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.
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.
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.
Yeah, back when I was in school it was a cat and mouse game of finding a new proxy every week when the last one got blocked. The minute someone found a new one, it was everywhere.
I decided to sidestep the whole game and run my own proxy at home. I didn't have enough bandwidth for multiple users, so it was just me. I don't think IT ever caught on.
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.
Gotta get schools back to using paper homework. There's so many of those awful online classroom portals for homework. Absolutely trash software, technically speaking.
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.
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.
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.
they brought laptops to cafeteria? outside? the core issue is usage of phones outside of the class, no? if he used it during the class, cool (we all gad boring teachers). if he was able to use it after the bell rang that is not having a ban
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.
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.
> 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.
Kids are smart. My school district has sealed pouches.. Its amazing how many kids throw an old phone in there, and put their actual one away hidden on silent.
Which I guess gets looked the other way, since they aren't using it in class.
>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
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.
This is how it works in my kids' school. Not Estacada, but not that far away, and not in Portland. No pouches or lockers, just an understanding that phones which are seen will be confiscated. First time they get sent to the office and returned as the student leaves school. Second time they have to be picked up by a parent.
You'd think it would be a huge deal with rebellious teens, but my daughter says it has basically been a non-issue.
The sealed pouches are a bit of theatre. My son's school has a policy that pupil's can take their phones to school but if one is seen or heard on the school grounds it'll be confiscated and the owner's parents called to come pick it up on their behalf. From what I hear they're not shy about applying that policy either.
Offsetting part of the punishment to the parents (having to get them to come in to the school to collect the phone) is going to help get the policy reinforced from home in most cases.
My kid’s school had a similar policy. I didn't mind having to go out of my way to collect the phone and didn’t pass any of that on to my kid, they were annoyed enough about having it confiscated that it only took a few times before they modified their behaviour accordingly.
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.
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)
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.
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.
Back in the day the feature I liked most about my TI-82 was the amount of information that could fit on the display, the formatting options available, the ease of entering and editing what you entered, and the amount of past entered formulas that would be saved and how easy they were to retrieve. It made doing large blocks of basic BEDMAS math very quick and less suspectable to errors caused by accidentally hitting the wrong key entering in large formulas, and very easy to go back and find out where I messed up and quickly retabulate everything.
All of that mostly comes up in physics and chemistry were its about knowing what long formulas you need to plug the numbers you have available to you to find out what you need to know. Oddly enough their seems to be very little benefit to using a graphing calculator in a actual math class.
Personally, playing with the graphing and algebra functions on the calculator were hugely informative. Rapidly trying out different things, seeing how they looked how tweaking things would cause adjustment, all added educational value.
I feel like graphing calculators enable exploration in a way that doing it manually with pen and paper cannot. Obviously, pen and paper is super valuable as well, but I feel that they are complimentary.
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.
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.
Having all been in high school, I think we can all agree that lack of trust is warranted. Not for every kid, but for enough of them that blanket rules make sense. We also don’t allow students to use the calculator app on their phone for tests, and instead make them buy the “old school technology fallback” version.
An MP3 player seems like a good compromise, and far cheaper than the phone they’re replacing.
"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.
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.
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.
Note that in this case, you are getting what you pay for: I had a FIIO DAC that sounded amazing but was really bad about full-scale turn-on, sync and desync pops to the extent that it damaged my speakers. Yes, perfect power sequence hygiene would have prevented the problem, but one can't always be ready with the amplifier volume knob when their playback system crashes.
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.
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" :)
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.
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.
I teach CS in the US and I have gone back to pencil-on-paper quizzes for my classes. I allow one page of hand-written notes and given them a quiz review beforehand where I essentially tell them what's going to be on the quiz.
My intent isn't to trick anybody with hard questions, but rather to force the knowledge through their head out through their hand, then back through their eyes and through their hand again.
Next semester I'm doing in-person paper readings, where the first 20 minutes of the class are reading a paper I print out and hand to them, we discuss the paper in class, then they submit their annotated papers to me for a participation grade.
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.
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.
