I find it nuts that this is an argument at all, for Christ sake. I don't think you need reams of academic studies to know that powerful distraction machines are detrimental for learning. Feels very much like an issue where Journalists and Policy Makers can't see the wood for the trees. Just get the kids to put their phones in a box at the front of the classroom! It's not hard
Definitely a situation that has fallen prey to this idea that you can't make any decisions without a perfect casual study because otherwise you're not listening to the Science.
I think the whole reason this is an issue and not just common sense by everyone is that a lot of people LIKE their own phones and also don't want to upset their moody teenagers. When I've taken my own teen daughter's phone for whatever reason she makes sure to give me the most contemptuous look I've ever seen and then act out in the most spiteful way for the rest of the day. Our anti-discipline society causes us to live in absolute fear of children & teens. As a society we've given kids so much power that we can't really effectively parent them.
I was a little taken aback by Matt suggesting it was “paternalistic” to restrict teens’ access to smartphones—like, they are not yet adults, aren’t they supposed to be getting parental guidance (and in school, teachers providing that guidance).
As a teacher and parent, I am really shocked how seldom other parents restrict or take away their kids’ cellphones. For me, it’s the best leverage for cooperation I have: they want to earn cellphone privileges back. Other parents seem afraid to incur the temporary wrath of a mad teenager.
The degree to which so many adults don't want to be adults in relation to the children they are responsible for is absolutely appalling to me as a parent.
And then there is the weird discrepancy towards the way parents are lax towards screens but micromanage everything else.
Adults will regulate the most minute aspect of children's free play with other children or their time outdoors, but then have zero rules for anything digital and act almost offended at the idea that they have to provide guidance in the realm of screen use.
I think what it really is is that many adults don't want to voluntarily give up their own bad habits, so they are lax with their kids about the things they want to be lax about with themselves.
But they know this is lazy AF, and that as parents they need to regulate something or at least publically perform some kind of regulatory parenting (it's my experience that about 90% of being a mom - at least in suburban Connecticut - is Performing Good Motherhood to avoid the judgement of the other Good People). So the authoritarian energy gets excessively channelled into telling kids they aren't allowed to go play in the woods or ride their bikes around the neighborhood because of "ticks" and "kidnappers," or into micromanaging kids interactions at the park for even the slightest breach of "Kindness."
It's all so backwards.
It's the opposite of the way I was raised in small town Michigan - my parents were absolute fascists about our TV and video game time, but gave F all about what we did all day in the woods or around the neighborhood.
Absolutely! My son is Gen Z, and using his favored electronics, whether it was the Nintendo Wii, Gameboy, PS Vita, Playstation, PC games when he was younger, to the phones and consoles when he was older, these were always the carrots and sticks in my parenting toolbox! Nightly I would take either the controllers and power supplies, or later on the actual phone until later in high school (and in retrospect I should have continued to take the phone at night then!), and he did not get a smart phone until his first year in high school, and he was not allowed to take it to school until again, later in high school (with same retrospect regret). it was the most direct way to ensure homework and chores got done, and bedtime actually happened for the bulk of his tween to teen years - definitely don't understand the reluctance of parents to use these most effective objects for reward/discipline!
She almost certainly won't. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't do it if you feel it's in her best interest.
I've taken a much more permissive stance on screen time with my kids with mixed results. So I definitely understand why parents would take a hard line here.
It's a bit tough to deny them something that is so integral to society these days. There are phone options out there that restrict what apps they can use and give parents lots of control. I'd recommend something like that.
If it is integral to whatever society they are part of, then you can try to find a subculture where it is not integral.
This is one of the reasons we are dropping out of conventional schooling and joining the local homeschool community. None of the kids have smartphones. None of their activities require it. Free play and getting together in person is the norm, as is paper and pencil school work.
I know not everyone can alter their lives that radically, but a lot of people can if it is important to them.
Also, I think the phones are less integral than people think they are. There is a big difference between "my kid needs this to be cool" and "my kid actually needs this to perform a required function."
"Being cool" is very overrated, even counterproductive to happiness and developing a real personality.
My parents never cared about me being cool or "fitting in." The fact that their not letting us have all the things the other kids had or watch the shows other kids watched would make us "less cool" was actual a feature, not a bug, for them, because they thought learning to resist the need to "fit in" would make us freer and more independent adults.
And it worked, and I am SO GRATEFUL for that.
I find it both surprising and sad how many parents actually prioritize their child "fitting in" or "being cool."
I think this is a real dynamic but I'd expect it to apply everywhere _except_ at school. If the school takes away my kid's phone, that's kind of not my problem - it happens at school not while I'm around and they have to enforce it. It's the one no-phone case a non-confrontational parent get for free.
(FWIW my pet theory is that the real driver is a small number of anxious and vocal parents who for some reason want the trackability/reachability of their child having a working phone on them at all time.)
"As a society we've given kids so much power that we can't really effectively parent them."
I pretty strongly disagree with this. As I see it, kids are subject to far more adult supervision than at virtually any point in human history. They are held to relatively high standards (college used to be for the privileged few, now its considered the main path to success, etc.). And their ability to make their own choices and build their own life is often delayed to a much later point than it used to be. The fact that we've become less disciplinarian in some ways—like, idk, we recognize them as human being who can't be beat with a cane for speaking out of turn—doesn't really negate the rest of this stuff for me.
I'd also point out that smart phones are the device through which teens' relationships operate in the modern world. Cutting a teen off from that is effectively removing them from their social circles. Of course they don't like it! (Haidt gets this—that's why he emphasizes the importance of parents' making these decisions as a group rather than for their individual children)
EDIT:
Remembered this gem while I was responding to another comment...
It feels paradoxical because we're really talking about two different sets of parents. There are the stereotypical helicopter parents, and then there are the parents who thought that it was great that they could hand their kid a smartphone and distract him with it.
The latter group both have a way of keeping tabs on their kid at all times -- they can quite literally track the kid using his iPhone -- but have no idea that he's inhaling Andrew Tate content on YouTube because they're that disconnected from the kid.
It’s a reversal of mid century parenting. Back then, kids had wide latitude outside the house, but strict discipline inside. And your mom would kick your ass up and down the street if she heard you’d been rude to an adult. Now, kids have far less freedom, but also little discipline or expectations for manners. The worst combination of hovering and permissiveness.
I’m skeptical that kids-being-rude has significantly increased. By most reports, kids’ treatment of each other is much better than it used to be - much less bullying, etc. I would be surpised if that trend was somehow the opposite for kids’ treatment of adults.
What seems more likely to me is that as social norms change, people of older generations find themselves uncomfortable with new modes of communicating. Thus:
If you're truly taking the long view of human history then the norm was for children to start working, usually in their parents occupation, as soon as they were old enough to. And in most cultures their parents married them off (usually the parent's choice of parter) and that's when adulthood and "making their own choices" began.
So I think you're setting up an idealized view of the past that may only apply to very recent time periods in very developed countries, if it applies at all.
I'm not suggesting that people in general were "more free" in the past—I don't think they were. Just that adulthood came sooner and childhood was less discplined (though, granted, when discipline did come, my impression is that is tended to be harsher).
Unfortunately, quite a few parents honestly don't think about screen time negatively. They raise their kids with the TV just on by default, their kids watch Netflix with the sound on at restaurants, their kids watch TikToks at school instead of paying attention, they expect their kid to grow up an have the TV on by default, watch TikToks at work instead of paying attention, etc. These parents are good people, they want their children to be successful, but the causal relationship between time spent scrolling vs. time spent reading and writing more in-depth work, which seems so urgently clear to me, doesn't seem that way to them.
It’s a good comparison to where schools seem to be today. I recall kids being caught playing the Mattel football in class and the teacher confiscating it on the spot. No one thought that was any great injustice.
A smart phone isn’t used for class work. What I’m saying is that a school with a no-phones policy should allow and encourage teachers to confiscate a phone if they see one.
This could be *made* to be the case if phones were banned, but it's definitely not true by default right now. Among other things, plenty of students use TI-84 emulator apps rather than purchase the device, or use mobile browsers to access Desmos or real-time quiz activities.
Every elementary school I’ve been at has pretty successful smartphone bans. What I hear from hs teachers is in today’s actual environment enforcement is really hard and since no one is afraid of the consequences school can give in some cases literally dangerous.
I’m in a war for attention with the God damned Chromebooks and I hate that I’m saying this but technology has been a disaster. I think there’s incredibly cool opportunities to do really interesting projects with technology and I feel like I’ve done a few of them. But it’s mostly just a cost saving measure that’s absolutely a tax on my sanity compared to having a computer lab and enough resources for pen and paper. I’ve done stuff I’m really proud of with computers but it’s a small minority of the time they use them. I’ve had one good online curriculum.
It’s mostly been a trash fire of problems, and I’m the tech saavy teacher who enjoys these things.
>What I hear from hs teachers is in today’s actual environment enforcement is really hard and since no one is afraid of the consequences school can give in some cases literally dangerous.
Yes. There were a lot of reasons why I quit teaching, but if I had to pick one thing that made the actual *teaching* part awful (as opposed to all the non-teaching stuff like the pay, the paperwork, etc.), it would be this. Simply put, I did not decide to do the job because I wanted to spend my days cajoling and nagging and gently nudging students to follow rules. I think my second week of teaching I told two students to stop talking and said I'd separate them, and the one says to me, "We'll just talk across the whole classroom instead of quietly like we're doing now, do you really want that, Mr. U?" and then I threatened to write them a referral and he laughed and said "Mr. U, nobody gives a shit about no damn referral." So, of course, I called his bluff -- but he was right. He didn't give a shit, and admin didn't really either. They had bigger problems than a kid talking back to me.
So, of course, what is one supposed to do? You can't do basically any discipline *in* the classroom other than speaking sternly, which might work well on the conscientious kid who's normally good and is just acting up today but is basically useless against someone who is checked out of the idea of being a 'good kid' altogether. I've had kids start screaming at me, telling me they were going to beat my ass, when I threatened to take their phones etc. Fortunately I am a really big dude so I was not particularly threatened, but if I was a small woman (like many teachers!) I can imagine being terrified to enforce the rules in my class because of how kids might react.
I think it is good that corporal punishment is no longer in typical public schools. It's generally quite bad, destroys the relationship with the student, and most problems can be resolved without it.
The issue, as Matt points out, is that the continued presence of openly defiant and disruptive students totally destroys the behavioral environment for the rest of the students who are just normal kids -- i.e., prone to misbehaving on occasion but also not 'bad'.
My preferred solution (which would get me crucified by just about everyone in education grad schools) is to remove these children from the environment. If their parents want to continue their education, they can put them in a school specifically designed for such pupils that uses other, stricter methods. Otherwise, they can take care of the kid themselves.
This would be probably be net worse for those children, but we are talking about a very small % of students. It would make the environment so much better for everyone else in so many ways that it doesn't really matter to me if some kids fall through the cracks and get left behind.
In other words, "no child left behind" is dumb even as a general concept. It should be, "no child allowed to hold 90% of other children back."
Not that I want kids using or selling drugs, but it is outrageous to me that students caught doing that will be expelled fairly quickly, but the students who disrupt the classroom every day are tolerated.
I think the threat of corporal punishment would mean that it wouldn't actually have to be used that much. When there is no threat of real punishment, people act out a LOT more.
As with most things there needs to be a balance. Punishments can be abused. But lack of them also causes a lot of problems.
Also, sending bad kids to another school only partially fixes the problem. Those kids still need to be taught, and hopefully educated so they don't just move on to crime and prison.
Adults seem to be acting out more as well, yet nobody is saying that means bosses should get to spank employees or married couples can non-consensually spank each other for getting out of line.
It’s definitely true that schools have to figure out how to discipline kids. Apparently there used to be a program in my county where kids were put to work, and basically had to earn back hours of schooling. We have to find programs that are not cruel but that kids fear. They have lost all fear.
Our exhaustion with the Chromebooks and all the fancy "cool" projects is why we are pulling our kids from their Catholic school and putting them in a classical homeschool hybrid program next year.
The school is completely failing to provide any discipline or solid foundations in basic arithmetic, phonics, or reading. The entire fourth grade is still doing remedial arithmetic because the third grade teacher literally let the apps teach the kids all day (when I objected that I wasn't paying 7k for my kid to be on EPIC! Books all day or play video games I was told this was the "future" of education.). Kids shout out tiktok memes all day in class and screw around on the chromebooks. One of my sixth grader's recent assignments was to play an "Escape Room" video game.
I'm all done. I'm so ready for a good, boring education where they do things like read real books, diagram sentences, and memorize their times tables - and then have their fun and games outside of school, with some old fashioned free play.
This is just a generalization but I'd say Jesuit schools tend towards being more rigorous. Jesuit schools also tend to be targeted more towards low-income communities. Cristo Rey is the best known of these. I think they do a great job.
Disclosure: I am biased as I think the Jesuits should be a model for Catholicism.
It depends too. Some Archdioceses stay pretty hands off, some do not. Some Jesuit schools are still linked to the Archdiocese (like where I live), some are not.
Jesuits do a great job (I attended a Jesuit college as did my husband) but to your point, they do focus more on low income areas and in some (many) cases all boys schools. There are lots of good schools out there in the Dominican, Franciscans, Visitation, Sacred Heart out there as well.
Catholic schools run by a diocese tend to chase the pedagogical trends in public schools because most of their teachers and admin come out of the same sorts of schools of education, though at nominally Catholic universities (aka Sacred Heart or Fordham instead of UConn or SUNY).
And once they buy the iPads and Chromebooks they are going to use them under the justification of "we spent the money", though the line given to parents is usually some crap like "it's personalized learning.". Translation - if the Chromebook can babysit half the class while a teacher works with the other half there is no need to pay for an aid.
And then you have all the politics that comes with tuition paying and scheming private school parents. There are always kids who "can't be failed" or "can't be disciplined."
Catholic schools where we live are just credentialing factories to get into "the best college." Anything that compromises that, including a discipline record, is treated by a lot of parents like a breach of contract and they lose their sh*t. So admin shruggs at everything and figures that in th jungle the strongest will survive.
I feel like an escape room as a once in a while activity can be useful and test a lot of regular old fashioned skills. You need to find the central idea of the text in order to proceed etc.
I think there's still some really cool learning projects like to do character point of view I had students create skits from their novel study unit. (how did this character see it, how did the other character see it?) and like yes you could do that in front of the whole class and sort of consume several days of class time but webcams allowed them to create them semi-privately in between traditional seat work so it's not the whole focus of what we were doing that day.
I’m aware they are subsidized, didn’t realize it was quite that extreme. Clearly if they are just putting kids on an iPad all day, they are cutting corners on instruction.
I mean...that's one of those jokes that's funny in the abstract but not when you think about actual kids who have to grow up with that shit. And perhaps one of those kids is a subscriber here.
I think there's an obvious case for a good, boring education as you term it, but we should also be wide eyed that students are going to goof off, just as they did back in the Good Old Days. That said, there's definitely a case to be had to reduce the distillation of the goofing off, as Matt makes here.
Honestly in this environment part of the advantage of public schools is that they're subject to state testing, which as much as people complain about it, it at least ensures that the kids have to be learning something or heads will roll at the school.
Great comment, but why do elementary schoolers have smartphones at all?? There is a big parenting fail at the root of these problems. These things are bad for social skills, mental health, and academic success. We grew up just fine without them. If you’re worried about reaching your kid in an emergency, get them a dumb phone with only call and text abilities.
I wouldn't be surprised if most Democrats are ok with restricting social media for pre-teen kids. Hawley and DeSantis would probably get a lot more traction if they framed it as anything else besides being against "woke capital," which isn't really a thing.
Ron DeSantis could be right now that he knows his political future is shot so he is focusing on legacy decisions. Like he just made an accord with Disney. It’s weird.
The two reasons I hear from parents who've decided to get their kid one are tracking and lengthy after-care or before care stays. I know there are other options but you can slowly release responsibility with a phone as the parental settings on iPhone can be pretty damned limited and they last.
My foster kid goes and comes to school with me and I just keep a few things in my desk for him if I'm still working after he's finished his homework but that's not an option for everyone.
It's so exasperating that the only really substantive argument for letting kids have phones is fear of school shootings--which are incredibly rare, even though in a country with a third of a billion people you're bound to see them on the news constantly. People seem to have no capacity to weigh competing risks in a rational way.
The problem isn't really the devices, though. If minors were banned from social media and video games I think most of the distraction effect would disappear... and the remaining use cases for smartphones might actually have some educational value.
My understanding is that even in a school shooting situation, phones are bad for safety, because they are a distraction and kids need to be paying attention to their environment and the instructions of the adults around them.
> If minors were banned from social media and video games
Yes, once we put the bell on the cat everything will be simple. Nobody authorized Drug Wars in Matt's story. People just installed it on a machine that was supposed to be used for other things.
What I meant to say is that the whole debate about "banning phones in school" involves dumping a lot of effort and responsibility on teachers and principals, which they shouldn't really have to carry.
Social media for minors seems harmful enough that it should be banned legislatively, and then there might be less need for schools to act as enforcers.
