As of last month, had enacted phone restrictions in K-12 classrooms, with 27 banning phones in classrooms outright. In many cases, schools are asking students to drop their phones in Yondr pouches for the school day, at a cost of about $30 per student annually. 

What you may not know is that the pouches have been floating around for more than a decade, first appearing in an Oakland biker bar — and that the man behind them had thinkers like French philosopher and English novelist on his mind as he developed the idea.

More than a decade later, Graham Dugoni sees the pouches as a low-tech, countercultural way to help young people begin to see unexplored frontiers in their own lives.

Born in Oregon in 1986, Dugoni briefly played professional soccer in Norway and the U.S. before taking his first real “adult” job in finance in Atlanta. He recalls a “Kafka-esque” experience toiling away in a windowless office — in his free time, he began immersing himself in philosophy and teaching himself jazz piano. 

Philosophers like and got him thinking about technology and society, while jazz — with its improvisations and emphasis on self-expression — pushed him to explore broader themes of personal freedom.

A pivotal moment happened in 2012, when Dugoni, by then based in California’s Bay Area, was enjoying a music festival. He watched in shock as an intoxicated concertgoer danced uninhibitedly while a perfect stranger filmed him with a smartphone, then uploaded the video to social media. Dugoni began searching for a way to make such interactions impossible, wondering how he could create phone-free spaces that foster genuine connection — and a measure of privacy.

“To see someone just having a good time and being uninhibited and watching them be filmed and posted online,” he said in an interview, “I just followed it out logically. Where does that go?”

He’d read enough about the corrosive effects of technology to know that while tech can help create a more open, democratic society, “You don’t get something for nothing.” He knew that giving up privacy in the public sphere could have “a tremendously huge impact on people’s ability to communicate, to express themselves freely, to be swept up into a shared moment.”

In 2014, Dugoni developed the first magnetic pouches out of materials from his local hardware store and began selling them door-to-door — his first customer was a biker bar in Oakland that wanted to dissuade patrons from filming its burlesque shows. Around the same time, he signed his first school.

Then, in 2015, he got a call from comedian Dave Chappelle’s manager, who wanted to at his shows to enforce a no-phones policy. That helped push Yondr into public consciousness, with schools, artists and venues soon queuing up.

The disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic began shifting parents’ attitudes around mobile phones and schools. And Jonathan Haidt’s 2024 book , which urged schools to go phone-free, pushed the company to even bigger prominence. Yondr now boasts about 150 employees. The company, which is privately held, doesn’t share revenue figures, but a spokeswoman said it has seen “sustained triple-digit growth” over the past three years. Its pouches are used by about 2.5 million students in all 50 states and 45 countries, and the company said the figure could triple once total sales are tallied by the end of the year.

TIME included the pouches as their “” — under the “Social Good” heading, which also included a new malaria vaccine and a 3D-printed resin water filter for people without access to safe drinking water. 

By now, many students understand the importance of going phone-free, even if the locking pouch impinges on their social life. “It’s not the best, but I think it’s for the best,” one student last spring. 

The 74’s Greg Toppo recently chatted with Dugoni, 39, to ask him about the company’s origins, his philosophy and why he considers phone-free schools as spaces where kids can be kids, focus on their studies and develop vital relationships.

Their conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

I wanted to ask you about that 2012 music festival where you came up with the idea for the pouches. What was on your mind? 

I was looking at the smartphone, and the fact that everyone had a recording device, but also access to the Internet. I knew that that was a fundamentally new human experience, and that, from a pure sociology standpoint, there are going to be questions asked because of that that have never been asked before. No one’s had to ask questions about what degree of privacy can you assume in the public sphere. No one had to think about what effect would the ability to be recorded or show up online in any context do to social interaction, to the idea of privacy, to the idea of intimacy. 

This new tool, I felt, was ushering in these questions. But I was walking around San Francisco in my waking life, and no one else was aware of them. In an education setting, it was happening in a different way to the same degree: the push to put more tech into the classroom, faster, which was really nonsensical in a lot of ways. But at a music festival, to see someone just having a good time and being uninhibited and watching them be filmed and posted online, I just followed it out logically. Where does that go? 

I had read enough of people like Foucault and things like that to understand what that ultimately leads to. In a lot of tech society, there’s this idea that transparency in all things is going to create a more open society and more democratization. And like anything, you don’t get something for nothing. You give something up. And that’s how I saw it playing out. If there’s no degree of privacy in the public sphere, I saw it having a tremendously huge impact on people’s ability to communicate, to express themselves freely, to be swept up into a shared moment — things that are deeply valuable for an individual’s psychology, but also the collective consciousness and experience of civil society.

You guys strike me as a privacy company, first and foremost, but also a tech company that’s turning back the clock, in a way. Is that the way you see yourselves?

Not really. I would say we’re a bit of a counterculture company, really. And I would say we’re definitely not a tech company.

I purposely, early on, did not go with early venture capital money because there’s a certain profile that those companies have to follow. What I’m about, especially for young people in a school setting, but also people in daily life, is a sense of choice and a sense of freedom, and especially showing this younger generation that there is a way to walk through the world that’s not completely mediated by screens and the Internet. 

It’s not poo-pooing technology or what it can do. The question is, really, how do you integrate it into our lives? And I don’t think anyone has a perfect answer for it. But I’ve always felt that phone-free schools and spaces, that Yondr started — we created that concept — is a really good way to give people some sense of what that is, because people have to experience it. 

How quickly did you start thinking about schools as users of these pouches?

Our first customer was a venue, and we got a lot of notoriety early on from working with certain artists, like Dave Chappelle. But really, at the same time that we started working with a few venues, we got our first school customer around the Bay Area. So from the very beginning, the two pillars of the company have been centered on those two — that’s been lost in the general story a bit. Now, going around the Bay in 2014, talking about a phone-free school, you can imagine how many doors got shut in my face. But even then, from talking to teachers, I knew it was a huge problem — it just hadn’t floated up into general awareness enough for superintendents to take any notice of it. But teachers knew, even back then.

So where was this brave new school that came to you and said, “We need to do this”?

