Each fall, every teacher must wage a few key wars with a new class of students. In my classroom, one battle is around bathroom usage. Another is assigned seats. A third is side conversations—especially during our first few weeks of class community building. Increasingly, though, the biggest fight that never seems to end is around phone usage.
This year, the Pew Research Center reported that 9 in 10 American adults own a smartphone. While most of us can recall what life was like before our national smartphone addiction, most of today’s adolescents are too young to remember such a time; however, smartphone ownership among 13 to 17-year-olds almost mirrors adults. Furthermore, smartphone use among teenagers has been a growing obstacle to learning.

My colleague and I teach the same group of 11th grade students in our Title I high school in Oakland; she teaches history, and I teach them science. Given the size of this group, we are able to build strong relationships with these 60 students during our 40 weeks together.
Early in the year, we noticed most students were extremely attached to their phones. So, about halfway through last year, we decided to investigate how much screen time our students consumed. While not unexpected, the results of our investigation baffled us. Kids were reading off figures like “8 hours and 43 minutes daily” with no shame. The highest across the group? Just under 12 hours per day. The lowest? An admirable 2 hours and 50 minutes. Weekly? The vast majority totaled over 40 hours — more than an entire workweek spent staring at a screen.

As teachers, this is not only exhausting but demoralizing. While 77% of public schools have some type of cellphone regulation during classroom time, our high school does not. This is an extremely controversial issue at my school site and in other schools across the country. As school safety concerns rise with campus shootings, parents are also worried about not being able to contact their children. However, while this is a valid concern for many parents, teachers are also battling signs of poor mental health, decreased engagement and overall general lack of socialization with peers in our students.

As a teacher standing in front of an audience who simply cannot put their phones down, the diminishing attention span of my students takes a toll. When I talk to other staff at my school, the majority of people want a phone usage policy across the school. Many academic cohorts in my school have their own policies with varying degrees of success, but some teachers are adamant about policy implementation. Teachers who don’t want policies often cite lack of support as a major reason; this could be due to unresponsive or unsupportive administration, lack of clear consequences on a school-wide basis or lack of consistency across classrooms.

Each of these factors leads to teachers having to fight the same battles every day. Not only does it take away from our overall teaching time, but it impacts our relationships with students—the only thing keeping many of us in the classroom in one of the lowest-paying but most difficult-to-teach districts in the Bay Area.

Even if you uphold clear structures in your classroom, they must be retaught each day because your students enter seven different spaces throughout the day with varying policies and expectations before you see them again. Without a school-wide policy, it’s not only confusing for students but there’s no real buy-in without a chain of consequences that reaches outside one specific classroom.

Shifted Landscape

In my experience as a teacher, the classroom landscape was distinctly different before and after the COVID-19 pandemic. Before the notorious Zoom Year, phones were a minor issue; students were generally receptive to being redirected and there was an overall culture of understanding of how to act in a classroom. Often, when students were finished with their work or needed a break, they’d chat with me about their weekends, telling me about events in their lives such as a morning spent fishing with their dad or their little sister’s upcoming quinceañera. Sometimes, they’d pull out a book or talk to their classmates. These moments were priceless to me as their teacher, and these small check-ins made going to work a joy.

Now, the entire landscape has shifted. I’ve noticed that students generally lack the mental fortitude and self-regulation to put their phones down. Each day, I battle against social media, online gambling, sports games, texting friends and everything else that the internet provides, and for the most part, it’s me versus my group of 28 students. Most of them seem to understand that it’s an expectation I have in my classroom, but the same general understanding of smartphone etiquette is no longer ingrained in the school culture or this generation of students.

Instead, kids see phone usage as a non-issue; it’s simply something that everyone does. This creates a barrier between my students and me and highlights so many factors that are pushing teachers out of the field, such as increased workload and mental health. Additionally, because of the controversy around smartphones, we feel unappreciated and invalidated in our efforts to encourage kids to engage in our classrooms and create a positive learning community.

Managing Expectations

Because of the combined inconsistency in school policy and significant overuse of smartphones among my students, navigating this issue has made my teaching experience incredibly difficult — especially since I often go hours on campus without interacting with another adult. When an issue plagues the way you teach and has become an accepted norm among students, it can be hard to continue pouring energy into the effort when you feel alone in a losing battle.

Though there is clear progress in policy around smartphone regulation in states like California, there is not yet clarity on how these policies will look in schools with varying access to resources. Current political movements, like All4Ed, raise questions about funding provided to Title I schools to uphold such policies.

As I settle into this school year, I’m hopeful that my school will make some progress in developing a sound, consistent policy that applies to every classroom. However, as our budget has been cut significantly, further reducing resources and staff available to address phone use in classrooms and around the school, I’ve adjusted my expectations in hopes of future movement on this issue.

Yet again, teachers are tasked with solving society’s issues without resources or support. Smartphone use is an issue that needs to be addressed sooner than later in schools so that this generation of kids can build and focus on the skills they need to succeed in the world.