I'm not sure you need to be so drastic with video games but maybe there should be a weekly time limit for users under 18, which I think most kids would prefer not to use up in class.
A phone is a physical object which a student can be forced to place somewhere inaccessible during class. Social media and video games are programs which can be installed on that physical object and restricting the ability of children (and only children) to install and operate those programs, or only operate them for limited amounts of time, requires not just legislation but broad technological solutions. I mean, just as a for example, you can access social media and even video games through web browsers, so now you've got to lock down every web browser (but only for children) on every model of phone which a child might possibly have. Can we even stop children from browsing porn in classrooms right now, much less TikTok?
Maybe in the long run you're right and it would be worth doing, but in terms of simple direct action, forcing children to hand in a physical object at the beginning of class could be accomplished so much easier.
Honestly part of the problem is that the explosion in certain diagnoses (ADHD, autism spectrum) has greatly expanded the number of kids who qualify for "special ed."
When I was in school in the 1990s, "special ed" was for kids who would never be able to function on their own. Now "special ed" is much broader than that.
ADHD is a way for white parents to get their sons into the victim hierarchy, allow them more time to complete assignments and avoid being the only people without an affinity-group.
I can neither confirm nor deny that my sons are going to be tested for every conceivable learning disability as soon as they get within a whiff of genuinely competitive schooling.
That may be true but it does seem like there are some people who have big problems with impulsive behavior or attention-span deficit. Whether labeling that a "medical disorder" is helpful or not is an open-question. But if someone is normally excessively shy it might make having a few drinks at a party a good idea. I don't mean that as a perfect analogy, but I'm just saying that differing brains really do exist and there may be things that are especially helpful for people who have poor impulse control and attention spans.
I don't know it seems to me there's a small number of ADHD patients whose impulse control is so bad it's hard to imagine them functioning normally. It's a small percentage but they exist and you can tell within five minutes if they forgot their medication.
As an Autism case from the 80s (then Asperger's). I'm not really sure that's an accurate description of sped then. I feel like there has been a concept creep where weird and shy and being a jerk have all been medicalized.
I think if it weren't for the lawyers I agree. The language of ESSA is extremely broad and contains very little for cost-benefit analysis but very little supportive funding. You can push back on the torches and pitchforks but the right to Free Appropriate Education in the least restrictive environment is like just sitting there on a lawsuit t.
And there's a process where you can get an alternative placement, or you can go forward with proving that the behavior isn't related to the disability but the pipeline of experts you need can be quite overstuffed.
Suspending or expelling kids who don't want to be in school in the first place is rewarding them for their bad behavior while also making it more likely that they will fail to function as adults. (No, I don't know what the solution is).
When I was in school, in-school suspension was where they went. Out-of-school suspension and expulsion were for kids who the rest of the student body literally needed to be protected from.
Yeah, I think that's what they do where I live now, as well. That also existed when I was a kid, as did a special "alternative school" for particularly egregious cases. (I actually know, as an adult, a kid I went to school with who landed in alternative school for drug possession. He's a very successful and decent adult. I would not have predicted that. Redemption is possible.)
True, but being shown that actions don't have consequences doesn't help them function as adults either. Suspensions are not ideal, but there is something to be said for placing a burden on parents to force them to implement their own punishment on the kid. No, it's not equitable, but I think it's better than the alternative.
Yeah, I think a lot of the issue is that the kids who typically draw out-of-school suspensions and/or expulsions are often the same kids who will face no consequences from their parents, while the kids who would are generally well-behaved enough that they never get to that point.
I brought this up last time the topic came up but my high school district had a separate school they sent kids to with "chronic problems". It was ~ a one-way street. As a student, everyone knew there was a very real threat of getting sent there. Kind of thought this was the norm for all big districts but seems to be pretty rare. I support it.
Yes, it's a problem. I believe it is mainly for social justice reasons, but the result has been terrible. Schools across the board are trying to avoid suspensions/expulsions at all cost with the result that they can't implement discipline to protect teachers or other students.
The interesting thing about the use of things like Chromebooks in the classroom is that they don't' seem to be leading to real world skills that would be useful. Pretty much everyone in the private sector agrees that new graduates are worse with technology from a job perspective than their peers 10 years ago were despite growing up surrounded by technology.
The big UX divergence between consumer and enterprise applications is a killer here— the former keep getting smoother and lower effort, while there isn’t anything like the same sort of selection pressure on the latter. (Excel is less clunky than it was when I was a kid, but Snapchat is like, infinitely less clunky and more user-friendly than AIM was.)
It’s about reducing labor costs— the theory is that a teacher can manage more kids without assistance while getting similar learning outcomes if they can let big chunks of the group play educational games for significant chunks of the day. (Empirically, this is not true, but districts struggling with Baumol disease are very motivated to pretend that it is.)
The question is the real reasons for the Baumol effect. Is it so much that hiring teachers is that much more expensive, or that the system lost a lot of efficeincy by hiring a lot of non-teachers with dubious contribution (many kinds of admins, consultants, bureaucrats, outsourcing stuff etc.
Put differently, if we tried to recreate a school of 1960 or 1980, precisely the same staff roles for precisely the same (inflation adjusted) salaries and compensations, would that come out as more expensive than today's school? Would it even come out as more expensive as percent of the district's budget?
I have no idea, but I wouldn't be surprised if the answer is in the negative. I think a huge part of the problem is both deprioritizing education and having frankly stupid ideas about education. There might be some broader, more "ievitable" aggravating factors, but my guess is that they are far less important that the double whammy of the former two.
Teachers’ salaries haven’t risen much on an inflation-adjusted basis since 1980, but their overall real cost of employment has increased considerably (as healthcare benefit costs have sharply increased and increasing lifespans made defined-benefit pension plans significantly costlier to implement— an annuity is a lot more valuable if you live longer!)
It certainly is also the case that the number of school employees per student has increased over that period, and it’s likely that some of that effect is driven by a degree of administrative bloat. But it’s worth noting that, at least in the US, this is partially driven by a widely-socially-agreed-on mandate to educate disabled students within normal schools (instead of sending them to often-far-from-home centralized facilities), which has required a ton of additional labor to both staff (at the classroom level) and administer.
Also the opportunity cost to be a teacher has risen dramatically so the people who are teachers now and in the 1960s are not the same (e.g. an average mathematician can now become a programmer and women have substantially more career options).
Yeah, like, my grandmother who had a grad-level degree in a STEM field from a major university worked as a middle-school science teacher. That would be a lot less likely now.
Healthcare is a society wide problem (and suggests fixing that would have far more beneficial effects than “just” saving lives in the literal sense!) but for the rest I’m less sure. Life expectancy in the us is now decreasing even if still better than 1980….
As for blot- that’s an important question. What precisely is the level of budgetary burden for the integration of the disabled? Of course it’s a good thing we should be willing to pay a price for, but I also think that all will agree that we shouldn’t agree to pay *any* price for it (just about nothing in this world is literally “whatever the cost”). What exactly is the price and how badly does it “hurt” education overall by effectively constraining other resources? That’s a question we should seriously ask. The good of the minority must always be balanced with the good of the majority. I suspect the effect is not as dramatic as you suggest but without numbers who can say?
I respect your patience to break down the bleeding obvious so meticulously. Of course no phones in school.
Also, how bout parents not give their kids smart phones at ALL till 16? Let them call and text. But also let them learn to fill their time, solve problems, and navigate their neighborhood without the damn thing.
I think this is one of the main goods that will come from Haidt’s book. He’s really really focused on changing parental norms. If there’s enough support in the parent population then you’ll give schools the cover they need to enforce bans.
It feels like there's a very clear divide on this between Gen X parents (who thought smartphones were a good way to distract and monitor their kids) and Millennials (who are skeptical at best that this is an unalloyed good.)
Gen Z coming up with technology in their hands for their entire childhood and the end result of it is causing some people to rethink the way kids are raised, I guess
I really do feel that us elder millennials ended up in an extremely good position with regard to technology. We started using computers young, but with command prompts and such. We didn't have cell phones until high school, social media until our early twenties, and didn't have smart phones until our mid-twenties.
I was somehow a great student who did all my homework with the TV on while talking on the phone.
Not sure if this means I would have fully tipped over the edge and failed out if I had a smartphone, or if kids ability to perform under distraction is underappreciated.
I predict a class divide. More affluent and better educated parents will prohibit smartphones and social media to a fairly advance age, just like they are more aware and able to monitor everything else (nutrition, screen time generally, balanced activities etc.). Poorer kids will get screens and smartphones and social media far earlier and with less supervision. Differing class norms, reflected in the school population, will solidify this gap.
We’re already kinda there, aren’t we? Weren’t there a bunch of articles back in 2014 about how Silicon Valley tech elites were sending their kids to schools that banned all tech?
But why not? Children are not *supposed* to have as much freedom as adults. They don't have the right to do things that harm their future selves: drinking, smoking, skipping school. Why should they have the right to go to school and end up learning less than they could?
But all the evidence on damage to attention spans suggests pretty strongly that kids who are constantly on their phones outside of school will end up doing worse in school.
Banning phones during school hours is incredibly weak tea, which makes it a little discouraging that it's even a subject for debate.
We can also ban television, soccer balls, skateboards, Nintendo, and tennis rackets, speakers, as well if we want to legislate what distractions are allowed to be in the house while doing homework.
Of course, it would be inappropriate to use a Nintendo Switch in class (or a skateboard or soccer ball for that matter), and schools would be right to control when and where these things can be used on campus. And for certain things a complete ban at school might be reasonable (just like Tamagachis were banned at school when I was a kid).
Oh boy, Tamagotchis. That was more of a core Millennial digital distraction than it was for cusper Xer/Millennials like Matt and myself. Glad I never went down that rabbit hole.
Yes, schools don't have the authority to dictate what kids do outside of class. But Congress and the state legislatures do.
I keep coming back to the parallel with pornography. As far as I know, there's no reliable research showing that children are harmed when they look at photographs of people having sex. But everyone agrees that it should be made difficult for them to do that.
With social media the evidence of harm is a good deal stronger, so why is it even up for debate that states can ban it for kids?
That’s not necessarily true. Schools have routinely exercised authority outside of school property and courts back this up as long as it’s linked in some way to schools educational purposes. So, like, if you get bullied on the internet by another kid at the school, schools are allowed to do something about it because you’re both their student and the bullying impacts your ability to have a productive school experience. Now, most schools shy away from this stuff unless they absolutely have to confront it, but it’s not because they’re not allowed.
There are lots of things parents aren't legally allowed to do to their kids. Whether giving them smartphones belongs in that category is an empirical question: it depends on how harmful it is.
The only reason kids were ever allowed to have smartphones is that initially it wasn't known to be harmful at all. Now that the harm is well established, I think reasonable people can disagree about whether it's severe enough to justify overruling parents' judgments. But new research on that issue always seems to move the needle in just one direction.
Florida is about to test this in federal court, so let's see how it goes. But I think it would be a huge mistake for the Supreme Court to make a sweeping decision in favor of children's free-speech rights when the empirical evidence is still so limited. States should have the flexibility to test policies like these without being immediately slapped down by judges.
I think Congress should make it illegal to have officious nanny state busybodies who want professional politicians in charge of how to raise their kids as parents while we are talking about harming the next generation.
I think there are real costs here. I wouldn't be willing to use any North American transit agency without access to some form of a real-time tracking (and it's good to get kids to use transit). Also, kids like to take photos of things!
If you’re concerned about tracking you can put an AirTag in their backpack. If they like taking pictures you can buy them a camera. These arguments feel lazy and all of these solutions are vastly cheaper than a smart phone.
ZFC means tracking things like when the next bus is coming. I gave my kids phones when they were in 6th grade because that is when they started taking public transit to school and other places. They were dumb phones because for the older kids it was a while ago, and my youngest kid won't use any apps at all because he is afraid of "them" knowing too much about him. (He will likely have the last laugh over all of us.), but mapping and transit apps can be very useful and give kids more freedom to explore on their own.
Is there a safety concern in tracking when trains come? Or just convenience? I took public transit as a kid and figured it out by looking at the schedule posted at the bus stop. I agree that GoogleMaps is the biggest loss in switching to a dumb phone, but learning to find your way to and from home, school, friends houses, and activities is good for spatial reasoning, situational awareness, and problem solving skills. It's also just not that hard to do. Print them a map.
Also the posted schedules bear no relationship to the schedule. My local bus in Chicago is supposed to run every 15 minutes. Usually it ends up being 2 buses showing up at the same time and then another 25 minute wait for the next one.
As an occasional transit rider, I am with you, the transit times apps have been a game-changer. The posted schedules for Chicago Transit Authority service in my neighborhood bear no relationship whatsoever to reality. For the commenters who are saying "but the schedules are posted," you just told me "I never take public transit." OTOH the % of American youth who are taking public transportation is a small minority so this is really an edge case.
As a parent, I'm totally on board with this but I fear it'll be heard to implement, as someone who is specifically addicted to Twitter. My guess is that I'll have to change my own behaviors if I expect the same of my kids.
I can only speak about my school. 4 years ago the school district decided to no longer enforce rules on absenteeism, homework, or being disruptive in class. My daughter, as many students, learned this quickly. She would show up at home midday (someone pulled the fire alarm, so why not). Her grades started sliding (ignoring homework lead to lower test scores)... So, for past years I’ve had to micromanage her (this fucking sucks, and would be worse if I had to have 2 jobs to pay the bills). Now, the school’s talking about phones. I don’t disagree with MY’s thesis that phones are a distraction, but feel the phone discussion keeps school districts from having to admit the policy choice of “no rules” is a failing kids.
Who are the proponents of the no enforcement policy? Is its support coming from groups of parents? Admins? Local government? Teachers? Why isn't there more pushback?
See, this is the interesting question. I’ll offer my version of the answer but it’s entirely based on my experience and not on some kind of research.
I’d say there are four groups, all have slightly different approaches and impacts but if you combine them all, you get a ton of dysfunction.
Progressive discipline (meaning you progress along a line of escalating discipline responses) has broken down even though it remains “on the books.” Somewhere at the stage where kids face consequences that place a demand on their free time or parents free/work time schools have become wary of escalating. When you used to get in school suspension, now kids are more often sent back to class which undermines the teacher’s ability to manage that student because the most she can do is refer the kid to the front office. If that’s gone… what?
Here’s where the first two groups come in. 1) equity focused people. Remember how toward the end of the Obama admin there was a lot of discussion of the school-to-prison pipeline? People were worried that schools were over-punishing kids, especially black kids, and this was even landing some of them in jail as teenagers for things that they did in response to school discipline like resisting the school police. There probably is some merit to this but it really looks like schools took this too far.
2) special education students and their litigious parents. ADA and IDEA place a very heavy legal burden on schools to educate students with disabilities. Those disabilities can and do result in behavioral issues for some students. But it is very very hard to remove a special needs student from an educational context and into a more sheltered environment. This shit gets district sued all the time and parents know this and will make the threat to get what they want. When I last worked on IEP committees (these are the legally required groups of parents, teachers, psychologists, and admins who make a plan for every single special needs student) I’d say about 1/3 of my case load would have parents bring lawyers to the meeting which then meant the district brought lawyers and so on. So, I dunno, call your congressman? It’s federal law right up there with civil rights. You can’t suspend or even really punish these kids because you’d be violating their civil rights. Did I mention that somewhere north of 15% of students have IEPs with another 10% receiving other specialized services? [edited for accuracy, see replies]
3) parents! There are a lot of parents who simply don’t accept that schools can discipline their kids and will resist, raise hell, make legal threats. I could usually pick these families out within the first month of starting school. We have a very permissive parenting environment these days.
4) let’s call this one “school capacity”. Many schools simply can’t perform all of the tasks which they’ve been given because they lack staff, have to rely on an endless cycle of brand new teachers, can’t run bus lines to get kids on campus etc. The pandemic money stops next fall. Layoffs are coming.
What are all of these students getting IEPs for? 25% of students having an IEP sounds like something downstream of a perceived advantage, but I'm curious what.
Certain diagnoses automatically come with more time to take tests. Apparently some parents seek this out to confer SAT/GPA advantage to their children. Certain people were gaming this in law school. One of my professors told me that all the top scorers in my class were people taking the exams essentially untimed.
I remember this being a huge controversy a decade or so ago, but I didn't know that it extended to law school. Insane.
I took the SAT more than two decades ago, but having extra time on the math portion would have been a huge advantage-- for stronger students, basically everyone could get a perfect score with enough time.
When I was a kid (90s) the trend was for certain parents (white, affluent) to find a doctor to give their kid a "diagnosis" that would get them a special accommodation (ADHD was always joked about as the thing that was wildly overdiagnosed in my generation.) That only seems to have gotten worse.
You know what, you’re right. I was including students who receive “other education related services” in that number which can include kids on 504 behavior plans, receive speech and language supports, and other similar things. They do not have IEPs.
It's everywhere. I've seen it in our schools here. It's coming from admins who are under pressure to reduce punishments for social justice reasons, though there are likely other reasons I don't know about.
