May 12, 2023
The Phone-Free Classroom Experiment: What Schools Are Learning a Year In
Ask a middle school teacher what changed first after the phones went into pouches, and almost none of them mention grades. They mention lunch. Kids started talking to each other again, loudly, awkwardly, 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. Everyone already agreed on that. It is what actually