Well, they didn’t come to me. I went to them. I was going door-to-door. The first school that said Yes was Peninsula High School in San Bruno, south of San Francisco.

And what did they see that nobody else did?

I would say principals and teachers fell into two camps, for the most part, around phones. One group saw it as so far gone that this was a bell that could not be unrung. On the other side, you had teachers and people who knew it was a huge deal, but they were trying to figure out a solution. For a lot of reasons, it’s a difficult thing to unwind. It’s wrapped up with social behavior, social psychology, habits, all of those things. So this principal fell into that camp: someone who had the gusto, the energy and wanted to try to do something. I came to them and said, “Look, I think there’s a way to do this, and I think I can help you do it.” Now, I didn’t know anything about how to actually make it work, so it didn’t work so great in the early days. But we’ve spent the last 11 years figuring out all the things that have to go with it to make this work for a school, a district, and now whole states.

As you said, the ethos at the time was to get more tech in schools, not less. I can see what you were up against.

The drive, at the end of the day, to make things faster, easier, cheaper and more available, it’s very tantalizing. You’re turning kids and people in general into information-retrieval machines, which is very different than critical thinking.

What changed? Obviously COVID had a hand in this. What else? 

Eleven years ago, everything was different, and our team was out on the ground, going into schools. And basically the way we’ve grown as a company to where we are now — we operate in all 50 states, we’re in 45 countries and millions of students use Yondr every day — we did it brick-by-brick, school-by-school. We went in and helped them actually do it, figure out a policy, help them implement it, learn from them how to do it. We’ve had a huge ground game over the years. Up until COVID, we were building that out. We were building around pockets of teachers at first, who helped us figure it out, and then we realized we had to expand into the whole school to make it work. Then it started to grow. And we’re building up just by word of mouth, teachers and principals saying, “Hey, this works, and this company has helped us.” 

Then COVID hit, and that basically flattened out our business. We almost went under. But it also had an incredibly positive effect in the aftermath, because so many teachers — and parents especially — saw what it meant for their kid to be behind a screen for that long. They saw what was happening. So out of COVID, the conversation completely flipped. Whereas before our team was out kind of evangelizing, saying, “Hey, here’s what a phone-free school is, a phone-free space is” — we invented the term — we have people kicking it back to us now and saying, “Yeah, we get it. There’s a problem here, and we’re looking for a solution.” The zeitgeist really changed and people’s awareness clicked over. 

I guess Jonathan Haidt’s book didn’t hurt.

It added a lot of fuel to the fire, but it was, in terms of us, all the schools mentioned [in the book], they’re Yondr schools. So we already knew it. But the general awareness that it generated was tremendous.

A couple of weeks ago, I was in a school in Boston that’s using these pouches. My favorite comment from a teacher was, “My students are laughing at my jokes again.” What are some of the reactions that you remember?

Those are the little stories we look for. We have the case studies that show improvements in academic performance, teachers getting more teaching time back, students feeling safer on campus. But the way I see what we do is that it’s a broader cultural shift inside of a school. And so stories like you just mentioned, we hear that all the time: Teachers are seeing the students’ eyes again. We hear a lot that the body language, the posture of students inside the hallways, totally changes. We hear a lot of times that more books have been checked out in the first three weeks at a library than the entire previous school year.

One that’s most interesting to me, in a way, is we’ve heard from a lot of schools that more lunches are being eaten at the cafeteria. It’s not because the kids are less distracted. It’s because a lot of kids are afraid of eating lunch in the cafeteria because they don’t want to be filmed or recorded in an embarrassing moment and posted online. 

What I like about those stories is they help people who are not in the day-to-day, like teachers are, realize what an existential situation these young kids are stepping into. And it reframes that: A phone-free school is not taking something away from students. We’re trying to give them a space to be kids and to focus on their studies, develop the social relationships, a sense of identity that they’re going to need. And phone-free space is part of that.  

Speaking about technology, you recently said it has “this total neutralizing effect on people’s ability to express themselves, because there’s no such thing as intimacy without privacy.” That seems like a big part of this project.

It’s very difficult to find frontiers in modern society anymore: Places you can go where there’s unexpected things, there’s adventure, there’s a sense of unexplored territory. That’s especially hard for this younger generation, which has grown up always being able to look around corners. Things are curated and manicured, and they know where people are at all times. You can look at it through the lens of privacy, which is real, but also through that lens of just what’s unexplored. And when you go to a show that uses Yondr, it’s unexplored. What happens there is for the people who are there. And it makes the experience richer. It leaves a deeper impression on the people there. 

What about the ways students try to get around these pouches? How do you view that? Do you view that as helping you problem-solve or rethink the pouches themselves?

Of course it happens. We’ll talk to principals and be super candid: “You know the students who are going to buck against a new policy, and you know there are going to be students who smuggle a phone through their sock, or whatever.” 

I always want to hear the stories. I smirk a little bit, because it’s good to see that students are using their ingenuity and being creative. But it’s not really about that. The broader message is that it precipitates a cultural shift in the school, where the expectation is that the school is phone-free, bell-to-bell. What we found is that after two or three weeks, that becomes the new normal. Once you establish that inside a school, and a culture that supports it, that’s the point. So if a student finds a workaround, or they want to bring in a phone, the important thing is that the community is ready to deal with that in a way that is appropriate for them. If you reinforce the benefits of a phone-free culture, eventually you win everyone over as they start to see the results.

So we’re not naive about it. We know we’re not going to win over every 16-year-old overnight. But we can convince them and show them that they might enjoy it once they’ve experienced it.

I was listening to a call-in show about phone-free schools the other day, and one of the panelists pointed out that if school is a training ground for students’ real lives, the only jobs where they’re going to have to put away their phones are low-paying service jobs. I’d never thought about it in those terms. Does that give you pause?

There’s something much more fundamental than that happening. I’ve talked to a lot of people in different state agencies. I can tell you they’re having an extremely difficult time hiring young people right now, and a lot of that comes down to their ability to focus, to think critically and to just socialize. Those are skills that you’re less likely to develop if you have a crutch in your pocket that makes those things less risky or easier. A lot of modern technology, it ultimately makes something easier. Now, that’s fine. We do a lot of trade-offs in our life for convenience. But when you get down to what education is about, it’s not just about using a tool. You have to be able to build up critical thinking muscles and some of the aptitude that’s going to carry you through life. 

