About a year ago Gov. Gavin Newsom signed Assembly Bill 3216 (AB 3216) into law.
The new law mandates that public school districts have policies restricting student cell phone usage.
Unfortunately, the law’s inherent problems — a lack of necessity and clarity — are showing up in classrooms across the state this fall.
The underlying rationale behind the bill, that phones hurt teens and younger kids, is not a controversial stand; it has already been researched and proven to be true; instead, the real issue with this law is that it’s useless.
Compared to Assembly Bill 272 — a bill that prohibited cell phones in school passed in 2019 — the new law makes only one meaningful change: It now requires districts to adopt some kind of cell phone policy. Otherwise, there are essentially no alterations to the previous law.
Beyond the text of the legislation, I highly doubt that the implemented bans are useful. On Newsom’s official website, a statistic used to rationalize the new law states the median time students spend on mobile devices during school is 43 minutes. Forty three minutes barely covers lunch and a passing period — it’s not evidence for cell phone addiction and isn’t going to cope with the effects cell phone usage brings.
The largest issue is, however, the utter lack of clarity in the new law. There is no definition for what bans look like, leaving it entirely up to school districts — and even individual teachers — to interpret.
But the nail in the coffin comes when AB 3216 says, “The policy may also include enforcement mechanisms that limit access to smartphones.” T In other words, it allows for a situation where having policy is mandatory, but enforcing it is entirely optional.
You can see the dissonance caused by these unclear requirements. While some teachers have added phone caddies for their classrooms, many others just ask for phones to be placed in backpacks. In those classrooms, there is barely any change, if any, from previous years.
Making the ban even worse is that phones aren’t always a detriment or distraction in classrooms; sometimes they are helpful and even necessary to use. A student who has just come from another country struggling with English may find help with having their mobile phone for translation purposes. Or in a class like journalism or yearbook, phones are a necessity for interviewing. A blanket ban with exceptions built-in does nothing to actually address the issue across the board.
Worse, the ban may even have an adverse effect on phone usage. Most often, cell phone bans tend to fail for two reasons: They are difficult and costly to enforce or easily bypassed by students. More concerning, however, is a phenomenon known as psychological reactance, in which these bans may push children into hidden and more extreme online behaviors, which they do away from guardians or educators.
For example, at school, a student may bring two phones to school, turn in one to the teacher and use the other in class. There are many other extreme cases that could arise in reaction to the ban.
AB 3126 advocates for action to combat a known problem, habitual cell phone usage, but its effect is mostly useless. Mandating schools implement new rules without defining a timeline, exceptions and even leaving enforcement optional doesn’t help students in any way. Furthermore, 43 minutes of phone usage during school does not warrant a blanket ban, especially if that ban does not require enforcement at all, and can actually be damaging to students.