Norms around absenteeism have really shifted post-COVID and I think this deserves further discussion.
When I was a kid, pulling your kid out of school for a week to go on a family vacation was just, like, not done. Now apparently parents feel comfortable doing this? The problem is that this sort of norm-shifting has downstream consequences, like kids (mostly different ones) feeling more comfortable with simply blowing off school.
I was discussing with a partner in my firm just last week about how absurdly casual parents have become about pulling their kids out of school for vacations and such. He and I agreed that (1) when we were kids it was very rare that you would miss school for a vacation or other non-school activity that didn't involve medical care/death and (2) we both had the experience of actually having to go to school *on the morning of a travel day* and our parents coming to school at lunch or early afternoon to pick us up to go to the airport.
I can probably count on one hand the number of times I got pulled out of school for non-illness/"family emergency" reasons as a kid. And that simply never happened once I hit high school.
Yeah, it's really pretty shocking. The idea of missing school for a ski trip or something would have been unthinkable.
I wonder if norms might be emerging that it's OK to miss school for "affluent" reasons like skiing or a trip to Europe, but not OK to miss school for "non-affluent" reasons like a visit to grandma back on the farm.
Maybe we should consider shortening summer breaks and extending other breaks during the school year so that families have a little more flexibility in planning vacations.
I'm actually with Matt that common days off are generally good, though. So everybody having the same week off for spring break is better than families picking within a three-week break.
“…that it's OK to miss school for "affluent" reasons like skiing or a trip to Europe, but not OK to miss school for "non-affluent" reasons like a visit to grandma back on the farm.”
As a family who took our kids out of school this year for Disney this year, I’ll chalk it up to this:
* All segments of travel/hospitality have gotten much more efficient in price variation on peak dates
* Americans are wealthier overall and travel more, so traveling at a peak time (skiing or Disney over winter break etc) is both far more expensive and far less enjoyable.
* The gross COVID overreaction to in-class schooling broke the “100% Attendance” many parents had. After two years of having classrooms shut down because a student had asymptomatic COVID or possibly a small runny nose, no one feels the same responsibility to keep their kids in school, especially if flights are 2k cheaper in an off peak week.
Funny that this was super controversial when it last came up here. I guess the difference is smartphones are clearly bad even for high-achieving kids from the kind of families that post here, whereas there are individually rational reasons for us to violate norms on travel
I disagree - when I was a kid (80s) my parents pulled us out all the time for vacations and didn't give a sh*t and neither really did the school.
But our kids school is ridiculous about making it as hard as possible to take kids out - while giving barely any real vacation time (we have only a week off for Christmas and Spring Break isn't until late April).
I have stopped GAF about my kids attendance this year because it became so obvious about how much time was being wasted on assemblies and pep rallies and what is essentially endless school spirit marketing from the Development Office to create future donors. (We are in Catholic school.). There is an entire *week* of special parties and themed days (like Polar Express Day) right before Christmas.
I'm sorry, but if the school can waste all the time on BS then I have zero guilt about extending Christmas Break so they can go skiing with their grandparents.
When I worked in truancy court there was a noticeable shift in the kind of kids who ended up there post-2020. Before that they generally fell into one of two buckets: either kids who were obviously biding their time until the state said they could legally drop out or kids (often obviously LGBTQ, if not openly so) whose school experience was so miserable that they just didn’t want to go. After 2020 you started seeing more normal kids who were, like, B-students but blew off school so much that they ended up in truancy court. It was really weird to see.
I don’t know that there’s a causal link between the two but it’s pretty obvious that norms have shifted from the days when it was “you were in school unless you were sick with something more serious than a cold, death in the family, or approved extracurricular activity.” And that extends to parents who are far more shameless about not simply planning family vacations around school breaks.
Given that in some areas there's still a massive social stigma* against going out with a runny nose or lingering cough due to COVID fears, I think it must be nightmarish trying to get kids to come to school when plenty of adults will agree that the kid needs to stay home if they have a scratchy throat. Some kids legitimately do run low-grade colds through the entire winter, and some will take advantage of parents "playing it safe" by letting them stay home.
*One of my friends got a cold this week, and she spent her time recovering on instagram railing against people who go out without masks and "don't stay home even when they feel a cold coming on and know some people are immunocompromised." She's got some online presence so her rambling about how this chest cold was something people maliciously did to her by being reckless and ableist got thousands of likes and reposts.
When my parents went to Europe for two weeks, we stayed with my grandparents and enrolled in the school there. I still remember the Spanish I learned in that two weeks.
Something else not mentioned here is the poor modeling of adults, and that phones provide comfort along with distraction. Dopamine feels good!
Parents are pretty awful models - I'm typing this while I make my kids breakfast bc I know if I'm not early nobody will read my thoughts if I'm not up soon. And for every teacher who stashes it away in their desk all day, there are more who are checking regularly. And this gets more common as students get older. Much easier to check Facebook during a unit quiz; also I can't get dinged for using school property for personal use.
Took a phone from a kid who was watching the tick tock in study hall. Our school let's 14 year olds listen to music on their phones with teacher permission.
I remember sitting in the hall and downloading drug wars from another kid on my calculator. I was sweating bullets. It felt like downloading drugs onto my calculator. I miss safe rebellion.
I was going to ask, Drug Wars wasn't just on the calculator right? It had to be downloaded, right?
All my friends and I did was program choose your own adventure games on to the TI-84. Or occasionally I'd write a program that would flood the screen with random numbers and all you had to do to stop it was turn it off, but it was funny watching other kids get that calculator, press that button, and then sit back in their chair freaked out like "I broke the calculator."
This actually came up on a recent episode of the Search Engine podcast with PJ Vogt. He talked about addicting games and talked to a developer of games for the TI calculators. Definitely not sanctioned by the TI corporation.
Of the ways I screwed around in class, programming my TI-84 was probably the most productive. Hell if I had stuck with that, maybe I'd be in programming now.
I'm 100% in favor of this policy, but as others have pointed out, the enforcement can't be half-assed. When I was a sub, I tried to enforce no phone rules at first, realized the office rarely found that a problem worth dropping everything to take care of, and eventually decided to pick my battles. Granted, a sub has less buy-in than the regular teacher, but sstill, rules gotta be enforced otherwise they ain't rules.
Secondly, I'm surprised teacher's unions are backing the phone bans. In blue states at least, teacher's unions have been on board with the equity agenda to relax school behavior standards. In my experience, most teachers really do hate this. Either one of two things is happening. Either this is cynically part of the broader push away from keeping track of anything, similar to the push to eliminate standardized tests, OR the teacher's unions themselves are completely ideologically captured. I'm leaning towards the second. Sure, teachers are human and don't like having their performance evaluated any more than anybody else, but they don't want their day to day jobs to be miserable, and working in an out of control class is miserable. The way the unions are often out of step with their own members is something an enterprising policymaker could exploit.
My AP bio teacher's rule was that you put your phones in this set of sleeves she had hanging from the closet door at the start of class, which might be randomly checked. If you forgot to put it away once, you get a warning; after that your participation grade for the class was capped at 75%, which came out to -6.25pp off your final grade. I did the math quickly and was very good about putting my phone away.
That would work in a class like your AP Bio class where presumably all the kids there care. A lot different to enforce in a school where a solid half the kids just don't care, but you still have to keep a lid on things for the sake of the other half (or for the sake of a typically apathetic kid who decides to pay attention that day).
The ideology is more like "rules are disproportionately enforced against poor students/students of color" (because those also happen to be disproportionately the students breaking the rules) but in practice it turns into non-enforcement of rules because if the other kids aren't breaking the rules you can't simply enforce them just as hard against kids who aren't breaking them.
The peak of absurdity I witnessed around this was a white principal explaining to a black gym teacher that he couldn't really discipline a black student because something something equity.
Edit: ftr, she didn't use those words exactly, but was saying stuff about how removing kids from class isn't fair and we've got these new guidelines from the state yada yada
Alternative theory: teachers unions do what teachers want and teachers really hate dealing with phones in class rooms. Not everything needs a nefarious explanation.
My experience as a college student (been a few years now!) is that technology was basically a zero or a negative in terms of value-add. When teachers stopped writing on the board and just lectured from powerpoints, kids would just print out the slides and watch the lecture instead of taking notes. Aside from learning programming or doing fancy modeling with Mathematica or Maple, I think computers are pretty useless for most classes, and even in those technical subjects they are often a net negative for live classroom instruction.
I did physics the best was when they walked through the notes on chalkboard but also provided you with a hard copy at the end so u at least had one version in writing you knew was correct. Never had an effective math or physics lesson that involved really any technology, other science classes a little different getting the slides ahead of time helped me follow easier and take more effective notes in the rare cases I printed the slides and brought them to class. But yeah I would have never predicted how ineffective technology would be at bettering education when I was younger. My dad was taught how to become a math whiz with just a slide rule.
I mean, when the teachers put up the assignments for the day on the board, I just opened up the book and did the work because I was so bored from listening to the teacher..
The worst lectures are the ones where they're reading from the book and want you to take notes. Why should I just be copying what's already in the book?
I’m a high school educator and have spent ten years at the same charter high school in Brooklyn. We have never allowed phones. Initially this was a NYC DOE policy that was rightly removed by the DeBlasio administration, as once every kid had a phone, they wound up paying corner stores and cell phone storage trucks to keep them stored for the day. (Yes, an entire economy existed that profited off of high school students storing their devices.)
However, when the ban was lifted, school buildings had an option to continue the policy. We did and created a system of collecting phones when students enter the building and storing them in a locked box for them. We give them out to each last period teacher to administer. This works because we are also a scanned school (students come through airport level security to enter school).
We have never, to my knowledge and memory, had a student suspended because of a phone with this system.
While many students say that they feel imprisoned by the phone ban, many come back after graduation and are grateful for it retrospectively. Taking this long of a break from a device is healthy, especially for adolescents who are in an important time for brain development.
I think this is the sort of system you'd need (airport scanners at school entrances) to really make this policy work. I'm not necessarily agianst it, but it would be very costly, and have very dystopian vibes
I agree that scanners are dystopian, but it is also the norm in urban high school settings. In schools like those, I don’t see how dropping phones off is a problem. Many of them scan and then permit phones.
At the same time, taking phones when kids enter a school building doesn’t seem to like it would be dystopian, even without scanning systems. Kids can drop them off; if they don’t do so, there are greater consequences for when they appear in a classroom. I don’t see how a policy like this would be a problem to implement.
Granted, families choose to send their kids to charter schools, but they may react negatively in a traditional district setting.
On the whole, this type of policy takes organizational thinking, buying a lock box organizer and human capital, but I don’t see how it isn’t worth it.
I agree! But what doesn't come across as dystopian in NYC might be different in suburban North Carolina (where I'm from)—I can imagine lots of people here reactively negatively against scanners on purely aesthetic grounds
I don't think so. It just takes an expectation that phones are supposed to go to a certain place coupled with real repurcussions for breaking the rules. It's not actually hard to enforce rules, as long as it's done at the school level rather than each teacher having to manage their own policy that has no buy-in from admin.
To me, it seems like a big issue that phones are very easily hidden. When the probability of being caught for rulebreaking is low, in my experience, noncompliance is usually high.
Yep—I think we see this problem in lots of areas (drug laws, etc.). The only exception I can think of is tax avoidance (probability of being audited is low, but people generally try to follow the rules).
I think it's more that if you have a normal job that pays you above board, it's hard to hide income because your employer has to report it to the IRS.
Now -- child support enforcement is a different matter. Lots of employees who want to be paid "off the books" do so more to avoid child support than to avoid taxes.
My sense is it’s less that there was really an affirmative argument than that there was slippage between kids bringing dumbphones to school and then a whole new class of devices came along that’s also called phones.
i'm starting to think what people claim is path dependency and status quo is influenced by a survivorship bias, and therefore creates a self-justifying loop.
There is an affirmative argument for phones in high schools, and it’s the one many of us (including me) make at the prestigious public high school where I teach. Here it is: much of high school work involves writing. This work needs to be done both in the classroom and “at home,” which really just means outside of class — many students do HW during free periods. Very few people write essays by hand these days, and while this is making a comeback in the ChatGPT age, it wouldn’t make much sense to make students do ALL their writing by hand; it would also be maddening for teachers trying to decipher the handwriting of a generation that was taught to expect to type. So, high school students need to be able to type during school, not just in class but on their own. The ideal situation, in my opinion, would be for all students to have a school laptop that is owned and managed by the school, so the school can block the biggest distractions (games and social media). That situation doesn’t exist. The situation that DOES exist at my school is that some (mostly wealthier) kids have computers and iPads and other (mostly poorer) kids don’t. But they ALL have smart phones. So a policy of making kids lock up their phones at the start of the day would, in fact, be inequitable: wealthier kids could still do their homework during their frees, while poorer kids would have to fight for spots at the few school computers. In order to ban phones at my school, we would need to stop asking our students to use COMPUTERS— and that’s a big ask for everyone. It would force teachers to stop asking kids to wacth educational videos, read PDFs, search for news articles, do language practice via apps, play math games on Desmos, create digital art projects, and much more. So from my perspective, when we are talking about banning phones in high schools, we need to be talking about making every school what is called a 1-to-1 school, meaning that the school provides every kid with a school laptop. That would be great. But I think it’s important to reckon with the full cost of the ask.
Note that I don’t think my arguments apply to elementary schools. They might apply to some middle schools, though.
Okay I guess that wasn’t an affirmative argument for phones per se. It’s an argument that phones = little computers the school system doesn’t have to pay for. Students do need computers, and schools don’t have enough money, so phones meet a need.
But nobody ever really explained why they started allowing kids to bring dumbphones to school, either. In the early 2000s bringing a phone to school usually meant you were a drug dealer, so they were completely banned -- like, you couldn't even have it in your locker, you just had to leave it in your car all day.
by the mid 2000s dumb phones were common in my school and you only got in trouble for using it in class (and barely in trouble anyway as long as you kept it on silent).
The reason is that cellphones became cheap and common. It's easy to have a rule that you can't have X when most people don't have X but once everyone has X enforcing the rule is much harder.
But I started noticing in 2001 that everybody at the football game had a cell phone -- but they were still banned at school and students took that rule seriously.
I would guess that well over half my classmates (including me) had dumbphones by 7th grade in the mid-2000s. I think they were supposed to be left in lockers or zipped up in backpacks and occasionally someone would be warned or have one taken away for the period if their use was blatant, but there was plenty of under-the-table texting (actually much easier with multitap on physical keypads—the pro move was to type and send an entire message from your pocket without seeing the screen). This was definitely a distraction that in some ways presages the issues we're considering here, but I think the overall burden on the class was closer to physical note-passing, just with moderately lower odds of getting caught. For most schools I don't think this was felt to outweigh the usually-uncontroversial benefit of middle schoolers being able to, e.g., call their parents and let them know the bus broke down or their bike got a flat or whatever.
In my admittedly biased memory, the people who were still stridently against any student having a phone on school property were mostly (1) just generally suspicious of technology, youths, and any combination of the above, (2) teachers who were really personally annoyed by phone use and watched like hawks, sometimes more disruptive in scolding than the two students silently texting were, or (3) people noticing the emerging source of distraction and worrying about its normalization as the precipice of a slippery slope, most of whom I assume are feeling depressed and vindicated by now.
I feel like the ridiculous school shooting argument is an excuse for parents that just really want to be in touch with their kids 24/7, even if that means during school hours or even in the classroom.
My kids had a teacher who would answer the students' phones when they rang because it was invariably a parent. Teacher would then go on in a way that would totally embarrass the kid. It worked, but I think only a teacher that has worked in a place for a long time at a school where there isn't much parent involvement, as was the case here, could get away with it.
It happens all the time! Reminders of doctors appointment, checking to make sure they are actually in class, can you pick up your cousin from elementary school, etc. Kids tend to ignore their parents' texts, so the calls.
Yeah, I live in actual Newtown and my kids have classmates who are the younger siblings of victims. The "school shooting" excuse is not just ridiculous, but dangerous.
If your kid is in an actual school shooting they are supposed to be in lockdown and absolutely silent.
Smartphones ringing and kids wasting time looking for their phone to call parents INCREASES the danger during an actual shooting. It means they are making noise and not getting into hiding as quickly as possible. And the teacher is wasting time dealing with the extra chaos of thirty kids all needing to call mom instead of locking the door and getting the kids in a closet as fast as possible.
You want the classroom as dark and quiet as can be.
"My kid needs a smartphone because school shootings" is the brainfarts of way too online women who have never been anywhere near an actual school shooting.
Yes! Parents are definitely under the expectation that they should be able to chat with their kids whenever they want and often freak out if their kid doesn’t reply right away.
I'm not a parent, but much of my peer group is, and their preoccupation with school shootings is both sincere and completely insane. I think it's wildly unhealthy and unethical to teach children that they need to be mortally afraid of going to a place they have to be at 35+ hours a week, but like, i'm not in a position to critique their parenting styles - I just think it's messed up to tell kids all the time they're about to get mowed down when they're much more likely to drown at their friend's swimming pool or get hit by a truck backing up in the school parking lot.
