5 ms·

This is an elite boarding school in the Berkshires. Not sure that the cell phone ban is the most important thing in these outcomes and I'd hesitate to draw swe

by 33a 3y ago

This is an elite boarding school in the Berkshires. Not sure that the cell phone ban is the most important thing in these outcomes and I'd hesitate to draw sweeping generalizations here.

rapind 3y ago
Agreed, but some of these surveys quoted are troublesome. > A survey of a school district in Virginia found that about a third of teachers were telling students to put away their cellphones five to 10 times a class, and 14.7% did so more than 20 times a class. > When a middle school in Canada surveyed staff, 75% of respondents thought that cellphones were negatively affecting their students’ physical and mental health. Nearly two-thirds believed the devices were adversely affecting academic performances as well.
wharvle 3y ago
One observation about private v. public schools: Private schools, perhaps counterintuitively, have greater ability to enforce rules that some parents dislike, than public schools. They can organize around and enforce a general culture in ways that public schools cannot, and this ability increases the more prestigious they are. Families self-select to be generally agreeable to and aligned with the school's culture, and bad fits can simply be sent away. Public schools have to deal with whatever mix of families they happen to serve, period. Private schools are sometimes pointed to as being more-accountable to parents, and that's sort of true, but they also have much greater freedom to tell a loud minority of their "customers" to, frankly, go eff themselves. An observation of trends I've seen with a limited dataset but that I suspect generalizes pretty well: Better-off, if you will, parents, or at least those with a "higher-class" cultural background (Fussell's upper-middle and higher—doctors, lawyers, executives, in short) are giving their kids phones later, restricting use more, and are more-amenable to restrictions on phones imposed by schools, than lower-class (Fussell's middle and lower) parents. These factors tend to significantly reduce student phone use in ritzy private schools, "captive" nigh-private-school public schools, and the tip-top of other upper-tier public schools, compared with practically all the rest of the school landscape. I fully expect this to widen already-large class differences in education.

by 33a 3y ago

This is an elite boarding school in the Berkshires. Not sure that the cell phone ban is the most important thing in these outcomes and I'd hesitate to draw sweeping generalizations here.

rapind 3y ago

Agreed, but some of these surveys quoted are troublesome. > A survey of a school district in Virginia found that about a third of teachers were telling students to put away their cellphones five to 10 times a class, and 14.7% did so more than 20 times a class. > When a middle school in Canada surveyed staff, 75% of respondents thought that cellphones were negatively affecting their students’ physical and mental health. Nearly two-thirds believed the devices were adversely affecting academic performances as well.

wharvle 3y ago

One observation about private v. public schools: Private schools, perhaps counterintuitively, have greater ability to enforce rules that some parents dislike, than public schools. They can organize around and enforce a general culture in ways that public schools cannot, and this ability increases the more prestigious they are. Families self-select to be generally agreeable to and aligned with the school's culture, and bad fits can simply be sent away. Public schools have to deal with whatever mix of families they happen to serve, period. Private schools are sometimes pointed to as being more-accountable to parents, and that's sort of true, but they also have much greater freedom to tell a loud minority of their "customers" to, frankly, go eff themselves. An observation of trends I've seen with a limited dataset but that I suspect generalizes pretty well: Better-off, if you will, parents, or at least those with a "higher-class" cultural background (Fussell's upper-middle and higher—doctors, lawyers, executives, in short) are giving their kids phones later, restricting use more, and are more-amenable to restrictions on phones imposed by schools, than lower-class (Fussell's middle and lower) parents. These factors tend to significantly reduce student phone use in ritzy private schools, "captive" nigh-private-school public schools, and the tip-top of other upper-tier public schools, compared with practically all the rest of the school landscape. I fully expect this to widen already-large class differences in education.