As phones become more ubiquitous in the classroom, teachers and administrators are increasingly fighting a losing battle.Katie Collins/Reuters
The kids are not all right. At least according to their test scores.
The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development laid it out this week: test scores, especially for reading and math, have declined globally.
Every three years, the OECD conducts the Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA, a global evaluation of 15-year-olds to assess reading, math and science skills. This isn’t the sort of test where answers can be memorized and reproduced. It is designed to measure logic and reasoning skills. Can the kids problem-solve?
Not as well as they used to.
Across the OECD, reading scores in 2025 fell 28 points from 10 years earlier. The results show the lowest average levels of performance ever observed in science, reading and math.
While Canada fared better than many countries, our scores have dropped significantly too.
If you’ll excuse the leap of logic, the answer is staring us in the face. Literally. It’s the phones, stupid.
Over the past decade, phones have become more ubiquitous in the classroom. Teachers and administrators have been increasingly fighting this battle and the phones are winning. Meanwhile, the students lose.
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As the PISA study notes: limited use of devices for learning at school is often associated with better outcomes, but when phones are used for leisure at school, “the relationship reverses sharply, with substantially lower levels of student performance.” In schools with clear policies on cellphone use, fewer students are distracted by devices.
Every province now imposes some restrictions on cellphone use in the classroom – including Quebec, with a bell-to-bell prohibition, as well as B.C. and Ontario, where there are limited and varied restrictions. But as Alison Yeung and Andrew Cantarutti wrote in The Globe and Mail this week, “We know there are teachers in all three provinces rolling their eyes; for many schools, these policies exist on paper more than in practice.”
With loose policies in too many classrooms, the slide is inevitable. Okay, you can take your phones out once you’ve done your work. Lunchtime, in between classes, sure. Yes, you can use your phones to do your research.
Do you think the kids are going to leave it at that?
“How many times do you go on your phone … and something else on your phone distracts you,” Angie Clark, executive director of Phone-Free Schools Movement Canada, asks rhetorically.
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A former teacher and parent of grown children, Ms. Clark advocates for phone-free schools, bell-to-bell. And for strict guidelines – not leaving it up to individual schools or teachers.
Two University of Ottawa professors surveyed high school and elementary teachers across the Toronto District School Board following the implementation of the September, 2024, TDSB cellphone policy.
Sachin Maharaj and John Ranellucci found that only 44 per cent of high school teachers reported that the rules were consistently enforced at their school. And that 51 per cent of secondary teachers were having “a lot” of difficulty enforcing the ban.
“Without clear guidelines and strong support from school administrators, the policy is destined to fail,” the authors wrote, calling for bell-to-bell restrictions and consistent phone-storage protocols.
The farther the phone is, the better. Research from 2017 widely known as the “brain-drain study” found that the mere presence of a phone reduces cognitive ability.
Many parents – and certainly teachers – don’t need the OECD test scores to tell them that something is rotten in the state of education, or that the phones are the poison. They don’t belong in the classroom, period.
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Phone restrictions should be presented to students as positive contributions to their education. “This is not a punishment,” says Ms. Clark. “This is really an opportunity that’s going to give you the space and time to allow you to focus.”
Her PFSM-Canada toolkit cites data showing teens receive a median of 273 notifications a day, with nearly one-quarter occurring during school hours. And that devices don’t just distract their users, but students nearby. “When schools reduce these distractions, academic gains follow.”
Keeping classrooms phone-free isn’t enough. We must teach digital literacy, including the harms associated with these devices: the cognitive declines, the dangers of social media, the way Big Tech is spying on us and using that information to manipulate us. Students need critical thinking skills to wade through misinformation and disinformation, especially with AI. They need to learn about AI – not how to use it; they’re already doing that – but its drawbacks and dangers.
We can’t just add devices as a tool to the education system as we have known it, and we can’t just lock them away and pretend they don’t exist. They have changed everything, for all of us. Young people need to learn about this. We’re going to need them to fix this mess we’re in.
Editor’s note: This article has been updated to correct the reference to the PFSM-Canada toolkit.