Cell Phones in Schools | The Cincinnatus Series Ep. 5 by The American Mind

coming up on this episode of the Round Table you know the problem is probably 70 80% of parents either aren't don't have strong feelings on this or fine with it but there's 15 or 20% of parents who want really want to be able to call their kid or text their kid and those are the parents who tend to be loudest so when you're contemplating this as school boards when you're deling this as a principal um you tend to catch a lot of flak from these folks and the folks who go oh yeah that sound sensible tend not to speak up because it doesn't have any direct impact on them um this is actually one of the reasons why tackling this as a state level is so potentially powerful because it then puts School Board superintendents principles in position where they're saying look this has been uh this has been argued out your elected representatives have made a decision we're simply executing kind of state educational policy in a way that makes them less the bad guy in the equation [Music] well welcome everyone once again to this special Cincinnati series we're doing at the Claremont Institute I'm Ryan Williams your host the president of the clont Institute publisher of the clont cre books in the American mind I'm joined once again by Scott yenner uh Scott and my joke is that I mean you're going to be on all of these except one Scott so you're you're the ubiquitous State expert uh Scott's a senior fellow senior director of State coalitions at our center for the American way of life in Washington DC we're happy to Welcome Back Rick Hess who's a senior fellow and Director of Education policy um at the American Enterprise Institute and then we're very pleased to welcome a new guest CLA Morell who's a fellow at the ethics and public policy Center and is our resident expert on screens and technology and all that so I thought uh we're going to talk today about screen use and children and schools and what state legislators ought to do about this but uh we should I think set the stage a little bit so Claire if you'd allow me to impose on you should we how should we think about this problem and um you know I guess we could start with what's the main problem of screens and children and School uh and pedagogy and all the rest yes that's a big it's a big question um so I think you know the main concern that we've been seeing is that nationally reading math and science scores have just dropped pretty precipitously to the lowest scores that we've seen really since they started collecting these scores in like the 1970s um and particularly they started dropping post 2010 when we saw this big kind of push in kids getting access to smartphones and social media and also screens becoming much more common just in the classroom as part of learning and so um the kind of academic uh effect of screens is probably the most pronounced I think though also increasingly data has shown that having screens in the school environment particularly students having access to smartphones and social media is also very disruptive um to student relationships and in-person interactions and so it's contributed to this rise in mental health issues like anxiety and depression and loneliness um among this Rising generation and so having these devices be part of the school day which is both Children's Primary academic environment but also their primary social environment and where they're really learning social skills by interacting with their teachers and with their peers have both been critically undermined um by smartphone social media and then also just the kind of push for screen learning we really see is not panning out um and I written on this um but there's a lot of studies that show that children just do not learn literacy and reading comprehension as well through a screen um as they do using real books um paper and pencil to help them learn their letters and establish really the building blocks for literacy so the kind of the the myth sold by silen Valley that one laptop per child was really going to solve our educational achievement Gap um has actually really been quite the opposite yeah you also I forget when I read it was maybe five seven years ago but there's the interesting fact that the really fancy private schools in Silicon Valley that's right where the tech Moguls send their kids are screen-free exactly no and I think that just really speaks to the kind of elitism of a lot of these you know Silicon Valley Elites that they are not allowing their own children access to these devices because they know the harms and they are sending them to schools without screens because they realize it's not what best for learning um but at the same time they're pushing edte on all the rest of the schools and so we just see that disparity continue to increase do you have a sense of the macro statistics uh across I guess we could just start with the the elephant in the room which is our K through2 public institutions I mean how widespread or penetrated are the public schools with permissive approaches to screen use wow I don't have a like statistical analysis but I can tell you anecdotally that almost every parent I've spoken to says in a in a public school system um that the the tablets and the Chromebooks are being pushed at younger and younger grades so that now basically K through 12 kids are assigned a tablet and they're increasingly relied upon by teachers um that it's not really just okay occasionally we pulled this tablet out uh to do an exercise but it's pretty much constant throughout the school day um and so they've completely replace books I was talking to a parent that said um actually our school got rid of textbooks completely there are no textbooks in the school anymore it's all through the tablet which also makes it incredibly difficult for individual parents to opt out and particularly parents um who have children with learning disabilities or learning challenges or ADHD say that they want to be able to opt out because the screens are actually very disregulated to their child and they just don't even have the choice um because this is how assignments have to be completed and this is the way uh they are actually being taught is all through the learning device in the classroom yeah and then you mentioned social media as well is there is there a notice noticeable inflection point I mean I when did I mean Facebook sort of broke onto the college scene I think in ' 04 is uh and then the first iPhone I think was in' 09 or 2010 um and so there's this social whole social side to it too and it's even even infected College uh just the ubiquity of social media and of course our main delivery or the main one main delivery device these days is the smartphone I I remember um my colleague Charles Kessler had an experience with a student at Claremont McKenna college and uh Charles had asked some somewhat provocative question uh during I think the lsh hype you know 2020 2021 hype over George Floyd and the whole summer of of protests and the racial Justice movement and uh nobody really spoke up in class and one of the students came to his office hours and and