In a welcome acknowledgment that children are addicted to their phones and need to be weaned off them, school districts across the country are imposing strict bans — even stricter than the unenforced, ineffectual ones that already exist — in a more concerted effort to address a serious educational issue. The presence of phones in the classroom is not just distracting kids and creating huge disciplinary problems for teachers, it's also contributing to the dumbing down of the American student, as reflected in recent national testing results.

Parents haven't always been helpful in the quest to pry phones away from their kids. A lot of young people come from backgrounds of extreme domestic instability, and the phone often serves as a lifeline to home. Parents likewise use texting to make sure students are where they're supposed to be and are safe. During school mass shootings, phones have helped prevent parental panic at a time of unimaginable anguish.

That said, too many students use their phones to play video games during class or to post videos. In all-too-common cases, they use phones to share porn videos with classmates, which is why all the right-wing attention to banning books on school library shelves seems so laughable.

When phones are present, instruction flies out the window. Teachers can demand that a student relinquish the phone, but the typical response is a protest that the student was just texting mom that everything was O.K., or an adamant refusal to give it up. The teacher can give up and continue trying to teach, or campus security can be summoned to have the student removed.

In the St. Louis area, policies against possession of cellphones in the classroom have had mixed results. In 2019, University City schools tried requiring students to give up their phones to be placed in cellphone lockers. The short-term reported result was a fairly dramatic upswing in attention levels and discipline.

But old habits are hard to break. A lot of districts around the country just gave up trying.

Now they're realizing they can't give up because phone-related disciplinary problems are rising and performance levels, largely due to phone distractions, are dropping. The solution many are trying is the Yondr pouch, The Washington Post reports. It's a slim case that allows students to keep their phones with them throughout the day — answering a major concern young people have — but keeps them inaccessible with a strong magnetic lock. At the end of the school day, they pass the pouch over a device that opens it.

The same technology has been in use for years at concerts where performers and comedians don't want to be photographed or recorded.

As far as students are concerned, the crackdown has to happen if there's any hope of salvaging the classroom as a place of learning instead of just another online entertainment-viewing venue.

REPRINTED FROM THE ST. LOUIS POST-DISPATCH

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