Discussion

bawolff: I'm a little confussd... was there a point they were allowed? I went to school in the late 2000s, and even at that point of a teacher saw you with a cell phone it was immediately confiscated.

kleiba: This has absolutely been the standard in every school around where I live for years. Anecdotally, however, I wouldn't go so far and say it lead to "engaged students" and "joyful teachers" :)

ecshafer: I agree with the cell phone bans (I would extend it to all electronic devices, schools should be pen and paper). But we just got our phones taken away in highschool.

galleywest200: Surely an electronic wrist watch is fine, and maybe an mp3 player. Also graphing calculators.

drivebyhooting: Why do you need a music player in school?

superkuh: I mostly just listened during homeroom and lunch period. But once I was sent to in-schoool-suspension in high school in the early 2000s for listening to my mp3 player (Diamond Rio PMP300) after I finished taking the yearly standardized tests the state used to judge schools.

superkuh: It's crazy to me that cell phones, and especially smart phones, were ever allowed in the classroom during class.

reedf1: They are not allowed in any school I've been to, especially during class.

bityard: "Need" might be strong, but I am okay with music players. My ADHD self is able to focus many times better if I have certain kinds of music playing to block out nearly talking and other distracting sounds.

mrinterweb: Listening to music can help people focus.

bananamogul: In 2026 the number of people with mp3 players that are not also smart phones is vanishingly small.

caderosche: I don't think banning is the right solution to this. At some point, I think we are going to have comms devices imbedded in our heads and whatnot.I think the right approach is finding teaching techniques that still work when every human has all the world's info at their finger tips 24/7.At some point, an uninterruptible, 24/7 live connection to the rest of the world is inevitable.I'm not convinced a human teacher is a required part of this.

throwawayk7h: music players were often essential for my ability to stay focussed on my work and reading.

rootusrootus: During class time?

reedf1: My understanding is that these are already banned in most schools and the practical difference between enforcing this at a state or national basis is basically nonexistent vs simple local enforcement.

dizzy9: > In crafting its policy, Estacada incorporated feedback from parents. That led to some key decisions around the cell phone ban. Rather than use pouches or lockers, students are allowed to keep their phones safely stored in their backpacks. That was for two reasons — it allows students to contact loved ones during emergencies, and many parents use phone trackers to keep tabs on their kids.I'm glad to hear this. They're currently trying to shill the magnetically sealed pouches in the UK, but the flaws are obvious: massive bottleneck at the pouch station would delay entry and exit from the building, phones would be unavailable during emergencies or to record incidents of crime or staff malpractice, and financial burden on schools.Students can be trusted to obey a simple "no phones in class" rule.

scuff3d: We're talking about kids, not adults. You ban cell phones for the same we weren't allowed to play our Gameboy during class when I was a kid. They lack the self control and decision making capabilities to forgo something fun for the sake of something important.Not to mention we have plenty of studies that show even a silent phone sitting quietly in your pocket or on your desk can be an attention drain, as you're subconsciously waiting for a notification to go off.I'm amazed it took this long for the schools to finally ban the damn things.

rootusrootus: > We're talking about kids, not adults.Frankly, I believe the world would be a better place if we did a lot more banning of smartphones for adults, too. They are like crack.

eru: See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SubsidiarityAny ban above school level is silly.

technothrasher: My son, who recently graduated high school, went to a school that banned phones but insisted on laptops (providing them for the kids who couldn't afford one). He said it was ridiculous, as none of the kids had any problem using their laptop for anything they would have used the phone, which was mostly texting, scrolling social media, watching videos, and playing games. Even when the school tried to lock down services, as soon as one kid found a way around it, they all did.

svachalek: My son is in middle school and it's the same thing. They can't have devices in the classroom, except for the school mandated device that does everything the phone does and more.

germinalphrase: "Banned" is only meaningful if there are consequences for defying the ban. My experience as a high school English teacher in a handful of schools across several states was that admin is, generally, unwilling to implement a hard ban on smartphones because a significant portion of parents would vocally object (to put it mildly).Pushing the ban to the state level acknowledges the broad inability of district level leadership to self-police these problems.

john_strinlai: not all classes are 100% lectures. many of my kids classes have 15-30 minutes of "work time". sometimes entire periods are "work periods" when they have a big project or whatever.

j2kun: They were not. The rule now is that they have to go into a special bag that cannot be opened while school is in session. Before they could be left in a backpack and snuck out or used between classes.