Chat throughout the school day? Already a few years ago my millennial nephew was being observed by his parents via his college dining hall’s webcam. They knew what time he had dinner. To me, it feels like a dysfunctional “we are as one” relationship model. (Yeah, we Boomers can probably be blamed for starting on this path.)
I connect it subrationally with the young adults in my city who constantly complain on Reddit about the aspects of city living they find unpleasant (campers, car break-ins, “I feel unsafe!!”) It’s always in the form of an accusation against their new “parents”— the Mayor, the police, some governmental “they” who magically know how to fix these problems yet mysteriously refuse to do so. So much for the adventure that comes with taking on adult responsibility and dealing with new and challenging situations.
(My nephew takes a different route: his boundaries are so firm that no one at all got to go to the wedding; in fact we didn't even hear about it until after it happened..)
Safety. When the shooting starts, kids need to be able to call for help.
Safety and communication. When my child is bullied or a teacher treats her badly, I need to be able to hear about it.
Communication. Parents and their children routinely text/whats app with each other during school. They’re used to being able to chat.
Theft/property rights. I’ve purchased a $1500 device for my kid and no societal failure grifting $50k a year off the local working man is going to take it away from her. If someone at school takes it, I will consider it theft. I pay your salary. You work for me and that means my kid gets to have her device.
Responsibility. It’s the teacher’s and school’s job to manage the classroom. When my kid is at home, I’m the boss and she knows how to behave. If she’s not behaving at school, then it is because the school is doing a bad job.
Denial or always siding with child. My kid never does this at home. I talk to her. She’s so smart and says she works very hard on all her assignments. She says she thought she was allowed to have her phone out and was just using it to look something up for class. I believe my child and think the teacher/admin just has it out for her.
Just noting that the “it’s schools’ fault” point has been made in this comment section and is, like the others, not a straw man but a belief many parents and members of the public genuinely hold.
You have provided the reason why most teachers tell me that they do not take phones away from kids when they break the phone ban. They do not want to be accused of breaking an expensive device.
Does anyone remember when Stuyvesant High School banned phones? (Maybe it still does?) There was an enterprising person who would drive a van over to the school in the morning where kids would pay to check their phones and he would return at school dismissal to return them. Maybe making something like this national would be a good business opportunity.
The FEMA training for CERT (Citizen Emergency Response Team) volunteers teaches command structure all the way down to pairs of responders designating a leader who issues the final decision about an action. First responders always operate according to a hierarchy that results in only one command from one person at a time. Multiple parents communicating with kids during an event (active shooter, fire, earthquake, whatever) would seriously interfere with this tried-and-true system for saving lives.
The very fact that parents insist on kids having phones in the first case indicates to me that parents would not be able to resist questioning commands from the teacher and from first responders. “No, don’t stay in the corner, climb out the window!” “Are you sure the door’s locked? Go and check!” (Multiply this by ten parents simultaneously giving advice and undermining the teacher’s authority.)
I mean, look at Uvalde where parents were prevented from entering the school by police. I think exactly that kind of confusion is what will continue to happen.
You can find some of these sentiments expressed by commenters right here on SB. I assure you that, despite my somewhat tongue in cheek presentation of these positions, there are many who genuinely hold them.
Had I called or texted my parents for basically any reason during the school day, beyond a catastrophic event, I can guarantee you my phone would have been gone the second I got home. A school shooting is one thing, complaining about a teacher or a kid at lunch is another thing.
And while I agree that teachers need to manage classrooms better, if you talk to a lot of them, you'll find out they can't because they are being prohibited from doing so. Parents are constantly overstepping and district administrators won't defend teachers when they try to. That's a problem.
When the shooting starts your kid needs to be silent and get in lockdown mode as fast as possible. Their teacher needs to be 100 percent focused on getting the class in lockdown and locking the door.
And that one kid who forgot to silence their phone while they are in lockdown? Well, one ring, and now the shooter knows the room is occupied and all their classmates are dead.
Phones in class are a safety HAZARD during a shooting.
There are many parents who look at how school shootings are handled, expect the police response to be too slow (MSD, Uvalde), and would prefer to attempt to retrieve their child.
Matt makes that case, either that it's a matter of individual responsibility and liberty (your hobby horses) to best use your own time in school (and maybe there's even a chance that they find a better use of their time, or optimize it?)
And that it's a matter of safety for parents who want to know where their kids are, or give them more independence before and after class.
Yes the problem is at least half parent. But some how parents kept their precious snowflakes safe before smartphones existed. We could resurrect that technology
I think it's a little more complicated than that, and this is where it overlaps with the teen social media issue, that there's a collective action problem.
If some parents don't want their kids to have phones, it impacts the kid by being cut out of a lot of socializing, and becomes an endless fight between the kid and parent.
A bit like in my day, Pokemon cards were distracting, but when they were banned, and only a few kids managed to bring them to school, it became a lot less distracting because there was no one else to trade with anymore.
My kids are currently 3 so well short of the age where you'd even consider them having a smartphone (or even a phone, for that matter), but I'm dreading the day when I'm the one making my kids ostracized because they're the only kids at their school who don't have one.
I don’t think that’s a meaningful claim. We could similarly say that somehow people in cars were safe enough to be happy before airbags and seatbelts were invented and we should just go back to that. Just claiming that we were fine with one way of doing things so others should be fine with not using new development since then isn’t very meaningful.
No, kids are safer today. I often wonder that is because of what is called "helicopter parenting." People make fun of it, but perhaps it does keep kids safer.
Even if true, "safer" does not mean "better" or "more healthy". The elevation of safety above all other considerations is a very bad trend, for children and adults alike.
This is a big part of Haidt's ideas. Kids today suffer very few injuries -- no broken bones, no cuts, contusions, etc., but that is actually bad in the long run. They don't explore, don't fail and then succeed, don't learn how to overcome. etc.
Back when a swing was an old tire suspended with rope tied to a tree limb, and we swam in lakes and rivers instead of chlorinated pools, and didn’t wear helmets when biking or knee pads when skateboarding, and rode in the bed of pickup trucks on the highway?
There was certainly some discussion in our area about the need for communication during an emergency. I proposed a “feel free to come grab your phone from the front of the class if you have reason to believe there is a shooter on campus” rule.
Smartphones are a part of life that isn't going away, so schools should be finding ways to teach and model healthy use, rather than just banning it. That probably looks more like 'no phones during class' than 'phones confiscated at the school gate'.
Maybe the schools could teach about DND, Focus Modes, good time management, etc? But they can barely teach reading as it is, so maybe wishful thinking.
Do we think that having zero exposure to the challenges of using phones healthfully will magically result in good habits in college, the workforce?
If the White House takes a position on banning cell phones in classrooms then all these Republicans trying to constructively address the issue will do a 180.
I too am a bit skeptical of Republicans going full Cleek's Law [https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=cleek%27s%20law], but I would be concerned as a more general observation of education polarization making Republicans more skeptical about education in general, and perhaps using this as one issue of many to make the case to roll back public support of it.
Yes, the libertarian wing of the Republican Party would seem to naturally hate smart phone bans, so it’s actually pretty surprising to me that these bans are popular in red states. I could definitely imagine Josh Hawley for example switching from proposing pretty radical limits on social media companies to loudly mocking the “nanny state” and proclaiming that “parents— not teachers— should decide when and where their children can use smart phones”.
The libertarian wing wouldn’t hate smartphone bans in school. The only people who are confused about adults being the bosses of kids are the prog left.
I could see that possibly, but I think it's highly unlikely. If there was a popular backlash to the bans among parents then I could see him jumping on the bandwagon. Otherwise I think he would come down on the side of what would be best for educational outcomes.
A prosperous suburb of my city introduced the Yondr pouches this year because they felt it was the only way to truly enforce the phone ban without putting undue burden on teachers. The result? Tons and tons and tons of parents complaining. But teachers being thrilled with the results. They say the students talk to each other more, there is less fighting and bullying, more cooperation in the classroom, and kids actually engaging with content.
I don't have a lot of sympathy for the "I have to get in touch with my kid" argument, although I completely understand the anxiety of not being able to. First responders say that people should be paying attention to what is around them and directions from teachers, police, EMTs, etc, not paying attention to phones. And phones can spread false information like wildfire. I saw this at my own kid's high school a few years ago. There was a melee at the school. It WAS chaos with a lot of fights, and something like 18 kids got arrested and many more suspended. First of all, the students wouldn't have been able to coordinate like that - pulling alarms, starting fights, etc simultaneously - without phones. Secondly, all kinds of exaggerated information spread fast between kids and parents - that several people had gotten stabbed, that police were beating up students, that the block around the school was on fire - all of which were completely false, but which led to parents rushing over to the school and being more of a hindrance to resolving the situation than a help.
I've been really skeptical of the Yondr patches--they seem like an unneeded cost as opposed to just turning in the phone into cheap school controlled lockers at the door, and unlocking them at the end of the day.
I actually think that you might be underrating the negatives of heavy smartphone use even for high-performing, high-intelligence students. These kids will still do fine at regular schoolwork (because for most of K-12, it’s going to be pretty easy for them and not use anything like their full capability range), but the cognitive effort that they put into things like social media-based social network management make it harder for them to go deep on the sorts of self-directed intellectual exploration which will set them up to do great things later. Bored smart kids will accomplish more if they surreptitiously read or program games on their TI-84s or fiddle around with IMO problems while not paying full attention in class than if they’re just optimizing their Snapchat streak leaderboard rankings.
You made me think of my son's friend who attended Harvard. When he went to his orientation, several other students recognized him as the person who - at some point - had the greatest number of Karma points (or whatever they are called) on Reddit.
My hot take as a parent of 2 kids, aged 13 and 17: phones need to be out of the classroom (mandated in our middle school but not our high school) AND all the tech trends for using laptops in class are a goddamn disaster. The enthusiasm for tech has vastly outpaced the guardrails. The kids are busy playing during class time. Meanwhile the school blew off one kid’s handwriting issues with “he’ll just type” then it turned out that a laptop was too distracting and he has to do everything on paper. Smart.
One of the worst things about sending my kid to kindergarten is finding out they are already required to have little ipads (that we have to keep charged and will have to pay for if lost or broken or stolen). Why is this useful, let alone necessary in Kindergarten?
I didn't have a laptop in class until law school (which dates me, I know) but probably explains why I was a C-student in law school after spending basically my entire life prior to that as an A/B-student.
Apple could avoid this whole discourse by just creating "parent mode" where a kid's phones is locked between defined hours A and B (i.e., school), except for for contact to/from a couple of approved contacts (e.g., mum and dad) and the kid has the option to override the lock (in case of emergency) but it costs like $20 and mum/dad get notified when it happens. Could even give half the money to charity, or the school or somehting. Literally just a digital version of Yondr.
I wrote a comment above about this, but I strongly agree and I generally think that technological solutions are imperfect but could be very useful. I'm surprised that there's not legislation toward something like this.
Apple is unlikely to do this unless there’s serious cultural and political pressure. The highest-margin and fastest growing chunk of their revenues comes from taking a cut of the economic activity that happens in the iPhone ecosystem, so habituating people to use it all the time (even before their big spending years) is important to their long-term prospects.
I find it nuts that this is an argument at all, for Christ sake. I don't think you need reams of academic studies to know that powerful distraction machines are detrimental for learning. Feels very much like an issue where Journalists and Policy Makers can't see the wood for the trees. Just get the kids to put their phones in a box at the front of the classroom! It's not hard
Definitely a situation that has fallen prey to this idea that you can't make any decisions without a perfect casual study because otherwise you're not listening to the Science.
Those arguments are ALWAYS motivated. It's always a cover up for some other things going on in people's minds.
I think the whole reason this is an issue and not just common sense by everyone is that a lot of people LIKE their own phones and also don't want to upset their moody teenagers. When I've taken my own teen daughter's phone for whatever reason she makes sure to give me the most contemptuous look I've ever seen and then act out in the most spiteful way for the rest of the day. Our anti-discipline society causes us to live in absolute fear of children & teens. As a society we've given kids so much power that we can't really effectively parent them.
I was a little taken aback by Matt suggesting it was “paternalistic” to restrict teens’ access to smartphones—like, they are not yet adults, aren’t they supposed to be getting parental guidance (and in school, teachers providing that guidance).
He didn't mean it pejoratively. He was making the point that, historically at least, we EXPECT schools to be paternalistic.
We also expect parents to be paternalistic (because, after all, IT'S LITERALLY WHERE THE WORD COMES FROM) and yet.
As a teacher and parent, I am really shocked how seldom other parents restrict or take away their kids’ cellphones. For me, it’s the best leverage for cooperation I have: they want to earn cellphone privileges back. Other parents seem afraid to incur the temporary wrath of a mad teenager.
The degree to which so many adults don't want to be adults in relation to the children they are responsible for is absolutely appalling to me as a parent.
And then there is the weird discrepancy towards the way parents are lax towards screens but micromanage everything else.
Adults will regulate the most minute aspect of children's free play with other children or their time outdoors, but then have zero rules for anything digital and act almost offended at the idea that they have to provide guidance in the realm of screen use.
I think what it really is is that many adults don't want to voluntarily give up their own bad habits, so they are lax with their kids about the things they want to be lax about with themselves.
But they know this is lazy AF, and that as parents they need to regulate something or at least publically perform some kind of regulatory parenting (it's my experience that about 90% of being a mom - at least in suburban Connecticut - is Performing Good Motherhood to avoid the judgement of the other Good People). So the authoritarian energy gets excessively channelled into telling kids they aren't allowed to go play in the woods or ride their bikes around the neighborhood because of "ticks" and "kidnappers," or into micromanaging kids interactions at the park for even the slightest breach of "Kindness."
It's all so backwards.
It's the opposite of the way I was raised in small town Michigan - my parents were absolute fascists about our TV and video game time, but gave F all about what we did all day in the woods or around the neighborhood.
Absolutely! My son is Gen Z, and using his favored electronics, whether it was the Nintendo Wii, Gameboy, PS Vita, Playstation, PC games when he was younger, to the phones and consoles when he was older, these were always the carrots and sticks in my parenting toolbox! Nightly I would take either the controllers and power supplies, or later on the actual phone until later in high school (and in retrospect I should have continued to take the phone at night then!), and he did not get a smart phone until his first year in high school, and he was not allowed to take it to school until again, later in high school (with same retrospect regret). it was the most direct way to ensure homework and chores got done, and bedtime actually happened for the bulk of his tween to teen years - definitely don't understand the reluctance of parents to use these most effective objects for reward/discipline!
Another reason why my daughter won't be getting a smart phone.
Ty
Good man. She’ll thank you one day.
She almost certainly won't. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't do it if you feel it's in her best interest.
I've taken a much more permissive stance on screen time with my kids with mixed results. So I definitely understand why parents would take a hard line here.
It's a bit tough to deny them something that is so integral to society these days. There are phone options out there that restrict what apps they can use and give parents lots of control. I'd recommend something like that.
If it is integral to whatever society they are part of, then you can try to find a subculture where it is not integral.
This is one of the reasons we are dropping out of conventional schooling and joining the local homeschool community. None of the kids have smartphones. None of their activities require it. Free play and getting together in person is the norm, as is paper and pencil school work.
I know not everyone can alter their lives that radically, but a lot of people can if it is important to them.
Also, I think the phones are less integral than people think they are. There is a big difference between "my kid needs this to be cool" and "my kid actually needs this to perform a required function."
"Being cool" is very overrated, even counterproductive to happiness and developing a real personality.
My parents never cared about me being cool or "fitting in." The fact that their not letting us have all the things the other kids had or watch the shows other kids watched would make us "less cool" was actual a feature, not a bug, for them, because they thought learning to resist the need to "fit in" would make us freer and more independent adults.
And it worked, and I am SO GRATEFUL for that.
I find it both surprising and sad how many parents actually prioritize their child "fitting in" or "being cool."
They can get a flip phone at the point they need one
I think this is a real dynamic but I'd expect it to apply everywhere _except_ at school. If the school takes away my kid's phone, that's kind of not my problem - it happens at school not while I'm around and they have to enforce it. It's the one no-phone case a non-confrontational parent get for free.
(FWIW my pet theory is that the real driver is a small number of anxious and vocal parents who for some reason want the trackability/reachability of their child having a working phone on them at all time.)
"As a society we've given kids so much power that we can't really effectively parent them."
I pretty strongly disagree with this. As I see it, kids are subject to far more adult supervision than at virtually any point in human history. They are held to relatively high standards (college used to be for the privileged few, now its considered the main path to success, etc.). And their ability to make their own choices and build their own life is often delayed to a much later point than it used to be. The fact that we've become less disciplinarian in some ways—like, idk, we recognize them as human being who can't be beat with a cane for speaking out of turn—doesn't really negate the rest of this stuff for me.