My partner is currently in an online college program for computer science. The platform and way they have structured it feels like actual computing hell. There is so much friction compared to what I know a more seamless learning experience online should be like.
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. Students don't need continuous access to a computer. Shared computer labs with a set goal for the time will always have better outcomes.
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.
> 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.
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).
This reminds me of university. Thankfully I did it long enough ago that a lot of stuff was still pen and paper, but some obvious stuff used computers (I did finance and econ, so some programming, lots of spreadsheets and statistics, etc...).
We had some student portal thing online for submitting assignments, MS Office was "required", but the portal was weird and it was right after the .doc/.docx fiasco so everything related to office was a shitshow. Some of our profs simply gave up on the blessed tech stack, issues assignments as Google Docs files, and had us submit assignments through Google Docs. So much easier. I know Google gets a bad rep because of weird perceptions about surveillance, but no one does cloud syncing better. And because most of their software is browser based, it does basically "just work".
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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!
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.
>Create a separate Mac / Windows non-admin account just for coding?
Yes, I got as far as creating a separate account on my MBP a few years ago and I do programming and open source stuff with that account. And it has helped quite a bit! Although it's not perfect (case in point, I am here on HN right now).
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
> a surprisingly large amount of the distraction is parents texting kids while they're at school
We'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.
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.
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?"
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.
It's some of both. Parents do text their kids during the day, but kids also pull out all the excuses when caught.
Even when I was in high school "I was responding to my mom" was the go-to excuse when caught using a cell phone. I had one teacher who would actually read what was on the screen (this was before locking your phone was common and probably lawsuit material today, but things were different) and call kids out when they were lying. The threat of having a teacher read your text messages was enough to put an end to cell phone usage in class.
When I was in high school in the early 2010s it was down to every teacher to enforce their own policy on phones. In practice, this meant that it was wildly variable, kids were getting texts from kids in more permissive environments (the gym teachers had no issue with you playing on your phone as you did a mile walk) which was driving FOMO and leading to students leaving the classroom to check their phones, lots of trying to sneak a look when teachers were distracted, etc.
The rollout of LTE data and more-modern smartphones + social media during that area was a nuclear bomb on teenagers's ability to focus in hindsight. I can distinctly remember the divide between dumb phones/ipods/early smart phones with slow data, and modern social media + fast cellular data to get around school network bans. Things went from the occasional student thinking they were clever with a wired headphone down their sleeve to near constant distraction very rapidly.
The "innovation" has been basic leadership -- setting policies at the school/district and in this case state level. Consistent expectations make it easier for students to follow the policy. Some schools have gone as far as physically locking phones away for the day, though reading the article it sounds like that's not what Oregon is doing.
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.
Previously, the confiscation was the teacher's policy.
"I dunno Mom, at the start of 4th hour I put my iPhone in the basket Mrs. Wormwood makes everyone drop their phones in, and when I got it back after class the screen had this big crack in it. It wasn't because I dropped it in 3rd hour in Mr. Lockjaw's PE class while walking and checking Instagram, nuh uh. Can you get me the iPhone 17 Pro Max instead of the iPhone 17e this time?"
And then at conferences (or worse, at the PTA meeting or school board meeting) Mrs. Wormwood is going to hear from Mom how she broke Johnny's phone and cost them $1100.
Now it's state law. It's not Mrs. Wormwood's decision to confiscate phones from students, preventing little Johnny from texting Mama when there's a lockdown, it's the law and her hands are tied.
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'm also confused by stories that imply that kids were allowed to use their phones during class.
The local schools I'm familiar with allowed phones in backpacks, but if you got caught using it during class there were consequences.
Enforcement was never perfect. Some teachers didn't care, some students were sneaky enough to not get caught. Yet the consequences seemed to keep the kids afraid of using phones for the most part (from what I've been told, obviously I wasn't sitting with them in class).
Some of these articles are written like entire classrooms were just scrolling their phones during class? I don't get it. Was there just a total lack of enforcement?
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.
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.
