10 ms·

School cell phone bans and student achievement

212 points by harias 10mo ago

harias 10mo ago
Two years after the imposition of a student cell phone ban, student test scores in a large urban school district were significantly higher than before, David N. Figlio and Umut Özek find in The Impact of Cell Phone Bans in Schools on Student Outcomes: Evidence from Florida (NBER Working Paper 34388). Paper: https://www.nber.org/papers/w34388 https://www.nber.org/papers/w34388
aschla 10mo ago
I'm not particularly old yet, in my mid-thirties, but I reacted like someone much older when I learned kids are allowed to carry around their phones all day at school. Back in my day (when we walked to school uphill both ways), we weren't allowed to carry around basic flip phones. They had to be in our locker and only used before or after school. When and why did it become acceptable for much more distracting and stimulating devices to be allowed in class?
- jdalgetty 10mo ago
  When parents themselves also became addicted and decided it was easier to give their kids phones than to parent them.
  - kakacik 10mo ago
    This is bulk of the problem. Don't expect kids to do better when their role models screw up so badly. Sure some will come on top of their own parents but thats not the norm rather just an exception. There is always the peer pressure excuse but thats not good enough. At the end who buys and setups and keeps paying for that phone?
    - jdalgetty 10mo ago
      The other side of it - why can't parents set up screen time and app limits, especially during school hours? No kid needs access to clash royale or snapchat during the school day. The phone should be locked down to "essentials" like the calculator, etc.
- AAAAaccountAAAA 10mo ago
  I think it is precisely because they are more distracting. When the most addictive thing in phones was the snake game, kids did not bother to insist in using their phones all the time. Now, when you try to tell a pupil to put the phone away, it often results in a huge arguments, so eventually teachers gave up.
  - johnnyanmac 10mo ago
    no seizing of phones, no detention/disciplary action? It's not even about the phones at that point, it's just general disrespect to staff. What changed overtime? Or maybe it was always this way and I simply had a better environment?
    - kelnos 10mo ago
      As usual, it's the parents, as a result of decades of creeping helicopter parenting. Without district-wide policy, if a teacher were to confiscate a phone, that would lead to a parent calling the school administrator to complain. The administrators, absent a policy, are spineless, and assure the parent it won't happen again. The teacher then gets chastised by the administration. So then the teachers just stop caring: doing something about the phone distraction will only cause them grief. If the kids don't learn, whatever, not their problem, really, as long as the same thing is happening in every other classroom, which it is. A school-wide policy, or, even better, a district-wide policy gives the teachers and school administrators cover: they can make sympathetic noises when the parents complain, but tell the parents there's nothing they can do, because the policy comes from above their pay grade.
- _vqpz 10mo ago
  It became "acceptable" because the teachers and admin were already on their phones constantly. I went to grade school from 2005-2017, when iPhones came around the adults got them years before kids did, I had numerous teachers that would sit on their phones half the class.
- stonemetal12 10mo ago
  Never. There has never been a time when it was OK to use a phone in class. What happened is A) Some kids do take their phone out and play with them and either get caught or not B) Something happens and kids record it aka school fight videos. C) giant moral panic that has very little basis in reality.
  - johnnyanmac 10mo ago
    I think it's less about what's okay and more about enforcement. It does seem like post pandemic schools lost all their teeth.
  - ErroneousBosh 10mo ago
    > B) Something happens and kids record it aka school fight videos. A friend's kid got in a small amount of trouble for something along these lines. He was "present at but not involved in" a fight at school, where some of the other kids were shooting it on their phones. Then one of the teachers came round the corner to break it up and take the guilty parties off to the headmaster's office. My mate's son, kind of similar thinker to his dad, clever guy, bit of a windup merchant, sprung into action. "OKAY, CUT! Right, you and you - " pointing at the antagonists " - reset please, everyone else places right now please, " and rounds on the teacher "... and you can be here but you have to be out of my shot." There's no way to prove they weren't trying to make a film. There was a note home from the school that basically said "We know he's at it, we just can't prove he's at it, but we do know that he's not going to do that again, right?"