Charles asked you know what what's up with this no one really wanted to even talk about that question I raised and he said well everyone's scared and and Charles said well you scared of the administration or and he said oh no no no we're scared of our fellow students uh and their the kind of social mob mentality that has prevailed and it's just I mean I between in Instagram and Facebook and Twitter uh it seems to be ubiquitous no it definitely is and I think a big inflection point was in 2012 like after the like button was invented and social media became a lot more addictive it wasn't just a feed um of just things po pictures posted by your friends but it really started attaching all these metrics to it um metrics that kind of gave that little burst of dopamine to our brains that oh someone liked my photo and that really just draws people back for more and it created a really highly addictive business model then with their algorithms that now recommend things to you that aren't even necessarily from your friends and the kind of infinite scroll and so all of that kind of really started taking off in 2012 and as you mentioned other apps started coming onto the scene and now you know most recently Tik Tok but to your point about the social effect um you know the contrast is that one school that got rid of phones completely during the school day it was in michig again they were kind of an early School District to do a phone ban basically this one girl just shared that she feels like she can be herself at school now and that she no longer spends an hour getting ready in the morning because she was so nervous about the things that she would do during the school day being captured and posted on social media by her peers I think these kids have felt like they're just living under a microscope because you never know when someone could be recording you or taking pictures of you and posting them online and it just that whole environment just infected the school day of just all these kind of metrics and likes and everything is about what's happening in the kind online virtual world was really just undermining kids abilities to develop real friendships um and so it does kind of have this network effect as Jonathan height and others has called it that the the effects of social media are not just individual um but they change the whole group dynamics in a school um or Community yeah it's as if you you took the social social pressure that everyone experienced uh in middle school and pre-teen years and even into high school and made it 247 and worldwide it seems yeah what could possibly go wrong that's right yeah so I think that's that's been just some of the kind of main challenges then of social media has infected the learning environment um and social environment for kids and the social media use is really a problem during the school day I can't even tell you the amount of teachers who say that even you know it's on their phones but even on the the school issued devices it's impossible to keep kids off of online games um social media websites and sadly even online pornography um there's some pretty horrifying statistics about the amount of kids that are watching pornography during the school day and of that percentage 40% we accessing it on the school issue devices so um it's really difficult for educators to affect ly police these things in the classroom yeah I remember the anecdote from California I don't know if it was La USD or where but they they had this um uh allegedly these tablets that were you know locked down and you couldn't get on the wider internet you couldn't search all the stuff and I think it took the children a day to hack around it and get off all the protocols and be able to access almost anything yes yeah yes they're resourceful those kids but uh so I I just want to I'll open this up of course to Rick and Scott um jump in at any time but I want to ask you one more question sure Claire if we can Steelman the the opposite case are there any uh robust benefits even with all these negatives to the introduction of screens in the classroom benefits of the screens I thought you were gonna ask me benefits of phone bans and I was ready to tell you how great how great phone bands are for kids given the studies that have been done um benefits of screens you know I think the main benefit to be honest has been to the Educators and school administrators that it is it improves the speed at which teachers can grade um and correct students assignments um it's easier for parents then to access that information and it has just kind of increased the speed and efficiency for the school and just so many administrative ways um that everything all the grades assignments everything is just collect in kind of one portal um that's very easy for people to overse and so I'm not sure that there's really been a benefit um to the students themselves as much as it has benefited the educational system which is one of the difficulties as I've encouraged schools and school districts to think about moving away from so much screen based learning is that the system has now become so built around these devices they're incredibly entrenched um just because again as I mentioned schools have actually gotten rid of textbooks everything has gone onto the screens which saves the school costs in different ways um and just makes it easier for teachers and administrators and so um that has been the main benefit which is one of the reasons it's been difficult then to try to get schools to move away from the screens um and listen I'm not anti-tech I think kids can learn to use computers like I had a computer lab class in high school but this has now seeped into every subject matter and I don't think kids need to be on screens to learn literature I think there's a lot of evidence that shows actually kids and this study came out actually from Columbia um university that uh kids comprehend text more deeply um when they read it in print rather than on a screen and so there's Great Value that's being lost particularly in some of those subject matters that you they should be engaging with a printed text um like the social sciences um so I I can't say I have a lot of benefits from the student perspective as to the screens being in classrooms yeah it's a so it's a tale as old as modern postwar public education the the first among equals at the table are really the teachers unions and the administrator not surprising Scott You' been chairman how about this how about this uh as a benefit uh realtime factchecking of teachers yeah or the ability to press record right right C to catch ideological excesses and indoctrination in live feed in the classroom yeah no that's a good point Scott I was going to say you've been a chair of a classical school private school for a long time now I think you one of your previous episodes you said 20 years I think what what has been your experience with this topic yeah so I have lots of practical experience and uh one of the nice things about reading your report Claire is that it just totally jibes with our experience at the school so three years three years ago we implemented a a phone