A recent craze in education that has garnered the attention of students and teachers alike is the ever increasing presence of phone pouches, or more specifically for my school, Yondr pouches, These small, neoprene packs have a firm magnetic seal that can only be released by tapping it against an unlocking base. Their main purpose is quite simple: stop students from accessing their phone during the school day. The rationale is that the less time students spend on their phone, the more time they will spend learning.

Recently, the response from students and teachers seems to be fairly divided, with most students vehemently opposing it and most teachers earnestly welcoming it. Indeed, according to a recent poll from the Pew Research Center, a majority of U.S. teenagers oppose banning phones during the school day. On the contrary, a separate survey of 1,098 adults found that 93% of adults support cell phone restrictions. This survey is part of the Understanding America Study (UAS), which was conducted last year by the University of Southern California Center for Economic and Social Research.

While common sense dictates what side I should take as a teacher, I can’t say I’m a fervent supporter of phone pouches.

The Problem with Storage

On the surface, phone pouches promise to create distance between the phone and their pupil. Ultimately, this distance may improve learning outcomes by helping minimize phone-fueled distractions. Indeed, according to a study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), U.S. teenagers already spend approximately 70 minutes using their phones during the school day. Those 70 minutes lost could’ve been used to advance a student’s understanding of content, cultivate their ability to work with others or simply finish a recent assignment. Thus, with a Yondr pouch, those are an additional 70 minutes teachers like myself have to work with. However, what most don’t seem to understand is that implementing phone bans with a product like Yondr pouches has its drawbacks.

My district uses phone pouches because our policy prohibits students from using their phones the entire school day. Students are required to put their phones in these packs before their first class of the day. Every teacher and administrator has an unlocking station magnet that unlocks the pouches at the end of the school day. 

At the beginning of every class, I spend roughly the first seven minutes walking around to check each student’s Yondr pouch. It’s a routine that provides me (as well as my colleagues) reassurance that every phone is truly sealed away. Considering a standard school day lasts seven class periods, that is already 49 minutes of instructional time a student has lost on Yondr pouches. But the worst part is, that’s only a conservative estimate. It doesn’t account for the additional time wasted on further surveillance.

Monitoring Student Activity

Oftentimes, as I monitor students, I see them attempting to circumvent this restriction on phones entirely. Whether students are scrambling to put their phone away since it was never locked up, messing with the seal so it appears to be untampered with or gritting their teeth because they have a fake phone in the pouch that they hope will deceive their teachers by tricking them that their real phone is in their pouch. For instance, some students instead put a calculator or a broken, “fake” phone instead of their real phone to subvert the policy. Because they have a fake phone in the pouch that they hope will trick their teachers, it still costs time. 

I have seen students intentionally arrive late to school to avoid phone checks, use pencils to jam open the lock or simply steal magnets teachers use to unlock the pouches. Ultimately, each of these infractions add up. Now, instead of prioritizing learning through meaningful instructional time, teachers have adopted an additional role of policing the phone policy.

And what benefits, really, do the pouches have? A recent paper, “The Effects of School Phone Bans: National Evidence from Lockable Pouches,” found that Yondr pouches have no statistically significant impact on standardized scores for high schoolers in English. And the impacts in math are modest at best

Bans Backfiring 

Fundamentally, what makes these pouches unsuited for education is not that they don’t stop phone use; rather, it’s because that’s all they accomplish. As educators, we often can’t see the forest for the trees. We get so caught up in locking up phones and villainizing students who pull them out during classtime, that we forget why they’re being used in the first place. We forget that there was once a time when students entered the classroom with the sole intention to learn something new, and to learn it well.

So, if promoting learning is truly the goal, a phone pouch isn’t the way to do it. Rather, addressing the underlying reasons why these pouches were needed in the first place will. 

I would suggest that school districts approach the rollout of phone pouches with curiosity, not with blanket enforcements. This can mean dedicating several class periods during the first week of school to discuss this topic. Instead of walking through the various parts of your syllabus, have an open conversation with your students about the impacts of phones in their daily lives: When do you use them? How do you use them? What do you use them for? 

From there, you can introduce them to what the research shows on the impacts of phone use in the classroom, bringing new meaning to a seemingly harmless (and leisurely) way of spending the day. This way, rather than pure enforcement, you can cultivate a culture where students “buy in” to this new phone practice, promoting both better learning outcomes and student agency.