- phantasmish 10mo ago
  We weren't allowed to have any of several different individual devices the functions of which are present in a smartphone. Banning that stuff was more-or-less uncontroversial. Obviously kids in an ordinary classroom shouldn't have instant cameras, and video recorders, and audio recorders, and Walkmen, and radios, and game boys, and TVs, and flashlights, and... Now we have devices that are all of those things in one and parents will fight you if you try to keep kids from having or using them. Go figure. What's baffling is why so many more people started thinking all those devices were OK when they're combined into one device. Like, not much of this is novel, we could have had devices that did most of the relevant things a smartphone does, in class. But we didn't because of fucking course they weren't permitted.
  - johnnyanmac 10mo ago
    I really don't understand why the parents would fight for them. My theoretical kid is there to learn, enforce any reasonable rules that can disrupt that goal. It's also in general a good way to form work habits for future aspects. Be it college, a job, military, etc. You can't fight over having your phone out to your boss. You can do it to your professor, but that's your $20k/yr tuition talking.
    - knollimar 10mo ago
      >You can't fight over having your phone out to your boss Give me a company phone or you don't get this rule. I'm not using my phone for work if I can't have it out during work. I use it 99% for work related things during work, though, with the 1% being happy birthday texts or something similar
      - dhussoe 10mo ago
        This is kind of a weird example to begin with on a forum mostly populated by software engineers, because I'd find it very weird if a manager ever objected to someone using their personal phone at a SWE or similar office job, but I'd guess that the sets of jobs where a "boss" would object to someone using their phone during work (but still getting their work done) and those that would potentially have a company phone are mostly disjoint... a complete prohibition on using your phone seems like entry-level retail job type rules. excepting corner-case stuff like some very high security facility where you wouldn't even be allowed to bring any outside electronics in.
- johnnyanmac 10mo ago
  Yeah I'm not that far out of high school but my school in the late 00's had a library policy on phones. You can keep them in your pocket, but don't bring them out during school. Otherwise they get taken for the class time, and it escalates from there. This included recess and pretty much extended to all non-calculator electronic devices, but it was generally more lax when you weren't disrupting someone. I couldn't imagine brazenly having my phone out while a teacher was talking unless it was an emergency.
- japhyr 10mo ago
  I was a classroom teacher from 1994-2019, so I watched the transition through the advent of phones until just before Covid. It's not as simple as it seems, for a few reasons. One, there's the very real pressure from parents to be able to contact their kids when they need to. In the US, regular school shootings have made this a complicated issue to navigate. Also, it requires much more consistency from school staff than most people realize. If it's top down and not supported by just about everyone, then many teachers and staff find themselves in endless battles. It takes more consistency and clarity of vision, and consistent enforcement than many schools are capable of. Last, the devices students carry with them are often more capable and reliable than school based technology. So when students need to look something up, it's easy for them to just pull out their device. Super-addictive devices in a society that's prioritizing many of the wrong things is a hard thing to manage. How many of you would give up your tech salaries to make $40-60k to take on these issues?
  - Mistletoe 10mo ago
    If they need to contact their kids they can call the school to talk to them in the very rare case that is actually necessary. It was quite nice and refreshing to have the umbilical cut to your parents while you were at school in the past. You had to learn how to be on your own. If there is a school shooting, what is texting their kid going to do?
    - makeitdouble 10mo ago
      I feel too few people apply the same logic to themselves. For instance would you put your phone in a locker for the time you're on the clock for work ? Some professions require that, it's not an unreasonable proposition in itself. But how many actually can/would do it ? Some people see it as a guilt thing and just assume they're succumbing to some tentation. Another way to look at it is the generic message being just wrong, we're doing fine _enough_ as we do now, and pushing moral principals nobody actually cares about on kids isn't as smart as people want to make it.
      - kelnos 10mo ago
- bluedino 10mo ago
  In the 90's only drug dealers had pagers and cell phones, at least in the eyes of the board of education. If you were caught with one you'd be expelled.