mentalgear: 'Engaged Students, Joyful Teachers' ... but sad Zuck ! As soon as this becomes popular and Zuck's engagement numbers tank, prepare for a propaganda campaign of nuclear proportions - maybe they even pull the OG Sheryl Sandberg back to steer the PR ship. And with the current crop of cronies in office, don’t be surprised if a new ID bill will be introduced that requires "social connectivity" as requirement for ID verification. Your "trust score" might eventually depend on how much data you feed Zuck's sucking machine and whether you’ve hit your daily scroll quota. If you think that sounds crazy, you haven't been paying attention to how fast the goalposts are moving.

engeljohnb: And everyone's going to fall for it too.

dgxyz: UK here. My kid's school is insane. They think they are so progressive because they banned personal phones entirely, which is fair enough. But they forced us to buy marked up Yondr pouches, which is not fair.However this isn't the only problem. They also force us to pay monthly for iPads with wonky ass Logitech cases to be issued on which they do everything on Google classroom.Google Classroom is an abhorrently bad bit of software on an iPad. It's just horrible in every possible way. Clunky, interface sucks, slow, unreliable.Then they give detentions when children can't submit work, some auth issue means the entire device goes down the toilet for two days, documents won't open because the staff use Office instead, they keyboard case craps out and you can't type with anything but the screen, the staff forget to submit the work until an hour before it's due, the entire school wifi network is down for a week and they have no backup.They should ban that too. Technology MUST be fit for purpose in a classroom and most of it isn't.Go back to paper for everything. Work, journals, timetables, the lot. And the teachers can use whatever to drive projectors in the classroom.

bitexploder: Probably a similar problem to AI. Using AI for the sake of AI in an engineering workflow probably wastes time right now. Using technology in the classroom for the sake of using technology is probably similar. Is it really creating access, opportunity, saving time. All that? I am skeptical. I have had similar experiences with my children over time. There was a layer of technology that made sense for education. Probably peaked when I was in school in the 90s.

shimman: Ah yes, some point (possibly 100s of years into the future) we have to be concerned with a sci-fi scenario not borne in reality so we can't possibly ban cellphones now. Just ignore all the negative externalities of these mass misery machines, we have to plan for a future that has no basis in reality!There needs to be a politics of rejection, because I an assure you 95% of humanity does not want a device implanted in their skull where communication sent to you is unblockable.SV has clearly cooked a generation of engineers that think working on ad surveillance tech is the pinnacle of humanity and not just another American moral failing that is wrecking the world while a select few profit off it.

caderosche: "imbedded in their heads" was a bit over the top.All I actually mean is I'm sure that soon there will be some cell phone equiv tech that teachers won't be able to ban/control without scanning their entire bodies every day for RF signals.

jedberg: In the last 10 years, driven a lot by school shootings, the tide shifted and parents started fighting schools about letting their kids keep their phone "so they can be contacted in emergencies". The schools gave up fighting with the parents.Laws like this give the school cover to confiscate the phones and say "talk to your congressperson if this bothers you, my hands are tied".

selectively: Phone bans are bad.

wjholden: For what it's worth — my last workplace did not allow cell phones in the building and I learned to love it. When people attended meetings, we all made eye contact and talked about the task at hand. Nobody ever got distracted by notifications or tuned out with boredom. And since we all had traditional telephones at our desks, someone would come get you if your family was calling with for an urgent crisis. I miss it.My kids' school banned phones during the school day. The principal promised that the office would relay any messages if parents call, and they do. I would be interested to see if there are already statistics showing academic success. That is, are grades and test scores affected by phone bans? The article talks about graduation rates, but doesn't directly address grades and scores.

Neywiny: When I was in uni I would repeatedly get told that such issues with their software were fine because the lowest N quizzes/homeworks/etc wouldn't get counted. So instead of spending that leeway on a bad day I had to use it on their servers being down or whatever.

bawolff: Do graphing calculators actually help people learn? We used them in high school, but when i needed to take calculus in university we didn't use them. I'm doubtful they are good for learning especially when trying to teach the foundations.

jeffgreco: Complete waste for anything math related for me. Did act as a proper gateway into coding though!

ottah: Do you have an elected schoolboard? In my state, if something was that bad, there would be no end to the meetings and public complaints.