I was in high school in the early 2010s. In 2010 I went to a school that gave all students ipod touchs, which seemed futuristic at the time. By 2012 phones weren't banned from school, but a teacher would still take it if you were blatantly using it during class.
'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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> At some point, I think we are going to have comms devices imbedded in our heads and whatnot.
This will have limited impact because, at some point shortly after that, the moon will hatch and the lunar dragons will consume our satellite infrastructure, disabling all comm devices.
You can't make policy now based on nebulous ideas about possible futures, particularly not when those ideas aren't based on any reasonable inference.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah, back when I was in school it was a cat and mouse game of finding a new proxy every week when the last one got blocked. The minute someone found a new one, it was everywhere.
I decided to sidestep the whole game and run my own proxy at home. I didn't have enough bandwidth for multiple users, so it was just me. I don't think IT ever caught on.
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.
Gotta get schools back to using paper homework. There's so many of those awful online classroom portals for homework. Absolutely trash software, technically speaking.
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.
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.
It should be more simple devices with only helpful apps like books reader and learning videos player, not general access devices
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.
they brought laptops to cafeteria? outside? the core issue is usage of phones outside of the class, no? if he used it during the class, cool (we all gad boring teachers). if he was able to use it after the bell rang that is not having a ban
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.
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.
> 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.
Kids are smart. My school district has sealed pouches.. Its amazing how many kids throw an old phone in there, and put their actual one away hidden on silent.
Which I guess gets looked the other way, since they aren't using it in class.
>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
It’s a lack of enforcement due to unruly, unparented children,
in most regions’ school districts.
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-c...
They also begged parents to help pay for them: 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.
This is how it works in my kids' school. Not Estacada, but not that far away, and not in Portland. No pouches or lockers, just an understanding that phones which are seen will be confiscated. First time they get sent to the office and returned as the student leaves school. Second time they have to be picked up by a parent.
You'd think it would be a huge deal with rebellious teens, but my daughter says it has basically been a non-issue.
> it allows students to contact loved ones during emergencies, and many parents use phone trackers to keep tabs on their kids
That's such bullshit.
- There is no emergency that require students to contact anyone. Communication can go through the school
- Parents have no business tracking their kids when they're at school
The sealed pouches are a bit of theatre. My son's school has a policy that pupil's can take their phones to school but if one is seen or heard on the school grounds it'll be confiscated and the owner's parents called to come pick it up on their behalf. From what I hear they're not shy about applying that policy either.
Offsetting part of the punishment to the parents (having to get them to come in to the school to collect the phone) is going to help get the policy reinforced from home in most cases.
My kid’s school had a similar policy. I didn't mind having to go out of my way to collect the phone and didn’t pass any of that on to my kid, they were annoyed enough about having it confiscated that it only took a few times before they modified their behaviour accordingly.
> Students can be trusted to obey a simple "no phones in class" rule
That was the general policy before these bans. It was not working.
>Students can be trusted to obey a simple "no phones in class" rule.
And what if they don't? En masse?
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.
That is exactly why this is a success.
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)
Good ... do it the old way ... I support the blanket ban, wish it would go further. It's a good start.
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.
Surely an electronic wrist watch is fine, and maybe an mp3 player. Also graphing calculators.
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.
Back in the day the feature I liked most about my TI-82 was the amount of information that could fit on the display, the formatting options available, the ease of entering and editing what you entered, and the amount of past entered formulas that would be saved and how easy they were to retrieve. It made doing large blocks of basic BEDMAS math very quick and less suspectable to errors caused by accidentally hitting the wrong key entering in large formulas, and very easy to go back and find out where I messed up and quickly retabulate everything.
All of that mostly comes up in physics and chemistry were its about knowing what long formulas you need to plug the numbers you have available to you to find out what you need to know. Oddly enough their seems to be very little benefit to using a graphing calculator in a actual math class.
Personally, playing with the graphing and algebra functions on the calculator were hugely informative. Rapidly trying out different things, seeing how they looked how tweaking things would cause adjustment, all added educational value.
I feel like graphing calculators enable exploration in a way that doing it manually with pen and paper cannot. Obviously, pen and paper is super valuable as well, but I feel that they are complimentary.
