11 ms·

Oregon school cell phone ban: 'Engaged students, joyful teachers'

278 points by nxobject 7mo ago

superkuh 7mo ago
It's crazy to me that cell phones, and especially smart phones, were ever allowed in the classroom during class.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 7mo ago
  I once had to sit in the principals office for bringing in some electronic fishing game. How we went from that to phones being allowed is insanity. They came like a tsunami.
- jasonmp85 7mo ago
  [dead]
- reedf1 7mo ago
  They are not allowed in any school I've been to, especially during class.
- coffeefirst 7mo ago
  I suspect it was sneaky. The old Nokia in school wasn't a problem. You get in trouble for playing snake. The iphone 1 wasn't really a problem. There weren't that many, and it served as a calendar. But year after year, release after release, the industry deliberately loaded more and more addictive machinery, pushed more and more boundaries, until it's beyond unacceptable. As an aside, it's amazing how hard it is to turn the modern phone into a no-nonsense tool, and I'm an adult with self-control, a deep understanding of dark patterns, and a fully-functioning brain after 3 cups of coffee.
  - svachalek 7mo ago
    Completely. I'm a software engineer that has a better shot at this than just about anybody, and I have no idea how to give a child a phone that's not just digital crack. If you think ScreenTime etc will do the job you probably have no idea what's actually happening on your child's phone.
    - eloisant 7mo ago
      You can buy a dumbphone. For example a Nokia 3210 4G.
  - eloisant 7mo ago
    Interestingly dumb phones are making a comeback. They disappeared for a few years, but now you can buy a dumb phone, for example running KaiOS, that charges with USB-C and supports modern cell networks. You can even get a Nokia! There is absolutely no need to buy a smartphone to any kid younger than 15. Now for high school students it's a bit different, they should be old enough to have self control and respect rules to keep their phones in their bags during class.
- j2kun 7mo ago
  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.
ecshafer 7mo ago
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 7mo ago
  Surely an electronic wrist watch is fine, and maybe an mp3 player. Also graphing calculators.
  - drivebyhooting 7mo ago
    Why do you need a music player in school?
    - WithinReason 7mo ago
      For the walk home
    - mrinterweb 7mo ago
      Listening to music can help people focus.
      - bananamogul 7mo ago
        In 2026 the number of people with mp3 players that are not also smart phones is vanishingly small.
        shimman 7mo ago
        If you are interested in standalone digital audio players (DAPs), I just recently bought this: https://www.fiio.com/echomini https://www.fiio.com/echomini For ~$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.
jasonmp85 7mo ago
[dead]
ronbenton 7mo ago
I remember reading somewhere else that there was a psychological benefit for kids as well. Not having the constant pressure to check the device. Just seems like a big win all around.
- windexh8er 7mo ago
  In our district phones are banned during the day. Most students don't care about their phones, what they care about is FOMO. And so the ban does great to not only reduce distractions but also the cognitive load of constantly wondering what they're missing.
- justonceokay 7mo ago
  I surprisingly found this with my Apple Watch. was so concerned it would make me even more plugged in. But in reality now 90% of the time I get a junk email I just say “huh” instead of needing to open the phone to see what it is (and the other 15 notifications). Can’t have fomo if you know you’re not missing out, amirite?
  - subscribed 7mo ago
    That's still quite insane. I get a lot of email daily but notifications onto about priority / important ones. Which is about 1-2 per _week_.
reedf1 7mo ago
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.
- rootusrootus 7mo ago
  If anything I suspect it helps reduce the adversarial relationship between local schools and their parents. "State law, not our policy, sorry." Sounds childish, but hey, if parenting has taught me anything it is that plenty of people never outgrow childish behavior.
- germinalphrase 7mo ago
  "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.
- eru 7mo ago
  See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsidiarity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsidiarity Any ban above school level is silly.
caderosche 7mo ago
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.
- shimman 7mo ago
  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 7mo ago
    "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.
- scuff3d 7mo ago
  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.
kleiba 7mo ago
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" :)
bawolff 7mo ago
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 if a teacher saw you with a cell phone it was immediately confiscated.
- Rebelgecko 7mo ago
  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.
  - temp84858696945 7mo ago
    I wonder how much of that is actually parents texting kids, and how much of that is that kids are using that as an excuse to why they checked their phone mid class. That seems like one of the easiest excuses for kids to make that is hard to argue against.
    - genthree 7mo ago
      No, no, it's the parent. Parents calling their kids in class isn't as rare as you might think...
      - lastofthemojito 7mo ago
        Yeah, there was a recent NYT article about the ongoing phone ban/pouch discussion and one parent reported having a shared Google Doc for emergency communication with their kid to work around the lack of a cell phone. The nature of such emergencies was not discussed, but I cynically suspect it was along the lines of "do you want mac n cheese or nuggets for dinner?" https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/25/style/yondr-pouch-school-phone-ban.html https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/25/style/yondr-pouch-school-...