People say, “Well, we should teach kids how to use these devices.” Absolutely. How do you plan to do that? If you have something in your pocket soliciting your attention all the time, that becomes basically wired into your central nervous system and always offers you a path of least resistance when anything difficult comes along, how do you plan to educate someone, especially a digital native who has no experience of the world without it? So it’s more, “How do you believe human psychology works, and how do you actually develop habits and patterns of thinking?” 

The pouch is more of an impulse disrupter. A student feels the phantom vibration in their pocket. They reach for it. Hand feels the pouch. You’re allowing a new pathway to emerge and develop that leads to a new habit. Because it’s hard to make the argument that young people are not going to have enough exposure to the Internet and their phones to learn how to use them. You can make a lot of arguments to say that six to eight hours a day without it to focus on their studies and being a kid is probably a good thing, given what we know. 

Last question: Talk about your tech habits.

I’ve had a flip phone for 10 years. I’m not saying everyone should do that. That’s my own choice. It makes a lot of things in life very inconvenient, very difficult. But on balance, it helps me because I have fewer inputs than the average person. My morning, I’m not flipping open the news and getting carried away to some place about things I can’t affect in any positive way, which is a big part of the modern world as well. If you allow everything to solicit your attention and your empathy, what are you left with to affect the things positively that you can control? 

That’s a funny effect of digital media in general: There’s a lot of important things, and it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t care about them, but what can you affect? For me, that’s a choice I have. So I operate in front of the computer, or I do phone calls. It slows my world down. I place a big emphasis company-wide on writing, on clarity of writing, and clarity of thinking that comes out of that. 

And then in my own home life, it’s all about boundaries. Technology as a theme — this is not just the Internet — it’s not totally neutral. Albert Borgmann and Martin Heidegger write about this: It’s not something that knocks at the door and asks permission to enter. You have to create boundaries. And to me, boundaries are best created in a physical way. So I use a computer in one room in my house. That’s it. So my mental associations are, if I’m here, I’m doing work. 

But when the manuscript for J.K. Rowling’s fourth book landed on his desk, Saylor sat up straight: It was huge. Bigger, more complex and narratively intricate than virtually any storybook ever aimed at children.

“I had to really think,” he said in a recent interview. “‘How are we going to typeset this book? How are we going to print a million copies? How are we going to get enough paper?’”

Bound and shipped, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire clocked in at a formidable 734 pages —  2.5 pounds. It was, of course, another in a series of massive hits that collectively spent atop The New York Times Bestseller List, ensnaring both children and adults, including most of Saylor’s friends.

He jokes that until the advent of Potter, “mostly no one cared that I worked in children’s books.” As excitement for the series grew, friends would ask him when the newest installment was due … and what happens next?

“Suddenly my job became important,” he said.

But the book and its six co-volumes now serve another purpose. They’re an eloquent proof point in an ongoing conversation in the publishing world: Are kids still reading books?

By the time Potter arrived, Saylor had lived through waves of predictions about the next extinction-level event to doom his industry. First it was TV, then video games. Before that it was radio and comic books, once derisively called “.”

“I’m only slightly jaded by these reports,” said Saylor, 65, “only because people are always predicting that kids are going to stop reading, and that the end of publishing is near.”

This time, it feels different.

Even as children’s publishing explodes with new talent and excitement from fans , new distractions and diversions are precipitously driving down the share of young people who read for fun. It’s a long-simmering problem that even the optimist Saylor acknowledges his industry must confront. 

‘The reading class’

Over the course of , from 1984 to 2023, the proportion of 13-year-olds who said they “never or hardly ever” read for fun on their own time has nearly quadrupled, from just 8% to 31%.

During that time, the percentage of middle-schoolers who read for fun “almost every day” has fallen by double digits, according to surveys conducted for the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the test widely known as “the nation’s report card”: In 1984, 35% of middle school kids read for fun almost every day. By 2023, it was just 14%.

The phenomenon is part of a larger shift away from reading, research suggests. from the University of Florida and University College London found that daily reading for pleasure has dropped more than 40% among all age groups over the last two decades, “a sustained, steady decline” of about 3% per year.

Findings like these have sparked fears that, after more than a century of steadily expanding literacy, reading is devolving into an act relegated to a small group of elites, a “” that enjoys books while the rest of us see them as, in the words of scholar Wendy Griswold, “an increasingly arcane hobby.”

It’s a strange and thorny problem that in some sense seems contradictory: If you followed around a young person for a day, you’d likely see that she is reading constantly, but often in tiny fragments. In addition to school assignments, she’s taking in a ton of atomized content: alerts, text messages, memes and social media posts. All those bits add up for sure — one that the typical American reads the equivalent of a slim novel every day — but it isn’t the same as sitting down to read a book.

For young people, that’s having downstream effects, with NAEP reading scores slumping even before the pandemic and college professors increasingly reporting that students are uncomfortable tackling long reading assignments, let alone . 

Adam Kotsko, an assistant professor who teaches in the , a discussion-based classics program at North Central College in Naperville, Ill., recently that his students are intimidated by any reading longer than 10 pages. They seemingly emerge from readings of as little as 20 pages, he said, with “no real understanding.”

That has put pressure on professors to design courses with fewer readings: “I got to a point where I was cutting to the bone so much that there wasn’t even enough to discuss in some class sessions,” he said in an interview. “It seems like the habits of sustained reading are not being taught in the first place, in some cases, and they’re just being replaced with nothing.”

While COVID lockdowns took a toll on reading, the problem predates the pandemic. Many observers point to several possible culprits, including schools’ fraught approaches to reading instruction and two decades of test-driven K-12 school pedagogies, which often de-emphasize fiction in favor of short non-fiction passages. 

This has all taken place amid the dawn of smartphones — the iPhone turned 18 in June — and the rapid, unregulated rise of social media. So Kotsko and his colleagues are careful not to place the blame on students’ shoulders, but on a schooling and media ecosystem they can’t control.

