Schools vs. Screens

This fall, provinces from coast to coast confidently announced that they were banning phones in the classroom. It’s not going well.

November 12, 2024

This past September, on the first day of class, an Ontario high school teacher I’ll call Adam attended a school-wide meeting about the province’s new restrictions on students’ smartphones. He and his colleagues had heard lots of buzz about the new rules, which they felt were long overdue, but had little concrete information about how teachers on the frontlines would enforce them.

According to Adam, the previous school year had been a gong show. Students arrived every morning with phones out and AirPods in, bleary-eyed from late nights scrolling. They texted during the national anthem and played mobile games under their desks. They shared pictures and videos of each other, of teachers and of after-school fights. They coordinated mid-period vape breaks in group chats. One student went to the bathroom and returned with an Uber Eats delivery. Any time Adam wrote on the board, he’d turn back around to find students glued to their glowing screens. Engagement had plummeted, grades were declining and, because Adam was constantly policing students’ phone use, his bond with them was fraying. “These kids want to do well, but they’re so lost,” says Adam. (I changed his name because he feared retribution from his administration for speaking to me.)

This year, the province mandated that students were not to use phones in class at all, with rare exceptions. But as Adam listened to the principal explain the new system, he grew dismayed. It was obvious that this was no sweeping ban. The principal urged teachers to be accommodating by default, noting that there was no way for them to know why students were using phones—maybe they were monitoring a medical condition with an app, or waiting on a text about an ailing relative. And though Ontario’s policy required rule-breakers to immediately surrender their devices when caught, the principal implied that teachers would be personally liable if a confiscated phone was lost or damaged. The principal advised teachers to send offenders to the office instead. Adam’s colleagues rolled their eyes. They’d tried that before; it didn’t work. A vice-principal would give students a mild reprimand and send them back to class.

Adam left the meeting feeling deflated. “The general consensus was that they were telling us, ‘Don’t do anything,’ ” he says. Sure enough, within a week, students were back on their phones in classrooms and roaming the hallways watching TikTok. “It feels about the same as before,” says Adam.

This was supposed to be the year that schools broke up with smartphones. Over the past few months, governments around the world—in Italy, Brazil, Nigeria, Singapore, Australia and multiple U.S. states—have introduced regulations dictating where, when and how students could use their mobile devices. So did every province in Canada, except for Newfoundland and Labrador. There had been ministerial announcements, exhaustive media coverage and authoritative emails to parents. It looked like, after years of debate, educators were mounting an all-out assault on electronic distractions.

But as provincial governments jumped on the phone-ban bandwagon, they left enforcement to school boards. Educators had mere months to figure out how to prohibit phones in classrooms where students have become addicted to them, and where, in many cases, the devices have become essential tools for course work. Some boards rolled out coherent strategies; many more did not. Across the country, teachers like Adam told me they began the semester without any guidance from their principals, superintendents or boards. It’s been up to them to decide how—or if—they’ll keep their classrooms phone-free.

The result is a hodgepodge of approaches. One Grade 12 student at Cathedral High School in Hamilton, Ontario, witnessed the chaos from the start. When they returned to school this fall, their biology teacher was uncompromising, placing devices in a phone jail (a little mock prison cell complete with bars and a lock). Their kinesiology teacher, meanwhile, encouraged students to use phones to conduct research and take notes. Religion class fell in the middle: most of the time, students had to put their phones in an over-the-door shoe holder, but could use it to complete an assignment that involved analyzing tweets. Their chemistry teacher said she didn’t want students on their phones, but trusted them to be mature enough to handle them. “The rule is to keep it in your locker,” the student says, “but even the teachers know there’s no stopping you from bringing it to class.”

A few months into the academic year, the results differ dramatically from school to school, and even classroom to classroom. “It’s everything I dreamed of,” one English teacher in Toronto told me in September. “I’m on cloud nine with how well it’s working.” A Vancouver-area tech teacher was also pleased that phones had (mostly) disappeared. Others, like Adam, reported that the restrictions hadn’t changed a thing. I interviewed one teacher in Hamilton, who spoke to me by phone from his office: “Right now,” he said, “I’m looking into a classroom, and there are kids on their phones.”

So what is separating schools that have gone phone-free from those still infested with distracting devices? A handful of key factors have jumped out of my conversations with teachers and students: support from parents; funding for schools to buy their own electronics; and how willing teachers and administrators are to physically separate kids from their devices, not just leave them buzzing in their pockets. But the biggest factor, I heard over and over, is buy-in from the top. The fate of phone restrictions will depend primarily on whether or not principals and superintendents can establish clear rules, stand up for teachers who enforce them, hold firm against parents who object, and create clear and enforceable boundaries between legitimate and illegitimate use.