        genthree 7mo ago
        Consider how many people are clingy and/or just have questionable judgement about boundaries with their friends, family, and acquaintances in general, usually with a healthy dose of neuroticism thrown in for good measure. Consider that lots of these people have kids, and when they do, they tend to have a very friend-like relationship with them. Like, they aren't just magically better at this stuff when it's their kid. These situations are a source of a great deal of this behavior, and the "I can't contact my kid-friend!" anxiety.
technothrasher 7mo ago
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 7mo ago
  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.
- rootusrootus 7mo ago
  Yeah it probably took about 15 seconds for the first kid to figure out that you could just share a google doc with your friends and use it for texting.
- Auracle 7mo ago
  Way back when I was in school (2004 or so) I set up a proxy on my personal website to get around them blocking email, because I don’t want to have to save things to a damned floppy drive. I then let a teacher use it because he was frustrated half of his search results would get blocked. From there, it spread like wildfire. Eventually they blocked it and from then on the IT guy would give me a side eye whenever we crossed paths. Anyways, I can only imagine the clever ways kids get around things now. If it’s not per device, all a kid would need is a mobile hotspot to be king.
  - technothrasher 7mo ago
    Back in the day when every hotel that was charging for WiFi was stupidly leaving port 53 wide open, I wrote an IP over DNS tunnel to get free WiFi. Worked great until I went to a hotel in Tokyo and turned it on. Suddenly my network connection was completely dead. They were clearly watching for shenanigans. Took me a few minutes to figure out they had redirected my MAC address to the bit bucket. I spoofed my MAC to a different one, and then behaved, as well as admired those IT guys.
bananamogul 7mo ago
"decreed by executive order" That's the only bummer here. I do agree with this policy, but no one voted for it. The governor just said "you're going to do this". Yes, yes, I know - people elected the governor. But this sort of policy seems like something that should require legislative approval, not just one person deciding the whole state must do something. For every time something good comes of that kind of behavior, there's 10 times when it's a disaster.
- j2kun 7mo ago
  The legislature (of states and the federal government) routinely passes laws explicitly giving the head of state the power to make decisions like this without passing a law. The most recent one in Oregon about schooling was SB 141.
- roughly 7mo ago
  FTA: > The kids also weighed in on the debate around the extent of the ban. The two options bandied in Salem were a “bell-to-bell” policy or just inside classrooms. The latter would allow kids to use their phones during passing period and lunch. Several advocated for that change. That mirrored the debate within the Oregon legislature. It ultimately led to a stalemate and the need for Gov. Kotek’s executive ruling. It sounds like the legislature broadly agreed on the ban, but couldn’t agree on a couple final details. Insofar as an executive is useful, that’s the case for it: calling the shot in the face of several good (or bad!) options but no clear winner.
- nxobject 7mo ago
  This is a fun bureaucratic aside, but in Oregon the governor _is_ the statutory superintendent, rather than an elected official. (There are other oddities in Oregon: policy is otherwise extremely devolved, _and_ because property taxes are capped, funding goes through the legislature.)
mentalgear 7mo ago
'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.
- deleted 7mo ago
  [deleted]
- glaugh 7mo ago
  Saw this the other day: https://thehill.com/opinion/technology/5726492-social-media-teen-mental-health/ https://thehill.com/opinion/technology/5726492-social-media-... Writer’s org’s founders include Meta, among many others: https://itif.org/our-supporters/ https://itif.org/our-supporters/ I’m no expert here, so leaving this as a datapoint
  - ecshafer 7mo ago
    Social Media Bans are never the answer says unbiased author Zark Muckerburg
- soopypoos 7mo ago
  more like gaolposts amirite
dgxyz 7mo ago
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.
- Neywiny 7mo ago
  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.
- bitexploder 7mo ago
  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.
  - dgxyz 7mo ago
    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.
dizzy9 7mo ago
> 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.
- starkparker 7mo ago
  Don't get it twisted, almost every Portland-area school has gone full in on the stupid fucking Yondr pouches, and yeah it fucked up entry/exit: https://katu.com/news/local/portland-students-adapt-to-new-cellphone-policy-with-mixed-reactions-from-parents https://katu.com/news/local/portland-students-adapt-to-new-c... They also begged parents to help pay for them: https://www.govtech.com/education/k-12/portland-schools-ask-parents-for-contributions-for-phone-pouches https://www.govtech.com/education/k-12/portland-schools-ask-... A friend's kid needs an exemption from their doctor because their phone is also their glucose monitor and diagnostic tracker, and the exception only allows them to unlock the pouch under supervision when necessary.
  - selectively 7mo ago
    What a vulgar situation. Policy made from a moral panic and - look at that - it is negatively impacting actual people who exist.
    - bpt3 7mo ago
      It's not a moral panic. There are loads of studies indicating that disconnected classrooms produce better outcomes for students. I'm not sure what argument there is for allowing all students unfettered access to their phones, but feel free to present one.
mystraline 7mo ago