“We are not complaining about our students,” he . “We are complaining about what has been taken from them.”

‘Continuous partial attention’ 

Gabriel Baez, 15, said phones are “a big distraction” at his South Florida charter school. As soon as teachers give students even a moment of downtime, the phones come out. Several teachers have begun requiring students to stash them in special pouches during class. “No distractions — that’s the only thing that I think helped a lot of us.”

A sophomore, Baez said he’s excited to read the science fiction thriller Ready Player One — a novel about, of all things, video games. He loved the 2018 Steven Spielberg movie, but said most days he’s overscheduled and barely able to find a minute to open a book. 

He’s in class from 7 a.m. to 2 p.m., then does homework until 5 p.m. Dinner is at 6 p.m., then he studies a bit more. From 7 to 8 p.m. it’s soccer training, then bed so he can wake up early and do it all again. “I really don’t have time unless I decide to substitute something.”

For many young people, school is what gets in the way of books. 

Julia Goggin, 15, grew up reading books and loving them. She consumed the first few Harry Potter books unassisted in second grade and finished the series by fourth grade. She read a lot in middle school. 

In high school? Not so much. 

Like Baez, she’s heavily scheduled, running cross country in the fall and track and field in the winter. She’s in her school’s theater group, which means after-school rehearsals. Then homework. All of it leaves little time for reading anything aside from school assignments.

“If a school is too overbearing about forcing kids to read a lot, it makes them not want to read for fun because it’s not fun anymore,” she said. “Because school isn’t fun.”

A junior at a private high school in Wilmington, N.C., Goggin enjoys reading, but said her two younger brothers, eighth- and ninth-graders, don’t. “They never got into reading the same way I did when they were little. Since then, I guess, they’ve just played video games instead. That’s, like, all they do all day.”

Over the years, she has noticed a change in herself: As a kid, she read for relaxation. “But now all I want to do is scroll on TikTok, which is really bad,” she said with a laugh. “Now I have to be more conscious: Instead of going on my phone, I have to make the decision to read, which is different than before. When I was younger, it was just a default.”

To be sure, young people in the U.S. are reading words — lots of words. Perhaps more than ever.

In her most recent book, the literacy scholar noted that research from as far back as 2009 found that the average American reads what amounts to 34 gigabytes of information, or about 100,500 words, daily — from newspapers, magazines, books, games, messages and social media posts. For a bit of perspective, To Kill a Mockingbird, the Harper Lee classic, clocks in at about 100,000 words.  

While all that grazing certainly adds up, Wolf said, it’s “rarely continuous, sustained, or concentrated.” Rather, those 34 gigabytes represent “one spasmodic burst of activity after another.”

She said the fact that young people are reading all those words should comfort no one. “It means nothing.” The inability — or the unwillingness — to go deeper is what’s more important. “I think we have, really, a demise of deep reading, which for me is synonymous with critical thinking and empathy and the beauty of the reading act.”

While the 20th century saw literacy rates in the U.S. , technological developments such as movies, radio, TV and the Internet shifted modern culture away from reading and writing and toward visual and oral communication. One unintended result: at least two generations of young people who see books and reading as optional.

In the meantime, 65% of 8-to-12-year-olds now have an iPhone or other smartphone, according to by the market research group YPulse — and 92% of 8-to-12-year-olds are on social media, where they’re inundated with memes and short-form videos. 

Carl Hendrick, a Dublin-born professor at in Amsterdam and co-author of the 2024 book , accuses this generation’s parents of all but abdicating their responsibilities. 

He likens smartphones’ cognitive disruptions to the health effects of cigarettes, recalling that he grew up in Ireland at a time when smoking was ubiquitous. “You could smoke on buses — you could smoke on airplanes. You could smoke anywhere. We look back on that now with horror. And I think the same thing will be true of phones. We’ll go, ‘How did we allow 11-year-olds to go onto social media?’”

Hendrick, who has emerged internationally as a for improving classroom instruction via better understanding of learning science, said digital distractions are taking a toll, hijacking kids’ ability to engage their working memory on difficult texts and problems. That kind of laser-like focus, he said, is rapidly disappearing from our lives due to the “weaponized distraction” of social media. “It’s at an extraordinary level of sophistication to try and ,” he said.

In a recent newsletter, he laid down the gauntlet: “Solitude, slowness and sustained attention are no longer default states but acts of resistance. And as those conditions erode, so too does the possibility of the moral work that deep reading once quietly performed.”

While social media sites are the latest offenders, the phenomenon is hardly new. In 1998, the sociologist and computer researcher Linda Stone coined the term “” to capture the ways in which the first digital television networks allowed users to “connect and be connected” 24/7. She described a kind of early , or “fear of missing out.” But it also generated an artificial sense of “constant crisis,” a dopamine-generated high alert that’s hard to extinguish.

By contrast, Hendrick said, giving oneself over to reading deeply, whether it’s literature, philosophy or any complex text, offers something more: a rehearsal for real life, and for the patience we need to deal with one another. “It is a rehearsal in understanding before judging, listening before reacting,” he wrote recently. “This is not merely a virtue. It is a survival skill for a pluralistic, tolerant society.”

Ironically, one of the big drivers of the “whole language” movement was to foster a love of books and reading. But what educators missed at the time was that not teaching all kids to read proficiently at a young age meant reading became “more and more laborious” as they got older, since they couldn’t handle more complex texts, said Holly Lane, director of the .

“Nobody likes doing something that they’re not good at,” she said. “They may love the idea of reading, but they don’t like the act of reading.”

That, to many observers, is the original sin of the reading problem: the nation’s uneven commitment to teaching reading in ways we now know are more effective, such as explicit phonics instruction, which systematically teaches students the relationships between letters and sounds. Other, less effective methods, such as “whole language” instruction, emphasize immersion in texts rather than attention to isolated skills.

Like many educators who are pushing schools to embrace scientific approaches to literacy, Lane is hopeful about improvements in states like Louisiana and Mississippi. But she worries that progress at the elementary school level will be wasted if educators can’t help students at the secondary level develop the stamina to read longer, more difficult texts. Without that, she said, they won’t develop into readers. “When they leave high school, even if they can read, they don’t.”

