The yr isn’t halfway over, and already 2023 has seen teachers punched within the face, pepper sprayed and even beaten unconscious for attempting to confiscate students’ phones and devices.
Experts say this uptick in violent outbursts is fueled by two causes: teens who are actually hooked on their smartphones, coupled with ineffective school policies about phone usage.
“[Youth phone addiction] very much mirrors all of the diagnostic features of an actual addiction,” psychologist Nicholas Kardaras, the writer of “Glow Kids: How Screen Addiction is Hijacking our Kids,” said. “Your dopamine gets spiked, and then you definately get habituated to that reward, and so round and round you go in pursuit of it.”
So when someone tries to remove the device, he said, it must be no surprise that the response is “not only a meltdown, however it’s a nuclear meltdown.”
And whilst more schools across the country are moving to curb devices — in response to the National Center for Education Statistics, 77% of colleges prohibit non-academic cellphone use — teachers are too often left alone to implement bans.
Although cell phones were banned in Recent York City public schools by former Mayor Bloomberg, the policy was reversed by DeBlasio in 2015. Now it’s as much as individual schools, and sometimes individual teachers, to determine their policies.
Without clear official orders, teachers could be put in a tough position: forced to make the alternative between being the “cool” teacher with a relaxed policy or the “bad guy” who says no phones in school.
“It must be a school-wide policy so that you just don’t have kids targeting who they feel is the ‘bad cop’ teacher,” Dr. Nicholas Kardaras told The Post. “Otherwise all of the animus and venom gets targeted towards that one poor teacher who’s attempting to do the suitable thing.”
It’s a sense Patrick Danz knows well. The 39-year-old has been an English teacher at Allen Park High School in Allen Park, Michigan, since 2008.
For his first few years on the job, the college’s policy required teachers to confiscate phones on-site in the event that they were spotted during class. Students would then should retrieve the device with their parents at the tip of the day from an administrative office.
That short-lived policy, Danz said, was very effective: “I feel it was good since it was from the highest down. For numerous kids, once you are taking it once, it was definitely a deterrent.”
But soon the college modified the policy, deferring to teachers to implement their very own phone rules. Danz said inconsistency between classrooms has been a difficulty, as some teachers are more lax than others.
In consequence, he said, student performance has plummeted.
“[The lack of a phone policy is] a serious detriment. Grades are very poor, generally speaking. I even have some classes now where you’re lucky if people even turn assignments in because they’re so distracted.”
In his own classroom, Danz keeps a display of numbered pockets near the door, where students deposit their devices. Even still, he has to maintain an eye fixed out for teenagers on phones — a task he called “demoralizing.”
“I didn’t go into teaching to police phones,” he told The Post. “I feel like I can’t compete with TikTok. I could ride a unicycle juggling flaming bowling pins, and that wouldn’t be exciting enough to compete with what they’ve on their device.”
Experts agree that teachers shouldn’t be put on this position.
“It’s just not fair to students, it’s not fair to teachers, it’s not fair to the parents and administrators,” said Dr. Anna Lembke, professor of psychiatry and addiction medicine at Stanford University. “Nobody can compete with the entertainment value and the addictive nature of digital drugs.”
If teachers are put within the position of being the “bad cop” without the backing of the college, Lembke said they will find themselves on the receiving end of explosive rage once they confiscate phones from students who are actually hooked on their devices.
“When you get the [phone] that you just use to administer your emotions and to self-soothe and to create your identity ripped away from you, you’ll feel as in case you’re falling into the abyss,” she told The Post. “It’s quite common to see children who get their devices taken away having rage outbursts.”
This, Lembke and Kardaras agree, is since the brain experiences tech addiction much like several other type of addiction.
It’s such a standard issue that Dr. Kardaras began a treatment program in Austin, Texas, called Omega Recovery to assist young adults do a digital detox from what he dubs “digital heroin.”
Lots of Kardaras’ young patients are referred to his clinic after getting physical with parents or teachers who try to take away their devices.
Although violent outbursts at school are still unusual, Kardaras thinks they’re becoming more common. The answer, he says, is for phones to remain out of the classroom — whether which means leaving them at home or checking them in on the door.
It’s a method that George Lammay, superintendent of Washington School District in southwestern Pennsylvania, is trying out.
Up until this school yr, phone policies were left as much as teachers. But this yr the district opted for a full-scale phone ban during schooldays.
Included within the plan is Yondr pouches, fabric baggies with a magnetic lock that works very similar to a retail security tag. Originally of the day, all seventh to twelfth graders deposit their phones, and so they’re only given the magnet to unlock it when it’s time to go home.
“At lunch time, kids actually talk to 1 one other again,” Lammay said. “They’ve conversations again.”
And, although academic data for the plan’s pilot yr is yet to come back, he’s “certain” that there have been improvements.
“Our teachers have affirmed clearly that the scholar engagement level is dramatically higher,” Lammay said.
Research has long confirmed that phone bans improve school performance.
A London School of Economics study from 2015 found that they end in adding the equivalent of an hour of instructional time every week. Test scores went up 6%, with the largest gains amongst at-risk and under-performing students.
More moderen research has confirmed these findings. As social psychologist and NYU professor Jonathan Haidt points out in his Substack, “The research is evident: Smartphones undermine attention, learning, relationships and belonging.”
Haidt, whose next book is 2024’s “The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness,” points to a wealth of research confirming that the overwhelming majority of scholars check their phones often, are easily distracted when doing so — and suffer learning losses as a consequence.
But implementing phone bans doesn’t come without pushback.
One common concern voiced by parents is that their children could be unable to contact them within the event of a faculty shooting. Kardaras says this may be a reason to go for a policy of leaving phones on the classroom door, fairly than a full-scale ban.
Students at Torrington High School in Connecticut staged a rowdy protest early last yr after their district attempted to implement a phone-pouch policy like Lammay’s district did. Fire alarms were pulled, police were called, and the college needed to cancel classes.
Legislators have tried to step in and back schools up — with mixed results.
While Maine, Arizona, and Utah all did not pass cellphone policies, other initiatives have had more success. In 2019, California became the primary state to offer schools the backing of the state to institute cellphone bans.
Meanwhile, a bill signed into law by Gov. Ron DeSantis just last month will prevent Florida students from using phones in “instructional time” unless “expressly directed by a teacher solely for educational purposes,” starting in the approaching school yr.
The brand new law instructs teachers to “designate an area for wireless communications devices during instructional time,” like Danz does with the phone pouches.
And while states, school districts and teachers all grapple with the problem of what to do about phones, Kardaras said parents have a job to play, too.
“The varsity can’t be an alternative to good parenting relating to digital usage. That begins at home,” he said. Kardaras is a father of dual 16-year-old boys, who he didn’t give smartphones to until they turned 15.
His message to concerned parents: “Delay, delay, delay as much as possible. When you give a phone to a 9-year-old, they’re not developmentally equipped to handle such a strong piece of technology.”