Adam, though, says that his administrators are kowtowing to helicopter parents, tolerating illicit device use and depriving teachers of enforcement power. The higher-ups have decided that insulating themselves from risk—a broken iPhone, an irate parent—is more important than students’ education.

“They’re happy to sacrifice an entire generation of kids because there’s a one-in-a-billion chance that some student or parent might complain about something,” says Adam. And without support from the top, the rules are toothless. “As teachers we do the best we can,” he adds. “But if kids call our bluff, we’re screwed.”

Like Game Boys, Walkmans and Tamagotchis before them, smartphones initially seemed like unwanted intruders in the classroom—devices that belonged in lockers and knapsacks, not on students’ desks. In 2007, when the iPhone debuted, students were already using phones to text and game in class, film schoolyard fights and cheat on tests. In response, schools around the world did the obvious thing: they banned them. The embargoes weren’t airtight—kids snuck flip phones and BlackBerrys into class—but they mostly worked. When I attended high school in Toronto, from 2006 to 2010, phones were almost entirely absent.

Shortly after I graduated, however, they crept back in, and it wasn’t long before almost every kid was clutching one. In 2010, fewer than a quarter of Canadians owned a smartphone; four years later, two-thirds did. As phones became more common, school boards responded by lifting bans—but they weren’t just capitulating to the devices’ growing ubiquity. Increasingly, they were in thrall to the idea that the microcomputers in students’ pockets were powerful pedagogical tools. This about-face was in part a response to the decline, in Canada and around the world, in math, science and reading scores. The reasons for the drop are murky. Some educators blamed a lack of specialized training for teachers in subjects like math. Others suspected the culprits included new teaching philosophies like inquiry-based instruction, which de-emphasizes memorization in favour of open questioning.

Big tech firms proposed another theory: students were falling behind because textbooks and blackboards weren’t stimulating enough. “Far too many students find their schooling boring and irrelevant,” wrote a former Microsoft employee in a report that Pearson, one of the world’s largest education companies, presented to Canadian school boards and policymakers in 2014. Another report, produced by Apple, proposed a fix: “Students learn better when they are engaged, and research about what engages them points to technology.” To reach students, Apple contended, schools needed screens, and lots of them. (Apple has since sold tens of millions of iPads to schools around the world.)

Even at the time, research was mounting against these claims. A 2013 survey of more than 6,000 Quebec students who used school-provided iPads revealed that a third played video games on them during school hours; 99 per cent said the iPads were distracting. A few years later, two U.S. studies found that students who brought laptops to class earned lower grades. Several experiments found that students who used smartphones during lectures retained less information and performed worse on exams. But the authors of the Pearson report argued that negative outcomes occurred because schools didn’t employ devices properly—or often enough.

For a few years, this screen-centric pedagogy took hold. Victoria’s public school board spent $1.25 million on more than 2,300 Chromebooks and iPads in 2017. Guelph’s Upper Grand District School Board bought 15,000 laptops, while Edmonton Public Schools procured 46,000. The country’s biggest spender was the Toronto District School Board, which cited Pearson’s report in 2021 when it committed to spending nearly $42 million on 136,000 Chromebooks. Other schools encouraged students to bring their own devices to class. Classrooms were soon saturated with screens, and students were, in many cases, required to use devices to access some course materials.

Provincial governments in B.C., Manitoba and Ontario signed lucrative deals with the Kitchener-based company D2L to use its popular learning management system, Brightspace. Other districts opted for Blackboard, Moodle or Google Classroom. These platforms allowed teachers to post announcements, livestream lessons, message parents and upload schedules, rubrics, digital textbooks, slides, links and worksheets. Students could access class resources remotely, ask each other questions, communicate with teachers and submit assignments, which would be automatically screened for plagiarism and, more recently, AI-generated content.

In many ways, the new tech made education more engaging and efficient. Schools were happy to transition from printouts and photocopies as paper prices soared. Educators, parents and students appreciated having communications and class materials in one digital space. And when students missed lessons, online tools made it easier to catch up.