Others worry that the rush to teach phonics without attention to solid background knowledge will continue to yield disappointing results. Phonics instruction is “trendy to care about right now,” said Boston University’s Elena Forzani, but it’s being enacted “in pretty superficial ways” that ignore student motivation. “We’re teaching kids to read in a content and motivational vacuum,” said Forzani, who directs the university’s programs.

In order to be able to read deeply, she said, students need many opportunities to enjoy, analyze, discuss and write about a text and the issues or problems it presents. But when she visits classrooms, she sees students reading short, disconnected “popcorn passages” with new topics every day, sometimes multiple times a day. 

While more and more kids are getting the explicit phonics instruction they need at an early age, the vast majority are learning to read “in a very isolated fashion — the focus is on the skills. And kids don’t care about that. They’re humans, like the rest of us. You only want to learn a new skill if it’s going to do something for you.”

‘Very good readers — and voracious readers’

When he visits schools to sign books, the Japanese-American writer and illustrator Kazu Kibuishi sees this in action. His popular nine-volume series of graphic adventure novels, about siblings who must find their kidnapped mother, finds a rapt audience of dedicated fans.

“I don’t really buy that kids are not reading anymore, because I see the opposite of that all the time,” he said in an interview. “I find kids to be very good readers — and voracious readers.”

But state-of-the-art digital entertainment has conditioned them to want more from their media. “Their minds are encoded to get information as fast as possible,” he said. “They have to turn that off when they go to school.”

Kibuishi’s publisher, Scholastic, has gone all in on graphic novels — Saylor, the creative director, even established an imprint . Teachers and librarians regularly tell him that kids read them avidly and repeatedly, “until they fall apart.”

Kibuishi said he creates comics that provide “high-quality, dense information” on every page, with fast-moving, high-stakes plotlines, rich illustrations and heightened emotions from his characters. His inspirations are the classic Marvel comics from the 1950s through the 1980s. “Big ideas were baked into small spaces,” he said.

Creators like Stan Lee and Jack Kirby “put a tremendous amount of life experience” into the slim stories, which he compares to little sponge dinosaurs that expand exponentially in water. 

A self-described average student, Kabuishi found his calling in storytelling after reading Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea in high school. “I read it pretty much in one sitting,” he said. “And when I was done with the book, I was transformed.”

The words “felt like pictures, and the book was so short,” he said. It was the first time reading didn’t feel like homework. “I felt like I was on a fishing boat. I felt like I had just experienced the rise and fall of this fisherman’s journey with this fish. And it was so poetic.” The little book “felt so much bigger than any other book than I’d been asked to read in class.”

The struggle to find such magic books is real, said Kelsey Clodfelter, a veteran English teacher at a Chicago public high school. She teaches students whose skills are often years behind where they should be by 10th or 11th grade. 

“When reading is hard for you, when it is literally difficult for you to decode words at the age of 16 or 17, reading is a very painful experience,” she said. “It’s also really embarrassing.”

Clodfelter, 35, who has a large said Common Core reforms of the past decade essentially replaced book-length readings with short non-fiction texts designed to prepare students for the kind of reading they’ll do “in the real world.” While it didn’t prohibit longer reading assignments, it may have made it harder for many teachers to assign appropriate books. 

And COVID, she said, “really did a number on us in terms of the transactional nature of school,” sending students the clear message that grades mattered more than learning, that standards in general were lower — and that nearly any effort was satisfactory.

The upshot, she said, is that she’s working harder all the time to get kids through reading assignments: She often swaps classic texts for contemporary memoirs, such as by actress Jeanette McCurdy. She invites students to read silently in class for 20-minute stretches. She creates book groups, and even sits with them and reads passages aloud.

“Students still won’t read the book,” she said.

‘Nobody can learn this much’

These days, even the most elite students are rebelling against reading.

, a longtime University of Virginia professor, said he has noticed lately that his students — “some of the most successful that the system produces” — not only complain about long readings but about “being asked to learn as much as I ask them to learn.”

Like Clodfelter, Willingham believes the pandemic scaled back expectations that have yet to be restored.

Each year since 1985, he has taught an introduction to cognitive psychology course that has changed little in 40 years. Students read about a chapter a week, averaging 30 pages or so. A careful reading, he said, would require about four hours of work.

“This is the first year since the pandemic [that] I’ve been hearing from students, ‘This is an unreasonable expectation. Nobody can learn this much.’”

A leading authority on cognitive science in the classroom, Willingham suggests to his students that they consider different study strategies. Long an advocate for the importance of broad background knowledge in reading instruction, Willingham said he’s “actually cheered and optimistic” that more educators are realizing the importance of a rich curriculum. 

But he worries about the time young people spend online — recent research suggests that they now spend most of their waking hours , he said.  

That may be the biggest irony embedded in this dilemma: The Internet has seemingly decimated young people’s desire to read books, offering them endless distractions and opportunities to do something — anything — else.

But dig a little deeper and you’ll find it is also doing a lot of heavy lifting, making it easier than ever for young people to find great books and connect to likeminded people who desperately want to talk about them.

Daphne LaPlante, 25, a video editor in Austin, Texas, posts videos to , and elsewhere proclaiming her love of books. She got her start on the app in 2021, in her final year of college.

Scrolling on the popular video app, she realized that other young people were also hungry for conversations about books. One of her favorites, the fantasy novel Six of Crows, was being made into a TV show, she recalled, “and I had nobody to talk to about it.” So she turned on her phone’s camera and hit record. Soon her videos began detailing what she’d read each month, and before long she was recommending books. After a while, publishers took note and started sending her advance copies of new titles.

LaPlante now has more than 40,000 followers on TikTok and over 30,000 on Instagram, and jokes that she has become a “micro-influencer” in the corner of the social media site known as . Born during the pandemic, it has become so influential that it has both crowned new hits and turned a few backlist books into . One industry analysis suggests that BookTok has changed behaviors: In 2021, the year it started gaining momentum, in the U.S. by 9%, to 825.7 million copies, the most since the research company NPD BookScan began tracking sales data in 2004.