Complete waste for anything math related for me. Did act as a proper gateway into coding though!
Same for me. Felt like a superpower.
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.
Why do you need a music player in school?
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.
Having all been in high school, I think we can all agree that lack of trust is warranted. Not for every kid, but for enough of them that blanket rules make sense. We also don’t allow students to use the calculator app on their phone for tests, and instead make them buy the “old school technology fallback” version.
An MP3 player seems like a good compromise, and far cheaper than the phone they’re replacing.
"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.
music players were often essential for my ability to stay focussed on my work and reading.
During class time?
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.
For the walk home
Listening to music can help people focus.
In 2026 the number of people with mp3 players that are not also smart phones is vanishingly small.
If you are interested in standalone digital audio players (DAPs), I just recently bought this:
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.
Note that in this case, you are getting what you pay for: I had a FIIO DAC that sounded amazing but was really bad about full-scale turn-on, sync and desync pops to the extent that it damaged my speakers. Yes, perfect power sequence hygiene would have prevented the problem, but one can't always be ready with the amplifier volume knob when their playback system crashes.
Woah, skeuomorphism writ large!
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.
This was some 20 years ago, but
- iPods? Taken away
- didn't have fancy smart watches, so those were fine. But I'm sure a modern smart watch wouldn't fly
- graphing calculators were fine. Just don't make it too obvious you were playing Pokemon Red on it.
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" :)
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.
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.
I teach CS in the US and I have gone back to pencil-on-paper quizzes for my classes. I allow one page of hand-written notes and given them a quiz review beforehand where I essentially tell them what's going to be on the quiz.
My intent isn't to trick anybody with hard questions, but rather to force the knowledge through their head out through their hand, then back through their eyes and through their hand again.
Next semester I'm doing in-person paper readings, where the first 20 minutes of the class are reading a paper I print out and hand to them, we discuss the paper in class, then they submit their annotated papers to me for a participation grade.
An irony of the AI era.
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.
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.
My partner is currently in an online college program for computer science. The platform and way they have structured it feels like actual computing hell. There is so much friction compared to what I know a more seamless learning experience online should be like.
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.
There is an academy board. Unfortunately it's filled up with the sort of people who should never be allowed on a board of any sort.
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. Students don't need continuous access to a computer. Shared computer labs with a set goal for the time will always have better outcomes.
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.
Man. Offloading all tbose costs to parents is stupid. But that aside: why is it always that edTech seems to have such shoddy software?
> 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.
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).
They just step around that with a policy that you aren't allowed to bring phones into the school if you don't have one. Yes they are arseholes.
This reminds me of university. Thankfully I did it long enough ago that a lot of stuff was still pen and paper, but some obvious stuff used computers (I did finance and econ, so some programming, lots of spreadsheets and statistics, etc...).
We had some student portal thing online for submitting assignments, MS Office was "required", but the portal was weird and it was right after the .doc/.docx fiasco so everything related to office was a shitshow. Some of our profs simply gave up on the blessed tech stack, issues assignments as Google Docs files, and had us submit assignments through Google Docs. So much easier. I know Google gets a bad rep because of weird perceptions about surveillance, but no one does cloud syncing better. And because most of their software is browser based, it does basically "just work".
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
A combination of https://selfcontrolapp.com/ and Hammerspoon automation and you can lock yourself out of pretty much everything.
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!
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.
>Create a separate Mac / Windows non-admin account just for coding?
Yes, I got as far as creating a separate account on my MBP a few years ago and I do programming and open source stuff with that account. And it has helped quite a bit! Although it's not perfect (case in point, I am here on HN right now).
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subsidiarity
Any ban above school level is silly.
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.
It's crazy to me that cell phones, and especially smart phones, were ever allowed in the classroom during class.
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.
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.
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.
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.
They are not allowed in any school I've been to, especially during class.
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.
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.
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".
There is a difference between being allowed to have the phone (in your pocket) and taking it out in the classroom.
Yes, and parents were getting mad at the school when their kids couldn't reply to their midday texts.