ban in the school and the rule was the the the phones do not come inside the school you can keep them in your car you can leave them at home but they don't come inside the school and we did this for you know for academic reasons because kids were looking at their phone in class for social reasons because um you know they would be spending time with the phone instead of with one another at lunch and things like that and then also because there were just some things that bothered us about what they were doing the classical school is based around the idea of Socratic discussions and the kids would have their phones underneath the table and they'd be texting one another what to say and what they're going to say and they'd start scripting uh the class in that way whereas we like the spontaneous nature of the discussion so we implemented a and uh you know keep it in the car keep it at home that was basically the position and I think you called that distance which was one of the uh one of the principles of a decent policy and and then of course we got lots of complaints well what if what if uh there's an active shooter situation my kids will be able to do something with their phone or uh how am I going to tell the kids that they need to pick up milk on the way home you know uh teacher or parents would have things that they would uh really want to be in constant contact with their kids and and those you know so we we just gave them workarounds and you know call the office if you need milk and uh eventually people realize that they can give the kids a grocery list or something and uh and then you know but but some parents and I would say it was widely wildly popular like 95% of people were just so happy that we did it because it relieved them of the burden of having to do it now we were kind of the bad guys and we're happy to uh do that I suppose um but you know there was a few parents here and there who just told their kids to defy the ban and uh put it in your locker put it on mute um check check it at 2 o'clock and I'll tell you to pick up milk you know like that scenario or that you need to pick up your brother and sister from a different place and uh you know and then whenever that we catch that you know we seize the phone and the parents would have to come in and get the phone and you know eventually that uh escalated and that was another one of your principles uh that there needs to be some sort of a consequences for a violation of the policy and uh and we did this three years ago and we heard stuff like the first two months of implementing this uh ban and I don't know that we've heard anything since um except from those who are kind of encouraging their kids to defy the rule um and just be very sneaky about it uh before for this we banned them and had them in the lockers you could have them in the lockers but then like what they do is start going out into the hallways and looking at their lockers and instead of talking with one another at lunch they'd be looking at phones in their lockers so you know we we think it's been a great success that it's really uh the school had a pretty good vibe and a good culture beforehand but it's really been one of the things that makes it distinctive a great learning environment a good social environment has really helped the culture of the school and uh and you know the kids are investing in one another uh like it was 20 years ago and uh so these things now have to be kind of artificially created as opposed to just expecting them to arise spontaneously the law needs to support the culture and uh in this particular case the rule I think uh supports the culture so um so I really like the report because it totally matched our antidotal experience and then not now I discover it's science so um so it must be true and uh so I we appreciate uh the model legislation and uh one of my questions as I was thinking about it was uh I mean one of it does work in a classical Christian School where the parents are very involved and they're very worried about overseeing their kids character development and so on and I wonder uh how um how much that extrapolates to other school experiences that is if public school with with their less lesser parental engagement would have the same kind of results as a kind of much more um hyper involved parents uh at a classical Christian School it's maybe something we can talk about yeah I'm happy to jump in and share a little bit too on that note if of Interest I did a lot of interviews for my forthcoming book um and I have a chapter specifically on schools um so this is my book called The Tech exit which that subtitle is a practical guide to freeing kids and teens from smartphones so um but it comes out June 3r and I have a chapter specifically for schools and what they can do to help parents and just like you were saying Scott like leaving it all on individual parents particularly when there are collective aspects of these harms when it affects everyone in a social environment like a school um is is really difficult because um then you know individual parents are having to police this but also even then those kids that are not on the phones are still left out of the social environment like you said if every student's like going over to their locker during the passing periods then the students that aren't on the phones are still left out of the social interactions and so it is amazing that schools can provide such a collective solution so all that to say I interviewed um a school board member in Orange County Florida because this County um Florida passed the first kind of law in the United States to get phones out of schools the law was limited to classroom time they just said you can't have phones in the classroom but Orange County went a step further and they said you know what we're going to just take them out of the entire school day and the board member I happened to contact for an interview this is totally serendipitous said that she was initially opposed to the policy she said that she was worried that students who feel socially awkward without their phones wouldn't know what to do they'd feel lonely at the lunch table and she said I'm willing to admit i' when I'm wrong and I've been completely wrong and she said she was really convinced by teachers during these kind of Schoolboard discussions they said please don't allow them in the school day you don't know how disruptive it is to my class just by students having access to these phones during lunch that they come back to class and they are dealing with all these discipline issues the things that have come up from the Lunch Period so to say um she said that their experience has been overwhelmingly positive and it's a public school district um and the New York Times did an article featuring the school interviewing students who were saying that now they play pickle ball during lunch they organize game board events where they bring in a bunch of board games and just have like a competition kind of during lunch period so the students have been very creative um and I asked her if she hadd gotten push back from parents and she said you know a couple parents had