- wiredpancake 10mo ago
  [dead]
- kelnos 10mo ago
  I'm a little older than you (mid forties), and back in my day (when we walked to school uphill, both ways, in the snow, with no shoes), they banned pagers. (And the penalties could be pretty bad, since "only drug dealers have pagers".) (The thing that annoyed teachers was when we played games on our graphing calculators, which they of course couldn't ban, since the school required them in the first place!)
  - accrual 10mo ago
    > played games on our graphing calculators Block Dude! I also spent quite a bit of time writing functions and tools on my TI-84+, probably the closest thing I'll have to "growing up writing BASIC" since I missed that bus.
  - welcome_dragon 10mo ago
    I'm a little older than you (mid fifties) and back in my day we couldn't have walkmans/headphones on inside the school. I walked so in the winter I would wear headphones instead of earmuffs/hats (had to rock that 80's hair) and got in trouble all the time. Like one step in the building and busted. I think the biggest barrier to a phone ban being more widely adopted is parents. My wife works in the front office of a middle school and parents lose their minds if a kid gets their phone taken away. "But but but what if I NEED to get ahold of my kid during the day?". Umm... You ask the school to get your kid? I dunno seems pretty straightforward. Then again I'm in an affluent area where moms against liberty (as I call them) are prevalent so maybe it's just the people here?
- accrual 10mo ago
  In my case phones were just starting to become commonplace, the Razr was the coolest phone to have, we had iPods but not iPhones, etc. Most instructors didn't want to see any phones and would threaten to take them away, so we became skilled at using T9 under the desk or in sweatshirt pockets, etc.
1970-01-01 10mo ago
It's beyond obvious that they should be paying attention to the classroom and not their screen. Future generations will equate our screentime addictions to smoking and drinking. Just putting it down doesn't work. It needs to be out of reach and in certain locations, taken away from us entirely for the betterment of humanity.
HPsquared 10mo ago
I wonder if there's a hidden confounding selection bias here, i.e. "ability of the school to ban phones". This is probably easier in less chaotic schools where the students listen to the teachers, say.
- moduspol 10mo ago
  If the teachers and schools cannot implement a phone ban because the students won't listen to them, it might be time to reassess what their purpose is.
  - c22 10mo ago
    These sorts of schools already make kids pass through metal detectors on their way in so phones can just be confiscated at that point.
  - phantasmish 10mo ago
    Ever watch The Wire? The school in that show is a very accurate depiction of what a... middling-bad inner city school is like. There are tons of ones worse than it (they may have shied away from one of that sort either because it didn't suit the story, or because they thought too many viewers would think they were exaggerating) There are schools where the administrators are too busy dealing with violence to have time for much else.
  - lmm 10mo ago
    Are you saying that from a perspective where the purpose of schools is to offer an education, or to keep kids locked up and be cheaper than daycare?
    - moduspol 10mo ago
      My phrasing suggests that. I was having trouble thinking of a non-offensive way to say, "I don't think the kids can possibly be learning much if the teachers and administration are incapable of implementing a phone ban." Parent comment described them as "chaotic." I'm not even sure I'd describe them as "schools." But to more clearly answer your question: I think it's fair to question what their actual purpose is (and it doesn't seem to be education), but I don't think it was anyone's explicit intention to make them that way.
doctorpangloss 10mo ago
The increase in scores is really small. It’s 1.1 percentage points. My interpretation is, the pandemic is a root cause of lower test scores for many reasons, one reason is that kids started using cell phones way more during the pandemic, and that new stuff on the phone (TikTok, let’s be real) causes lower test scores. Reducing usage during school is addressing a real problem, but it’s one of many real problems, and some are way bigger.
- eitally 10mo ago
  I think you're correct, but another piece of this is that students (especially in HS, but probably also in MS) have realized they can accomplish most assigned tasks in a fraction of the time using online resources (whether copies of old tests, agentic AI, or other sites), so they lean on their phone for this. A big piece of the missing equation here is the fact that home PC/laptop use has also been consistently decreasing, in favor of phones & tablets, causing phones themselves to be even more indispensable for youth. I read a position paper last week suggesting the solution to this is to take a zero tolerance policy in the classroom and move all course testing back to pencil & paper / bluebooks. I would support that (as a parent of two current high schoolers).
