I teach middle school in a state with a cell phone ban. We had our first year with the phone ban last year, and I thought it was an improvement.
Phones can be very detrimental to the school experience. For one, it is very difficult to teach kids who are already unwilling or resistant to learning while they have a piece of technology they are literally addicted to in their hand. Secondly, phones and social media contribute to a lot to the bullying, violence, and general misbehavior that occurs at schools.
My school district also provides all students with an iPad, so they have their own school-provided tech. In my experience, this comes with their own problems though. I often feel like I am playing “whack-a-mole” keeping kids off their iPads (playing games, etc.) during instruction. It’s nice to be able to incorporate technology into lessons, and it definitely is more convenient for teaching, but I don’t think the trade off is worth it. For example, the cheating with A.I. was off the charts for me last year.
This coming school year, I am looking to incorporate more paper and pencil assignments into my teaching. A lot of my students seem to favor assignments where they aren’t using their iPads. I think most agree that these kids’ eyeballs need a break from the screens.
Also, to people with concerns about the phone ban, students are allowed to bring their phone to school. My state’s law states that the phone must be turned off and in the student’s backpack during instructional hours. Students may be on their phone at school before and after classes start. In the event of an emergency, no one is going to care if the students get their phone out their bag to call their adult. So, kids will retain access to their phone. In fact, most of the students carry their phones around in the pocket and none of the teachers generally care as long as the student isn’t blatantly using their phone during class time. If a kid is caught using their phone during class time, they have to turn it in to the main office for the remainder of the day will escalating consequences for repeat offenses.
Also, I’m sure it varies from teacher to teacher, but I am very understanding when a kid needs to contact a parent/guardian. I will always allow my students to use the phone in my classroom, call a parent from the main office, or use their cell phone in the hall as long as the kid asks permission and explains the situation.
Had a friend in the most expensive private school in my area. They had phones banned over a decade ago already.
Probably because richer parents have more mental bandwidth to worry about children’s digital footprint and neural development rather than survival.
Thus I believe extending this ban to public schools is only fair. Distraction-free and surveillance-free environment for children shouldn’t be a luxury reserved for few.
Y’all need to go read /r/teachers to learn what a scourge phones in classrooms are. The teachers are begging for an outright ban.
Right. Probably correct
That subreddit paints a realistic picture of what it’s like being a teacher, but I find it overly negative. While there are a myriad of reasons why education in the U.S. is in a bad place, there are also a lot of fulfilling and heartwarming moments to being a teacher that don’t get brought up over there.
I think you just described every internet forum perfectly.
I live and teach in a state that implemented a ban. Results after year one were marginal improvement. Many just did the “hiding” trick more than before. A number didn’t think we’d notice them hunched over whispering to their watches. It was rather comical when they would do that.
I propose we build all new school buildings as giant Faraday cages.
I mean, are phones conducive to learning? If not then forbid their usage at school and bloody enforce it. I think the fact phones became common place for kids so quickly and so early in their lives coupled with just the general insanity of American schools so often being under attack, the schools have just lost any agency to restrict them given their usage is already rampant.
It’s the parents that are the problem. The problem is, when schools try to ban them, parents flip the fuck out. They become apoplectic at the idea of not being able to instantly reach their kids at every hour of the day. A surprising number of parents install tracking apps on their kid’s phones. They have them tagged like wild animals under study.
So schools are stuck compromising with unenforceable rules. Instead of banning phones entirely, they’ll ban kids from having them out in class. Which of course never works, as the kids just take them out as soon as the teacher turns their back.
as the kids just take them out as soon as the teacher turns their back
When I was in school the teacher’s were seizing the phone if they caught you with it in class and sometimes require your parents to pick it up after school
Yup same. Then a few phones went missing, parents threatened to sue because cell phones were insanely expensive back then, and the school told teachers they couldn’t do that anymore. 🤷♀️
Did the teachers stole the phones or how did that even happen? 💀
It’s darkly hilarious that parents are demanding that schools allow their kids to be stupid and the schools are just like “okay, we can’t do anything about this.”
What’s even the point? Shut 'em down if they’re not going to enforce any rules.
At that point, it’s probably more healthy to send little Bobby down into the mines, at least he won’t have time to melt his brain on a screen.
Imagine a world where teachers weren’t geriatric and taught their kids digital literacy instead of digital luddism.
I mean, shit, homework was invented as a fucking punishment and so many studies have shown it has diminishing returns after a certain age. Yet here we are, perpetuating a system designed explicitly for controlling kids - not teaching them.
But yeah, phones are the problem. The internet is the problem. Definitely not how kids are taught to interact with them, no sir. While we’re at it, just get rid of PCs at the school - that way the district can save money on their IT department. They can access social media from the PCs so I don’t see the problem.
