May 12, 2022
The Phone-Free Classroom Experiment: What Schools Are Learning a Year In
Lunch is loud again. In schools that spent this year locking phones in magnetic pouches from the first bell to the last, the clearest sign something changed isn’t a test score. It’s the noise in the cafeteria, kids talking over each other the way twelve-year-olds are supposed to. That detail matters more than it sounds like it should. Bell-to-bell phone restrictions rolled out across a wide swath of districts heading into this school year, and the early results are starting to separate the real effects from the wishful ones. The friction point worth examining is not whether phones are bad.