But as classrooms began brimming with computers, tablets and smartphones, the devices themselves were filling up with a new generation of more sophisticated and addictive apps: Instagram, TikTok, Fortnite, Among Us. When students opened their laptops for schoolwork, their attention was rapidly derailed by video games and social media pings. School boards built firewalls into school-owned devices to restrict social media and, in 2019, Ontario tried to prohibit students from using their personal phones in class. But that would-be ban failed to launch; it was simply too late. Enforcement was left up to teachers with little institutional backing. Meanwhile, the laptops and tablets boards had spent hundreds of millions of dollars on were already becoming obsolete, and some schools were encouraging students to bring their own devices to class to get online. Many kids began working entirely on their phones, taking pictures of marked-up whiteboards and writing English papers in the Notes app, even as they fielded chats, texts, likes and follows. There had become no way to untangle the good from the bad: personal devices had become fonts of distraction as well as crucial classroom tools.

Dante Luciani, a teacher at Hamilton’s Cathedral High School, has struggled with this dilemma in his own classes. Phones have become vital tools for many of his students. In ESL lessons, he communicates with Spanish-, Swahili- and Arabic-speaking students using translation apps. When he teaches photography, kids use their phone cameras. In math class, their phones double as calculators. But it’s a devil’s bargain. “If I drop my pencil and it causes a four-second break in my lesson, I look up and I’ve lost them,” he says. “I kid you not, some of my students will not graduate high school because of their phones.”

The pandemic onlystrengthened students’ attachment to their devices. When schools closed in March of 2020, their lives shrank to the size of their screens—overnight, they began spending upwards of six hours a day in virtual classrooms. That was only the half of it. A survey by researchers at Western University in 2021 found that non-school screen time among primary school students more than doubled in 2020, to nearly six hours a day. Phones had become kids’ entire worlds: their classrooms, entertainment and their primary connection to friends and peers.

Colleen Russell-Rawlins, who served as the TDSB’s director of education from 2021 to 2024, noticed this deepened dependence when schools reopened after lockdown. Phones were everywhere: at lunch, in the halls, in class. Students’ already-diminished attention spans had evaporated, and keeping them focused was a constant struggle. Russell-Rawlins recalls a school board event where she spotted three students in the audience with their heads down, scrolling on TikTok during a speech she gave. She approached them later and apologized—in earnest—for boring them. The teens explained that it wasn’t personal. “This is what I do every day, miss,” one said.

As the school year progressed, darker currents rose to the surface. Cyberbullying became a massive problem, and spats that began on social media spilled into schools. Between September of 2022 and April of 2023, 323 TDSB students were involved in violent incidents at school, including fights, sexual assaults and shootings. Teacher surveys showed similar spikes across Ontario and in other provinces, including Saskatchewan and New Brunswick. Much of it was directly connected to social media.

Damir Maltaric, a guidance counsellor at Rosedale Heights School of the Arts in Toronto, told me that after the COVID closures, more students came to his office seeking help with cyberbullying and self-esteem problems stemming from social media. Their addiction to their devices was also more apparent: their attention would wander during a counselling session, and they would pull out their phones and tune him out. “Many students do not have the ability to regulate their smartphone use even when they want to,” he says. “The drawbacks of the technology outweigh the benefits.”

Another student at Cathedral came to the same conclusion last school year, in Grade 9. She says that, during group projects, classmates failed to pull their weight because they spent all their time on their phones. She gets distracted as well, and at 15 years old experiences phone-induced eye and back pain from constant hunching and neck-craning. Most days she uses Instagram for at least four hours and TikTok for another two, plus a little time on Snapchat. That’s still less than most of her friends. “The way I see people using their phones in school, on the bus, when they go out, it’s alarming,” she says. “People don’t communicate.”

By last year, the educational reputation of smartphones had come full circle and then some, from nuisance to panacea to menace. Last summer, UNESCO endorsed banning smartphones in schools, citing research that found students can take up to 20 minutes to refocus once distracted by a single notification. That’s a startling statistic, considering the volume of notifications teens receive. (One widely publicized study last year by a U.S. nonprofit pegged the number at 237 per day.) UNESCO also cautioned against using tablets and computers in schools except where they improve educational outcomes—a rare result, the report also noted.

Quebec was the first Canadian province to heed UNESCO’s advice, banning phones in classrooms in January. That month, a nationwide survey by polling firm Narrative Research found that 80 per cent of Canadians supported similar action. The bans that swept the country in the months that followed vary somewhat from province to province, but in general they dictate that, until Grade 7, students aren’t allowed to use phones anywhere at school, full stop. This applies to all public boards and schools. Things loosen up in high school, where some provinces allow students to use devices during breaks and lunch periods.