Digital literacy doesn’t do much when it comes to tech engineered to hook you and grab your attention. It bypasses the frontal lobe entirely.
At this point I don’t even know anyone who managed to use something like Instagram “occasionally” or in controlled manner. It’s way too addictive for this, and usage spirals out of control pretty fast.
I do agree with you generally though, schools should only use evidence-based interventions or none at all, no exceptions. In healthcare rolling out a drug without randomized control trial would be called heresy.
But when government does it, it makes it mandatory for all kids immediately, and then ignores increasing pile of evidence how it’s bad for decades
I don’t blame the teachers, I blame the system. I know too many teachers who have been yelled at by admin for daring to teach in a way the kids can learn because it’s “not what you’re supposed to teach, stick to the curriculum.”
It’s tough.
Kids are going to use their phones for random bullshit in class no matter what if they are allowed, but phones in general can be a fantastic learning tool used in the classroom.
I wonder if we might eventually see schools distribute phones like they do laptops, even though that in itself is rare. It would allow the school to lock them down during school hours. Maybe include some option to buy out the phone/number when a student leaves.
A common complaint of not allowing phones is that students can’t contact their parents quickly in an emergency or vice versa. A locked down phone with “emergency contacts” fixes that issue.
Can we just ban them in general? We used to be a proper society and had our phones on the kitchen walls with 25ft cords.
Back in the good old days when homosexuality was a felony, the cure for autism was an ice pick lobotomy, and certain people would be killed for being caught in nice neighborhoods? Proper society.
Jesus, show us on the doll where the bad man hurt you why don’t you. Can we not have a joke about anything benign these days without someone coming along to make it about the wrongs of society? And before you say it, yes, the things you mentioned were wrong.
Chill out, I wasn’t making a statement about race relations, intolerance, bigotry, or medical ignorance. It was just a joke about long phone cords.
You must be a miserable bastard to spend much time around if this is how to react to such things in real life as well.
To be fair, I think I need that lobotomy to deal with the US as a whole right now…
Minus the lobotomies, that’s still happening.
My kid is not going to the murder factory without a phone. I’d be happy to scream at someone in a room over it. Guarantee my kid’s safety or they’re bringing a phone.
Not to be a jackass but what will their phone help with in this supposed murder factory? If ur so worried about a shooter or something, it’s not like the phone puts them in an invincibility bubble or something.
Exactly. In these situations, the exact last thing schools want is a bunch of parents showing up to try and get their kids out. It sucks for the parents, but it’s one of those situations where by trying to help their kid, they’re putting a lot of other children in danger. If a bunch of parents run into a building with a shooter and escort their kids out, now you have the nightmare scenario of trying to track down scores of kids that have gone who knows where. Plus now there are more people running around the building who the police may mistake for the shooter. Oh, and a good number of these parents would want to show up with guns of their own. Now you have multiple random armed people running around the school.
You do not want parents running into the scene of an active school shooting.
IDK man how could having 300 portable, accessible ways to call 911 in a shooter emergency possibly help in that moment?
C’mon guys help me figure out this MENSA-level brain-twister.
You do realize there are wall phones in every classroom, and each teacher can carry their own cell phone, do you not? You’re talking about dozens of people who have the ability to call 911. Past a certain point all you’re doing is saturating the 911 line and preventing ambulances and fire trucks from getting to other unrelated emergencies.
Having students alert 911 in that situation is insane. Their priority should be either running away or hiding, neither of which is helped by getting on a phone call. If that’s the point hire someone whose job is 100% just doing that and make everyone safer for it.
How else are the kids going to call a waymo to get away?
Do I need the ./s?
Ah yes, let’s flood the 911 lines with panicked kids and then their parents too. Making sure no other emergencies can call 911. Isn’t it great every single other type of emergency a person can have will magically be put on hold until the school situation is cleared up…
Oh, and there’s going to be some kids who will think they need to give regular updates, so they’d likely put themselves in danger in order to “just help”
He can call me and I can come help. It’s not much, but it’s something that gives me peace of mind a little bit.
Not the be that prick, but how? If there’s an active shooter, you’re not bulletproof just because you’re a parent. Or are you storming in and going to start shooting yourself? Really curious what your plan is.
My plan is to get any kids I find out, that’s all I can do. Doubt I’d bring a weapon, way too high a chance I’d hit a friendly target instead.
Cell Phone bans hold up great until a school shooting happens and no one can call for help… then it’s all: “why didn’t anyone call for help”, “phone bans are dangerous to our kids”, “the trans kids are to blame”, “bitch bitch bitch transphobic bitching etc etc etc”.
