This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
I very much think smartphones do not belong in the classroom.
That said, I also very much think that assault rifles don't belong in schools. And until we can prevent that, we can't really take away the only way for parents to figure out if their kid is dead or just traumatized.
If you're more worried about your kid at school getting shot than them getting distracted during their education, You might be the one living in a shit hole country.
I believe in educating kids to know how to ignore distractions. The phone will be there in every work/life situation and will be a tool used to get them further in their careers and life in general. It's stupid to let them use them openly during class... It's also stupid to make legislation about them. Notice we don't have country wide dress codes for schools. Just legislation that says when such codes have gone to far. Banning students from having items they carry daily is just a stupid over abuse of power being instated for what reason? Failed parenting and failed educators?
You text during class you get told to stop, happens again you get detention/thrown out of class/sent to the dean and eventually thrown out of the school. Always was that way. No need for laws around it.
I don't understand how a state governor can "introduce" a bill.
Isn't that the legislature's job?
Anyone can introduce a bill, including you. Only the legislature's vote on it counts.
This sucks, because smartphones could be such fantastic tools in a classroom. Not that I'm under the illusion that they're being used in any sort of productive way (or even would be), I was once a kid scrolling through shitposts and memes in class. But having all of the textbooks in one place, the ability to record lectures and whiteboards for later review, and automated schedule management would've definitely made my high school education a lot smoother.
The other side of the coin on this. Cell phones as day planners are invaluable. So kids who have spent their lives organizing their schedules on digital calendars are being told "Oops! Sorry. You can't use that anymore. We caught someone else using it incorrectly."
Incidentally, I'm old enough to remember how every graphing calculator in the school had video games installed on them and half my class carried a gameboy someone on their persons. This is going to be pure wack-a-mole as a policy. Selectively enforced, with lots of high profile punishments for minor infractions and inevitably highly intrusive misconduct by individual teachers and principles. Richer, whiter students will almost certainly be exempted from the policy through loopholes. Poorer, blacker students will be shoved even more forcefully through the School To Prison Pipeline. Cops will inevitably get involved in the worst possible way.
And all of this will be sold as a means of "reducing distractions".
When using the right tools, phones are already incredibly powerful in an educational environment. There's a reason why Kahoot achieved meme status: it's because students love it.
Great,I fully support this
Schools should be places to learn, not to be distracted by continuous alerts from phone addicted children
I fully support this as long as they put the pay phones back in the schools so kids can call their parents when they need to
A school shouldn't make kids pay to call their legal guardian. Make phone calls free.
https://www.capitolhillseattle.com/2024/06/police-investigate-shooting-outside-garfield-high-school/
5 days ago. Glad they have their priorities straight.
A lot of public school districts now provide laptops or Chromebooks to the students to use during class while doing... let's say...minimal oversight at best.
So most of the same inappropriate garbage behaviors and distractions will just be offloaded from the personal phone to the school device.
Ontario has now passed two different bills banning cell phones in school. It's a great distraction from actual problems. I fully expect we'll pass a third in a few years if our provincial government is re-elected
Teachers don't need a sheet of paper at a legislature somewhere to take away cellphones. They can do that already, and if the kids disobey a legislature won't help. I assume no one is expecting kids to go to prison for having a cellphone
The key thing is that teachers can ban phones in their individual classrooms if the school permits it.
There are many schools in which the senior admin don't institute phone bans (you'd be surprised how common this is).
Legislating it helps maintain consistency and parity between schools nation wide, which is important as it's a quality of education issue, so the policy should be consistent across all schools.
I'm not from North America, but the situation is similar across most western democracies.
It's dumb as fuck.
Hate it if we want (and I have major problems with how young phones and similar devices become glued to kids), but they're here to stay. They're a part of modern life, and trying to completely ban them is the most idiotic waste of time and resources possible.
You gotta find a way to limit use in a consistent and evenly applied way so that parents and school staff are all on the same page. Then you just keep enforcing the rules amd explaining them over and over. Eventually, it becomes a manageable annoyance instead of the chaos it currently is
so that parents and school staff are all on the same page.
That's the problem, they aren't on the same page. Teachers and admins have to live in the reality of kids having these devices in school, while parents just live in the anxiety of the very rare "what if something happens?"
Every teacher I know is happy with this move. Personally, I think kids could do fine with a flip phone. Maybe this will bring them back more on the market, too.
I work in a high school in a California school district where they're discussing banning cell phones.
Most teachers I've talked to about it think it's really fucking stupid because you're not going to be able to ban them, partly because a TON of parents showed up at the school board meeting to say they would send them with their kid anyway for a variety of reasons. The board also talked about different things they could buy to take phones and lock them up during class or as students come in. Most of the solutions were pretty expensive, and some of the schools are literally falling apart, so that also pissed people off.
A great start would be to have a campus-wide rule that is CONSISTENT. Some teachers give out a detention if they even see the phone. Some do activities with QR codes and use them as tools. Some have boxes on the corner of their desk and students are required to keep their phone in the box so the teacher can see if they reach for it. We have students with free periods, and if they don't go home, they hang out outside around campus or in the library. Should phones be banned then too? Or just during class?
There are so many ways to try to deal with it, and at least in my school (not even the district as a whole), every teacher deals with it differently. I doubt the state of New York is all that different.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
“I have seen these addictive algorithms pull in young people, literally capture them and make them prisoners in a space where they are cut off from human connection, social interaction and normal classroom activity,” she said.
The smartphone-ban bill will follow two others Hochul is pushing that outline measures to safeguard children’s privacy online and limit their access to certain features of social networks.
In New York, the bills have faced pushback from big tech, trade groups and other companies, which collectively spent more than $800,000 between October and March lobbying against one or both of them, according to public disclosure records.
This differs from other state-level bills across the country, which place some reliance on self-policing by tech companies to decide which features could be harmful by completing assessments of whether products are “reasonably likely” to be accessed by children.
“Meta itself admits its own parental controls aren’t widely used – they’re often confusing and frequently fail to work as intended,” said Sacha Haworth, executive director of the Tech Oversight Project, a policy advocacy organization.
The major social media firms have faced increasing scrutiny over harms against children, including sextortion scams, grooming by predators and worsening mental health.
The original article contains 922 words, the summary contains 199 words. Saved 78%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Gross! Couldn't even let schools decide, somehow it's important to ban them state-wide? Piss off.
The state is responsible for the education of children. This absolutely falls within their scope.
Yes, education is important, and this would spare every single school the intense battle vs parents to do the right thing.
LOL good luck with that guys
I'm 100% in favor of this move. If parents really need their kid to have a phone at school, get them a basic flip phone.
Good idea. Its of the main reason why education today is faltering. Allowing too many screen in the class room is simply a bad idea. These kids have the no ability to stay focused in any way. They way they learn guarantees many will never learn to read without a screen and the internet. I see it often in my current job.