alexfoo: > They should ban that too. Technology MUST be fit for purpose in a classroom and most of it isn't.Absolutely agree.It’s just bad luck that your kid is in a school that can’t get it right.My 16yo kid’s (state) school is far from perfect but the school provided laptop works well, is reasonably locked down and policed, and is fixed or swapped out quickly if there is a problem. Sure we have to contribute towards it but we can (and we pay extra to help cover the cost for someone who isn’t able to pay for it). There are no similar tales of broken WiFi, unavailable servers or whatnot.They went through some problems where there were multiple systems in use and the kids regularly got confused about where they had to check for homework, with different teachers for the same subject using different systems, but that was resolved eventually.Phones are officially banned but enforcement is sometimes sporadic. If they do take the piss with it then it gets confiscated and a parent has to come in to get it released (the school has some generic Nokias to hand out at the end of the day if the kid has to have some way of being in contact). That deals with the majority of it.They seem to have got the balance mostly right in terms of doing enough to keep the lessons mostly distraction free, and also reducing access to keep FOMO down (if hardly anyone has access to their phone during the school day then they, as a group, don’t think they are missing out on much).Not a fan of them going back to paper for everything, but 100% on screens isn’t good either, especially as the exams are pretty much all paper based.

dgxyz: Well saving time it does not.My daughter got a 0/20 for a test that she sat and did. Now she's not a complete idiot so this was suspicious. I asked about it and they said that it was likely that she didn't get any questions right. I asked for them to provide me with a copy of the exam paper so I could independently verify that.Magically she got a 17/20 grade updated but no paper appeared. I pushed it further and was told it was resolved. I raised a formal complaint immediately and they did a full investigation. The conclusion was there was a defect in the system used for tracking progress and it was losing information imported from the exam system. They had to manually enter over 200 student papers again due to this.No one had noticed or actioned it or saw it was a serious issue until I raised a formal complaint.When technology is in the loop it's very difficult for anyone to take personal accountability as demonstrated.

mytailorisrich: My children's secondary school (England) also banned use of phones, but the rule was that the phone had to be switched off and kept in the school bag, which was all very sensible.State schools cannot charge for essential equipment needed for the curriculum. Some schools are taking the p. If all parents told them to do one they would have no leg to stand on, and it is rather scandalous that nothing is done to stop this at Council and government level (they probably prefer to turn a blind eye rather than footing the bill).

donatj: I have worked in Edtech for the last 15 years, and I stand by it when I say most of it is just added noise.1:1 programs are a waste of money and time. They don't need continuous access to a computer. Shared computer labs will always be a fine environment.Kids frankly aren't learning more today with all this tech in the classroom than they were twenty years ago with paper and whiteboards, and the metrics prove it.

masfuerte: I don't see the need for it. The only time I ever needed to graph a function was to answer a homework problem that specifically asked me to. Having your calculator do it misses the point.

nabbed: I would love it if my laptop had a "study mode" for when I am trying to debug something or learn something new using my laptop. Some of us have less than stellar self-control, so a study mode which requires a multi-step rigamarole to shut off might prevent me from casually checking my email or a news website when I am supposed to be learning a new data structure or figuring out a data corruption bug. I have no idea how it would work in real life: I need access to the internet to lookup API documentation, download libraries, and read online books, but I imagine something could be worked out.(This article mentions that not only are cell phones banned at the featured school, but these kids have hobbled laptops that supposedly help them focus on school work, although the imperfect nature of the hobbling has unintended consequences).

DenisM: Create a separate Mac / Windows non-admin account just for coding? I’m sure there are parental control measures for either platform. As time goes you can update the deny list of web sites.Another thing that helps is recording your screen for the whole day. Once you start doing review in the evening it will create back-pressure on the monkey brain that jumps to distractions.Yet another thing is to setup a separate computer. You can browse crapnet as long as you want, but you have to walk to another desk. The back pressure is subtle but has long-term effect and requires very kittke will power.

alexfoo: I gave my 16yo ADHD kid an mp3 player with hours of “ADHD focus” music on it.It’s proven very useful a few times where a few ND-unaware teachers have confiscated phones that the ND kids use to help them focus.They don’t get it to use it whenever they want but there are some situations where they are allowed to use it and where having a phone is tricky given the lack of trust some teachers have.Old school technology fallbacks are sometimes useful. Who knew.

lastofthemojito: From my teacher spouse's perspective, a lot of it seems to be the monetary value of smartphones. Some kids are coming to school with the latest and greatest $1000+ smartphone, so if the teacher drops it, scuffs it, misplaces it, etc, the parents are coming after the teacher about an item with real value. Teachers don't want any part of that battle so confiscation is now off the table.

Aurornis: But this new law also involves confiscation.I don't think that explains anything.

shimman: If you are interested in standalone digital audio players (DAPs), I just recently bought this:https://www.fiio.com/echominiFor ~$60 you get a device that can play every type of audio file and has better sound quality than your cellphone + streamer combo.I've been reading more about Chinese hardware and if you've been sleeping on it there are a lot of great Chinese consumer products that are both extremely high quality + very cheap.Turns out when you have tens of millions of engineers they pump out banger after banger. Also always hilarious, in an enduring way, finding the factory engineers engaging with consumers on random forums that take their feedback seriously.

jjgreen: Woah, skeuomorphism writ large!