And considering it’s America… School shootings are basically the Republican legally required National pastime. – Republicans actually get boners thinking about all the dead kids and they even get extra horny thinking about all the ways they can blame those deaths on LGBTQ+ folk… despite the fact that most school shooters lean towards right wing extremist philosophies… if you can even call pure evil incarnate a philosophy.
I, too, am generally in favor of virtuously-sounding limitations placed upon demographics I am not a part of and never will be.
But a demographic they all were and most will one day not be. Yes, there are overly parented kids; and yes our system makes the stair step function of responsibility incredibly steep. But there will be plenty of time for scrolling and phones, screens in general in classrooms are not the curl all we thought they were.
My position on this is really weird because I’m in support of laptops being in classrooms for educational uses. However, I’m against cell phones being in classroom.
That being said, as someone who grew up in a school system that didn’t allow the parent to communicate with their child or a teenager, meaning that they couldn’t call the school to have them relay a message, I am firmly against a straight ban period on school grounds. I was given a phone because my parents’ work schedule was very fluid and could change within an hour or two. And on more than a handful of occasions, my mom would call the school and be like, hey, you need to relay the message to get on a different bus because there’s no one going to be home, And they just wouldn’t relay it. It also helped if I chose to go to a friends house after school
I’m also disliking how they skewed the results. If you read the actual study, you’ll see that they merged the kind of agree strongly agree and the kind of disagree strongly disagree categories to make it a binary choice, but then chose to omit the six percent of the people who said they didn’t care or had no strong opinion.
they also removed any results where the person chose the first option or the last option on every question. And I dislike any type of automated data sanitation method like that, because while they did randomize the first and fourth answer, every time, there’s always the possibility that someone legitimately answered everything as either the first or last answer. My own vote could be stated that since I strongly agree that the cell phone shouldn’t be in the classroom, but strongly disagree that it should be straight banned. So if question one and question two had the polarity of question one and question 2 flipped, where one was strongly agree and one was strongly disagree, it’s entirely possible I would have been removed from the survey as a fraudulent result.
edit: removed couple sentences that drifted from topic some and fixed a repeated line
Don’t see why they can’t just have locked down WiFi networks so only staff and school equipment can use it and then have some sort of localized cell phone jamming that automatically turns off if a fire alarm or other alarm is triggered for emergencies.
In the US this isn’t legal. Signal jammers are outlawed period, you can’t even use one in your own private residence. The FCC is super clear on it’s legality. Any form of signal jamming period that can disrupt a communications signal such as a cellphone or wifi signal on US soil is a felony. They have even gone as far as fining companies who sold devices that could potentially have been used to signal jam over the restriction. In the US the only time you can use any device that has the capability to block signals is by a federal agency on a case by case basis
They actually
havehad (its been replaced with a much shorter excerpt that only mentions classrooms in a passerby) a FAQ about signal jammers where they explicitly mention it’s use in the school environment.I am a principal or school teacher and would like to use a jammer to limit cell phone calls and texting during school hours. May I do so? No. It is a violation of federal law to operate a jamming device within the U.S. Cell phone jammers do not distinguish between social or other cell phone conversations and an emergency call to a family member or a 9-1-1 emergency responder. In an emergency, use of a cell jammer can pose a threat to both students and staff by preventing communications with police or emergency services. In other words, jammers, even if carefully targeted, create risks of interference outside their intended zone of operations and can thereby disrupt critical communications by public safety providers, as well as the legitimate communications of passersby.Yeah, this is a problem that needs to be addressed when the school is being built. It flabbergasts me that it already isn’t standard practice to construct classrooms and schools as big Faraday cages.
That’s the real way to address that. You can still have a locked down wifi network for educational purposes. But you make it so the kid’s phones simply do not work inside the building at all.
Ignoring whether or not that would be considered against the intent of the law as well, I personally think cost, zoning and safety requirements are going to be killer on any type of plan like that and is likely why no districts that I know of have attempted it.
I’d sorta think this is a good idea but I’m not really down for putting cellphone jammers or anything like that on school property. Freedom comes first.
The solution is to fund schools better for better education programs and more staff who would be able to handle rule infractions better. Harder to use your phone in class when 3 staff members are around engaged with the kids.
Freedom does not come first in all cases. There’s all sorts of rights that get curtailed when you enter a classroom. For example, while Tinker v. Des Moines does protect certain nondisruptive exercises of free speech on school grounds, schools still need to have wide leeway to restrict many kinds of speech that would otherwise be perfectly legal outside school grounds. For example, many kinds of speech that would be perfectly legal outside schools will get you disciplined for bullying. Students may be allowed to wear nondisruptive things like armbands, but if a student insists on holding up a giant protest placard in the middle of their math class, the school can restrict that.
