ROOKE: Schools Are Finally Tackling The Greatest Threat To American Children

As technology use among young Americans increases, educators are finally receiving the support they need to address significant classroom challenges.

School districts in states like California, Colorado, Georgia, Maine, Ohio, Texas, Florida, Louisiana, South Carolina, Utah, and Virginia are banning the use of cell phones in some capacity during the school day. This is not an exhaustive list, as thousands of school districts in at least 22 states across the country have implemented technology policies that restrict access to personal devices. However, it shows that, across political lines, there is a growing understanding that unfettered access to technology has been detrimental to our children.

Every generation of children faces a new threat that needs to be handled and overcome. This is the reality of our ever-increasing connected world. Still, over the last decade, American students and their teachers have been witnessing the erosion of human connection as technology has taken its place, with severe negative impacts on learning.

NEW: Schools across the country are requiring students to lock their phones in a phone pouch for the entire school day, can unlock the pouch at the end of the day.

Teachers and principals say phones in the classroom are becoming too much of a distraction.

“The last couple… pic.twitter.com/LHe0Yk11xd

— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) August 19, 2025

In 2024, Pew Research found that 72% of U.S. high school teachers reported that student distraction by cell phones is a major problem in their classrooms, and 33% of all K-12 teachers said it was a major issue, with another 20% calling it a minor problem.

Stony Brook University’s research, published in JAMA Pediatrics in 2023, monitored adolescent phone behavior over four months using a third-party app. The study found that, on average, students spend about 90 minutes of their school day on their phones, with female students often averaging at least 30 minutes more (2 hours) than the overall population. (Sign up for Mary Rooke’s weekly newsletter here!)

Teachers familiar with the study believe that this number severely underestimates the amount of time students spend on their phones in the classroom. Still, even 90 minutes of phone usage can significantly disrupt learning and contribute to the declining test scores seen across the country, especially when combined with data showing that 97 percent of teens admit to using their phones during the school day.

It doesn’t take much mental effort to understand that having a cell phone in a classroom is going to lead to learning loss. But unless you are a parent or are around teens and young adults, it’s hard to grasp just how bad cell phone usage is for their mental health.

In 2023, Pew Research found that 19% of teens say social media hurts their mental health; 48% believe it has a mostly negative effect on peers. Girls are more affected than boys by social media, with 25% saying it hurts their mental health versus just 14% of boys.

This is the generation that lost critical social interaction with their peers during the COVID lockdowns, which forced school closures across the country, leading these students to turn inward to their devices to connect with the outside world. Try taking a teenager who has spent the entire day texting or scrolling through social media away from their phone, and almost always, you’ll see a complete meltdown. They depend on these devices like a drug addict depends on their drug of choice. (ROOKE: There’s An Insidious New Plan Creeping In To End Humanity As We Know It)

Our children deserve better than a lifetime dependency on a product that makes them anxious, depressed, and dumb. It seems astonishing that it has taken this long for school districts to ban cell phones, and that every district in the country has not instituted a strict no-device policy. Still, there is hope that as the school districts that banned cell phones report the positive effects on students, more will join the fight.

But even with this new hope, the reality is that the battle will not be won until parents opt out of giving their young children phones in the first place.

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