some concerns about getting in touch with their student and she said but we worked through those you know making sure you could get in touch with the school office and she said No in fact I've mainly heard from parents telling me thank you so much for passing this policy I can see the impact it's had on my kid both socially but also their grades improving so I think um that's just an I would just say it matches I think your experience Scot and that's a public school system in Florida Rick has this come up much in the James Q Wilson K through2 Education Centers work and research well um I mean you know I mean it's interesting uh it's obviously on everybody's mind uh you know the data on this is compelling six to S hours a day for teens and tween on devices uh with girls it's more social media with Mo boys it's more gaming uh the gaming thing is interesting because obviously that's more platform based uh that's your Xboxes and Nintendos so that's less likely to be in their pocket and more likely to be at home uh in the evening so the mix for boys and girls is different but the you know kids are getting 100 plus interruptions uh if they have a device during the day so yeah you can't avoid it uh when you start talking obviously as it's come up to especially in public education settings to superintendents to principles uh there's a you know one most parents haven't had the time or energy to really think deeply about all this uh all their kids Friends start getting devices when they're 10 or 12 parents don't want to be the SOB as has come up so it's real easy for parents to just okay all right well that's everybody gets it I'll get it for you and so there's a question of how do you change those Dynamics and what role schools play um schools don't want to be upfront on this because the loudest parents on this uh tend either to be the parents that have been alluded to who say they're worried about a shooting situation at school or they're worried about a medical situation and they need to be able to talk to their kid because of allergies or because of medications or whatnot and then on the other hand Tiffany Justice for instance co-founder moms for Liberty has made the point that she wants kids to have devices for what has come up to be able to uh rev videotape problematic conduct in school uh primarily on the part of Educators and so you know the problem is probably 70 80% of parents either aren't don't have strong feelings on this or fine with it but there's 15 or 20% of parents who want that really want to be able to call their kid or text their kid and those are the parents who tend to be loudest so when you're you're contemplating this as school boards when you're deleting this as a principal um you tend to catch a lot of flak from these folks and the folks who go oh yeah that sounds sensible tend not to speak up because it doesn't have any direct impact on them um this is actually one of the reasons why tackling this to a state level is so potentially powerful because it then puts School Board superintendent principles in position where they're saying look this has been uh this has been argued out your elected representatives have made a decision we're simply executing kind of state educational policy in a way that makes them less the bad guy in the equation yeah let's get to the policy question at the state level um what's the best locus of uh policymaking for this is it uh we've talked about school boards you have Claire um is should it be the state legislature you mentioned the C the Florida law should a mix of the two how should state legislators think about their role in this whole process I mean I think ideally um just for the reasons mentioned that it is I think you know states are responsible for the education um in their state and it is their Authority um in the state to oversee the education of the children in that state and I think if it becomes apparent like this evidence that we've been presenting that the phones are really harmful to education is well within a State's power to pass a law or in the case of Virginia governor yunan issued an executive order asking his Department of Education to investigate this issue and put out guidance for schools to follow um and you know was interesting they kind of took a different approach than just passing it through the legislature but they allowed they kind of went through the rulemaking process on this guidance and they had listening sessions and they heard from parents and they heard from teachers um and so then they considered all that and they basically issued their draft guidance provided a period of public comment um on that guidance and then finalized um the guidance at the end of this past year and then it just went into effect in January and where they came down was getting was telling schools they needed to get phones out of the school day from Bell to Bell um which is as I had recommended in my report has just had the most positive outcomes of having no access during the school day whatsoever and so there that that approach is a viable one as well um I think other states like Louisiana um you know I mentioned Florida I know California have all passed laws through their legislature then signed by the governor um as another approach to say we want our schools to go phone free from Bell tobell and I think what that really helps do is um as you all were mentioning just the the kind of taking the pressure off those at the more local level so first if you have it at the school level you kind of remove that from parents if you have the school board level you remove it from the school principal and then if you go even higher up to say it was that action of the governor of the state legislature it does take some of that individual pressure off at the local level to say listen this is a policy across the state and I think the more you can provide that Collective solution the better and just to to know that the the end goal is improving education and improving student well-being and it would be ideal to have that across the state not just in different individual schools or individual school districts and I actually think it's easier for parents and students to accept when it is done on such a broad level because then their friends in the next town know there are under the same policy it's not like their kids are off the hook and get to have phones during the school day so I personally think it's ideal to have a state level action but in the meantime what's so great is schools don't have to wait for that school districts don't have to wait for that they can adopt these policies earlier and what I will just say to encourage schools and school districts is I've heard from people at the state legislature level or even at the Schoolboard level that what encouraged them to even adopt such a policy was having individual schools in their District that had already done this and seeing the positive results that that school was experienced really kind of put the steel in their spine to say okay we're going to go ahead and pass this policy as a school board at a school district level and then the same for a state level and so it's