  - phantasmish 10mo ago
    Funnily enough, as a parent, I'd have loved for my (young-ish at the time) kids to have been on old-school pencil and paper stuff during the pandemic. Tear-out worksheet books or a weekly trip to the schools to grab a packet of physical papers with the week's lessons and work (or, hell, send the buses around to drop them off) would have been SO MUCH easier to manage and help with than all the online horse-shit. Like, I truly think my 80s and 90s classrooms would have been better prepared to deal with the pandemic than the modern computerized ones. You'd think it'd be the other way around, but from what I saw, no. It's just so much harder to keep track of what's going on in several different computer programs, than a stack of paper and a couple books for each kid.
- pavon 10mo ago
  I think there is a typo in the paper, that was carried over to the article. These two sentences appear to contradict one another as written: > Interestingly, we observe significantly improved student test scores in the second year of the ban (about 2-3 percentiles higher than the year before the ban) when suspensions revert to pre-ban levels. > Overall, we show that student test scores improved by 0.6 percentiles, with the ban increasing spring test scores 1.1 percentiles in the second year relative to the spring test right before the ban took effect. Instead, I think the 1.1 percentile gain should be about the first year, and a 2-3 percentile gain by the second year. That is consistent with the graph. But yes, a fairly small gain. I agree that much of the gain could be recovering from losses during the pandemic. Also the FAST is a new test that started in the 2022-2023 school year, so some of this could also be due to students and teachers adjusting to the new test and improving over time.
i_c_b 10mo ago
Back in the late 90s, when I first entered the video game industry to work (when it was quite scruffy, countercultural, and populated by some pretty odd people), one of the first things I encountered was a new co-worker who, next to his giant tower of used Mountain Dew cans, had a black and white TV in his cubicle. This struck me as very odd at that moment in time - as I understood things, obviously the point of work was supposed to be that it was a place where you worked, not a place where you watched TV. (Now, granted, everyone else was playing the recently released Diablo on their work PCs during lunch in network mode, and we were a game studio after all, so my reaction wasn't totally coherent). Still, no one else had a TV, and that guy was young and single with no work-life balance, he was a recent transplant, and it still seemed unusual at the time. Fast forward 28 years later, and now everyone has an amazing TV in their pocket at all times when they commute, sit in their work space, go out for coffee or lunch, or go sit down in the bathroom, all with a near infinite collection of video via youtube, netflix, and even massive amounts of porn. How little did I know. And that's to say nothing of texting and twitter and reddit and instant messaging and discord and ... Several years ago, I was working on a college campus, and there were giant corporate-flavored murals beside some of the city blocks students walked, full of happy multicultural clip art people and exciting innovative technological innovation, and adorned with the message, "Imagine a borderless world!" Clearly that message was meant to be rhetorical, not a call to reflection, critique, or reevaluation. There did not seem to be the suggestion that one might imagine the borderless world and then, having done so, decide it was a problem to be corrected. I wonder a lot, these days, if we're not deep into a Chesterton's Fence situation, where we have to rediscover the hard way the older wisdom about having separate spheres with separate hard constraints and boundaries on behaviors, communities, and communication pathways to facilitate all sorts of important activities that simply don't happen otherwise - something like borders and boundaries as a crucial social technology, specifically about directing attention productively. Phones and tablets are, in their own Turing complete way, portals to a borderless world that pierces the older intentional classroom boundaries.
- kragen 10mo ago
  The older wisdom was that you worked on the farm with your husband and children for your entire life, breastfeeding while you peeled the potatoes, putting down your spindle to comfort a crying child. Millers lived in the mill; even blacksmiths lived at their smithies. Except for rituals, separate spheres with separate hard constraints was a novelty of the Satanic mills where the Victorian proletariat toiled.