For a country that likes to brag about being a "democratic republic", the 2 major areas of society (school and work) are the most fascistic top-down authoritarian structures we have. And sure we can vote every 2 years. Yay. But what freedom do we have when schools can steal student's property, or a business owner can fire you for speech made outside of work.
- erelong 7mo ago
  I'm actually surprised there isn't more of a focus on school and work reform and a lot of focus on... everything else
mmaunder 7mo ago
Given the free market nature of cellphones, where vendors and companies have unfettered access to monetize users, having cellphones in school is akin to making school children line up and listen to sales pitches from companies around the world for several hours a day, instead of focusing on education.
wjholden 7mo ago
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.
- moduspol 7mo ago
  > I would be interested to see if there are already statistics showing academic success. It's fair to expect that data, though honestly at this point, it might also be reasonable to expect data that increased screens IMPROVE the outcomes before allowing or issuing them.
selectively 7mo ago
Phone bans are bad.
- saltyoldman 7mo ago
  Why is that?
  - selectively 7mo ago
    The obvious reasons. People who do not have political agency should not have decisions made that prevent them from using their own devices in a setting that they are legally required to be in. That's not how things should work. One group of people should not be setting policy for another group of people in this matter. The victims of these policies aren't infants; they will be adults in about five minutes. Blankets bans and these idiotic 'oh just ban phones/computers entirely, pen and paper am i rite?' ideas have a ton of nasty externalities that no one seems to care about. They reduce the quality of life for people who rely on AAC (having your actual voice on the device you carry day to day is nice, having a lesser experience without your actual data is intolerable + 'everyone' having the kind of device that you use for this purpose prevents you from standing out at all times) in service of chasing and responding to a moral panic. In the real world, kids just unenroll Chromebooks via the nine million exploits that have been found over the years (many of which are unpatched and some are hardware flaws) and load software that lies to the management system about the state of the device. They do whatever they want on on those devices - which is mostly 'doing their actual work without staff being able to spy on their screen/being able to play a simple game when they have no work to do'. The people using phones in class are the exact same people who were using iPods in class, were using non-smartphones in class to text constantly, using Discmans in class and so on. To pretend that smartphones are somehow different from that past involves gesturing towards pseudoscience and non-credible actors. For more on this: https://www.techdirt.com/2026/01/21/two-major-studies-125000-kids-the-social-media-panic-doesnt-hold-up/ https://www.techdirt.com/2026/01/21/two-major-studies-125000... These policies have both possible problems - the 'gun control problem' (you can't really achieve anything that you claim to care about while also issuing kids laptops that are used in class + you have to issue laptops in order to much of the kind of relevant teaching necessary in 2026, so there is no real way around this problem) and also the problem of the policy itself not addressing an actual real problem that exists - it's mostly a moral panic about social media, not some real problem of widespread usage of phones during class. The people who are interested in learning will learn, the others will not, that's that. People should be treated as individuals rather than a faceless blob of youth who need hostile policy designed for them. I'd also remind lawmakers that these people will be adults in about five minutes and resentment can easily carry over into the voting booth. By the way, the Oregon ban is illegal and will be tossed out the moment that it gets to the appropriate level of judicial review - the Governor cannot make law.
SunshineTheCat 7mo ago
It's tough to imagine how different it must be for kids now than when I went to school. I know there's a billion other reasons, but I've heard parents say they want their kid to have a phone so they can keep in touch if they need to. When I was a kid, cell phones weren't a thing (at least for kids) so the once or twice a year I needed to call a parent I went down to the office and asked to use their phone. Then I got to have whatever, usually embarrassing, conversation with my mom while everyone in the school office stared at me. Good times.
nabbed 7mo ago
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).
- corporate_pie 7mo ago
  Here is how it would work in real life: The laptop would come with a study mode button. You would push it and turn off distractions. Then 5 minutes later you would disable it just to send a chat. Then since it was off, you'd just quickly check TikTok. Then while you're at it, it just a quick break, you'd pop over to Twitch. 3 hours later... If you can't teach yourself restraint, a button won't help.
  - alexfoo 7mo ago
    That’s a very simplistic view. Granted it won’t work for 100% of people but I’m sure it would work for lots of people. Something as simple as a button you have to press to disable it is often enough of a barrier to prevent people from doing that as it makes the context switch from work to non-work more obvious than simply alt-tabbing to a different browser window.
  - kibwen 7mo ago
    Slowing down the dopamine feedback loop works. Many impulses that lead to distraction are automatic, not conscious. Ever closed a Hacker News tab just for your fingers to immediately re-type the URL into the bar and hit enter? There are browser extensions that delay loading pages on a given site for a number of seconds, to cut off that sort of automatic behavior, and they work as long as the delay to load the site is less than the time and effort it takes to open up your addons manager and disable the addon.