actually important you know just to have people championing this even in their individual schools they set an example um and they can actually spur higher level change yeah so just as the states are Laboratories of democracy so the school boards school districts can be test cases for a lot of this stuff that's exactly what I was trying to say you said it better than I could you're um yeah and if I could just I want to hum in on that just for a second because it's one of these policies it's a little bit like grade inflation it's difficult for one teacher to solve the problem it's difficult to solve it in one classroom because the expectations that people have for standards the behavior are kind of cultural you can have your own classroom you know culture but if you're a hard grader and everyone else is an easier grader it affects the culture it affects the selection of students that you have in your class uh I mean I would say the same thing for AI policies if some you know teachers this is something that happens all the time at the University level I mean no one is in favor of cheating but what's cheating oh and and now there's uh you know big debates about what cheating is well you can you can do a first draft with AI but I want to see you improve that first draft and being the only teacher who no longer assigns papers and has blue book tasks like I'm an outlier right but it's hard to have a culture with uh it's hard to participate in a common culture when the rules are so different across the places so at least schools have to have a common culture in that way and presumably like the higher up you go school district districts uh would be better uh because there's just a total Collective action problem and uh which is probably what happens in these schools that you're talking about CLA right um a couple teachers try to ban the phones in the classroom they find it difficult because other teachers aren't Banning them it's actually a lot of work to ban them when you're the only one Banning them so in order to make something more plausible and make something more possible uh you have to have the entire school to get behind it yeah so there's a couple things worth adding here one is this point about how hard it is for individual teachers cannot be emphasized enough um you know when you've seen focus groups with teachers on this uh in almost every case um a cell phone is uh the most valuable possession a kid owns uh it is far and away kind of the best gift they've ever received uh it's a strong part of their identity uh to ask a teacher to confiscate a phone from a 14 or 15 year old um and then much less when teachers have had somebody break in and steal a phone that's been confiscated there's all kinds of liability issues teachers do not want to be put in that position and they therefore tend not to enforce um unless there is clear support coming from the school leadership in the district all the way down U but let's also make sure we're clear because if we're talking to Folks at the state level about potential legislation it's really important to understand the Steelman case here and I'm not sure we've articulated that fully enough I mean there's a couple of different things going on one is particularly it's we need to keep in mind for how long Governors blue and red reformers blue and red have been telling schools to pursue device adoption uh you know Jeb Bush wrote this uh oped at the beginning of the pandemic about how we need to embrace this opportunity uh folks like Bill Gates were writing the same thing in the Wall Street Journal in New York times like we need to jump forward into the tech enabled future so what's happened is school districts have run with that and partly they have embraced these Learning Management Systems as Claire noted which you know run through pads they run through Chromebooks so what the what Learning Management systems do is all of the assignments all of the homework all of the feedback all of the instructional resources so districts were told this is coste effective let's stop wasting money buying those overpriced textbooks let's get stuff that can get updated stuff where we can do real time assessment and so a lot of them have kind of figured out how do you wire your instructional strategy through this now as parents many of us hate it because if you don't want your kid on iPads or Chromebooks and they come home they have to be because that's the only place they can do their homework you can't do it away from it but you know one it's important to make sure we're distinguish ing between phone policy and broader concerns about kind of the integration of digital materials that that's a harder thing to tease apart on the phones in particular what we're trying to do I think is get these Perpetual distraction machines out of kids hands so that they can actually engage that is a more manageable ask than trying to figure out how do we unwind a lot of the tech but yeah one of the hottest things education Tech circles is AI tutoring this idea that a kid's phone will be able to provide them realtime support with math problems with science problem with with writing and so they're getting a lot of pressure from certainly the tech vendors but also from you know our over caffeinated excited Ed reform Community about the opportunities presented so legislators need to be prepared to have various serious conversations about the difference between phones and school and how does that how how do we approach that separately from some of these larger very sensible issues CLA posed but which are harder to unpack and when folks start saying yeah but my kid needs their phone because that's their tutor that's their explainer that's their support system how were how are legislators prepared to think about and talk about those issues and to address those effectively they want to make sure they're sitting down with Educators and thinking through what are the pedagogical implications of what we want to do no that's great thank you for distinguishing those two things because I think that is it is important and I think the phones are the more pressing problem and I think the easier to just address and say we should just get these out of the school day and to me that's just really a first step and I think one that last you mentioned with kind of help from Educators if legislators are informed they can actually help explain these policies to parents because I think a lot of times there's kind of common myths that parents are afraid of and if it's just explained to them you know here's ways that we're going to help your child if they need to get in touch with you it kind of puts them at ease and so I do think it's important for uh legislators Educators to know how to explain some of these things to respond to parents concerns and to be clear I share a lot of Claire's concerns about uh the digitization of the classroom I think there you know the way Scott put it there are real problems here um and it's one of the things that private schools are in a better position to address because they can say to parents and teachers you know Buy in or don't buy in you don't have to come