NegativeLatency 10mo ago
Having grown up in the "no cellphones allowed at school" age, and now having a kid, I'm super glad that my local school district is finally banning phones. There's always going to be exceptions but speaking for myself there's no way I'd be able to resist the allure of a cellphone in class.
gpt5 10mo ago
This is an area where hacker news shows its weakness. We have: 1. A chart showing a very low increase (1-2 percent) 2. Nothing to control scores rising in every school in America in the last school year (due to reduction of COVID effects). 3. Scores not moving immediately after the ban, but only after the start of a new school year, which means a new cohort of students muddying the data. Yet the data fits people's biases here (regardless whether it's right or wrong), so the celebrate it and add anecdotes and explanations why it's true.
- uniqueuid 10mo ago
  To be fair, all those details are in the paper. And a 1-2 percent increase does not seem low to me for such a measure.
- nineplay 10mo ago
  I'd go further and say its a global weakness and unbelievably destructive. The bulk of current discourse today is: 1. Read a headline/tweet/instagram. 2. Decide whether or not it fits in your worldview. 3. Move forward with the confidence that you are better informed than everyone else who agrees/disagrees with it. You see it everywhere on all sides of all beliefs. It didn't use to be like this. We used to read articles, we used to read common news sources, we use to not have media overrun with bad actors who know exactly what to say to get the most engagement and solidify people in their own world views. It's all over HN and I could have hoped there'd be more willingness to say "let me consider the contents and the source before deciding if I accept it". That attitude is just lost and I don't think it will be regained and I think it's the reason we are all in a death spiral.
  - nemomarx 10mo ago
    When was it not like this, though? I think people are rosey about the past here. A small educated set was different in the past but probably the bulk of the population has always done something like this - now you can hear them online easier.
    - 10mo ago
ryuhhnn 10mo ago
Some very important context that the researchers don't mention: during the same period that they are claiming test scores improved because of phone bans, Florida changed the way they administer standardised tests. Starting in 2024, they switched from doing one end-of-year assessment and started administering more frequent tests throughout the year in order to better gauge a student's progress and provide a tighter feedback loop. (source: https://www.educationadvanced.com/blog/florida-standardized-tests https://www.educationadvanced.com/blog/florida-standardized-...) It's much more likely that simply changing the way they administer these tests had a more significant impact on test scores than phone bans.
- jobs_throwaway 10mo ago
  > It's much more likely that simply changing the way they administer these tests had a more significant impact on test scores than phone bans. Why do you think that's more likely?
  - ryuhhnn 10mo ago
    Put yourself in the student's shoes: instead of being required to rote memorise every detail and hold that in your head until the end of the year, you are now only required to be assessed at the time that you are learning the material. Do you think you'd fare better on that type of test, or a test done months after you actually studied the material? One of the first things they teach you in educational research is that standardised test scores are significantly impacted based on how the tests are administered and what the test is actually assessing.
    - johnnyanmac 10mo ago
      A good student would do well regardless, a bad student would do bad regardless. Cell phones might help a bad student do a little less bad, but only a little. For the middle, it really depends on the material covered. if it's cumulative, then results might not change as much. if it's "learn and forget", then it might be testing the wrong incentives.
uniqueuid 10mo ago
You have to admit that it's quite clever how they approximate phone use: > Our identification strategy relies upon our ability to calculate school-specific measures of smartphone activity that we can attribute to students, rather than adults in the building. To do so, we use detailed smartphone activity data from Advan between January 2023 and December 2024 that we link to LUSD schools using point-of-interest coordinates.13 In particular, we focus on the average number of unique smartphone visits (pings) between 9am and 1pm on school days (a common time frame that elementary, middle, and high schools in LUSD are all in session during school days) in the last two months of the 2022-23 school year (right before the ban took effect) and the first two months of the 2023-24 and 2024-25 school years.14 To disentangle student activity from the smartphone activity of teachers/staff, we subtract the average number of unique smartphone visits between 9am and 1pm on teacher workdays (in the same school year) from the same average on regular school days.
- pcchristie 10mo ago
  Nice spot. Very clever!
mikemarsh 10mo ago
Since when is a study needed to confirm that enabling a dopamine addiction, especially in developing minds, is a bad idea? Isn't our own direct experience as adults/parents struggling with said addictions enough?