jmward01 7mo ago
I think this is likely a good concept for schools, but I want to see the data and not opinions. Lack of evidence based policy is what got us here, we should at some point start using evidence based policy to get us out of it.
- mrinterweb 7mo ago
  There are many sources for data on before and after school cell phone bans. Oregon is far from the first to implement this. 35 US states have some form of school cell phone ban, and I believe the UK is doing a nation-wide ban. There is a good amount of supporting data measuring results on this topic.
  - cmxch 7mo ago
    Any data that discusses the effects of jurisdictions that still have refused to pass or enact such provisions?
mattbaker 7mo ago
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 7mo ago
  > It’s the right idea but it also puts the burden of enforcement on teachers As 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? Enforcement becomes easier, not harder, when the rules are uniformly applied everywhere and without exception. There's no gray area and less temptation to bring the phone out because they know they'll lose it wherever they use it, even if it's in the hallways.
alexfoo 7mo ago
I think this more about it coming from a higher authority than the school itself. Many schools have similar bans but they don’t get support from many of the pupils or their parents as both groups have members that just believe it is the school choosing to overstep their authority. Now it is a diktat from above it makes the school’s job in enforcing it much easier. They can just point to the relevant legislation/diktat and say that their hands are tied, if you disagree here are the places you can go to voice your opinion. Meanwhile we (as a school) have no choice but to apply the rules, etc.
- philistine 7mo ago
  That is exactly why this is a success.
- akramachamarei 7mo ago
  This notion discomforts me. It has poor implication for decentralization of decision making, i.e. federalism in school administration.
briffle 7mo ago
its a blanket rule, which has almost no exceptions. So there are some silly parts. One of my kids is in band and the school uses YONDER pouches. They have had to dig out some really, really old analog tuners to use. They have a fraction of the capability of a $4 IOS app, but the kids are supposed to keep their phones in a special sleeve with no exceptions... (so many kids break that rule, or throw an old dummy phone in the pouch)
- 50208 7mo ago
  Good ... do it the old way ... I support the blanket ban, wish it would go further. It's a good start.
- SoftTalker 7mo ago
  Tuners? We had the oboe tune from a tuning fork, then the rest of the band tunes off of that. Or everyone tunes from a piano.
- xjlin0 7mo ago
  Tuning by ears is an important skill for musicians, learning that is beneficial. For example, you cannot rely on apps to tune your signing voice during performance.
  - Ylpertnodi 7mo ago
    Pianists are musicians that don't tune their instruments. People that use computers, too. A whole band tuning by ear? Ouch!
50208 7mo ago
Now ... what do we do about the rest of society. This problem isn't just a school problem, it is whole of society, escpecially senior citizens. They are more prone to the problems of phones, social media, and continuous disinformation ... and they vote.
tejohnso 7mo ago
Not having distraction devices in a classroom is such a basic concept. I'm surprised it required government intervention. Every half decent school principal should've banned them in their school, and if the principal didn't, the individual teachers should have banned them from their classrooms. The first time a kid had to have a question repeated to them because they were looking at their phone should've been the last time phones were permitted in that class.
- rtkwe 7mo ago
  Part of the problem is with each step down the ladder there's less authority and support and more chances for blowback from angry parents going higher up the chain. Teachers fear not getting support from principals if they're DIYing a device ban, principals fear blowback from complaints to the board or superintendent etc. There's also the normalization problem at the teacher level where kids are used to using them in other classes so it's a bigger lift to get different behavior in one specific class.
lmf4lol 7mo ago
Here in Amsterdam, most of the schools have a complete ban(!) for pupils below age 15 or 16. It has been a great decision so far. My daughters are essentially phone (and internet) free until they come hone from school. I love it
dkhenry 7mo ago
Just wait until you find out the benefits of taking them away from kids altogether! Phones are a mental health hazard for children, there is no benefit for them having a phone. The only downside is they feel left out when their friends only want to sit around and scroll TikTok, and can't manage to have any in person interactions without their face in a screen. None of my children have phones, and when they do get one, it will be when they are driving and will be a dumb phone for sending text messages and making calls.
- gib444 7mo ago
  Every parent when the kids are 0-3 says "I won't give them sugar/chocolate", "absolutely not having an iPad/iPhone before 14/15/16 years old", " no TV in their bedroom" etc. They ALL cave lol
chrismcb 7mo ago
Smart phones came out like 20 years ago. Why did it take so long to ban them in schools?
throwaway902984 7mo ago
Hundreds of comments and not one seems to think this is misguided - unusual for this community. Save the children I guess.
- spicyusername 7mo ago
  Mostly I think that's because it's pretty obvious smart phones, and the applications that inhabit them, have been a net negative for adults and children.
- kevincrane 7mo ago
  Unironically yes, save the children by not letting them be on smartphones all day during school.
erelong 7mo ago
Sounds dystopian and backwards, especially now with cutting access to AI tools that could accelerate educational achievement