But the rules are leaky. Most of them permit phones to remain on a student’s person, as long as they’re out of sight and muted. As well, every province attempts to accommodate appropriate academic and personal uses. But drawing a line between legitimate and illegitimate use is easier said than done. For some students with disabilities, phones have become a genuine support system, used for transcription and dictation. Other students use them to monitor medical conditions, like diabetes.

Some provinces, like Saskatchewan, require administrative permission for these kinds of accommodations. Elsewhere they can be baked into a student’s individual education plan, or IEP, but creating an IEP is complicated and time-consuming. Instead, exceptions are often informal arrangements, which makes teachers themselves the ultimate arbiters of who does and does not have a legitimate use case. It’s a Sisyphean task for which they have little time, energy or training.

At Cathedral, Luciani still allows some phone time—for example, his science students can use their devices to research the periodic table of elements and experiment with ChatGPT. But once students are on their phones, he says, it’s impossible to keep them on task: “I’ll walk by and see a kid with their head down. They might have been looking something up five minutes ago, but now they’re on TikTok.” When he tells them to turn their devices off, he gets pushback. “You get every excuse: ‘I’m waiting to hear back from my mom,’ or ‘My sister is transferring me lunch money.’ ”

Luciani would love to buy more in-class tech, such as cameras, so his students don’t have to rely on their phones. But like many others, his school simply doesn’t have the money. A combination of rampant inflation, growing enrolment and chronic underfunding has squeezed school budgets nationwide. The Calgary Board of Education pulled $2.6 million out of its reserves to balance the books. Saskatoon Public Schools, Saskatchewan’s largest school district, received an additional $180 million from its provincial government this year. But there are still worries that it won’t be enough to reverse the effects of years-long austerity measures and prevent cuts to library and support staff. In Ontario, education spending has decreased by roughly $1,200 per student since 2018, and the province’s schools have a nearly $17-billion repair backlog. In this context, it’s hard for educators to justify spending millions of dollars on even more devices, which will surely become obsolete at least as quickly as the last generation they purchased.

Then there are the parents. Though most support restrictions, a vocal minority brazenly defy them. Teachers told me about parents themselves texting, calling and sending social media posts to their kids. Some even video-chat with them during class. One teacher said that, during a Parent Council meeting last spring, some parents vowed to challenge the school and government’s right to tell their child how to use their phone and defended their own right to have access to their kid at all times.

“In a perfect world, a phone ban would be great,” says Luciani. “But there are always going to be a number of families who will find ways to ensure that their kid has their phone on them all day, some for perfectly rational reasons and others for completely irrational reasons.”

Some teachers told me they suspect their bosses have neglected to crack down on kids’ phones at least in part to avoid parents’ wrath. One teacher says that, two years ago, he bolted a small wooden box to his desk and started locking up phones in it from bell to bell. It was a safety measure—he taught automotive and woodworking courses, in which teenagers wielded power tools and industrial saws and where distractions would be dangerous. For a couple of weeks, kids got into the routine of stashing their devices and retrieving them after they’d cleaned up at the end of class. “It worked absolutely beautifully,” this teacher told me. “Until one parent complained.”

Someone had written to the principal, saying that teachers had no right to confiscate their kid’s phone. The principal told the teacher the box was a liability risk and said that if students were misusing their phones, he should send them to the office. So he did. Over and over. “It was a bit of a game,” the teacher says. “I made a show of my stance. The office got irritated with me for wasting their time. Nothing changed.”

This fall, emboldened by new school leadership and empowered by the new smartphone bans, the teacher brought back the phone box. “Most of my colleagues agree with me, but they’re afraid to do what I do because they don’t have the backing of the administration,” he says. Until they do, he says, the rules are futile.

Many teachers I spoke to said that effective bans will require nothing less than the most dramatic step possible: physically separating students from their property. When Quebec rolled out its restrictions this past January, it didn’t take long for teachers to realize that simply asking kids not to use their phones wasn’t going to cut it. Within months, the government was discussing stronger action. “The strategy needs to be renewed,” Education Minister Bernard Drainville acknowledged this past May.

But confiscating phones is challenging and controversial. Where it’s been successful, it’s not driven by lone teachers, like Adam, struggling against a reluctant administration, timid in the face of complaining parents or liability concerns. Instead, it comes from administrators themselves.

Several years ago, Vancouver Island’s Sooke School District began requiring elementary-school students to drop their phones into labelled cubbies at the start of every period. Middle-school students left them in their lockers. Though teachers can still grant exceptions as needed, stowing the devices reduced the number of phone-related office admissions by more than 90 per cent over two years, according to Sooke superintendent Paul Block. The measure has helped put a stop to the haggling between students and teachers over phone use, reducing conflict and improving teacher morale.