here Public Schools it's more of a challenge especially with straight procurement requirements and the rest but you know it's you know it's not that thinking about technological Suffocation in classrooms is not a real concern but we shouldn't allow the perfect to be the enemy of the good when we first address cell phones and then we can be more thoughtful hopefully about the role we want Tech to play in classrooms going forward all said yeah because it's yeah it's an interesting point Rick um because you would think that especially at struggling schools uh something like an AI tutor could be a real Lifeline especially for the more advanced students or for the students in a position to take full advantage of it and it be you wouldn't want to snatch that away from them but you have to balance it with this so the really the lwh hanging fruit I think you you both are saying is is phone's in the classroom the rest is more complicated and it's you know it's it's what Clarence Scott said right phones are distraction machines they have been optimized we have every movie ever made every sixc cat video every possible chance to bully and insult that kid who annoys us all of that is a you know I I don't know many adults over the age of 40 who can resist kind of looking at their phone every six minutes so the idea that we're going to take only partially formed 14-year-old minds and expect those kids to just resist temptation for six or seven hours a day is is a ludicrous ask yes can I just jump in on a point that I don't think has been mentioned yet that is worth drawing out which is um the kind of push to get screens in the classroom originally this one laptop per child was to try to reduce this academic a achievement gra gap between lower performing students who likely didn't necessarily have access to Internet or technology at home was the idea um and higher performing students from maybe more well-off families that had more access to technology and different resources and so this one laptop per child was going to be what finally reduced the kind of academic achievement Gap and that hasn't panned out but on a positive note a solution that has been shown to help reduce that Gap is smart phone bans so in schools that ended up Banning smartphones they saw overall grades improved but the most astounding finding was that it improved for the lowest quartile of kind of lower performing students those impacts in terms of the increase in grades and GPA more than doubled so the they saw the greatest Improvement was in the kind of lowest portile of students who had been struggling more and so I think it just shows how distracting phones are um but then also just that this is actually a very practical policy solution to trying to help reduce some of the achievement gaps in education um and so I think that it's a really it's a point that I don't think it's discussed enough but there is a Justice kind of angle to this problem to say that allowing the phones in school is hurting the most vulnerable students the most um it's having the most negative impacts on those students that that were trying to help bring up um their academic uh achievements and so I think it's just worth noting that the the more studies that come out they show that not only is it improving students grades overall but it's particularly improving the kind of lower performing students did our experience during covid have any impact on how this debate is being shaped I remember the one striking fact it's not really closely relevant to what we've been discussing but I just I just couldn't believe it and so it's interesting I think in La USD that's uh Los Angeles Unified School District I think at some point a few months into covid uh fully 40% of the students had never even logged on to the remote learning module that they were all supposed to be using to go to school um yeah it was Co was kind of a shock therapy uh more on the parents side for what the kids were learning but of course it was all screen learning for a lot of school districts for the better part of a year or even two years somewhere some places yeah no I mean I think the pandemic experience upended this conversation because it's you know it's tended to proceed uh in one way over the last 100 plus years we get excited about a new technology a r it was radio a 100 years ago uh there was a US Department of Education started you before there was a federal before there was the cabinet agency there was a US Department of Education uh launched to support the radio we were going to adopt it it there were millions of dollars in Grants uh the radio the radio was sold as a textbook of the air uh 20 odd States formally adopted it teachers were just going to have kids listen to the radio uh the problem was you actually aligning your class with the right time the radio was on controlling the bell schedule sound quality all of it it was a nightmare so that went away and then we tried it again with TV in the 1960s under Kennedy we had Federal TV initiatives uh it was promised that TV was going to drive ation Improvement so we go through this every so often it never pays off in the 80s it was computers in the early 2000s it was on to one initially with kind of laptops and then with pads um and look so so we have a long bitter history of being disappointed by this but nobody ever notices nobody ever remembers what was different about the pandemic was suddenly parents were watching their kids be bored to death at the kitchen table they saw that what got sold as quote unquote remote learning was in fact in no way shape or form a substitute for what kids weren't getting it was dehumanizing it was alienating it was pointless and that I think has meant for the first time you're actually seeing Scholars you're seeing parents asking hard questions about the effect of tech on learning you know Jonathan hate and Jee tweng were raising these concerns prior to 2020 they were getting no traction over the last five years you've seen them getting enormous traction particularly with policy makers who were concerned about the effects on youth well-being Mental Health social connectedness and so yeah um in some way in some sense the pandemic was you know a big bucket of water to the face in a way that has made it possible for legislators to start having a conversation which was probably sorely needed 2018 or 2019 but just wasn't feasible yeah and I think on the flip side of that Co also brought a lot more screen use into the home that parents have said is Inc is is just different is difficult to go back from and so they said one of you know one mom I had interviewed for the book explained that you know their school had the iPads tablets but they didn't use them that much before covid but then remote learning happened and they had to be used used a lot and so she thought oh well we'll go back to school and we'll go back to kind of not using them very much but she said that didn't happen now everyone was used to doing more on the screens and so in fact they continued to use them more and so her experience was that unfortunately the kind of ramping up of the screens in during covid has been