- immibis 10mo ago
  Since a study is needed to determine if anything is true. Sometimes the study is simple: look out the window and see if it's raining. But this is not one of those.
RandallBrown 10mo ago
Are students really allowed to be on their phones during class at a lot of schools? When I was in high school, we didn't have smartphones, but we had game boys, flip phones, and graphing calculators that could play games. If we were ever caught playing with any of these things we got in trouble. That seemed sufficient at the time, but is that not the case anymore?
- nomel 10mo ago
  iPads are required in some public school classrooms, in place of textbooks! There no "lockdown mode" that the teacher can enable, to lock to the apps/websites related to the lesson. It's INSANE.
  - mavhc 10mo ago
    Apple's Classroom says it allows locking to a single app https://apps.apple.com/us/app/classroom/id1085319084 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/classroom/id1085319084
    - nomel 10mo ago
      Then it can't work. Textbook, website for the problems, notes app, etc. Multitasking is required when the answers are input online (which is a problem itself).
protocolture 10mo ago
Correlation/Causation issues as others have pointed out. But also, complete inability of schools to adapt. Refusing to adapt to the reality that is, students will be living their entire lives with these devices, and that they should be working out ways to ensure student productivity despite their existence, is not the same thing as success. Teachers are inherently lazy. Its one of their more human qualities. But really they need to adapt, or fail and be replaced. There was a kid in my class in highschool. We had a school that permitted laptops, one of the first near us, but situationally. Teachers could exclude, or instruct the student to not use the laptop for periods during class. However policy was that students were allowed to use the laptop any time they could use a workbook. This kid was the only one who both had access to a laptop and was willing to risk damaging it by bringing it to school. Math class with this kid was: 1. He plays games on his laptop unless the teacher was looking, in which case he would be solving problems in excel or notepad. Proficient alt tab user. 2. At the end of class, he would copy out all the answers from the back of the textbook to his workbook, and he would hand that in. English was different. In english the teacher built a relationship with him and engaged him directly. If he was unresponsive he might be forced back to attention somehow, asked a direct question about the text, but that was true of a lot of the students. The entire class was a discussion on book content. When he used the laptop, he was using it to write notes because he was engaged through positive reinforcement. If the teacher caught him playing, the teacher would on those rare occasions, engage him about the game. Often, he had finished his assigned reading\tasks early and simply drifted over. In that case he was left to play because he wasn't disrupting anyone. Phone bans are a crutch for lazy, uninterested educators. Kids need to be prepared to live in a world with these things in their pockets. The correct dopamine reward feedback loops are not going to be built by banning them entirely. And being better at rote learning and regurgitating ancient course material isn't a strong indicator, if it was even an indicator, of better student outcomes.
- kelnos 10mo ago
  Perhaps I'm just lacking in imagination, but I'm not sure how having smartphones in class meaningfully enhances the educational experience. I could see a tablet for note-taking being useful, perhaps. (Or a more limited device like a Remarkable, which IIRC isn't a general-purpose touchscreen computer.) Kids can prepare to live in a world with these things in their pockets outside of school. Sure, primary school is about learning all sorts of things, not just what the teacher is lecturing about. But it doesn't have to be about everything, and I think it's fair to make the call that the distraction caused by smartphones (especially with all the apps designed to addict users) outweighs any positive teachable moments with them present. Your anecdote is interesting because it didn't really bring me to the same conclusion. Kids aren't going to be interested in every single subject, but we believe it's important to expose them to a bit of everything regardless. Maybe your classmate just didn't care about math, but enjoyed English and reading, and found that much more engaging. Maybe there was absolutely nothing the math teacher could have done to get that kid to pay attention all the time, even if they were the best teacher in the world. > he would copy out all the answers from the back of the textbook to his workbook, and he would hand that in. That's really the big flaw here. If he hadn't been able to do that, his grades would suffer, and someone, whether the teacher or his parents, would have (hopefully!) stepped in to see what was going on, and find a way to curb his game-playing in class. Maybe that would have meant he wasn't allowed to have the laptop out in that particular class until he could demonstrate that he could use it appropriately. > Teachers are inherently lazy. I know quite a few teachers, and calling teachers lazy is so mind-blowingly, disrespectfully inaccurate that it's really hard to take your opinions seriously. Sure, in every walk of life you'll find lazy people, but I see no evidence that teachers are on average lazier than people in any other profession. My take on it is that teachers might be on average less lazy than your average human.