“I think a big part of getting people into reading is community,” she said.

For the past year-and-a-half, LaPlante and a friend have also recorded a podcast called , about their love for 2010s-era young-adult dystopian fiction, epitomized by The Hunger Games and similar titles. “There are a lot of people, like me, who read those and were obsessed with them as a kid,” she said.

‘I don’t want to eat the f***ing salad’

If he’d had a mobile phone 25 years ago, Hendrick, the Irish educator, might well have been on BookTok, forcefully recommending his favorite literature, history and philosophy books. He recalled getting lost as a young man in The Great Gatsby, reading it cover-to-cover in two days. He has since read and taught it many times, but wonders: If he was 16 now, what incentive would he have to read such a book, given all the social forces in teens’ lives? With so much “easily attained dopamine” via social media, video games, movies and elsewhere, why would anyone go through the effort?

He thinks about what books must look like to his six-year-old daughter. “She can read,” he volunteered. “She’s really clever, but she just doesn’t want to because everything else is so ….” After considering it for a second, he finally said, “She’s in McDonald’s and I’m telling her to eat the salad, and she’s going, ‘I don’t want to eat the f***ing salad. There’s all these chicken nuggets. Why would I do that?’”

To bring back reading, he said, schools may very well have to do more than just improve instruction and reading stamina and find a few tasty books. They’ll have to get mobile phones out of classrooms, he said — actually, he thinks buying a phone for a 10-year-old “should be outlawed.” Many states and schools, to their credit, are getting the message and for much of the school day. But they may also have to consider a back-to-basics approach that treats reading as an indicator of public health.

“With cars, we mandated seat belts,” he said. “We mandated speed limits. It may be the case that we need to say, ‘Kids have just got to read for an hour in silence on their own. That’s just it — in the same way you’ve got to eat certain vegetables.’”

In 20 years, Hendrick predicted, we’ll likely discover that reading and, more broadly, deep cognitive focus, offer the same kinds of benefits as exercising or a balanced diet. We’ll look back on this decade, he said, with its easily attained dopamine, its endless mental chicken nuggets and distractions, and realize, “We were weaponizing mental health problems.”

A quarter-century ago, Hendrick recalled, after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the novelist Norman Mailer was unequivocal when asked about their significance. “He said, ‘It’s going to take us 10 years to figure this out. Call in the novelists.’ His thing was, we need to get the writers in to make sense of this.”

People, in other words, need books. No matter how advanced our digital media have become, nothing can replace the depth of understanding they afford. “For me, when I read Shakespeare or The Sound and the Fury or [James] Joyce, I was finding out what it meant to be alive,” said Hendrick. “My struggles were the struggles of other people. And I was learning about ethics and morality. Where are we going to end up without that?”

School administrators provided mostly positive feedback to lawmakers curious about implementation of a 2023 law prohibiting students from using their phones.

School officials provided the House Student Academic Success subcommittee feedback last week on , a 2023 law that prohibits phone use during instructional time, prohibits access to certain websites on school networks, and requires instruction to students to responsibly use social media.

“It’s gone very very well in many of our classrooms, especially I would say it goes really well in our classrooms with struggling learners. The teachers have seen the benefit of that increased interaction with each other, the increased focus,” said Toni Zetzsche, principal of River Ridge High School in Pasco County.

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The law, introduced by Rep. Brad Yeager, a Republican representing part of Pasco County,  support before serving as a sort of model legislation across the nation.

“The first step of this process: remove phones from the classroom, focus on learning, take the distraction out. Number two was, social media, without just yanking it from them, try to educate them on the dangers. Try to help to learn and understand how social media works for them and against them,” Yeager said during the subcommittee meeting.

An analysis shows Florida was the first state to ban or restrict phones when the law passed, with several other states following suit in 2024.

Florida schools have discretion as to how they enforce the law, with some prohibiting cellphones from the beginning until the end of the day, while others allow students to use their phones during down times like lunch and between classes.

Some teachers have taken it upon themselves to purchase hanging shoe organizers for students to bank their phones in during class, Yeager said.

Since the law took effect in the middle of 2023, Zetzsche said, students in higher level college preparatory classes have partially struggled because of the self-regulating nature of the courses and the expectation that teachers give them more freedom.

But for younger and lower-performing students, the law has been effective, according to Zetzsche and Yeager used to gain support for the bill.

“In some of our ninth and tenth grade classrooms, where the kids need a little more support, those teachers are definitely seeing the benefit,” Zetzsche said.

Orange County Schools Superintendent Maria Vazquez said schools have combatted student complaints about not having their phones by filling down time, like lunch periods, with games or club activities.

Zetzsche said she has seen herself and others use the phoneless time as an opportunity to get to know more students.

“I know I’ve spoken with teachers, elementary teachers, middle school teachers, and high school teachers that have said, ‘I’ve had to teach students to reconnect and get involved or talk to people.’ They are doing a better job of focusing on that replacement behavior now, I think. I think we all are,” Zetzsche said.

“I think, as a high school principal now, when I see a student sitting in the cafeteria and they’re on their cellphone watching a movie, I immediately want to strike up a conversation and say, ‘Hey, are you on the weightlifting team? Do you play a sport?’” Zetzsche said.

Bell to bell

Orange County schools decided not to allow phones all day, while Pasco County chose to keep phones away from students during instructional time, the extent the law requires.

“It was surprisingly, and shockingly, pretty easy to implement,” Marc Wasko, principal at Timber Creek High School in Orange County, told the subcommittee.

Rep. Fiona McFarland, a Republican representing part of Sarasota County and the chair of the subcommittee, encouraged further planning to better enforce the law.

“I will tell you, because not everything we do up here is perfect, there are some schools that I’ve heard of where, even if the teacher has a bag, kids are bringing a dummy phone, like mom’s old iPhone, and flipping that into the pouch where they’ve got their device in their pocket or if you’ve got long hair, maybe you can hide earbuds,” McFarland said.

