(The Center Square) – A new law in effect restricting cell phone use in Texas classrooms is benefiting teachers and students, a new report indicates.
Last year, Gov. Greg Abbott and the state legislature enacted HB 1481 to implement prohibitions of personal communication devices in the classroom, including cell phones, smart watches, tablets and other devices, The Center Square reported.
The bill passed with strong bipartisan support in the House and unanimously in the Senate. Abbott signed it into law last June and it went into effect before the school year began last August.
It requires public schools and open enrollment charter schools to implement polices that either prohibit personal devices on school property or provide a designated storage area for devices during the school day. It also requires the schools to adopt disciplinary measures for noncompliance.
One year later, a Texas A&M Vital Health report says the change has been positive for teachers and students. Initial anxiety was reported about enforcement but teachers feel freer “to focus their energy on educating instead of rule enforcement,” the report states.
Dr. Israel Arevalo, at Texas A&M’s Health Telehealth Institute, found that when the new law was enacted he saw “baseline anxiety in teachers, students and parents spike, plateau and then begin to drop.” Initial student anxiety was attributed to “digital withdrawal.”
“We are meant to be social – not through screens but through face-to-face interactions where language and communication can be truly conveyed,” Arevalo said. “Research has shown that increased screen time is associated with a greater likelihood of children developing socioemotional difficulties as well as decreased social skills.”
Arevalo also said the use of electronic devices prevents students from “engaging in the curricula,” which negatively impacts their grades and behavior.
According to a National Library of Medicine Digital Detox study, “Excessive use of social media platforms and digital technology, often driven by habitual scrolling due to adaptive feed experiences, has been linked to anxiety, sleep disturbances, and obsessive-compulsive behaviors while also exacerbating mental health concerns.”
Digital detox interventions “may alleviate depression and problematic internet use, and individuals with higher baseline symptom severity appear to derive higher benefits,” the report states.
Jared Cooney Horvath, PhD, MEd, author of the Digital Delusion, points to decades of data that indicates that increased use of technology has resulted in a substantial cognitive developmental decline in children.
“Increased classroom screen exposure is generally associated with weaker learning outcomes, not stronger ones. In narrow circumstances … digital tools can support surface-level skill acquisition, but in most core academic contexts screens slow learning, reduce depth of understanding, and weaken retention. This is not primarily a question of teacher quality, student motivation, or access to devices. It reflects a structural mismatch between how human cognition develops and how digital platforms are engineered to capture attention, fragment focus, and accelerate task switching,” he said, The Center Square reported.
Arevalo said the students improving the most from the cell phone ban are the ones whose parents support similar restrictions at home. “If a child leaves a phone-free campus only to spend five uninterrupted hours on a device at home, some of the benefits gained from limiting phone use during the school day may be diminished,” according to the A&M report.
“We can make those policy changes in the schools, but accountability is on the parents once the child goes home,” Arevalo said. “Whenever we are trying to change a behavior or implement an effective intervention, we want to make sure those efforts are consistent across settings.”
Less screen time is also improving social interaction, the A&M report found. ‘When attention moves from devices to peers, younger children gain opportunities to learn essential social skills, such as taking turns, labeling feelings and reading body language. For teenagers, face-to-face interaction encourages them to tap back into and refine the social skills they learned as young children, while developing more complex social and emotional skills they’ll use as adults,” it states.
“The school cellphone ban encourages a return to primary social development” with a goal of encouraging opportunities to learn and growth, socially, emotionally and educationally, Arevalo said. The immediate benefits include “opportunities to reclaim lost attention.”
Abbott has touted the ban as a success and has proposed additional measures to improve student outcomes. These proposals include limiting the use of laptops, tablets and other electronic devices during classroom instruction, and prioritizing direct teacher instruction using physical materials, phonics and handwriting, The Center Square reported.