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.
> a surprisingly large amount of the distraction is parents texting kids while they're at school
We'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.
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.
No, no, it's the parent.
Parents calling their kids in class isn't as rare as you might think...
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-...
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.
It's some of both. Parents do text their kids during the day, but kids also pull out all the excuses when caught.
Even when I was in high school "I was responding to my mom" was the go-to excuse when caught using a cell phone. I had one teacher who would actually read what was on the screen (this was before locking your phone was common and probably lawsuit material today, but things were different) and call kids out when they were lying. The threat of having a teacher read your text messages was enough to put an end to cell phone usage in class.
When I was in high school in the early 2010s it was down to every teacher to enforce their own policy on phones. In practice, this meant that it was wildly variable, kids were getting texts from kids in more permissive environments (the gym teachers had no issue with you playing on your phone as you did a mile walk) which was driving FOMO and leading to students leaving the classroom to check their phones, lots of trying to sneak a look when teachers were distracted, etc.
The rollout of LTE data and more-modern smartphones + social media during that area was a nuclear bomb on teenagers's ability to focus in hindsight. I can distinctly remember the divide between dumb phones/ipods/early smart phones with slow data, and modern social media + fast cellular data to get around school network bans. Things went from the occasional student thinking they were clever with a wired headphone down their sleeve to near constant distraction very rapidly.
The "innovation" has been basic leadership -- setting policies at the school/district and in this case state level. Consistent expectations make it easier for students to follow the policy. Some schools have gone as far as physically locking phones away for the day, though reading the article it sounds like that's not what Oregon is doing.
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.
But this new law also involves confiscation.
I don't think that explains anything.
Previously, the confiscation was the teacher's policy.
"I dunno Mom, at the start of 4th hour I put my iPhone in the basket Mrs. Wormwood makes everyone drop their phones in, and when I got it back after class the screen had this big crack in it. It wasn't because I dropped it in 3rd hour in Mr. Lockjaw's PE class while walking and checking Instagram, nuh uh. Can you get me the iPhone 17 Pro Max instead of the iPhone 17e this time?"
And then at conferences (or worse, at the PTA meeting or school board meeting) Mrs. Wormwood is going to hear from Mom how she broke Johnny's phone and cost them $1100.
Now it's state law. It's not Mrs. Wormwood's decision to confiscate phones from students, preventing little Johnny from texting Mama when there's a lockdown, it's the law and her hands are tied.
Previously where, though? In this specific Oregon school district?
It's not up to the teachers' discretion in the schools near me.
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...
I'm also confused by stories that imply that kids were allowed to use their phones during class.
The local schools I'm familiar with allowed phones in backpacks, but if you got caught using it during class there were consequences.
Enforcement was never perfect. Some teachers didn't care, some students were sneaky enough to not get caught. Yet the consequences seemed to keep the kids afraid of using phones for the most part (from what I've been told, obviously I wasn't sitting with them in class).
Some of these articles are written like entire classrooms were just scrolling their phones during class? I don't get it. Was there just a total lack of enforcement?
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.
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.
I was in high school in the early 2010s. In 2010 I went to a school that gave all students ipod touchs, which seemed futuristic at the time. By 2012 phones weren't banned from school, but a teacher would still take it if you were blatantly using it during class.
'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.
Saw this the other day: https://thehill.com/opinion/technology/5726492-social-media-...
Writer’s org’s founders include Meta, among many others: https://itif.org/our-supporters/
I’m no expert here, so leaving this as a datapoint
Social Media Bans are never the answer says unbiased author Zark Muckerburg
more like gaolposts amirite
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.
"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.
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.
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.
Phone bans are bad.
Why is that?
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.
> At some point, I think we are going to have comms devices imbedded in our heads and whatnot.
This will have limited impact because, at some point shortly after that, the moon will hatch and the lunar dragons will consume our satellite infrastructure, disabling all comm devices.
You can't make policy now based on nebulous ideas about possible futures, particularly not when those ideas aren't based on any reasonable inference.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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...
> 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.
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.