“I mean, this is the reality of being policymakers, folks,” McFarland continued. “We make a law, we can make the greatest law in the world, which is meaningless if it’s not executed and enforced properly. We could pass a law tomorrow to end world hunger and global peace, but it means nothing if it’s not operationalized well and planned for well.”

Yeager told the committee he does not plan to seek to ban phones outside of instructional time, although other lawmakers could push for further phone prohibitions.

Department of Education obligation

The law requires the Department of Education to make instructional material available on the effects of social media, required for students to learn under the law.

“Finding the time to be able to embed that into the curriculum is really difficult. We are struggling with instructional minutes as it is, when we have things like hurricanes impact learnings,” Zetzsche said.

“We are struggling to get through the content, so it would be nice to have something from the Department of Education that is premade that we can share with students, but maybe through elective courses or some guidance on how they would expect high schools, how they would feed that information to students.”

Administrators said parental pushback has been limited, and Zetzsche added that parents have sought advice from schools about how to detach their kids from their phones.

“When we struggle with the student who’s attached to their cellphone, the parents want to put things in place.
They just don’t know what to do,” Zetzsche said, calling for the department to provide additional information to parents.

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The Senate Education Committee voted 4-1 to send  to the floor for consideration by the whole body, but not before softening the language to read “restrict” instead of the original “prohibit.” 

The measure comes amid a bipartisan trend of new limits on smartphone and social media use in schools. Nearly 20 states, including California, Oklahoma, Minnesota and Florida, have passed laws or enacted policies that either ban or restrict students’ use of cellphones or recommend local districts enact such policies. 

Sponsor Sen. Wendy Schuler, R-Evanston, a retired teacher, said she was inspired to bring the bill by a common teacher complaint that policing phone use has become a classroom nightmare. She cited data on the harmful mental health effects of social media and the hours of screentime many teenagers experience. 

“When we talk about trying to do good things for our kids in education, I think this might be one of the most important things we can do for our students,” Schuler said. 

The bill zeroes in on restricting use just during “instructional time.”

Not everyone agreed, however, that it’s as simple as banning devices, and due to potential complexities around safety, health conditions and communication needs, lawmakers replaced the more stringent “prohibit” in the original version with “restrict.”

What they said

At least 18 of Wyoming’s 48 school districts — and likely more — do not have cellphone policies, according to data collected this fall by the Wyoming School Boards Association. The lack of district-wide policies hasn’t stopped some schools in those districts from adopting specific rules. Senate File 21 would force all districts to adopt policies restricting smartphone use

In states that already have such regulations, Schuler said, the results are promising. “They’re seeing better social interactions with kids with their peers, better focus in class, higher achievement.” 

Kirk Schmidt of Lander, a retired school administrator, warned lawmakers about passing a bill that would not be nimble enough to react to the ever-changing realities of technology. 

Schmidt also noted that some teachers use these devices for instructional purposes. “This takes all that away,” he said. 

Others wondered about enforcement, privacy concerns and timelines. 

Supporters, meanwhile, echoed that smartphones are correlated with declining academic performance and behavioral problems like bullying. 

“I can tell you that the phones in the schools are very difficult for the teachers and administrators,” said Cheyenne resident Deb Mutter Shamley, who has experienced it firsthand as a substitute teacher. 

Wyoming Superintendent of Public Instruction Megan Degenfelder supports the bill, a spokesperson told lawmakers. Degenfelder and Gov. Mark Gordon penned a joint letter in September urging Wyoming schools to limit cellphones. 

Tweaks 

In order to allow districts more flexibility, committee members voted to amend the language. They also pushed out the timeline two months to give school districts until Sept. 1 to enact policies. 

Sen. Charlie Scott, R-Casper, said he thinks the measure can “make significant progress in improving the quality of instruction in public schools.”

Sen. Chris Rothfuss, D-Laramie, who cited concern about state government overreach, was the lone dissenting vote. 

The bill now heads to the Senate floor where it must pass three readings before it can advance to the House.

This was originally published on .

WASHINGTON — The U.S. Education Department called on every state, school and district on Tuesday to adopt policies on cellphone use in schools.

The department asks schools to have well-thought-out policies on the matter, but does not dictate exactly what those policies should be. An accompanying resource for schools notes the risk social media can pose to students’ mental health.

“In this digital age, every elementary, middle, and high school should have a clear, consistent, and research-informed policy to guide the use of phones and personal devices in school,” U.S Education Secretary Miguel Cardona said in a written statement.

“The evidence makes clear: there is no one-size-fits-all policy,” Cardona added, noting that “different school communities have different needs, and the nuances of this issue demand that local voices — parents, educators, and students — inform local decisions around the use of personal devices in school.”

The department acknowledged the role cellphones can play in keeping parents connected to their kids, especially in emergency situations, while also highlighting the increasing evidence on the harms social media can have on youth mental health, such as sleep deprivation and depression.

Increasing state policies

An increasing number of states and school districts have enacted policies either prohibiting or restricting students from using their cellphones in the classrooms.

Across the country, schools and districts continue to grapple with how to deal with kids’ cellphone use, and  have sought to ban or restrict cellphone use in classrooms.

As of early November, at least eight states have passed statewide policies that either limit or prohibit cellphone use in the classrooms, according to .

That includes California, Florida, Indiana, Louisiana, Ohio, South Carolina and Virginia. A Minnesota law forces schools to  by March 2025.

A handful of other states’  have issued  or pilot programs, while lawmakers in several more have introduced statewide legislation regarding cellphone use.

The guidance from the U.S. Education Department coincides with the release of a  for education officials and local communities on adopting cellphone use policies.

In the playbook, Cardona points to U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy’s  in 2023 on  on youth mental health.

Murthy warns: “More research is needed to fully understand the impact of social media; however, the current body of evidence indicates that while social media may have benefits for some children and adolescents, there are ample indicators that social media can also have a profound risk of harm to the mental health and well-being of children and adolescents.” 

COLUMBIA — A model policy requiring South Carolina’s K-12 students to stash their cellphones during the entire school day received initial approval Tuesday from the State Board of Education, which wanted to get more feedback before finalizing minimum guidelines for school districts.