278 points by nxobject 7mo ago

superkuh 7mo ago

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

2OEH8eoCRo0 7mo ago
I once had to sit in the principals office for bringing in some electronic fishing game. How we went from that to phones being allowed is insanity. They came like a tsunami.
jasonmp85 7mo ago
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reedf1 7mo ago
They are not allowed in any school I've been to, especially during class.
coffeefirst 7mo ago
I suspect it was sneaky. The old Nokia in school wasn't a problem. You get in trouble for playing snake. The iphone 1 wasn't really a problem. There weren't that many, and it served as a calendar. But year after year, release after release, the industry deliberately loaded more and more addictive machinery, pushed more and more boundaries, until it's beyond unacceptable. As an aside, it's amazing how hard it is to turn the modern phone into a no-nonsense tool, and I'm an adult with self-control, a deep understanding of dark patterns, and a fully-functioning brain after 3 cups of coffee.
- svachalek 7mo ago
  Completely. I'm a software engineer that has a better shot at this than just about anybody, and I have no idea how to give a child a phone that's not just digital crack. If you think ScreenTime etc will do the job you probably have no idea what's actually happening on your child's phone.
  - eloisant 7mo ago
    You can buy a dumbphone. For example a Nokia 3210 4G.
- eloisant 7mo ago
  Interestingly dumb phones are making a comeback. They disappeared for a few years, but now you can buy a dumb phone, for example running KaiOS, that charges with USB-C and supports modern cell networks. You can even get a Nokia! There is absolutely no need to buy a smartphone to any kid younger than 15. Now for high school students it's a bit different, they should be old enough to have self control and respect rules to keep their phones in their bags during class.
j2kun 7mo ago
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.

ecshafer 7mo ago

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 7mo ago
Surely an electronic wrist watch is fine, and maybe an mp3 player. Also graphing calculators.
- drivebyhooting 7mo ago
  Why do you need a music player in school?
  - WithinReason 7mo ago
    For the walk home
  - mrinterweb 7mo ago
    Listening to music can help people focus.
    - bananamogul 7mo ago
      In 2026 the number of people with mp3 players that are not also smart phones is vanishingly small.
      - shimman 7mo ago
        If you are interested in standalone digital audio players (DAPs), I just recently bought this: https://www.fiio.com/echomini https://www.fiio.com/echomini For ~$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.

jasonmp85 7mo ago

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ronbenton 7mo ago

I remember reading somewhere else that there was a psychological benefit for kids as well. Not having the constant pressure to check the device. Just seems like a big win all around.

windexh8er 7mo ago
In our district phones are banned during the day. Most students don't care about their phones, what they care about is FOMO. And so the ban does great to not only reduce distractions but also the cognitive load of constantly wondering what they're missing.
justonceokay 7mo ago
I surprisingly found this with my Apple Watch. was so concerned it would make me even more plugged in. But in reality now 90% of the time I get a junk email I just say “huh” instead of needing to open the phone to see what it is (and the other 15 notifications). Can’t have fomo if you know you’re not missing out, amirite?
- subscribed 7mo ago
  That's still quite insane. I get a lot of email daily but notifications onto about priority / important ones. Which is about 1-2 per _week_.

reedf1 7mo ago

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.

rootusrootus 7mo ago
If anything I suspect it helps reduce the adversarial relationship between local schools and their parents. "State law, not our policy, sorry." Sounds childish, but hey, if parenting has taught me anything it is that plenty of people never outgrow childish behavior.
germinalphrase 7mo ago
"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.
eru 7mo ago
See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsidiarity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsidiarity Any ban above school level is silly.

caderosche 7mo ago

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.

shimman 7mo ago
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 7mo ago
  "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.
scuff3d 7mo ago
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.

kleiba 7mo ago

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" :)

bawolff 7mo ago

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 if a teacher saw you with a cell phone it was immediately confiscated.

Rebelgecko 7mo ago
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.
- temp84858696945 7mo ago
  I wonder how much of that is actually parents texting kids, and how much of that is that kids are using that as an excuse to why they checked their phone mid class. That seems like one of the easiest excuses for kids to make that is hard to argue against.
  - genthree 7mo ago
    No, no, it's the parent. Parents calling their kids in class isn't as rare as you might think...
    - lastofthemojito 7mo ago
      Yeah, there was a recent NYT article about the ongoing phone ban/pouch discussion and one parent reported having a shared Google Doc for emergency communication with their kid to work around the lack of a cell phone. The nature of such emergencies was not discussed, but I cynically suspect it was along the lines of "do you want mac n cheese or nuggets for dinner?" https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/25/style/yondr-pouch-school-phone-ban.html https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/25/style/yondr-pouch-school-...
      - genthree 7mo ago
        Consider how many people are clingy and/or just have questionable judgement about boundaries with their friends, family, and acquaintances in general, usually with a healthy dose of neuroticism thrown in for good measure. Consider that lots of these people have kids, and when they do, they tend to have a very friend-like relationship with them. Like, they aren't just magically better at this stuff when it's their kid. These situations are a source of a great deal of this behavior, and the "I can't contact my kid-friend!" anxiety.