difficult to then kind of taper back down both School screens but then also the kind of social screens she said they had really successfully resisted a lot of screens for their kids but then during Co there was nothing for her kids to do um so they started allowing their kids to use tablets or some different gaming apps with their friends and it's been really hard to disentangle from them and I think that's why this kind of phone ban approach is actually really helpful to parents to start saying you know what we're trying to put these Technologies back in their proper place um we've been using them too much and it hasn't been a good outcome um for for kids or through their relationships or their learning um and so I do think Co did bring about I do think I completely agree with Brick's point it brought about a lot of kind of awareness that parents just really didn't have prior to Co in terms of what was happening on the screens um but we on the converse we did also see an increase in the kind of use and overuse of screens um that is still taking time I think to taper back down to where it was before the pmic yeah Rick you raised an interesting point um that you know we had I want to raise this question I think I know the answer but it's good to talk it through a little bit I mean you mentioned radio TV even computers but I think from my sense of just a Layman's perusal of the social science research and psych psychological research from from hate and others that I mean smartphones and tablets especially conjoined with social media and Tik Tok is that I mean those are sort of a qualitative difference I don't want us to because I think the average technologist would say look you can't resist change you guys you know you guys would have been against the horse and buggy in a different context you know this is coming we have to figure out how to use it but it seems like there's a qualitative difference from the previous iterations of tech in the classroom going back a century and this new sort of untrod ground of uh AI social media uh rapid fire content and 20 30 second intervals and more mundane things like television screens and a VHS tap or or radio announcements or even radio learning yeah absolutely I mean I I I usually argue look it's in three dimensions um one it's portable so it's with you all the time which is very different from like your old VCR or TV Set uh two um it's connective you're connected to every movie every made you're connected to everybody you want to bully uh to everybody you want to meet up with uh you know after school and three it's optimized for distraction it's driven by algorithms it throws things in front of you constantly that it thinks will amuse you these are all fundamentally different from every one of those other Technologies you mentioned uh these have had huge impacts on adult well-being on adult habits behaviors just think about how absolutely profound the change is for kids especially in a learning environment where concentration is at a premium you know on the Lite point you know one of my favorite stories on that stuff is always that remember when the pencil when the pencil eraser was introduced in the 19th century um when the pencil eraser was introduced Educators were Furious because the problem was the Eraser meant that you could get rid of mistakes and this was going to have a hugely adverse impact on the moral formation of kids because they would come to believe that it was okay to make mistakes so like look you know what part of the problem is there are reasonable thoughtful sensible parents and lawmakers who were like guys look you guys have always freaked out about tech why are you freaking out again and what we need to articulate is yeah yeah yeah you know it was fair to say freaking out about the pencil was stupid this is a different story and here's why it's a different story and here's why in order to kind of do right by our kids we need to put in place guard rails that are going to allow them to have the kind of educational opportunities that we want for them two quick stories to underscore rck point there um the first is a teacher I interviewed was explaining that he has seen what he calls like the ticktock ification of the kind of media and kids attention spans that he said it used to be if he showed like a video clip from a movie for like five minutes in class that could kind of like reset everyone's attention re engage the students who were lulling off after their lunch breaks and he said now a five minute movie clip is too long to hold the attention spans of his students because they are used to 30 second reels on Tik Tok um and so just the the the nature of this technology and particularly how it's undermining students abilities to focus and sustain attention on the subject is really dangerous and the second point is that there was a article probably about two years ago in the Wall Street Jal J called um like I wish College was more like prison it had a very provocative title but it was about a college professor who was teaching a college class to prison inmat and she explained that these prison inmates don't have access to phones they don't have access to social media and she could teach them for two and a half hours and they would engage with these really great texts of literature ask amazing questions she just had the most amazing time teaching this group of prison inmates and she said in contrast her colleagues on the college campus were struggling to hold their college students attention for an hour and 15 minute lecture and they were you know exchanging tips on oh well have you tried doing this PowerPoint thing and you you know swipe in some images and just trying struggling to figure out how to sustain college students attentions for an hour 15 minute lecture and so um I think that just really underscores the point of how these technologies have totally undermined students ability to focus and and sustain attention on subjects in the learning environment um and so it was really a provocative thing to think about huh are prison inmates almost really the most free in a sense of these digital technologies that are really enslaving our brains in other ways so anyway this is an interesting thought experiment for you all but I I think that just underscores Rick's point about this the nature of this technology being very different than the past yeah and I I just I want to underline that too to me the number one issue is undermining of attention um it undermines the ability to read it undermines even the ability to write it actually mirrors kind of viices that you don't have self-control uh because you're you're addicted to these things and want to know how you know like your your photos are doing on social media or something like that and um so just requiring I mean I've done this for a decade in my classes no technology in the class like you to buy the book If you don't buy the book I'm going to give a quiz and the first question on the quiz is going to be what's the first word on page three you're not going to do well I mean it doesn't take a lot of brains to answer the question but it does require that you