I'd also point out that smart phones are the device through which teens' relationships operate in the modern world. Cutting a teen off from that is effectively removing them from their social circles. Of course they don't like it! (Haidt gets this—that's why he emphasizes the importance of parents' making these decisions as a group rather than for their individual children)
EDIT:
Remembered this gem while I was responding to another comment...
https://twitter.com/paulisci/status/1636490564962234368?lang=en
It feels paradoxical because we're really talking about two different sets of parents. There are the stereotypical helicopter parents, and then there are the parents who thought that it was great that they could hand their kid a smartphone and distract him with it.
The latter group both have a way of keeping tabs on their kid at all times -- they can quite literally track the kid using his iPhone -- but have no idea that he's inhaling Andrew Tate content on YouTube because they're that disconnected from the kid.
It’s a reversal of mid century parenting. Back then, kids had wide latitude outside the house, but strict discipline inside. And your mom would kick your ass up and down the street if she heard you’d been rude to an adult. Now, kids have far less freedom, but also little discipline or expectations for manners. The worst combination of hovering and permissiveness.
I’m skeptical that kids-being-rude has significantly increased. By most reports, kids’ treatment of each other is much better than it used to be - much less bullying, etc. I would be surpised if that trend was somehow the opposite for kids’ treatment of adults.
What seems more likely to me is that as social norms change, people of older generations find themselves uncomfortable with new modes of communicating. Thus:
https://twitter.com/paulisci/status/1636490564962234368?lang=en
If you're truly taking the long view of human history then the norm was for children to start working, usually in their parents occupation, as soon as they were old enough to. And in most cultures their parents married them off (usually the parent's choice of parter) and that's when adulthood and "making their own choices" began.
So I think you're setting up an idealized view of the past that may only apply to very recent time periods in very developed countries, if it applies at all.
I'm not suggesting that people in general were "more free" in the past—I don't think they were. Just that adulthood came sooner and childhood was less discplined (though, granted, when discipline did come, my impression is that is tended to be harsher).
Unfortunately, quite a few parents honestly don't think about screen time negatively. They raise their kids with the TV just on by default, their kids watch Netflix with the sound on at restaurants, their kids watch TikToks at school instead of paying attention, they expect their kid to grow up an have the TV on by default, watch TikToks at work instead of paying attention, etc. These parents are good people, they want their children to be successful, but the causal relationship between time spent scrolling vs. time spent reading and writing more in-depth work, which seems so urgently clear to me, doesn't seem that way to them.
I just can’t believe somebody just mentioned Drug Wars in a political blog post in 2024 what a throwback. Hail all nerds from the nineties!
I'm a little older so our distraction was secretly playing Mattel handheld football and trying to muffle the beeps.
But I'm curious - how did you get the game on the calculators? Download from a PC or something?
You needed a transfer cable and a friend who had it, and they could send it to you. OG digital virality.
It’s a good comparison to where schools seem to be today. I recall kids being caught playing the Mattel football in class and the teacher confiscating it on the spot. No one thought that was any great injustice.
The difference here is the calculator games were on a device that was useful and often needed for the class.
A smart phone isn’t used for class work. What I’m saying is that a school with a no-phones policy should allow and encourage teachers to confiscate a phone if they see one.
>A smart phone isn't used for class work
This could be *made* to be the case if phones were banned, but it's definitely not true by default right now. Among other things, plenty of students use TI-84 emulator apps rather than purchase the device, or use mobile browsers to access Desmos or real-time quiz activities.
I was only comparing to the Mattel football games.
Oh yes I remember that it was no super tecmo bowl but it did the job!
And also, keep those damn kids OFF MY LAWN...
Or leave them in their locker
Every elementary school I’ve been at has pretty successful smartphone bans. What I hear from hs teachers is in today’s actual environment enforcement is really hard and since no one is afraid of the consequences school can give in some cases literally dangerous.
I’m in a war for attention with the God damned Chromebooks and I hate that I’m saying this but technology has been a disaster. I think there’s incredibly cool opportunities to do really interesting projects with technology and I feel like I’ve done a few of them. But it’s mostly just a cost saving measure that’s absolutely a tax on my sanity compared to having a computer lab and enough resources for pen and paper. I’ve done stuff I’m really proud of with computers but it’s a small minority of the time they use them. I’ve had one good online curriculum.
It’s mostly been a trash fire of problems, and I’m the tech saavy teacher who enjoys these things.
>What I hear from hs teachers is in today’s actual environment enforcement is really hard and since no one is afraid of the consequences school can give in some cases literally dangerous.
Yes. There were a lot of reasons why I quit teaching, but if I had to pick one thing that made the actual *teaching* part awful (as opposed to all the non-teaching stuff like the pay, the paperwork, etc.), it would be this. Simply put, I did not decide to do the job because I wanted to spend my days cajoling and nagging and gently nudging students to follow rules. I think my second week of teaching I told two students to stop talking and said I'd separate them, and the one says to me, "We'll just talk across the whole classroom instead of quietly like we're doing now, do you really want that, Mr. U?" and then I threatened to write them a referral and he laughed and said "Mr. U, nobody gives a shit about no damn referral." So, of course, I called his bluff -- but he was right. He didn't give a shit, and admin didn't really either. They had bigger problems than a kid talking back to me.
So, of course, what is one supposed to do? You can't do basically any discipline *in* the classroom other than speaking sternly, which might work well on the conscientious kid who's normally good and is just acting up today but is basically useless against someone who is checked out of the idea of being a 'good kid' altogether. I've had kids start screaming at me, telling me they were going to beat my ass, when I threatened to take their phones etc. Fortunately I am a really big dude so I was not particularly threatened, but if I was a small woman (like many teachers!) I can imagine being terrified to enforce the rules in my class because of how kids might react.
You seem to be making a pretty good case to bring back corporal punishment.
I think it is good that corporal punishment is no longer in typical public schools. It's generally quite bad, destroys the relationship with the student, and most problems can be resolved without it.
The issue, as Matt points out, is that the continued presence of openly defiant and disruptive students totally destroys the behavioral environment for the rest of the students who are just normal kids -- i.e., prone to misbehaving on occasion but also not 'bad'.
My preferred solution (which would get me crucified by just about everyone in education grad schools) is to remove these children from the environment. If their parents want to continue their education, they can put them in a school specifically designed for such pupils that uses other, stricter methods. Otherwise, they can take care of the kid themselves.
This would be probably be net worse for those children, but we are talking about a very small % of students. It would make the environment so much better for everyone else in so many ways that it doesn't really matter to me if some kids fall through the cracks and get left behind.
In other words, "no child left behind" is dumb even as a general concept. It should be, "no child allowed to hold 90% of other children back."
Not that I want kids using or selling drugs, but it is outrageous to me that students caught doing that will be expelled fairly quickly, but the students who disrupt the classroom every day are tolerated.
I think the threat of corporal punishment would mean that it wouldn't actually have to be used that much. When there is no threat of real punishment, people act out a LOT more.
As with most things there needs to be a balance. Punishments can be abused. But lack of them also causes a lot of problems.
Also, sending bad kids to another school only partially fixes the problem. Those kids still need to be taught, and hopefully educated so they don't just move on to crime and prison.
Adults seem to be acting out more as well, yet nobody is saying that means bosses should get to spank employees or married couples can non-consensually spank each other for getting out of line.
I've actually seen some argument for physical punishment versus jail sentences
I made the argument a while back that most physical punishments wouldn't be as bad as being cancelled online.
It’s definitely true that schools have to figure out how to discipline kids. Apparently there used to be a program in my county where kids were put to work, and basically had to earn back hours of schooling. We have to find programs that are not cruel but that kids fear. They have lost all fear.
Our exhaustion with the Chromebooks and all the fancy "cool" projects is why we are pulling our kids from their Catholic school and putting them in a classical homeschool hybrid program next year.
The school is completely failing to provide any discipline or solid foundations in basic arithmetic, phonics, or reading. The entire fourth grade is still doing remedial arithmetic because the third grade teacher literally let the apps teach the kids all day (when I objected that I wasn't paying 7k for my kid to be on EPIC! Books all day or play video games I was told this was the "future" of education.). Kids shout out tiktok memes all day in class and screw around on the chromebooks. One of my sixth grader's recent assignments was to play an "Escape Room" video game.
I'm all done. I'm so ready for a good, boring education where they do things like read real books, diagram sentences, and memorize their times tables - and then have their fun and games outside of school, with some old fashioned free play.
Yikes this was a Catholic school? That’s depressing. I thought the Catholic schools were more likely to hold the line on old fashioned education…
Always look for ones run by Jesuits as opposed to directly by the Archdiocese.
I'm a Jew who has my kids in an Archdiocese school. What's the difference in terms of education?
This is just a generalization but I'd say Jesuit schools tend towards being more rigorous. Jesuit schools also tend to be targeted more towards low-income communities. Cristo Rey is the best known of these. I think they do a great job.
Disclosure: I am biased as I think the Jesuits should be a model for Catholicism.
The ones run directly by the Archdiocese have a tendency to veer into white flight schools.
It depends too. Some Archdioceses stay pretty hands off, some do not. Some Jesuit schools are still linked to the Archdiocese (like where I live), some are not.
Jesuits do a great job (I attended a Jesuit college as did my husband) but to your point, they do focus more on low income areas and in some (many) cases all boys schools. There are lots of good schools out there in the Dominican, Franciscans, Visitation, Sacred Heart out there as well.
Catholic schools run by a diocese tend to chase the pedagogical trends in public schools because most of their teachers and admin come out of the same sorts of schools of education, though at nominally Catholic universities (aka Sacred Heart or Fordham instead of UConn or SUNY).
And once they buy the iPads and Chromebooks they are going to use them under the justification of "we spent the money", though the line given to parents is usually some crap like "it's personalized learning.". Translation - if the Chromebook can babysit half the class while a teacher works with the other half there is no need to pay for an aid.
And then you have all the politics that comes with tuition paying and scheming private school parents. There are always kids who "can't be failed" or "can't be disciplined."
Catholic schools where we live are just credentialing factories to get into "the best college." Anything that compromises that, including a discipline record, is treated by a lot of parents like a breach of contract and they lose their sh*t. So admin shruggs at everything and figures that in th jungle the strongest will survive.
I feel like an escape room as a once in a while activity can be useful and test a lot of regular old fashioned skills. You need to find the central idea of the text in order to proceed etc.
I think there's still some really cool learning projects like to do character point of view I had students create skits from their novel study unit. (how did this character see it, how did the other character see it?) and like yes you could do that in front of the whole class and sort of consume several days of class time but webcams allowed them to create them semi-privately in between traditional seat work so it's not the whole focus of what we were doing that day.
Only $7k for private school?! Perhaps you get what you pay for.
Catholic schools are often subsidize by the church.
Some of our local ones were $5k for parishioners pre-covid. (~10-12k for non parishioners)
Thought about faux-converting to take advantage of it.
I’m aware they are subsidized, didn’t realize it was quite that extreme. Clearly if they are just putting kids on an iPad all day, they are cutting corners on instruction.
They are *parochial* schools, aka part of a parish community, and heavily subsidized by it.
It's a very different system than independent private schools.
Catholic schools are usually cheaper.
Comes with free inappropriate touch from the priest, too!
I mean...that's one of those jokes that's funny in the abstract but not when you think about actual kids who have to grow up with that shit. And perhaps one of those kids is a subscriber here.
I think there's an obvious case for a good, boring education as you term it, but we should also be wide eyed that students are going to goof off, just as they did back in the Good Old Days. That said, there's definitely a case to be had to reduce the distillation of the goofing off, as Matt makes here.
Honestly in this environment part of the advantage of public schools is that they're subject to state testing, which as much as people complain about it, it at least ensures that the kids have to be learning something or heads will roll at the school.
Great comment, but why do elementary schoolers have smartphones at all?? There is a big parenting fail at the root of these problems. These things are bad for social skills, mental health, and academic success. We grew up just fine without them. If you’re worried about reaching your kid in an emergency, get them a dumb phone with only call and text abilities.
Ron DeSantis just outlawed social media for kids under 14 in Florida. Matt's next contrarian piece should be about why he's right.
I wouldn't be surprised if most Democrats are ok with restricting social media for pre-teen kids. Hawley and DeSantis would probably get a lot more traction if they framed it as anything else besides being against "woke capital," which isn't really a thing.
Ron DeSantis could be right now that he knows his political future is shot so he is focusing on legacy decisions. Like he just made an accord with Disney. It’s weird.
I support that but 14 is too young still. Probably shouldn't have social media before 18. Same with smart phones
I hate to agree with Rob D about anything but when he's right (not often), he's right.
The two reasons I hear from parents who've decided to get their kid one are tracking and lengthy after-care or before care stays. I know there are other options but you can slowly release responsibility with a phone as the parental settings on iPhone can be pretty damned limited and they last.
My foster kid goes and comes to school with me and I just keep a few things in my desk for him if I'm still working after he's finished his homework but that's not an option for everyone.
Just pierce their ear and hang a tile or AirTag from it like biologists do when they tag wildlife
"Why is my child sitting in that corner and not moving? Did my child get bullied or beaten up????"
I can’t imagine dealing with crazy parents I salute teachers who try to do a good job
It's so exasperating that the only really substantive argument for letting kids have phones is fear of school shootings--which are incredibly rare, even though in a country with a third of a billion people you're bound to see them on the news constantly. People seem to have no capacity to weigh competing risks in a rational way.
The problem isn't really the devices, though. If minors were banned from social media and video games I think most of the distraction effect would disappear... and the remaining use cases for smartphones might actually have some educational value.
My understanding is that even in a school shooting situation, phones are bad for safety, because they are a distraction and kids need to be paying attention to their environment and the instructions of the adults around them.
It would be interesting to see a study of the amount of media coverage per student death for school shootings vs. car accidents vs. cancer.
> If minors were banned from social media and video games
Yes, once we put the bell on the cat everything will be simple. Nobody authorized Drug Wars in Matt's story. People just installed it on a machine that was supposed to be used for other things.
What I meant to say is that the whole debate about "banning phones in school" involves dumping a lot of effort and responsibility on teachers and principals, which they shouldn't really have to carry.
Social media for minors seems harmful enough that it should be banned legislatively, and then there might be less need for schools to act as enforcers.
I'm not sure you need to be so drastic with video games but maybe there should be a weekly time limit for users under 18, which I think most kids would prefer not to use up in class.
A phone is a physical object which a student can be forced to place somewhere inaccessible during class. Social media and video games are programs which can be installed on that physical object and restricting the ability of children (and only children) to install and operate those programs, or only operate them for limited amounts of time, requires not just legislation but broad technological solutions. I mean, just as a for example, you can access social media and even video games through web browsers, so now you've got to lock down every web browser (but only for children) on every model of phone which a child might possibly have. Can we even stop children from browsing porn in classrooms right now, much less TikTok?
Maybe in the long run you're right and it would be worth doing, but in terms of simple direct action, forcing children to hand in a physical object at the beginning of class could be accomplished so much easier.
agreed with banning social media for under 18 by law.
But the kids still shouldn't have phones in class. If a teacher sees one it should be confiscated till end of day
Long car rides as well. But don't they know that's what Louis Lamour books are for?!
They could always read a book.
I don't think high schoolers need a smart phone either.
Me neither. My rule is sixteen or when you pay for it with money you earn from a job.
Thank you for providing me with a response as to why our son shouldn't have a phone until he can drive!
> no one is afraid of the consequences school can give in some cases literally dangerous.
seems like we have a chronic problem of not suspending or expelling kids frequently enough
I kind of agree but oh man the special ed advocates will come for you with their torches and pitchforks and lawyers.
"we put too much money and effort into special ed" is a position that no one will say out loud but likely has some truth to it
Honestly part of the problem is that the explosion in certain diagnoses (ADHD, autism spectrum) has greatly expanded the number of kids who qualify for "special ed."
When I was in school in the 1990s, "special ed" was for kids who would never be able to function on their own. Now "special ed" is much broader than that.
ADHD is a way for white parents to get their sons into the victim hierarchy, allow them more time to complete assignments and avoid being the only people without an affinity-group.
I can neither confirm nor deny that my sons are going to be tested for every conceivable learning disability as soon as they get within a whiff of genuinely competitive schooling.
That may be true but it does seem like there are some people who have big problems with impulsive behavior or attention-span deficit. Whether labeling that a "medical disorder" is helpful or not is an open-question. But if someone is normally excessively shy it might make having a few drinks at a party a good idea. I don't mean that as a perfect analogy, but I'm just saying that differing brains really do exist and there may be things that are especially helpful for people who have poor impulse control and attention spans.
I don't know it seems to me there's a small number of ADHD patients whose impulse control is so bad it's hard to imagine them functioning normally. It's a small percentage but they exist and you can tell within five minutes if they forgot their medication.
The internet in general and Twitter especially is very weird about ADHD.
As an Autism case from the 80s (then Asperger's). I'm not really sure that's an accurate description of sped then. I feel like there has been a concept creep where weird and shy and being a jerk have all been medicalized.
I like to think that after the last couple of years we've learned the lesson that frothing-at-the-mouth leftists need to be stood up to.
