The Iowa City Community School District is heavily considering a new electronics policy that would ban all personal devices bell-to-bell—from 8:50 in the morning to 4:00 in the afternoon. The new, stricter policy aims to remove distracting devices like smartphones and personal computers, but what is it actually going to do?
ICCSD already has a phone policy keeping phones inside of backpacks during instructional time. This policy makes perfect sense. The smartphone is a distracting device that impedes the learning process in students, and therefore should be removed from classrooms. Beyond this though, there isn’t really an educational purpose to banning smartphones outside of class. Banning phones, headphones, Nintendo Switches, and home-computers during lunch makes just as much sense as banning sketchbooks, novels, and magazines. The ban is already implemented during the periods of the day where personal devices are a problem; why install it when it really isn’t necessary? Personal devices can’t distract students during lunch because THERE’S NOTHING TO BE DISTRACTED FROM.
Phones are far from the first distraction in the classroom. Before smartphones, students would pass notes, sketch, or sneak a comic inside their textbook. No special policies were implemented for these ‘distractions’, so why for the phone? Besides smartphones being pretty addictive, there is actually another issue: Test scores. Since COVID-19, test scores in high schools have hit historic lows. In fact, it’s the lowest overall score in generations, and many have been pointing to screens as a reason for the drop. Since federal funding is dependent on test scores, it’s an issue that must be addressed. ICCSD points to phones as the problem, but is this really the case? After all, as mentioned above, there have been plenty of distractors over the years. Why are phones any different? It seems more likely the dropping test scores are caused by things like chronic absenteeism, grade inflation, and just a general disinterest in class. And that’s ignoring the fact that standardized tests aren’t a very good form of measuring intelligence or understanding. When it comes to test scores, phones aren’t the main problem, but rather, the test taker.
On an average week, it is unlikely that a student doesn’t hear a teacher suggest that they take a photo of the board or assignment. Why? Because phones, applied in certain ways, can be very useful. At The Little Hawk, photos and videos are sometimes taken with phones, interviews are conducted using phones as recording devices, and are also used to post on the social media platforms The Little Hawk is involved in. An all-out ban removes this useful tool, rather than allowing students to use it for certain academic purposes. Beyond that, the phone is also very useful for coordinating pick-up times, which during the frigid Iowa winters, is both a favor to the student who can wait out the cold inside the building and to the parent, who can contact their student in the case of a change of plans or emergency.
In addition, laptops are also used by students often, since they tend to be better quality than the school Chromebooks. In journalism, laptops are used by many of the editors to work on newspaper pages at home. Laptops are also less laggy than the chromebooks, which may be necessary depending on the kind of work being done on the computer. Denying students their personal devices is denying them resources and tools.
On a given day, the average City High student has an hour and eleven minutes of break time, thirty minutes which are dedicated to passing periods, and the other forty-one to lunch, which doesn’t include the time it takes to walk from class to lunch and back or the time spent waiting in the lunch line. That relatively short period of time is all the break students get from school, which, depending on the circumstances, is more mentally taxing than many jobs, due to the variety of different subjects one has to study. It only makes sense that during these breaks students should have access to some kind of entertainment, something that electronic devices can offer. And sure, the argument can be made that one can always bring a book or draw, but those forms of entertainment cower in the all encompassing power of the Internet. If a student likes reading, why be limited by the books that fit in their backpack? Why not use the phone to its full potential and take advantage of its resources? Very few workplaces ban entertainment devices during break periods, which are important for students and workers alike to decompress, so why should schools?
The total phone ban proposed by ICCSD would do nothing that the current policy doesn’t, and if anything, it would decrease student productivity by removing useful tools and entertainment opportunities during students’ already limited break time.