actually get the book and uh because I want to be able to teach Aristotle I want to be able to teach dovi uh and you can't do that unless people are willing to focus and read and uh you know I can't control how they do homework or anything like that but you can you know get involved I think in trying to lengthen their attention spans and uh and that to me is like the number one thing about having an environment that does not um have the phones or even the other Technologies in it because it eliminates distractions or I shouldn't say it eliminates distractions you're left with the old world distractions of how do I look and what am I going to do after class and uh do I have to go to the bathroom or I'm really thirsty like those are nice things those are the old vices that we still have to F uh have to fight when we're in class so uh so I'm I'm you know I I think it's difficult to maintain that stuff alone and but I've you know I've noticed that many other professors do the same thing and uh anyways I think that's really the crucial moral and intellectual virtue uh that is undermined by uh by the social media and the and the phones in the class and you know what here's the other question that's kind of been uh left unanswered like should teachers be allowed to have the cell phones in the class uh because they're they're human they uh they set you know a standard in the classroom and if they can like have the kids do some work while they surf on their phone um does that undermine their own uh ability to lead a classroom um or does it uh or is it irrelevant to the uh to the question uh what what has happened Claire in those uh school districts that have banned phones for students have they done it for teachers I haven't okay I'll tell you the only the only example I know of is a private school and they decided to actually in order to kind of get this effort going and it's a boarding school so the students live there they actually they got a discount deal with the Light phone company have you heard of The Light phone it's like an alternative to a smartphone for faculty and students and a teacher reported I think it was in The Washington Post they were or the New York Times or Wall Street Journal one of those papers interviewed the kind of students and teachers at this school called the buckton school in Massachusetts it's a little bit of a kind of alternative school model but uh the teacher said he he didn't realize how distracted he had been during class just by you know honestly even just the mental distraction of thinking has someone texted me or you know done something on the phone like it's just it is very mentally distracting but he said having the Light phone which is just it gives no notifications it's very boring to look at just calls and text uh really freed him up he felt like to be a better teacher in the classroom so I don't think adults are immune from the effects of these Technologies and I think it is interesting obviously teachers and students don't necessarily have to have the same standard but I do think the point of modeling for the students is a really important one and I think you know schools could issue guidance to teachers to say you know really encourage you to have your phones out of the you know in a desk or out of you know out of the kind of classroom so that you can focus on the students because it does have benefits to to teachers as well for sure yeah I remember putting Instagram on my phone mostly to follow pictures of my sister's kids and their business was like kind of fun Boutique donnut shop and you know just harmless stuff like that but but Instagram has gotten very ticktock ified and about four years ago I noticed that I clearly was getting stupider and my attention span was declining so I I just took it off the phone and I as you said Rick uh anyone under 40 or 45 has some of the same problems with this uh kind of dopamine algorithm driven uh really sort of Technology short video uh ecosystem yeah have we left anything out Claire um do you have uh I mean what do you have sort of a top three steps to a tech exit in schooling or more broadly yeah we focus the smartphone is the the lwh hanging fruit as we've established it is no and I would just say I mean definitely feel free to read the book it's mainly directed at parents and families and what they can do but on the school front I think you know and this has come up in what Scott was saying just going phone free the big things to remember are just doing it Bell to Bell allowing it during passing periods or lunches and recesses does not have the same imp impact and that's been shown in the studies it's just they're not as effective in their results um for students and then also just thinking of ways to increase the distance between student and phone like asking them to leave it not bring it to school or having it away from them in a stored location for the day um because brain studies show that the mere presence of a phone even if it's in a backpack or something is still mentally distracting to the student so the greater the distance the better and then you just have to back it up with consequences I think schools really have to think through and I know you mentioned this as well you need that top- down support from school leadership leaving it to individual teachers to police is incredibly difficult but if a school administration Joe is going to take this seriously and have consequences like a detention or other action that they kind of crack down hard on that first instance they've seen success then in students really abiding you know by the policy so um yeah I would just say that I think it's very doable schools shouldn't be afraid to just start doing it even if your District or your state hasn't gone phone free just know that you can really Inspire higher level change and that at the end of the day it's going to be the best result um for students and so um yeah I think and Par and schools can do a lot to come alongside parents and provide that Collective solution that really individual parents really desire so um yeah that would be my like last word is is do it it's not it's not that hard and and everyone will be the better for it so yeah I just want to plug your book one more time so Claire Morel has been speaking to us as as well as Rick and Scott and What's the title of the book again Claire it'll be in the show notes but oh yeah thank you it's the tech exit a practical guide to freeing kids and teens from smartphones it's out June 3 excellent we'll have to pick it up uh maybe we'll review it in the Claremont review books please do yeah yeah we're right up on an hour I just want to thank you Rick and Claire and Scott for joining us again for the Cincinnati series and thank everyone for joining us too if you want to learn more about claremont's work go to clont .org check out all of our work out of the DC Center on policy at dc. claremont.ca review books.com American mind.org and we will uh wrap up this special short series next week with talk about red State strategy sort of more generally thank thank you all my guests and thank everyone for joining talk you soon [Music] a [Music]