I think if it weren't for the lawyers I agree. The language of ESSA is extremely broad and contains very little for cost-benefit analysis but very little supportive funding. You can push back on the torches and pitchforks but the right to Free Appropriate Education in the least restrictive environment is like just sitting there on a lawsuit t.
And there's a process where you can get an alternative placement, or you can go forward with proving that the behavior isn't related to the disability but the pipeline of experts you need can be quite overstuffed.
The special ed stuff is very bipartisan in my limited experience.
Yeah, because white conservative parents want their kids to get special accommodations.
Suspending or expelling kids who don't want to be in school in the first place is rewarding them for their bad behavior while also making it more likely that they will fail to function as adults. (No, I don't know what the solution is).
When I was in school, in-school suspension was where they went. Out-of-school suspension and expulsion were for kids who the rest of the student body literally needed to be protected from.
Yeah, I think that's what they do where I live now, as well. That also existed when I was a kid, as did a special "alternative school" for particularly egregious cases. (I actually know, as an adult, a kid I went to school with who landed in alternative school for drug possession. He's a very successful and decent adult. I would not have predicted that. Redemption is possible.)
True, but being shown that actions don't have consequences doesn't help them function as adults either. Suspensions are not ideal, but there is something to be said for placing a burden on parents to force them to implement their own punishment on the kid. No, it's not equitable, but I think it's better than the alternative.
Yeah, I think a lot of the issue is that the kids who typically draw out-of-school suspensions and/or expulsions are often the same kids who will face no consequences from their parents, while the kids who would are generally well-behaved enough that they never get to that point.
corporal punishment?
I brought this up last time the topic came up but my high school district had a separate school they sent kids to with "chronic problems". It was ~ a one-way street. As a student, everyone knew there was a very real threat of getting sent there. Kind of thought this was the norm for all big districts but seems to be pretty rare. I support it.
Yes, it's a problem. I believe it is mainly for social justice reasons, but the result has been terrible. Schools across the board are trying to avoid suspensions/expulsions at all cost with the result that they can't implement discipline to protect teachers or other students.
You spelled sacrificing wrong lol
The needs of the many (all the other students) outweigh the needs of the few (disruptive students).
in order to be sacrificed you kinda have to be somewhat blameless, no?
Not according to the Aztecs.
Just pick a student at random every once in a while and sacrifice them it’ll keep the others in line
Use your imagination. We should just put them in the Faraday cage room until they repent their smartphone ways.
One’s more fun. But I guess dead students reduce the federal funding for the school, so maybe you can just incapacitate them for the K12 years
The interesting thing about the use of things like Chromebooks in the classroom is that they don't' seem to be leading to real world skills that would be useful. Pretty much everyone in the private sector agrees that new graduates are worse with technology from a job perspective than their peers 10 years ago were despite growing up surrounded by technology.
The big UX divergence between consumer and enterprise applications is a killer here— the former keep getting smoother and lower effort, while there isn’t anything like the same sort of selection pressure on the latter. (Excel is less clunky than it was when I was a kid, but Snapchat is like, infinitely less clunky and more user-friendly than AIM was.)
I find it insane that chromebooks are cheaper now than pen and paper?
It’s more that they stopped buying textbooks.
It’s about reducing labor costs— the theory is that a teacher can manage more kids without assistance while getting similar learning outcomes if they can let big chunks of the group play educational games for significant chunks of the day. (Empirically, this is not true, but districts struggling with Baumol disease are very motivated to pretend that it is.)
The question is the real reasons for the Baumol effect. Is it so much that hiring teachers is that much more expensive, or that the system lost a lot of efficeincy by hiring a lot of non-teachers with dubious contribution (many kinds of admins, consultants, bureaucrats, outsourcing stuff etc.
Put differently, if we tried to recreate a school of 1960 or 1980, precisely the same staff roles for precisely the same (inflation adjusted) salaries and compensations, would that come out as more expensive than today's school? Would it even come out as more expensive as percent of the district's budget?
I have no idea, but I wouldn't be surprised if the answer is in the negative. I think a huge part of the problem is both deprioritizing education and having frankly stupid ideas about education. There might be some broader, more "ievitable" aggravating factors, but my guess is that they are far less important that the double whammy of the former two.
Teachers’ salaries haven’t risen much on an inflation-adjusted basis since 1980, but their overall real cost of employment has increased considerably (as healthcare benefit costs have sharply increased and increasing lifespans made defined-benefit pension plans significantly costlier to implement— an annuity is a lot more valuable if you live longer!)
It certainly is also the case that the number of school employees per student has increased over that period, and it’s likely that some of that effect is driven by a degree of administrative bloat. But it’s worth noting that, at least in the US, this is partially driven by a widely-socially-agreed-on mandate to educate disabled students within normal schools (instead of sending them to often-far-from-home centralized facilities), which has required a ton of additional labor to both staff (at the classroom level) and administer.
Also the opportunity cost to be a teacher has risen dramatically so the people who are teachers now and in the 1960s are not the same (e.g. an average mathematician can now become a programmer and women have substantially more career options).
Yeah, like, my grandmother who had a grad-level degree in a STEM field from a major university worked as a middle-school science teacher. That would be a lot less likely now.
Sure but is that relevant to the discussion at hand?
Healthcare is a society wide problem (and suggests fixing that would have far more beneficial effects than “just” saving lives in the literal sense!) but for the rest I’m less sure. Life expectancy in the us is now decreasing even if still better than 1980….
As for blot- that’s an important question. What precisely is the level of budgetary burden for the integration of the disabled? Of course it’s a good thing we should be willing to pay a price for, but I also think that all will agree that we shouldn’t agree to pay *any* price for it (just about nothing in this world is literally “whatever the cost”). What exactly is the price and how badly does it “hurt” education overall by effectively constraining other resources? That’s a question we should seriously ask. The good of the minority must always be balanced with the good of the majority. I suspect the effect is not as dramatic as you suggest but without numbers who can say?
I respect your patience to break down the bleeding obvious so meticulously. Of course no phones in school.
Also, how bout parents not give their kids smart phones at ALL till 16? Let them call and text. But also let them learn to fill their time, solve problems, and navigate their neighborhood without the damn thing.
I think this is one of the main goods that will come from Haidt’s book. He’s really really focused on changing parental norms. If there’s enough support in the parent population then you’ll give schools the cover they need to enforce bans.
It feels like there's a very clear divide on this between Gen X parents (who thought smartphones were a good way to distract and monitor their kids) and Millennials (who are skeptical at best that this is an unalloyed good.)
Gen Z coming up with technology in their hands for their entire childhood and the end result of it is causing some people to rethink the way kids are raised, I guess
I really do feel that us elder millennials ended up in an extremely good position with regard to technology. We started using computers young, but with command prompts and such. We didn't have cell phones until high school, social media until our early twenties, and didn't have smart phones until our mid-twenties.
I was somehow a great student who did all my homework with the TV on while talking on the phone.
Not sure if this means I would have fully tipped over the edge and failed out if I had a smartphone, or if kids ability to perform under distraction is underappreciated.
I predict a class divide. More affluent and better educated parents will prohibit smartphones and social media to a fairly advance age, just like they are more aware and able to monitor everything else (nutrition, screen time generally, balanced activities etc.). Poorer kids will get screens and smartphones and social media far earlier and with less supervision. Differing class norms, reflected in the school population, will solidify this gap.
We’re already kinda there, aren’t we? Weren’t there a bunch of articles back in 2014 about how Silicon Valley tech elites were sending their kids to schools that banned all tech?
Yes. I’m building off on that and predicting the inverse digital divide to get ever more stark
It's unsurprising, because Silicon Valley tech elites had a pretty good idea what kids were actually using their school-issued tablets for.
Sure, but I don't think this is something that should be legislated.
But why not? Children are not *supposed* to have as much freedom as adults. They don't have the right to do things that harm their future selves: drinking, smoking, skipping school. Why should they have the right to go to school and end up learning less than they could?
He’s saying that it shouldn’t be illegal to give a kid a phone before 16, beyond the schools stuff.
But all the evidence on damage to attention spans suggests pretty strongly that kids who are constantly on their phones outside of school will end up doing worse in school.
Banning phones during school hours is incredibly weak tea, which makes it a little discouraging that it's even a subject for debate.
We can also ban television, soccer balls, skateboards, Nintendo, and tennis rackets, speakers, as well if we want to legislate what distractions are allowed to be in the house while doing homework.
Of course, it would be inappropriate to use a Nintendo Switch in class (or a skateboard or soccer ball for that matter), and schools would be right to control when and where these things can be used on campus. And for certain things a complete ban at school might be reasonable (just like Tamagachis were banned at school when I was a kid).
Oh boy, Tamagotchis. That was more of a core Millennial digital distraction than it was for cusper Xer/Millennials like Matt and myself. Glad I never went down that rabbit hole.
The jurisdiction of teachers and principals encompasses the classroom not the home.
Yes, schools don't have the authority to dictate what kids do outside of class. But Congress and the state legislatures do.
I keep coming back to the parallel with pornography. As far as I know, there's no reliable research showing that children are harmed when they look at photographs of people having sex. But everyone agrees that it should be made difficult for them to do that.
With social media the evidence of harm is a good deal stronger, so why is it even up for debate that states can ban it for kids?
That’s not necessarily true. Schools have routinely exercised authority outside of school property and courts back this up as long as it’s linked in some way to schools educational purposes. So, like, if you get bullied on the internet by another kid at the school, schools are allowed to do something about it because you’re both their student and the bullying impacts your ability to have a productive school experience. Now, most schools shy away from this stuff unless they absolutely have to confront it, but it’s not because they’re not allowed.
Right this is what I meant.
Schools should definitely be allowed to regulate what kids bring to school.
But I don't think it should be illegal for a parent to give a 12 year old a smart phone if the parent wants to.
There are lots of things parents aren't legally allowed to do to their kids. Whether giving them smartphones belongs in that category is an empirical question: it depends on how harmful it is.
The only reason kids were ever allowed to have smartphones is that initially it wasn't known to be harmful at all. Now that the harm is well established, I think reasonable people can disagree about whether it's severe enough to justify overruling parents' judgments. But new research on that issue always seems to move the needle in just one direction.
Florida is about to test this in federal court, so let's see how it goes. But I think it would be a huge mistake for the Supreme Court to make a sweeping decision in favor of children's free-speech rights when the empirical evidence is still so limited. States should have the flexibility to test policies like these without being immediately slapped down by judges.
I think Congress should make it illegal to have officious nanny state busybodies who want professional politicians in charge of how to raise their kids as parents while we are talking about harming the next generation.
The research seems to be strongly suggesting that giving your kid a smartphone is probably the equivalent of giving them a beer or cigarette.
I'm fine banning them for kids
I think there are real costs here. I wouldn't be willing to use any North American transit agency without access to some form of a real-time tracking (and it's good to get kids to use transit). Also, kids like to take photos of things!
If you’re concerned about tracking you can put an AirTag in their backpack. If they like taking pictures you can buy them a camera. These arguments feel lazy and all of these solutions are vastly cheaper than a smart phone.
ZFC means tracking things like when the next bus is coming. I gave my kids phones when they were in 6th grade because that is when they started taking public transit to school and other places. They were dumb phones because for the older kids it was a while ago, and my youngest kid won't use any apps at all because he is afraid of "them" knowing too much about him. (He will likely have the last laugh over all of us.), but mapping and transit apps can be very useful and give kids more freedom to explore on their own.
Wait, “I” is referring to my own use of these systems. Waiting err_undefined minutes for the bus stinks
(Also, "there are real costs" can't be a lazy argument because it isn't an argument at all...)
Is there a safety concern in tracking when trains come? Or just convenience? I took public transit as a kid and figured it out by looking at the schedule posted at the bus stop. I agree that GoogleMaps is the biggest loss in switching to a dumb phone, but learning to find your way to and from home, school, friends houses, and activities is good for spatial reasoning, situational awareness, and problem solving skills. It's also just not that hard to do. Print them a map.
Yet another argument for high-quality public transit. If a train comes every six minutes, who cares about the schedule?
"figured it out by looking at the schedule posted at the bus stop"
Back when everyone needed to do this, agencies made sure to actually post/update the signs.
Also the posted schedules bear no relationship to the schedule. My local bus in Chicago is supposed to run every 15 minutes. Usually it ends up being 2 buses showing up at the same time and then another 25 minute wait for the next one.
I was going to make a joke about how I know which bus is, but I can't because that's most of them.
As an occasional transit rider, I am with you, the transit times apps have been a game-changer. The posted schedules for Chicago Transit Authority service in my neighborhood bear no relationship whatsoever to reality. For the commenters who are saying "but the schedules are posted," you just told me "I never take public transit." OTOH the % of American youth who are taking public transportation is a small minority so this is really an edge case.
“There might be a northbound 36 bus today. Or maybe not. Try us.”
—The CTA
I was told this almost verbatim in Croatia once.
A treat to see Matt in the comment section. Kudos to Ben too always great measured and informative responses gracias!
As a parent, I'm totally on board with this but I fear it'll be heard to implement, as someone who is specifically addicted to Twitter. My guess is that I'll have to change my own behaviors if I expect the same of my kids.
I can only speak about my school. 4 years ago the school district decided to no longer enforce rules on absenteeism, homework, or being disruptive in class. My daughter, as many students, learned this quickly. She would show up at home midday (someone pulled the fire alarm, so why not). Her grades started sliding (ignoring homework lead to lower test scores)... So, for past years I’ve had to micromanage her (this fucking sucks, and would be worse if I had to have 2 jobs to pay the bills). Now, the school’s talking about phones. I don’t disagree with MY’s thesis that phones are a distraction, but feel the phone discussion keeps school districts from having to admit the policy choice of “no rules” is a failing kids.
Who are the proponents of the no enforcement policy? Is its support coming from groups of parents? Admins? Local government? Teachers? Why isn't there more pushback?
See, this is the interesting question. I’ll offer my version of the answer but it’s entirely based on my experience and not on some kind of research.
I’d say there are four groups, all have slightly different approaches and impacts but if you combine them all, you get a ton of dysfunction.
Progressive discipline (meaning you progress along a line of escalating discipline responses) has broken down even though it remains “on the books.” Somewhere at the stage where kids face consequences that place a demand on their free time or parents free/work time schools have become wary of escalating. When you used to get in school suspension, now kids are more often sent back to class which undermines the teacher’s ability to manage that student because the most she can do is refer the kid to the front office. If that’s gone… what?
Here’s where the first two groups come in. 1) equity focused people. Remember how toward the end of the Obama admin there was a lot of discussion of the school-to-prison pipeline? People were worried that schools were over-punishing kids, especially black kids, and this was even landing some of them in jail as teenagers for things that they did in response to school discipline like resisting the school police. There probably is some merit to this but it really looks like schools took this too far.
2) special education students and their litigious parents. ADA and IDEA place a very heavy legal burden on schools to educate students with disabilities. Those disabilities can and do result in behavioral issues for some students. But it is very very hard to remove a special needs student from an educational context and into a more sheltered environment. This shit gets district sued all the time and parents know this and will make the threat to get what they want. When I last worked on IEP committees (these are the legally required groups of parents, teachers, psychologists, and admins who make a plan for every single special needs student) I’d say about 1/3 of my case load would have parents bring lawyers to the meeting which then meant the district brought lawyers and so on. So, I dunno, call your congressman? It’s federal law right up there with civil rights. You can’t suspend or even really punish these kids because you’d be violating their civil rights. Did I mention that somewhere north of 15% of students have IEPs with another 10% receiving other specialized services? [edited for accuracy, see replies]
3) parents! There are a lot of parents who simply don’t accept that schools can discipline their kids and will resist, raise hell, make legal threats. I could usually pick these families out within the first month of starting school. We have a very permissive parenting environment these days.
4) let’s call this one “school capacity”. Many schools simply can’t perform all of the tasks which they’ve been given because they lack staff, have to rely on an endless cycle of brand new teachers, can’t run bus lines to get kids on campus etc. The pandemic money stops next fall. Layoffs are coming.
What are all of these students getting IEPs for? 25% of students having an IEP sounds like something downstream of a perceived advantage, but I'm curious what.
Certain diagnoses automatically come with more time to take tests. Apparently some parents seek this out to confer SAT/GPA advantage to their children. Certain people were gaming this in law school. One of my professors told me that all the top scorers in my class were people taking the exams essentially untimed.
I remember this being a huge controversy a decade or so ago, but I didn't know that it extended to law school. Insane.
I took the SAT more than two decades ago, but having extra time on the math portion would have been a huge advantage-- for stronger students, basically everyone could get a perfect score with enough time.
Maybe the tests should be "untimed" for everyone - most would just finish, turn it in and leave but the scores would be more equitable.
It’s all over the place. Behavior problems, hyperactivity, reading issues, asd, really it’s a whole range of things.
It's not true that somewhere north of 25% of students have IEPs. It's 15% nationwide and the state with the highest rate (NY) is around 20%. And most of that is learning disabilities, where I'm not sure there is a nexus to discipline. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/07/24/what-federal-education-data-shows-about-students-with-disabilities-in-the-us/
15% is still pretty shocking. If you asked me to guess what percentage of students have some disability requiring accommodation, I would say 3-5%.