technothrasher 7mo ago

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 7mo ago
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.
rootusrootus 7mo ago
Yeah it probably took about 15 seconds for the first kid to figure out that you could just share a google doc with your friends and use it for texting.
Auracle 7mo ago
Way back when I was in school (2004 or so) I set up a proxy on my personal website to get around them blocking email, because I don’t want to have to save things to a damned floppy drive. I then let a teacher use it because he was frustrated half of his search results would get blocked. From there, it spread like wildfire. Eventually they blocked it and from then on the IT guy would give me a side eye whenever we crossed paths. Anyways, I can only imagine the clever ways kids get around things now. If it’s not per device, all a kid would need is a mobile hotspot to be king.
- technothrasher 7mo ago
  Back in the day when every hotel that was charging for WiFi was stupidly leaving port 53 wide open, I wrote an IP over DNS tunnel to get free WiFi. Worked great until I went to a hotel in Tokyo and turned it on. Suddenly my network connection was completely dead. They were clearly watching for shenanigans. Took me a few minutes to figure out they had redirected my MAC address to the bit bucket. I spoofed my MAC to a different one, and then behaved, as well as admired those IT guys.

bananamogul 7mo ago

"decreed by executive order" That's the only bummer here. I do agree with this policy, but no one voted for it. The governor just said "you're going to do this". Yes, yes, I know - people elected the governor. But this sort of policy seems like something that should require legislative approval, not just one person deciding the whole state must do something. For every time something good comes of that kind of behavior, there's 10 times when it's a disaster.

j2kun 7mo ago
The legislature (of states and the federal government) routinely passes laws explicitly giving the head of state the power to make decisions like this without passing a law. The most recent one in Oregon about schooling was SB 141.
roughly 7mo ago
FTA: > The kids also weighed in on the debate around the extent of the ban. The two options bandied in Salem were a “bell-to-bell” policy or just inside classrooms. The latter would allow kids to use their phones during passing period and lunch. Several advocated for that change. That mirrored the debate within the Oregon legislature. It ultimately led to a stalemate and the need for Gov. Kotek’s executive ruling. It sounds like the legislature broadly agreed on the ban, but couldn’t agree on a couple final details. Insofar as an executive is useful, that’s the case for it: calling the shot in the face of several good (or bad!) options but no clear winner.
nxobject 7mo ago
This is a fun bureaucratic aside, but in Oregon the governor _is_ the statutory superintendent, rather than an elected official. (There are other oddities in Oregon: policy is otherwise extremely devolved, _and_ because property taxes are capped, funding goes through the legislature.)

mentalgear 7mo ago

'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.

deleted 7mo ago
[deleted]
glaugh 7mo ago
Saw this the other day: https://thehill.com/opinion/technology/5726492-social-media-teen-mental-health/ https://thehill.com/opinion/technology/5726492-social-media-... Writer’s org’s founders include Meta, among many others: https://itif.org/our-supporters/ https://itif.org/our-supporters/ I’m no expert here, so leaving this as a datapoint
- ecshafer 7mo ago
  Social Media Bans are never the answer says unbiased author Zark Muckerburg
soopypoos 7mo ago
more like gaolposts amirite

dgxyz 7mo ago

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.

Neywiny 7mo ago
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.
bitexploder 7mo ago
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.
- dgxyz 7mo ago
  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.

dizzy9 7mo ago

> 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.

starkparker 7mo ago
Don't get it twisted, almost every Portland-area school has gone full in on the stupid fucking Yondr pouches, and yeah it fucked up entry/exit: https://katu.com/news/local/portland-students-adapt-to-new-cellphone-policy-with-mixed-reactions-from-parents https://katu.com/news/local/portland-students-adapt-to-new-c... They also begged parents to help pay for them: https://www.govtech.com/education/k-12/portland-schools-ask-parents-for-contributions-for-phone-pouches https://www.govtech.com/education/k-12/portland-schools-ask-... A friend's kid needs an exemption from their doctor because their phone is also their glucose monitor and diagnostic tracker, and the exception only allows them to unlock the pouch under supervision when necessary.
- selectively 7mo ago
  What a vulgar situation. Policy made from a moral panic and - look at that - it is negatively impacting actual people who exist.
  - bpt3 7mo ago
    It's not a moral panic. There are loads of studies indicating that disconnected classrooms produce better outcomes for students. I'm not sure what argument there is for allowing all students unfettered access to their phones, but feel free to present one.

