district reversed the ban with the support of Bloomberg's successor, Mayor Bill de Blasio, who took office in 2014. De Blasio had publicly criticized the ban, arguing that parents should be able to easily keep in touch with their children. The cell phone ban was lifted effective March 2015.

Cell Phones in School Today

School officials continued to struggle to balance student and parent concerns and, at the same time, address pressing ethical and privacy questions during the first decades of the twenty-first century. By 2024, nearly 76 percent of public schools prohibited cell phones for nonacademic use, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. That same year, the Los Angeles Unified School District became the largest school district up to that point to institute a total ban on cell phones during school days, and several states considered or legislated some level of ban or restrictions on cell phones at school. Furthermore, parents and educators increasingly called for bans or limits to cell phones on school property due to emerging research on the negative effects of social media on the mental health of teenagers. The COVID-19 pandemic further pushed some parents to desire cell phone bans as they witnessed firsthand the distractions caused by cell phones when children were participating in remote schooling during the height of the pandemic.

Apart from disturbances or distractions that cell phones might cause in the classroom, critics have pointed out that cell phones can be used to cheat on exams, or provide access, on school grounds, to prohibited materials such as pornography. School authorities have also grappled with students using cell phones in inappropriate settings, such as locker rooms, to record—or illegally distribute—unauthorized images of their peers, leading to increased incidences of sexting.

As technology continued to become even more sophisticated, efforts to limit the use of cell phones faced new challenges. Small wireless earbuds could be easily concealed, for example, and schools must also make decisions about allowing smartwatches, which have many of the same capabilities as smartphones. Still, critics of cell phone bans have continued to speak out against them, including many parents who worried about school shootings that repeatedly made headlines throughout the twenty-first century. Some teachers also preferred to allow cell phones for educational purposes because a complete ban was too hard to enforce.

These essays and any opinions, information or representations contained therein are the creation of the particular author and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of EBSCO Information Services.

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