We probably used it be more honest in diagnosing learning disabilities. We’d just say a kid was dumb.
When I was a kid (90s) the trend was for certain parents (white, affluent) to find a doctor to give their kid a "diagnosis" that would get them a special accommodation (ADHD was always joked about as the thing that was wildly overdiagnosed in my generation.) That only seems to have gotten worse.
You know what, you’re right. I was including students who receive “other education related services” in that number which can include kids on 504 behavior plans, receive speech and language supports, and other similar things. They do not have IEPs.
It's everywhere. I've seen it in our schools here. It's coming from admins who are under pressure to reduce punishments for social justice reasons, though there are likely other reasons I don't know about.
White women
Norms around absenteeism have really shifted post-COVID and I think this deserves further discussion.
When I was a kid, pulling your kid out of school for a week to go on a family vacation was just, like, not done. Now apparently parents feel comfortable doing this? The problem is that this sort of norm-shifting has downstream consequences, like kids (mostly different ones) feeling more comfortable with simply blowing off school.
I was discussing with a partner in my firm just last week about how absurdly casual parents have become about pulling their kids out of school for vacations and such. He and I agreed that (1) when we were kids it was very rare that you would miss school for a vacation or other non-school activity that didn't involve medical care/death and (2) we both had the experience of actually having to go to school *on the morning of a travel day* and our parents coming to school at lunch or early afternoon to pick us up to go to the airport.
I can probably count on one hand the number of times I got pulled out of school for non-illness/"family emergency" reasons as a kid. And that simply never happened once I hit high school.
Yeah, it's really pretty shocking. The idea of missing school for a ski trip or something would have been unthinkable.
I wonder if norms might be emerging that it's OK to miss school for "affluent" reasons like skiing or a trip to Europe, but not OK to miss school for "non-affluent" reasons like a visit to grandma back on the farm.
Maybe we should consider shortening summer breaks and extending other breaks during the school year so that families have a little more flexibility in planning vacations.
I'm actually with Matt that common days off are generally good, though. So everybody having the same week off for spring break is better than families picking within a three-week break.
I missed school for ski trips and am a Millenial...I'm not sure if my family was weird, or if it isn't quite as new as you think.
It's not necessarily *new* but it's way more common than it used to be.
“…that it's OK to miss school for "affluent" reasons like skiing or a trip to Europe, but not OK to miss school for "non-affluent" reasons like a visit to grandma back on the farm.”
Yeah. It’s shameful.
As a family who took our kids out of school this year for Disney this year, I’ll chalk it up to this:
* All segments of travel/hospitality have gotten much more efficient in price variation on peak dates
* Americans are wealthier overall and travel more, so traveling at a peak time (skiing or Disney over winter break etc) is both far more expensive and far less enjoyable.
* The gross COVID overreaction to in-class schooling broke the “100% Attendance” many parents had. After two years of having classrooms shut down because a student had asymptomatic COVID or possibly a small runny nose, no one feels the same responsibility to keep their kids in school, especially if flights are 2k cheaper in an off peak week.
Funny that this was super controversial when it last came up here. I guess the difference is smartphones are clearly bad even for high-achieving kids from the kind of families that post here, whereas there are individually rational reasons for us to violate norms on travel
I disagree - when I was a kid (80s) my parents pulled us out all the time for vacations and didn't give a sh*t and neither really did the school.
But our kids school is ridiculous about making it as hard as possible to take kids out - while giving barely any real vacation time (we have only a week off for Christmas and Spring Break isn't until late April).
I have stopped GAF about my kids attendance this year because it became so obvious about how much time was being wasted on assemblies and pep rallies and what is essentially endless school spirit marketing from the Development Office to create future donors. (We are in Catholic school.). There is an entire *week* of special parties and themed days (like Polar Express Day) right before Christmas.
I'm sorry, but if the school can waste all the time on BS then I have zero guilt about extending Christmas Break so they can go skiing with their grandparents.
What are the downstream consequences of pulling your kid out to go on vacation?
Provided that they don't fall behind I don't really see the issue.
Broader shifting norms around absenteeism.
When I worked in truancy court there was a noticeable shift in the kind of kids who ended up there post-2020. Before that they generally fell into one of two buckets: either kids who were obviously biding their time until the state said they could legally drop out or kids (often obviously LGBTQ, if not openly so) whose school experience was so miserable that they just didn’t want to go. After 2020 you started seeing more normal kids who were, like, B-students but blew off school so much that they ended up in truancy court. It was really weird to see.
I don’t know that there’s a causal link between the two but it’s pretty obvious that norms have shifted from the days when it was “you were in school unless you were sick with something more serious than a cold, death in the family, or approved extracurricular activity.” And that extends to parents who are far more shameless about not simply planning family vacations around school breaks.
Given that in some areas there's still a massive social stigma* against going out with a runny nose or lingering cough due to COVID fears, I think it must be nightmarish trying to get kids to come to school when plenty of adults will agree that the kid needs to stay home if they have a scratchy throat. Some kids legitimately do run low-grade colds through the entire winter, and some will take advantage of parents "playing it safe" by letting them stay home.
*One of my friends got a cold this week, and she spent her time recovering on instagram railing against people who go out without masks and "don't stay home even when they feel a cold coming on and know some people are immunocompromised." She's got some online presence so her rambling about how this chest cold was something people maliciously did to her by being reckless and ableist got thousands of likes and reposts.
When my parents went to Europe for two weeks, we stayed with my grandparents and enrolled in the school there. I still remember the Spanish I learned in that two weeks.
That seems much more disruptive than just missing two weeks! But I'm glad it turned out to be interesting for you.
Something else not mentioned here is the poor modeling of adults, and that phones provide comfort along with distraction. Dopamine feels good!
Parents are pretty awful models - I'm typing this while I make my kids breakfast bc I know if I'm not early nobody will read my thoughts if I'm not up soon. And for every teacher who stashes it away in their desk all day, there are more who are checking regularly. And this gets more common as students get older. Much easier to check Facebook during a unit quiz; also I can't get dinged for using school property for personal use.
Reading comments on my phone while proctoring a standardized test right now.
Took a phone from a kid who was watching the tick tock in study hall. Our school let's 14 year olds listen to music on their phones with teacher permission.
Well, proctoring is boring unless 20+% of the students are trying to cheat. Sounds like a good way to keep them off guard.
I remember sitting in the hall and downloading drug wars from another kid on my calculator. I was sweating bullets. It felt like downloading drugs onto my calculator. I miss safe rebellion.
The data link speed through that 1/8 in cable was not fast.
I was going to ask, Drug Wars wasn't just on the calculator right? It had to be downloaded, right?
All my friends and I did was program choose your own adventure games on to the TI-84. Or occasionally I'd write a program that would flood the screen with random numbers and all you had to do to stop it was turn it off, but it was funny watching other kids get that calculator, press that button, and then sit back in their chair freaked out like "I broke the calculator."
This actually came up on a recent episode of the Search Engine podcast with PJ Vogt. He talked about addicting games and talked to a developer of games for the TI calculators. Definitely not sanctioned by the TI corporation.
https://open.substack.com/pub/pjvogt/p/how-do-you-make-an-addictive-video?r=ewbr&utm_medium=ios
Of the ways I screwed around in class, programming my TI-84 was probably the most productive. Hell if I had stuck with that, maybe I'd be in programming now.
Few thoughts:
I'm 100% in favor of this policy, but as others have pointed out, the enforcement can't be half-assed. When I was a sub, I tried to enforce no phone rules at first, realized the office rarely found that a problem worth dropping everything to take care of, and eventually decided to pick my battles. Granted, a sub has less buy-in than the regular teacher, but sstill, rules gotta be enforced otherwise they ain't rules.
Secondly, I'm surprised teacher's unions are backing the phone bans. In blue states at least, teacher's unions have been on board with the equity agenda to relax school behavior standards. In my experience, most teachers really do hate this. Either one of two things is happening. Either this is cynically part of the broader push away from keeping track of anything, similar to the push to eliminate standardized tests, OR the teacher's unions themselves are completely ideologically captured. I'm leaning towards the second. Sure, teachers are human and don't like having their performance evaluated any more than anybody else, but they don't want their day to day jobs to be miserable, and working in an out of control class is miserable. The way the unions are often out of step with their own members is something an enterprising policymaker could exploit.
My AP bio teacher's rule was that you put your phones in this set of sleeves she had hanging from the closet door at the start of class, which might be randomly checked. If you forgot to put it away once, you get a warning; after that your participation grade for the class was capped at 75%, which came out to -6.25pp off your final grade. I did the math quickly and was very good about putting my phone away.
That would work in a class like your AP Bio class where presumably all the kids there care. A lot different to enforce in a school where a solid half the kids just don't care, but you still have to keep a lid on things for the sake of the other half (or for the sake of a typically apathetic kid who decides to pay attention that day).
If schools held students back for failing then students suddenly care about passing classes.
Some of them. Not the ones who eventually drop out, which is about 19% of them nationally.
Slapping credentials on the bottom quintile will never make them not the bottom quintile.
I mean I'm all for doing what we can to boost the absolute performance of the bottom quinine, but yeah, somebody is going to be in that quintile.
>>"equity agenda to relax school behavior standards"
Calling that equity is truly Orwellian. It is blatant class warfare against the poor and disadvantaged. Just like the defund movement.
https://www.nea.org/nea-today/all-news-articles/racist-beginnings-standardized-testing
Not exactly the same thing as school behavior, but similar impulse right on the NEA website.
What is the ideology they might be captured by? Is it an ideology of no enforcement of rules (because equity) or something to do with phones?
The ideology is more like "rules are disproportionately enforced against poor students/students of color" (because those also happen to be disproportionately the students breaking the rules) but in practice it turns into non-enforcement of rules because if the other kids aren't breaking the rules you can't simply enforce them just as hard against kids who aren't breaking them.
The peak of absurdity I witnessed around this was a white principal explaining to a black gym teacher that he couldn't really discipline a black student because something something equity.
Edit: ftr, she didn't use those words exactly, but was saying stuff about how removing kids from class isn't fair and we've got these new guidelines from the state yada yada
The first one.
Alternative theory: teachers unions do what teachers want and teachers really hate dealing with phones in class rooms. Not everything needs a nefarious explanation.
OK but I provided an example of teacher's unions doing something teachers don't like, so I'm not sure that's always true.
Haven't worked in schools for a while so idk what blue state teacher's unions are saying about phones.
My experience as a college student (been a few years now!) is that technology was basically a zero or a negative in terms of value-add. When teachers stopped writing on the board and just lectured from powerpoints, kids would just print out the slides and watch the lecture instead of taking notes. Aside from learning programming or doing fancy modeling with Mathematica or Maple, I think computers are pretty useless for most classes, and even in those technical subjects they are often a net negative for live classroom instruction.
I did physics the best was when they walked through the notes on chalkboard but also provided you with a hard copy at the end so u at least had one version in writing you knew was correct. Never had an effective math or physics lesson that involved really any technology, other science classes a little different getting the slides ahead of time helped me follow easier and take more effective notes in the rare cases I printed the slides and brought them to class. But yeah I would have never predicted how ineffective technology would be at bettering education when I was younger. My dad was taught how to become a math whiz with just a slide rule.
I mean, when the teachers put up the assignments for the day on the board, I just opened up the book and did the work because I was so bored from listening to the teacher..
Yeah, lectures are generally kind of awful pedagogy.
The worst lectures are the ones where they're reading from the book and want you to take notes. Why should I just be copying what's already in the book?
I’m a high school educator and have spent ten years at the same charter high school in Brooklyn. We have never allowed phones. Initially this was a NYC DOE policy that was rightly removed by the DeBlasio administration, as once every kid had a phone, they wound up paying corner stores and cell phone storage trucks to keep them stored for the day. (Yes, an entire economy existed that profited off of high school students storing their devices.)
However, when the ban was lifted, school buildings had an option to continue the policy. We did and created a system of collecting phones when students enter the building and storing them in a locked box for them. We give them out to each last period teacher to administer. This works because we are also a scanned school (students come through airport level security to enter school).
We have never, to my knowledge and memory, had a student suspended because of a phone with this system.
While many students say that they feel imprisoned by the phone ban, many come back after graduation and are grateful for it retrospectively. Taking this long of a break from a device is healthy, especially for adolescents who are in an important time for brain development.
I think this is the sort of system you'd need (airport scanners at school entrances) to really make this policy work. I'm not necessarily agianst it, but it would be very costly, and have very dystopian vibes
I agree that scanners are dystopian, but it is also the norm in urban high school settings. In schools like those, I don’t see how dropping phones off is a problem. Many of them scan and then permit phones.
At the same time, taking phones when kids enter a school building doesn’t seem to like it would be dystopian, even without scanning systems. Kids can drop them off; if they don’t do so, there are greater consequences for when they appear in a classroom. I don’t see how a policy like this would be a problem to implement.
Granted, families choose to send their kids to charter schools, but they may react negatively in a traditional district setting.
On the whole, this type of policy takes organizational thinking, buying a lock box organizer and human capital, but I don’t see how it isn’t worth it.
I agree! But what doesn't come across as dystopian in NYC might be different in suburban North Carolina (where I'm from)—I can imagine lots of people here reactively negatively against scanners on purely aesthetic grounds
I don't think so. It just takes an expectation that phones are supposed to go to a certain place coupled with real repurcussions for breaking the rules. It's not actually hard to enforce rules, as long as it's done at the school level rather than each teacher having to manage their own policy that has no buy-in from admin.
To me, it seems like a big issue that phones are very easily hidden. When the probability of being caught for rulebreaking is low, in my experience, noncompliance is usually high.
This in a nutshell describes the problem with deterrence.
A 90% chance of spending the night in jail for shoplifting is a much stronger deterrent than a 1% chance of spending a year in jail.
Yep—I think we see this problem in lots of areas (drug laws, etc.). The only exception I can think of is tax avoidance (probability of being audited is low, but people generally try to follow the rules).
I think it's more that if you have a normal job that pays you above board, it's hard to hide income because your employer has to report it to the IRS.
Now -- child support enforcement is a different matter. Lots of employees who want to be paid "off the books" do so more to avoid child support than to avoid taxes.
What's the affirmative argument that we should allow smartphones in schools?
My sense is it’s less that there was really an affirmative argument than that there was slippage between kids bringing dumbphones to school and then a whole new class of devices came along that’s also called phones.
Path dependency and status quo bias remain undefeated.
Also peer pressure and first-mover problems!
i'm starting to think what people claim is path dependency and status quo is influenced by a survivorship bias, and therefore creates a self-justifying loop.
COTD.
There is an affirmative argument for phones in high schools, and it’s the one many of us (including me) make at the prestigious public high school where I teach. Here it is: much of high school work involves writing. This work needs to be done both in the classroom and “at home,” which really just means outside of class — many students do HW during free periods. Very few people write essays by hand these days, and while this is making a comeback in the ChatGPT age, it wouldn’t make much sense to make students do ALL their writing by hand; it would also be maddening for teachers trying to decipher the handwriting of a generation that was taught to expect to type. So, high school students need to be able to type during school, not just in class but on their own. The ideal situation, in my opinion, would be for all students to have a school laptop that is owned and managed by the school, so the school can block the biggest distractions (games and social media). That situation doesn’t exist. The situation that DOES exist at my school is that some (mostly wealthier) kids have computers and iPads and other (mostly poorer) kids don’t. But they ALL have smart phones. So a policy of making kids lock up their phones at the start of the day would, in fact, be inequitable: wealthier kids could still do their homework during their frees, while poorer kids would have to fight for spots at the few school computers. In order to ban phones at my school, we would need to stop asking our students to use COMPUTERS— and that’s a big ask for everyone. It would force teachers to stop asking kids to wacth educational videos, read PDFs, search for news articles, do language practice via apps, play math games on Desmos, create digital art projects, and much more. So from my perspective, when we are talking about banning phones in high schools, we need to be talking about making every school what is called a 1-to-1 school, meaning that the school provides every kid with a school laptop. That would be great. But I think it’s important to reckon with the full cost of the ask.
Note that I don’t think my arguments apply to elementary schools. They might apply to some middle schools, though.
Okay I guess that wasn’t an affirmative argument for phones per se. It’s an argument that phones = little computers the school system doesn’t have to pay for. Students do need computers, and schools don’t have enough money, so phones meet a need.
But nobody ever really explained why they started allowing kids to bring dumbphones to school, either. In the early 2000s bringing a phone to school usually meant you were a drug dealer, so they were completely banned -- like, you couldn't even have it in your locker, you just had to leave it in your car all day.
by the mid 2000s dumb phones were common in my school and you only got in trouble for using it in class (and barely in trouble anyway as long as you kept it on silent).
Yeah and it seems like that norm/rule shifted on a dime for no real reason.
The reason is that cellphones became cheap and common. It's easy to have a rule that you can't have X when most people don't have X but once everyone has X enforcing the rule is much harder.