mystraline 7mo ago

For a country that likes to brag about being a "democratic republic", the 2 major areas of society (school and work) are the most fascistic top-down authoritarian structures we have. And sure we can vote every 2 years. Yay. But what freedom do we have when schools can steal student's property, or a business owner can fire you for speech made outside of work.

erelong 7mo ago
I'm actually surprised there isn't more of a focus on school and work reform and a lot of focus on... everything else

mmaunder 7mo ago

Given the free market nature of cellphones, where vendors and companies have unfettered access to monetize users, having cellphones in school is akin to making school children line up and listen to sales pitches from companies around the world for several hours a day, instead of focusing on education.

wjholden 7mo ago

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.

moduspol 7mo ago
> I would be interested to see if there are already statistics showing academic success. It's fair to expect that data, though honestly at this point, it might also be reasonable to expect data that increased screens IMPROVE the outcomes before allowing or issuing them.

selectively 7mo ago

Phone bans are bad.

saltyoldman 7mo ago
Why is that?
- selectively 7mo ago
  The obvious reasons. People who do not have political agency should not have decisions made that prevent them from using their own devices in a setting that they are legally required to be in. That's not how things should work. One group of people should not be setting policy for another group of people in this matter. The victims of these policies aren't infants; they will be adults in about five minutes. Blankets bans and these idiotic 'oh just ban phones/computers entirely, pen and paper am i rite?' ideas have a ton of nasty externalities that no one seems to care about. They reduce the quality of life for people who rely on AAC (having your actual voice on the device you carry day to day is nice, having a lesser experience without your actual data is intolerable + 'everyone' having the kind of device that you use for this purpose prevents you from standing out at all times) in service of chasing and responding to a moral panic. In the real world, kids just unenroll Chromebooks via the nine million exploits that have been found over the years (many of which are unpatched and some are hardware flaws) and load software that lies to the management system about the state of the device. They do whatever they want on on those devices - which is mostly 'doing their actual work without staff being able to spy on their screen/being able to play a simple game when they have no work to do'. The people using phones in class are the exact same people who were using iPods in class, were using non-smartphones in class to text constantly, using Discmans in class and so on. To pretend that smartphones are somehow different from that past involves gesturing towards pseudoscience and non-credible actors. For more on this: https://www.techdirt.com/2026/01/21/two-major-studies-125000-kids-the-social-media-panic-doesnt-hold-up/ https://www.techdirt.com/2026/01/21/two-major-studies-125000... These policies have both possible problems - the 'gun control problem' (you can't really achieve anything that you claim to care about while also issuing kids laptops that are used in class + you have to issue laptops in order to much of the kind of relevant teaching necessary in 2026, so there is no real way around this problem) and also the problem of the policy itself not addressing an actual real problem that exists - it's mostly a moral panic about social media, not some real problem of widespread usage of phones during class. The people who are interested in learning will learn, the others will not, that's that. People should be treated as individuals rather than a faceless blob of youth who need hostile policy designed for them. I'd also remind lawmakers that these people will be adults in about five minutes and resentment can easily carry over into the voting booth. By the way, the Oregon ban is illegal and will be tossed out the moment that it gets to the appropriate level of judicial review - the Governor cannot make law.

SunshineTheCat 7mo ago

It's tough to imagine how different it must be for kids now than when I went to school. I know there's a billion other reasons, but I've heard parents say they want their kid to have a phone so they can keep in touch if they need to. When I was a kid, cell phones weren't a thing (at least for kids) so the once or twice a year I needed to call a parent I went down to the office and asked to use their phone. Then I got to have whatever, usually embarrassing, conversation with my mom while everyone in the school office stared at me. Good times.

nabbed 7mo ago

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).

corporate_pie 7mo ago
Here is how it would work in real life: The laptop would come with a study mode button. You would push it and turn off distractions. Then 5 minutes later you would disable it just to send a chat. Then since it was off, you'd just quickly check TikTok. Then while you're at it, it just a quick break, you'd pop over to Twitch. 3 hours later... If you can't teach yourself restraint, a button won't help.
- alexfoo 7mo ago
  That’s a very simplistic view. Granted it won’t work for 100% of people but I’m sure it would work for lots of people. Something as simple as a button you have to press to disable it is often enough of a barrier to prevent people from doing that as it makes the context switch from work to non-work more obvious than simply alt-tabbing to a different browser window.
- kibwen 7mo ago
  Slowing down the dopamine feedback loop works. Many impulses that lead to distraction are automatic, not conscious. Ever closed a Hacker News tab just for your fingers to immediately re-type the URL into the bar and hit enter? There are browser extensions that delay loading pages on a given site for a number of seconds, to cut off that sort of automatic behavior, and they work as long as the delay to load the site is less than the time and effort it takes to open up your addons manager and disable the addon.