Solutions like “fund schools better” are empty platitudes.
I think this is a tough one to weigh in on depending where you come from. If I lived somewhere where the news talked about school shootings a lot, I might want my child to have a phone.
Go after the companies making addictive applications instead.
It’s not that hard. You keep it in your backpack, and never take it out the whole day while school is in session.
When I was a kid in school, you had to go to the office to use the phone.
My school at least still had a payphone near the cafeteria we only got rid of in 2011.
Same, and I feel like that should be the only phone available. Us older millennials didn’t have phones, these kids don’t need them either during school. Now I’m not against them used at lunch time or breaks, that’s there time
To be fair there was infrastructure then that doesn’t exist now. Most phone boxes are basically just public urinals now for example, I mean they always were but you could usually expect a phone to be in there too. People were also used to remembering numbers, but the only numbers I remember these days are my own and various landlines from my childhood which have been disconnected for over a decade as people did away with traditional landlines, then the VoIP bridge replacements which just became a way to receive international tech support scam calls more efficiently.
I personally want to see smartphones curtailed more generally; if I had absolutist power a lot of the adtech sector (at least surveillance-based behavioural recommendation algorithms) would be legislated out of existence on public health and democratic integrity grounds for example. I’d like to see e-ink smartphones become a wider market segment too, as these inherently break a lot of ‘dark patterns’ and also make short form video content less viable in favour of text content. I don’t think we can just take smartphones off kids and dump them at eighteen into the psychological manipulation engine that is the modern adtech sector without wider structural reforms to our relationship with smartphones and the internet.
I honestly think it would do a lot if all sorting algorithms were made open source.
We would quite quickly have mapped out how their algorithms work and which companies are the most predatory
Just make them leave it off. Anyone caught using a phone gets it taken away the rest of the day.
That’s what we did with anything that was distracting when I was growing up. You can have it on you, but if they see you using it. It goes into the principal’s office until EOD.
Yeah the issue with this is that it becomes a major pain to enforce.
Tones of schools have no phone policies but no one enforces it.
Students won’t give them up and parents get upset because they can’t contact little Timmy or because his 1500 iPhone is in someone’s desk.
You don’t necessarily need to take it away, there are other avenues of punishment. Detention, Saturday school, no extra-curricular participation, suspension, etc. I was in high school right as dumb cell phones started to become a thing and those were our punishments if we were caught with phones out. We were allowed to have them, but they had to be either off or on silent, and in our bags (same as CD/MP3 players.) We were allowed to have them out to check them only during lunch and before and after school, or if we had to make a call, in the main office. I completely agree that kids shouldn’t be using phones AT ALL during class time, but there’s ways to allow them to exist and punish inappropriate usage that doesn’t require teachers taking them. Teachers shouldn’t be taking phones, that’s a liability risk and not worth the effort.
Every school in America is currently trying this approach, and it is failing miserably. It’s not as easy to enforce as you imagine.
How would it help for children to have phones during a school shooting? Everyone on the staff already has one.
For real. What are they gonna do if their kid specifically calls them directly? Go all Rambo on the shooter?
A parent is more likely to go rambo and be helpful than cops or teachers, just look at past school shootings where cops didnt do jack sht
The cops definitely need to act quickly. But no one is helped by a bunch of parents wandering around the scene of an active school shooter. Hell, half of them will bring their own guns, now you have multiple people without school credentials wandering around armed on campus. And the police have to chase after them instead of the actual shooter.
This is one of those cases where by trying to help your own kid, you’re actually putting them and a lot of other kids at increased danger.
I’m a man with a very particular set of skills…
Go after the companies
Sir this is a Merica.
As a mom of two in a country where school shootings do happen far more frequently than anywhere else in the world, the US, I fully support completely banning phones from schools. The benefit to my kids education overall far outweighs the minuscule chance something would happen where they need their phones or a shooting took place. I say this also as a former American student who’s school did go on lock down a few times for active shooters in the area, like the time a local bank got robbed or when they found a “kill list” some kid made. It just doesn’t make sense to me to degrade education across the board in the very very off chance my kid, or even myself, was at the location of a school shooting.
Are you suggesting a phone would stop the shooting?
I was thinking about a shooting that happened in Norway. Some of the children called their parents. It didn’t stop anything horrible from happening, but they left the world knowing they were loved.
I wonder what the results would have looked like if they added questions to see the difference in acceptance between banning smartphones vs banning dumb phones.
A third of the country still thinks Trump is doing a good job. They probably don’t even know the difference