But I started noticing in 2001 that everybody at the football game had a cell phone -- but they were still banned at school and students took that rule seriously.
I would guess that well over half my classmates (including me) had dumbphones by 7th grade in the mid-2000s. I think they were supposed to be left in lockers or zipped up in backpacks and occasionally someone would be warned or have one taken away for the period if their use was blatant, but there was plenty of under-the-table texting (actually much easier with multitap on physical keypads—the pro move was to type and send an entire message from your pocket without seeing the screen). This was definitely a distraction that in some ways presages the issues we're considering here, but I think the overall burden on the class was closer to physical note-passing, just with moderately lower odds of getting caught. For most schools I don't think this was felt to outweigh the usually-uncontroversial benefit of middle schoolers being able to, e.g., call their parents and let them know the bus broke down or their bike got a flat or whatever.
In my admittedly biased memory, the people who were still stridently against any student having a phone on school property were mostly (1) just generally suspicious of technology, youths, and any combination of the above, (2) teachers who were really personally annoyed by phone use and watched like hawks, sometimes more disruptive in scolding than the two students silently texting were, or (3) people noticing the emerging source of distraction and worrying about its normalization as the precipice of a slippery slope, most of whom I assume are feeling depressed and vindicated by now.
That last group are definitely vindicated, lol. I mean even dumbphones could be pretty distracting.
You are describing a time when phones were the exception. Today they are the default.
I am not sure what this has to do with the point.
I feel like the ridiculous school shooting argument is an excuse for parents that just really want to be in touch with their kids 24/7, even if that means during school hours or even in the classroom.
My kids had a teacher who would answer the students' phones when they rang because it was invariably a parent. Teacher would then go on in a way that would totally embarrass the kid. It worked, but I think only a teacher that has worked in a place for a long time at a school where there isn't much parent involvement, as was the case here, could get away with it.
Parents would just... call their kids in the middle of the school day? What on Earth did they want to talk about? That is so weird.
It happens all the time! Reminders of doctors appointment, checking to make sure they are actually in class, can you pick up your cousin from elementary school, etc. Kids tend to ignore their parents' texts, so the calls.
You know, I bet a phone a parent could remotely lock until the kid responds to a text or something would be popular.
Ha, that's a great story!
Yeah, I live in actual Newtown and my kids have classmates who are the younger siblings of victims. The "school shooting" excuse is not just ridiculous, but dangerous.
If your kid is in an actual school shooting they are supposed to be in lockdown and absolutely silent.
Smartphones ringing and kids wasting time looking for their phone to call parents INCREASES the danger during an actual shooting. It means they are making noise and not getting into hiding as quickly as possible. And the teacher is wasting time dealing with the extra chaos of thirty kids all needing to call mom instead of locking the door and getting the kids in a closet as fast as possible.
You want the classroom as dark and quiet as can be.
"My kid needs a smartphone because school shootings" is the brainfarts of way too online women who have never been anywhere near an actual school shooting.
In fact, at Uvalde didn't they have a specific problem of parents showing up at the school and getting in the way of police?
Yes! Parents are definitely under the expectation that they should be able to chat with their kids whenever they want and often freak out if their kid doesn’t reply right away.
Perhaps you can make a case for allowing Gizmo style text only devices with very limited contact breadth as a compromise.
Great, now we will just have kids walking around in JNCO jeans, wearing their Jerry Bear necklaces and checking their beepers like Drug Dealers!!!
I regret to inform you that the kids are already walking around in JNCOs. It's alarming.
I'm not a parent, but much of my peer group is, and their preoccupation with school shootings is both sincere and completely insane. I think it's wildly unhealthy and unethical to teach children that they need to be mortally afraid of going to a place they have to be at 35+ hours a week, but like, i'm not in a position to critique their parenting styles - I just think it's messed up to tell kids all the time they're about to get mowed down when they're much more likely to drown at their friend's swimming pool or get hit by a truck backing up in the school parking lot.
Chat throughout the school day? Already a few years ago my millennial nephew was being observed by his parents via his college dining hall’s webcam. They knew what time he had dinner. To me, it feels like a dysfunctional “we are as one” relationship model. (Yeah, we Boomers can probably be blamed for starting on this path.)
I connect it subrationally with the young adults in my city who constantly complain on Reddit about the aspects of city living they find unpleasant (campers, car break-ins, “I feel unsafe!!”) It’s always in the form of an accusation against their new “parents”— the Mayor, the police, some governmental “they” who magically know how to fix these problems yet mysteriously refuse to do so. So much for the adventure that comes with taking on adult responsibility and dealing with new and challenging situations.
(My nephew takes a different route: his boundaries are so firm that no one at all got to go to the wedding; in fact we didn't even hear about it until after it happened..)
Safety. When the shooting starts, kids need to be able to call for help.
Safety and communication. When my child is bullied or a teacher treats her badly, I need to be able to hear about it.
Communication. Parents and their children routinely text/whats app with each other during school. They’re used to being able to chat.
Theft/property rights. I’ve purchased a $1500 device for my kid and no societal failure grifting $50k a year off the local working man is going to take it away from her. If someone at school takes it, I will consider it theft. I pay your salary. You work for me and that means my kid gets to have her device.
Responsibility. It’s the teacher’s and school’s job to manage the classroom. When my kid is at home, I’m the boss and she knows how to behave. If she’s not behaving at school, then it is because the school is doing a bad job.
Denial or always siding with child. My kid never does this at home. I talk to her. She’s so smart and says she works very hard on all her assignments. She says she thought she was allowed to have her phone out and was just using it to look something up for class. I believe my child and think the teacher/admin just has it out for her.
Thanks -- always appreciate a good steelman
Just noting that the “it’s schools’ fault” point has been made in this comment section and is, like the others, not a straw man but a belief many parents and members of the public genuinely hold.
https://open.substack.com/pub/matthewyglesias/p/smartphones-in-schools-are-bad?utm_source=direct&r=cgrc&utm_campaign=comment-list-share-cta&utm_medium=web&comments=true&commentId=53518139
You have provided the reason why most teachers tell me that they do not take phones away from kids when they break the phone ban. They do not want to be accused of breaking an expensive device.
Does anyone remember when Stuyvesant High School banned phones? (Maybe it still does?) There was an enterprising person who would drive a van over to the school in the morning where kids would pay to check their phones and he would return at school dismissal to return them. Maybe making something like this national would be a good business opportunity.
Or in a lot of cases, they are not allowed to.
Your Responsibility paragraph contradicts your entire comment.
I’m under no responsibility to make parents’ insanity make sense.
The FEMA training for CERT (Citizen Emergency Response Team) volunteers teaches command structure all the way down to pairs of responders designating a leader who issues the final decision about an action. First responders always operate according to a hierarchy that results in only one command from one person at a time. Multiple parents communicating with kids during an event (active shooter, fire, earthquake, whatever) would seriously interfere with this tried-and-true system for saving lives.
The very fact that parents insist on kids having phones in the first case indicates to me that parents would not be able to resist questioning commands from the teacher and from first responders. “No, don’t stay in the corner, climb out the window!” “Are you sure the door’s locked? Go and check!” (Multiply this by ten parents simultaneously giving advice and undermining the teacher’s authority.)
“..undermining the teacher’s authority”
That’s why this idea may need to be implemented through statute.
I mean, look at Uvalde where parents were prevented from entering the school by police. I think exactly that kind of confusion is what will continue to happen.
If you were talking to a parent, you would think that, but they often don't see the contradiction.
Is this parody/satire? If this is a genuinely held belief, it’s horrendous.
You can find some of these sentiments expressed by commenters right here on SB. I assure you that, despite my somewhat tongue in cheek presentation of these positions, there are many who genuinely hold them.
Had I called or texted my parents for basically any reason during the school day, beyond a catastrophic event, I can guarantee you my phone would have been gone the second I got home. A school shooting is one thing, complaining about a teacher or a kid at lunch is another thing.
And while I agree that teachers need to manage classrooms better, if you talk to a lot of them, you'll find out they can't because they are being prohibited from doing so. Parents are constantly overstepping and district administrators won't defend teachers when they try to. That's a problem.
When the shooting starts your kid needs to be silent and get in lockdown mode as fast as possible. Their teacher needs to be 100 percent focused on getting the class in lockdown and locking the door.
And that one kid who forgot to silence their phone while they are in lockdown? Well, one ring, and now the shooter knows the room is occupied and all their classmates are dead.
Phones in class are a safety HAZARD during a shooting.
There are many parents who look at how school shootings are handled, expect the police response to be too slow (MSD, Uvalde), and would prefer to attempt to retrieve their child.
The Beslan hostage crisis had Ossetian villagers attempt to attack the school on their own with AKs and shotguns.
Matt makes that case, either that it's a matter of individual responsibility and liberty (your hobby horses) to best use your own time in school (and maybe there's even a chance that they find a better use of their time, or optimize it?)
And that it's a matter of safety for parents who want to know where their kids are, or give them more independence before and after class.
Yes the problem is at least half parent. But some how parents kept their precious snowflakes safe before smartphones existed. We could resurrect that technology
I think it's a little more complicated than that, and this is where it overlaps with the teen social media issue, that there's a collective action problem.
If some parents don't want their kids to have phones, it impacts the kid by being cut out of a lot of socializing, and becomes an endless fight between the kid and parent.
A bit like in my day, Pokemon cards were distracting, but when they were banned, and only a few kids managed to bring them to school, it became a lot less distracting because there was no one else to trade with anymore.
My kids are currently 3 so well short of the age where you'd even consider them having a smartphone (or even a phone, for that matter), but I'm dreading the day when I'm the one making my kids ostracized because they're the only kids at their school who don't have one.
I don’t think that’s a meaningful claim. We could similarly say that somehow people in cars were safe enough to be happy before airbags and seatbelts were invented and we should just go back to that. Just claiming that we were fine with one way of doing things so others should be fine with not using new development since then isn’t very meaningful.
It's proof of concept. Smartphones are not absolutely necessary for parents to feel safe.
I also wonder if kids were safer in the past. Is that claim actually true?
No, kids are safer today. I often wonder that is because of what is called "helicopter parenting." People make fun of it, but perhaps it does keep kids safer.
Even if true, "safer" does not mean "better" or "more healthy". The elevation of safety above all other considerations is a very bad trend, for children and adults alike.
This is a big part of Haidt's ideas. Kids today suffer very few injuries -- no broken bones, no cuts, contusions, etc., but that is actually bad in the long run. They don't explore, don't fail and then succeed, don't learn how to overcome. etc.
I do think we have to be prepared for the possibility of traditional risky behaviors coming back if we succeed on a crackdown on screens.
Probably has more to do with the long-term drop in crime since 1994 than changes in parenting.
Back when a swing was an old tire suspended with rope tied to a tree limb, and we swam in lakes and rivers instead of chlorinated pools, and didn’t wear helmets when biking or knee pads when skateboarding, and rode in the bed of pickup trucks on the highway?
I very much doubt it!
There was certainly some discussion in our area about the need for communication during an emergency. I proposed a “feel free to come grab your phone from the front of the class if you have reason to believe there is a shooter on campus” rule.
More swatting calls. Great.
Pants-wetting from parents terrified of the extremely low possibility that their kids will be involved in a school shooting.
Smartphones are a part of life that isn't going away, so schools should be finding ways to teach and model healthy use, rather than just banning it. That probably looks more like 'no phones during class' than 'phones confiscated at the school gate'.
Maybe the schools could teach about DND, Focus Modes, good time management, etc? But they can barely teach reading as it is, so maybe wishful thinking.
Do we think that having zero exposure to the challenges of using phones healthfully will magically result in good habits in college, the workforce?
If the White House takes a position on banning cell phones in classrooms then all these Republicans trying to constructively address the issue will do a 180.
I have some concerns about this but honestly I think you’re a little too pessimistic here.
I've lost very few bets in the past few years betting on polarization.
I too am a bit skeptical of Republicans going full Cleek's Law [https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=cleek%27s%20law], but I would be concerned as a more general observation of education polarization making Republicans more skeptical about education in general, and perhaps using this as one issue of many to make the case to roll back public support of it.
As a rule of thumb, it's not possible to be too pessimistic about the Trump-era Republican Party. :-/
WWDJTD
DJT is a solid argument that adults shouldn't have smartphones either.
Make his Truth Social dribble show up when ever you unlock the phone by default.
Sad but true
Yes, the libertarian wing of the Republican Party would seem to naturally hate smart phone bans, so it’s actually pretty surprising to me that these bans are popular in red states. I could definitely imagine Josh Hawley for example switching from proposing pretty radical limits on social media companies to loudly mocking the “nanny state” and proclaiming that “parents— not teachers— should decide when and where their children can use smart phones”.
The libertarian wing wouldn’t hate smartphone bans in school. The only people who are confused about adults being the bosses of kids are the prog left.
I’m suggesting conservatives are likely to make a parents’ rights argument, not a kids rights argument.
I could see that possibly, but I think it's highly unlikely. If there was a popular backlash to the bans among parents then I could see him jumping on the bandwagon. Otherwise I think he would come down on the side of what would be best for educational outcomes.
All the more reason to do it!
A prosperous suburb of my city introduced the Yondr pouches this year because they felt it was the only way to truly enforce the phone ban without putting undue burden on teachers. The result? Tons and tons and tons of parents complaining. But teachers being thrilled with the results. They say the students talk to each other more, there is less fighting and bullying, more cooperation in the classroom, and kids actually engaging with content.
I don't have a lot of sympathy for the "I have to get in touch with my kid" argument, although I completely understand the anxiety of not being able to. First responders say that people should be paying attention to what is around them and directions from teachers, police, EMTs, etc, not paying attention to phones. And phones can spread false information like wildfire. I saw this at my own kid's high school a few years ago. There was a melee at the school. It WAS chaos with a lot of fights, and something like 18 kids got arrested and many more suspended. First of all, the students wouldn't have been able to coordinate like that - pulling alarms, starting fights, etc simultaneously - without phones. Secondly, all kinds of exaggerated information spread fast between kids and parents - that several people had gotten stabbed, that police were beating up students, that the block around the school was on fire - all of which were completely false, but which led to parents rushing over to the school and being more of a hindrance to resolving the situation than a help.
I've been really skeptical of the Yondr patches--they seem like an unneeded cost as opposed to just turning in the phone into cheap school controlled lockers at the door, and unlocking them at the end of the day.
I think that would be fine too. But it needs to be something that classroom teachers do not have to individually enforce.
Agreed.
I actually think that you might be underrating the negatives of heavy smartphone use even for high-performing, high-intelligence students. These kids will still do fine at regular schoolwork (because for most of K-12, it’s going to be pretty easy for them and not use anything like their full capability range), but the cognitive effort that they put into things like social media-based social network management make it harder for them to go deep on the sorts of self-directed intellectual exploration which will set them up to do great things later. Bored smart kids will accomplish more if they surreptitiously read or program games on their TI-84s or fiddle around with IMO problems while not paying full attention in class than if they’re just optimizing their Snapchat streak leaderboard rankings.
You made me think of my son's friend who attended Harvard. When he went to his orientation, several other students recognized him as the person who - at some point - had the greatest number of Karma points (or whatever they are called) on Reddit.
Yeah— accomplishing that is a huge amount of work, all applied to a fairly dumb goal.
My hot take as a parent of 2 kids, aged 13 and 17: phones need to be out of the classroom (mandated in our middle school but not our high school) AND all the tech trends for using laptops in class are a goddamn disaster. The enthusiasm for tech has vastly outpaced the guardrails. The kids are busy playing during class time. Meanwhile the school blew off one kid’s handwriting issues with “he’ll just type” then it turned out that a laptop was too distracting and he has to do everything on paper. Smart.
One of the worst things about sending my kid to kindergarten is finding out they are already required to have little ipads (that we have to keep charged and will have to pay for if lost or broken or stolen). Why is this useful, let alone necessary in Kindergarten?
I didn't have a laptop in class until law school (which dates me, I know) but probably explains why I was a C-student in law school after spending basically my entire life prior to that as an A/B-student.
The kid in my class who programmed snake on his TI is now a theoretical physics professor at a renowned uni. :)
Apple could avoid this whole discourse by just creating "parent mode" where a kid's phones is locked between defined hours A and B (i.e., school), except for for contact to/from a couple of approved contacts (e.g., mum and dad) and the kid has the option to override the lock (in case of emergency) but it costs like $20 and mum/dad get notified when it happens. Could even give half the money to charity, or the school or somehting. Literally just a digital version of Yondr.
I wrote a comment above about this, but I strongly agree and I generally think that technological solutions are imperfect but could be very useful. I'm surprised that there's not legislation toward something like this.
Sounds like a good way for Apple not to make money off apps and games.
Apple is unlikely to do this unless there’s serious cultural and political pressure. The highest-margin and fastest growing chunk of their revenues comes from taking a cut of the economic activity that happens in the iPhone ecosystem, so habituating people to use it all the time (even before their big spending years) is important to their long-term prospects.