On the other end of the country, Saint John High School, in New Brunswick, implemented a comparable ban in September of 2022—two years before the provincial government implemented province-wide restrictions. “I didn’t want to wait,” says principal Christina Barrington. With help from her teaching staff, she devised a simple rule: no phones or earbuds in class, with exceptions for medical uses. She bought “cellphone hotels” (sheets with phone-sized pockets that affix to a wall) for every classroom. She wrote to parents to explain the restrictions, put up posters around the school and dipped into the school’s budget to buy calculators and point-and-click cameras so students wouldn’t need phones for math or photography classes.

Some teachers fretted about liability: what if a phone got stolen or a screen got cracked? Barrington said the cost of any damage would be on her. “I haven’t had to replace a phone,” she says. “But I’m prepared for the day when that might happen, because it’s a small cost for a significant reward.” Among those benefits: academic averages have risen slightly across all grades, teachers report better relationships with their students, and phone- and cyberbullying-related office admissions are down from about one a week to one a month. “It’s like the physical separation gives students permission to focus on something else,” says Barrington. “And I have quite a few teachers who put their phones in the cell hotels as well, to model that they’re in it too.”

Coincidentally, when Canadian provinces debuted their phone bans this year, New Brunswick was the only jurisdiction that mandated all schools physically separate students from their phones: the province’s policy calls for high-schoolers to leave their devices on silent in a designated area of the classroom. Based on conversations with her superintendent and fellow principals, Barrington says this approach is working for other institutions, which are beginning to enjoy the improvements Saint John High experienced two years ago.

At Greenwood College School, an independent middle and high school in Toronto, educators are testing an even stricter form of separation. Students are required to put their smartphones into Yondr pouches, lockable fabric sacks that first became commonplace at comedy shows and are now in use at thousands of schools worldwide. While on campus, Greenwood students carry the pouches around with them, their unusable phones locked inside. When they leave for lunch or at the end of the day, they magnetically unlock their Yondrs at several stations scattered across campus.

“The biggest thing I’ve noticed is that school is loud, in a good way,” says Greenwood principal Heather Thomas. “At lunch, students are having conversations. They’re focusing on one another.” It’s too early to tell whether Yondr will improve academic achievement or benefit students’ mental health. But many Greenwood parents are thrilled. Students, while slightly less thrilled, understand the rationale. “We want them to have healthy habits around using their phones,“ says Thomas, “not needing to reach for them all the time, being able to be without them.”

Former Greenwood principal Sarah Bruce, who helped put the Yondr plan in place, says the pouches aren’t a permanent fix. No educator wants to lock up children’s personal property in perpetuity. “We feel like Yondr is quite extreme,” says Bruce. As the year goes on, Greenwood plans to revisit the approach. “But I don’t think anyone knows exactly what the perfect solution is,” she adds.

Clamping down on phones in the classroom is only one front in educators’ war against online distraction. A group of school boards in Ontario has recently taken on the social media giants in court. Twelve boards—including public and Catholic districts in Toronto, Ottawa, Niagara and beyond—are seeking $7 billion in damages from Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp; ByteDance, which operates TikTok; and Snap, the parent company of Snapchat. It alleges that social media has rewired children’s brains, compromising their ability to learn. These suits are inspired by similar claims south of the border, where more than 200 school districts have launched their own actions. So far, the courts haven’t been very receptive. In California, a judge has quashed some of the American suits, invoking Section 230, a piece of U.S. federal law enacted in 1996 that blocks users from suing social media platforms over, for example, a user’s defamatory post.

Resolution to the cases is years away. In the meantime, parents, teachers and administrators will continue groping toward the best methods for keeping phones out of classrooms, the one place they have real control. The only ones who cannot fairly be blamed for this situation are young people. Generation Z didn’t ask to be born into a world teeming with screens. Their parents handed them iPads when they were toddlers and smartphones when they were tweens. Schools equipped them with an armada of digital devices, only to suddenly reverse course.

This year, Damir Maltaric is teaching a Grade 9 English class. During the first week of school, he asked his students to brainstorm things they might do instead of using their phones: reading, journaling, doodling. “They’re drawing up a storm,” he reports. “They’re socializing more with each other. They’re being more creative.” It’s still early days, but he’s optimistic that some kind of watershed has been reached—that things will be different for students from now on. “These kids are, for the most part, absolutely brilliant.”

This story appears in the December issue of Maclean’s. You can buy the issue here, subscribe to the magazine here or send a gift subscription here.

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