adrr 10mo ago
Test scores fell off cliff when covid hit, they've been slowly rising nationally since. Here's California. https://edpolicyinca.org/publications/california-test-scores-show-little-improvement-after-pandemic https://edpolicyinca.org/publications/california-test-scores...
trgn 10mo ago
Crazy we need studies for this
cadamsdotcom 10mo ago
2021-2022 vs 2023-2024. Has anyone asked what Covid had to do with it?
TimPC 10mo ago
This seems like the single worst way to measure this because by looking at chronological data you get all kinds of temporal effects. A better baseline would be to look at the difference between pre-cell phone ban scores and post cell-hone ban scores compared to other districts where the cell phone ban didn't occur. I find it completely unremarkable that test scores went up post-COVID and feel it's very hard to tell what is causing what.
NatTheBat 10mo ago
To expect children/teens to outsmart big tech companies putting billions of dollars into getting us all addicted to our phone seems... naive. Removing availability to a vice has always been a somewhat effective strategy to mitigate temptation, i.e. food, drugs, etc.
socalgal2 10mo ago
I can hardly wait for all the WFT->RTO charts :P
- danans 10mo ago
  > I can hardly wait for all the WFT->RTO charts :P Work from ... Texas?
  - kelnos 10mo ago
    Ah yes, those years when we were all allowed to Work from Texas, and then all our bosses wanted us to Return to Ohio.
est 10mo ago
If phones were totally banned for kids, where would the kid get to know the world? TVs? Newspapers? Magazines? Well those are on-way, with limited feedbacks. What's the better alternative except phones?
- BenFranklin100 10mo ago
  For those of us who grew up before 2000, we somehow managed. I think younger people today will as well.
  - ojame 10mo ago
    Also it's important to note the topic is during school hours. There's a wealth of knowledge to learn at school, and there's also a wealth to learn outside of school. Knowledge about the world can, and will, happen in both. Many hours outside of school to 'grow your knowledge' through your phone.
  - lmm 10mo ago
    > For those of us who grew up before 2000, we somehow managed You had TV, newspapers and magazines - and perhaps more importantly, public libraries. The current generation doesn't, not if you take away their phones.
  - card_zero 10mo ago
    No we didn't. I never learned how to write games for 8-bit computers in assembler, like commercial games. No source of information would tell me about anything other than BASIC. There was no way to find out.
    - kelnos 10mo ago
      Not sure how having a smartphone in class would have allowed you to do that, though. And regardless, if you're in a physics or language class, you should be focusing on those those topics, not learning how to write computer games. My high school did offer a computer science class in the 90s, and students who took it got to use the school's computer lab. If your school didn't have something like that, that's a shame, but that doesn't suggest that you should have been able to ignore the presented curriculum and do whatever you wanted.
BenFranklin100 10mo ago
Learning requires focus; cell phones destroy focus.
FilosofumRex 10mo ago
The discussion here is so misdirected - It's not the device that's addictive or destructive, it's the exposure of young developing minds to endless, pointless advertising/sponsorship. Ban advertising to children & youth and the device itself will be harmless
AndrewDucker 10mo ago
A difference of 1-2%. Not something particularly worth worrying about.
Kim_Bruning 10mo ago
This is actually very sad. Finally every child had a computer in their pocket, but it turned out to be a locked down attention exploitation machine. I sincerely wish it wasn't. That's why they're being banned all over. Citizens and governments finally got savvy to how bad these devices can really be, especially in the hands of the inexperienced. Imagine if history had gone differently. Maybe history still can go differently. A portable computer in the hands of every child. One that actually works for them, not against them. Are there people already working on this? (I do know about eg. F-Droid, which is an improvement due to strict curation) edit: Think of eg 'A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer' : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diamond_Age https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diamond_Age
- sharperguy 10mo ago
  I'm thinking of this as I read this thread. How do you solve the problem of social media firehoses while still allowing kids to have access to the vast wealth of information and advice that the internet provides? It hasn't been so many years since many were predicting that the internet will make schools themselves obsolete.
lazy_afternoons 10mo ago
I am reasonably confident that Smart Phones will take the route of cigarettes. Restricted to adults over 21 years of age.