The unanimous vote comes six weeks after the state budget mandated school districts to adopt a policy banning cellphones during the school day or risk state funding. But the State Board of Education must first adopt a model policy for them to follow.

The goal is for all districts to have a policy in place before January, according to a memo the state agency sent school administrators over the summer.

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The board was considering a , which would require phones, smart watches and other devices to be turned off and stashed through the entire school day, not just during class time. It would allow exceptions for students with particular medical or educational needs, for specific educational purposes and for high schoolers who volunteer as local firefighters or other emergency responders.

It allows for school districts to set more restrictive rules, but not less.

It also gives school districts flexibility on setting rules outside the school day, such as whether to allow devices on bus rides. Districts could also decide where students would be required to keep their phones from the opening to closing bells — whether in a locker, a backpack or somewhere else.

Board Chairman David O’Shields said he wanted to take some additional time on such an important policy to gather feedback, including from parents.

“I do think without equivocation there needs to be a serious reigning in of cellphone use and proliferation because it’s negative consequences, especially for adolescents, can be quite harmful,” said O’Shields, superintendent of Laurens County School District 56 (Clinton).

While board members wanted more time, they were enthusiastic about the underlying idea.

“It’s not just about the discipline in the schools,” said Christian Hanley Jr. of Berkeley County. “The discipline is important, but it’s ruining our kids.”

Hanley noted the board put a lot of work into that bars books in schools that describe “sexual conduct.”

“You can get a whole lot more porn on these phones than you’re going to get in those library books,” he said.

Matthew Ferguson, deputy superintendent for the Department of Education, said the agency has already received a lot of feedback in creating the model rules.

More than 9,000 teachers responded to a survey on banning phones. Teachers reported that phones were taking up hours of their teaching time, and they asked for support from school administrators so they don’t have to be the phone police, he said.

“When we first sent the survey out … our survey platform thought we had been hacked and spoofed because the responses were coming in so quickly,” Ferguson told the board.

State Superintendent Ellen Weaver said her agency can also help school officials educate parents on the policies.

“The districts are very hungry for us as the department to help create communication tools and resources,” she said.

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Top challenges in more than half of the country’s schools were students being unprepared or disruptive in the classroom, according to the Department of Education’s research arm in . 

For 40-45% of schools, student learning and staff morale was also limited by students’ “trouble” working with partners or in groups and use of cell phones, laptops, or other tech when not permitted. In 75% of schools, students’ “lack of focus” moderately or severely negatively impacted learning and staff morale. 

Fighting and bullying were also pervasive: In about one in five schools, physical fights occurred about once a month, while weapons were confiscated at 45% of schools. Thirty percent report cyberbullying is a weekly occurrence; for 11%, it is daily.

Researchers say while overall, key adverse student behaviors have been on a downswing compared to prior generations, such as illicit drug use, violent crime and teen birth rates, several forces are compounding for students and impacting their wellbeing: High rates of trauma, a fraught political climate, and feeling they are being left behind, or unseen in school.

“Look what these students have gone through … not only the pandemic, through wars. Through a tumultuous, divisive political environment in the last six or seven years that’s only intensifying between right and left, between Black and white, between immigrant and non-immigrant. [Those separations] are filtering into schools and classes, perhaps with an awareness that we have not had before,” said Ron Astor, UCLA professor of social welfare and expert on bullying, school violence and culture. 

Students are also witnessing state legislatures and local school boards limit what classrooms can and cannot teach, leading them to question whether they belong in their school, he said. The atmosphere is impacting families across the political divide: “If parents and society see the school as teaching the wrong thing, doing the wrong thing, if you’re not reflected in that school – that’s going to impact your attention, too.” 

From coast to coast, districts are weighing phone bans amid rising concerns about bullying and distractions. But some researchers say solely nixing phones without boosting mental health supports or addressing overall school culture wouldn’t curb the negative attitudes students may be forming about school and the purpose of their education. 

Astor said some young people are experiencing conditions like ADHD, depression and PTSD, which can manifest in dissociation. Lack of focus can also stem from feeling irrelevance, either that the subject matter is not important to their future or that some part of who they are is not represented at school.

Framing students’ inability to focus as the cause for delay in learning recovery, “ignores the fact of why they’re maybe not motivated, why they’re not connected as they should be, why they don’t see themselves in the curriculum,” he added. “Why, when they did see themselves, they’re being taken out or not allowed to say or do things because they’re part of an oppressed group,” referencing book bans, history challenges, and restrictions on diversity, equity and inclusion curricula and positions. 

Astor and Johanna Lacoe, research director with the California Policy Lab, point to several ways school leaders can address these behavioral concerns: stronger classroom management training for teachers and keeping counselor, nurse, psychologist and social worker roles filled. 

“Young people who are in the classroom and who are behind, frustrated and struggling are just so much more likely to check out,” said Lacoe, a commissioner on San Francisco’s Juvenile Probation Commission. “For a teacher with 33 kids, who has maybe not that much experience managing a classroom, to teach to the range of abilities that present themselves with no support, is what we’re currently asking teachers to do.”

How schools handle disciplinary action after cyberbullying, violent behavior, and disruptions can greatly impact student perceptions of school. Lacoe pointed to several models that help students feel belonging after an incident such as in lieu of suspensions for low-level infractions, particularly as school leaders’ concerns about chronic absenteeism grow.  

In the , schools provide services such as healthcare, behavioral and housing support to children and families.

There are models at work where, “you’re always telling a student that they belong here even in the time of this [adverse] behavior – that they can make right what happened through a process, inclusive of the people involved,” Lacoe said. “You can figure out a way to resolve it that works for everyone and if possible, keeps the young person engaged at school.”

The vast majority of school leaders surveyed in late May by the National Center for Education Statistics – over 80% – agree the pandemic’s impacts are still lingering, negatively impacting the behavioral and socioemotional development of their students. At least 90% of public schools reported offerings for students since 2021. 

Students, including Astor’s own undergraduates, are asking, “‘Where do I fit in this world? How do I fit in society?’ … I think all of this impacts your ability to focus and your attention, including your motivation.”