jmward01 7mo ago

I think this is likely a good concept for schools, but I want to see the data and not opinions. Lack of evidence based policy is what got us here, we should at some point start using evidence based policy to get us out of it.

mrinterweb 7mo ago
There are many sources for data on before and after school cell phone bans. Oregon is far from the first to implement this. 35 US states have some form of school cell phone ban, and I believe the UK is doing a nation-wide ban. There is a good amount of supporting data measuring results on this topic.
- cmxch 7mo ago
  Any data that discusses the effects of jurisdictions that still have refused to pass or enact such provisions?

mattbaker 7mo ago

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 7mo ago
> It’s the right idea but it also puts the burden of enforcement on teachers As 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? Enforcement becomes easier, not harder, when the rules are uniformly applied everywhere and without exception. There's no gray area and less temptation to bring the phone out because they know they'll lose it wherever they use it, even if it's in the hallways.

alexfoo 7mo ago

I think this more about it coming from a higher authority than the school itself. Many schools have similar bans but they don’t get support from many of the pupils or their parents as both groups have members that just believe it is the school choosing to overstep their authority. Now it is a diktat from above it makes the school’s job in enforcing it much easier. They can just point to the relevant legislation/diktat and say that their hands are tied, if you disagree here are the places you can go to voice your opinion. Meanwhile we (as a school) have no choice but to apply the rules, etc.

philistine 7mo ago
That is exactly why this is a success.
akramachamarei 7mo ago
This notion discomforts me. It has poor implication for decentralization of decision making, i.e. federalism in school administration.

briffle 7mo ago

its a blanket rule, which has almost no exceptions. So there are some silly parts. One of my kids is in band and the school uses YONDER pouches. They have had to dig out some really, really old analog tuners to use. They have a fraction of the capability of a $4 IOS app, but the kids are supposed to keep their phones in a special sleeve with no exceptions... (so many kids break that rule, or throw an old dummy phone in the pouch)

50208 7mo ago
Good ... do it the old way ... I support the blanket ban, wish it would go further. It's a good start.
SoftTalker 7mo ago
Tuners? We had the oboe tune from a tuning fork, then the rest of the band tunes off of that. Or everyone tunes from a piano.
xjlin0 7mo ago
Tuning by ears is an important skill for musicians, learning that is beneficial. For example, you cannot rely on apps to tune your signing voice during performance.
- Ylpertnodi 7mo ago
  Pianists are musicians that don't tune their instruments. People that use computers, too. A whole band tuning by ear? Ouch!

50208 7mo ago

Now ... what do we do about the rest of society. This problem isn't just a school problem, it is whole of society, escpecially senior citizens. They are more prone to the problems of phones, social media, and continuous disinformation ... and they vote.

tejohnso 7mo ago

Not having distraction devices in a classroom is such a basic concept. I'm surprised it required government intervention. Every half decent school principal should've banned them in their school, and if the principal didn't, the individual teachers should have banned them from their classrooms. The first time a kid had to have a question repeated to them because they were looking at their phone should've been the last time phones were permitted in that class.

rtkwe 7mo ago
Part of the problem is with each step down the ladder there's less authority and support and more chances for blowback from angry parents going higher up the chain. Teachers fear not getting support from principals if they're DIYing a device ban, principals fear blowback from complaints to the board or superintendent etc. There's also the normalization problem at the teacher level where kids are used to using them in other classes so it's a bigger lift to get different behavior in one specific class.

lmf4lol 7mo ago

Here in Amsterdam, most of the schools have a complete ban(!) for pupils below age 15 or 16. It has been a great decision so far. My daughters are essentially phone (and internet) free until they come hone from school. I love it

dkhenry 7mo ago

Just wait until you find out the benefits of taking them away from kids altogether! Phones are a mental health hazard for children, there is no benefit for them having a phone. The only downside is they feel left out when their friends only want to sit around and scroll TikTok, and can't manage to have any in person interactions without their face in a screen. None of my children have phones, and when they do get one, it will be when they are driving and will be a dumb phone for sending text messages and making calls.

gib444 7mo ago
Every parent when the kids are 0-3 says "I won't give them sugar/chocolate", "absolutely not having an iPad/iPhone before 14/15/16 years old", " no TV in their bedroom" etc. They ALL cave lol

chrismcb 7mo ago

Smart phones came out like 20 years ago. Why did it take so long to ban them in schools?

throwaway902984 7mo ago

Hundreds of comments and not one seems to think this is misguided - unusual for this community. Save the children I guess.

spicyusername 7mo ago
Mostly I think that's because it's pretty obvious smart phones, and the applications that inhabit them, have been a net negative for adults and children.
kevincrane 7mo ago
Unironically yes, save the children by not letting them be on smartphones all day during school.

erelong 7mo ago

Sounds dystopian and backwards, especially now with cutting access to AI tools that could accelerate educational achievement