Rebelgecko: Around 2015 or so they became a lot more accepted. From talking to teachers, a surprisingly large amount of the distraction is parents texting kids while they're at school.

simplyluke: > a surprisingly large amount of the distraction is parents texting kids while they're at schoolWe're entering pretty substantial numbers of parents who grew up or at least spent their entire adult lives with cell phones and the expectation of constant communication. In fact, from my anecdotal experience, the mid-older millennial cohort is the worst at expecting immediate replies at all hours to any form of communication be it social or work.One of the things I realize I'm grateful for in hindsight is parents who didn't grow up with that, and had no problem calling the front desk of the school if there was a legitimate emergency that needed to involve pulling me out of school. And it turns out for anything short of that, the news could wait until 4PM.

caderosche: I don't disagree that people lack self control.My only disagreement is that bans on cellphone-like tech will be at all enforceable in the near future.

scuff3d: They're kids... Even in some dystopian ass scifi future we all have implants in our eyes or some shit, we aren't doing that to kids...

soopypoos: more like gaolposts amirite

soperj: Same for me. Felt like a superpower.

saltyoldman: Why is that?

overvale: I managed to build myself exactly this with Claude's help. There are 3 levels of protection.1. I use an app called SelfControl, which blocks websites temporarily.2. I have a script which watches `/etc/hosts` with launchd and reverts it to a version pulled from a server if the file changes. This blocks websites I never want to go to.3. I setup a 'focus mode' with hammerspoon prevents me from launching certain apps, and makes me wait 30 seconds and type a string of text when I want to switch it off.Yes, all of these things can be disabled when I want to, but the point is that they all add some fiction and give me a chance the reconsider the distracting action I was about to take.I've been doing it for about 2 weeks, so far it's working pretty well!

lastofthemojito: I'm not sure what law you're referring to. The linked article discusses the implementation of an executive order in Oregon that mostly bans use of cell phones during school time.Some schools may do things differently, but it seems like the one highlighted in the article allows the kids to keep phone in their backpacks: "Rather than use pouches or lockers, students are allowed to keep their phones safely stored in their backpacks"I didn't see anything in the article or the text of the EO about confiscation. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1R5kfyMYsA6cg3VQKutUxLTIGVpI...

mattbaker: It’s the right idea but it also puts the burden of enforcement on teachers that are already over extended, especially in schools where behavioral challenges are more prevalent. Great in a scenario where students are compliant, and a nightmare in environments where they’re not.I don’t have a solution to that problem, but I also think it’s important to acknowledge it’s not all sunshine and roses.I’m saying this as a person with close friends in Oregon school systems, based on the experiences they’ve shared with me.

Aurornis: > It’s the right idea but it also puts the burden of enforcement on teachersAs opposed to what? Enforcing rules of the classroom is part of the teacher's job.I don't understand this objection. What's the alternative? Just let the classroom be a free for all because we don't want to burden teachers enforcing rules? Put a separate security officer in the classroom?

scuff3d: I quit all social media (unless you count hackernews I guess), killed all notifications except calls and text messages, and regularly leave my phone in another room while I'm working or doing anything that requires prolonged attention. Helped a lot.

fidotron: The whole "browser game" industry is built on this phenomenon. It's about getting kids on school laptops mindlessly looping on something while shoving ads in their face.Honestly, get the tech out of classrooms. A few 8 bit machines that can run LOGO are far more genuinely educational than all the gunk they have today.

johnnyanmac: [delayed]

Aurornis: > Students can be trusted to obey a simple "no phones in class" ruleThat was the general policy before these bans. It was not working.

rootusrootus: Late 2000s was just after smartphones became a thing, and before they became a crack epidemic. In my personal experience, it has really been bad for about the last 10 years, getting better over the last few years however. Took a few years for everyone to really understand how bad the problem had become and how quickly.

porridgeraisin: Here in india it became normalised to bring it to school around 2016. But even today it's completely not OK to use it in class. It'll be confiscated immediately.

kimbernator: >Students can be trusted to obey a simple "no phones in class" rule.I'm honestly not educated on the topic right now since I haven't been in school for 15 years and have some time left before my daughter starts, but is this rule really not in place in most schools? How could any school justify not having this rule at the very least, regardless of how well-enforced it is?I always assumed it was a lack of enforcement due to understaffing that was the problem

johnfn: It’s hard to imagine a slow, overworked, somewhat inept, bureaucratic school board, with a thousand other things it wants to care about, managing to stay ahead of thousands of crafty and highly motivated teens.