- TheOtherHobbes 10mo ago
  And then progressively banned in public places. Which won't work. The model isn't an exact match. I'd rather see hard content filters in certain contexts than a complete ban. No social media sites, games, or messaging would remove most of the problem. But the ultimate driver of addiction is ad-tech, and all of these measures would cause a significant hit to the ad industries. So in practice it's easier simply to ban phones.
gcanyon 10mo ago
"Differences in test scores" Anyone know how to interpret that chart?
derelicta 10mo ago
Only slightly tengential, but am so happy to have invested in a remarkable and ony taking (most of) my notes during classes with it (when I dont break the tip and forgetting the replacement ones at home)
graybeardhacker 10mo ago
If I understand the graph correctly, it looks like there's maybe a three percentage point increase. But given there is a 1 percentage point delta in the pre-ban data, that would seem to indicate there is at least a 1 point variation that must be ignored as irrelevant. I'm not sure how they generated the error bars but that, to me, would suggest the relevant error could be +/- 1 percentage point. Meaning the delta could be at little as two percentage points. My intuition says cellphone bans would have a positive impact, but I don't think I'd call this data conclusive. I'd want to see more data from earlier and later. Also, if these are the same students, then test scores might be reflecting increased maturity. If it's different students of the same age, it could be a shift in some extra-educational factors affecting the younger generation. Too many unknowns and not enough signal.
pavel_lishin 10mo ago
> There were no statistically significant changes in test scores during the first year of the ban, when disciplinary rates were high. During the second year of the ban, in contrast, test scores increased significantly, with positive effects concentrated during the spring semester (scores increased 1.1 percentiles, on average). The researchers suggest that this may be due to the higher stakes of spring tests, which can affect grade advancement and high school graduation. Test score improvements were also concentrated among male students (up 1.4 percentiles, on average) and among middle and high school students (up 1.3 percentiles, on average). > When comparing high-effect and low-effect schools, the researchers note significant reductions in unexcused absences during the two years following the cell phone ban. They posit that increased attendance could explain as much as half of the test score improvements noted in their primary analysis. Seems to me like there wasn't a huge improvement, and the improvement seen could easily be attributed to other things, no?

212 points by harias 10mo ago

harias 10mo ago

Two years after the imposition of a student cell phone ban, student test scores in a large urban school district were significantly higher than before, David N. Figlio and Umut Özek find in The Impact of Cell Phone Bans in Schools on Student Outcomes: Evidence from Florida (NBER Working Paper 34388). Paper: https://www.nber.org/papers/w34388 https://www.nber.org/papers/w34388

aschla 10mo ago

I'm not particularly old yet, in my mid-thirties, but I reacted like someone much older when I learned kids are allowed to carry around their phones all day at school. Back in my day (when we walked to school uphill both ways), we weren't allowed to carry around basic flip phones. They had to be in our locker and only used before or after school. When and why did it become acceptable for much more distracting and stimulating devices to be allowed in class?

jdalgetty 10mo ago
When parents themselves also became addicted and decided it was easier to give their kids phones than to parent them.
- kakacik 10mo ago
  This is bulk of the problem. Don't expect kids to do better when their role models screw up so badly. Sure some will come on top of their own parents but thats not the norm rather just an exception. There is always the peer pressure excuse but thats not good enough. At the end who buys and setups and keeps paying for that phone?
  - jdalgetty 10mo ago
    The other side of it - why can't parents set up screen time and app limits, especially during school hours? No kid needs access to clash royale or snapchat during the school day. The phone should be locked down to "essentials" like the calculator, etc.
AAAAaccountAAAA 10mo ago
I think it is precisely because they are more distracting. When the most addictive thing in phones was the snake game, kids did not bother to insist in using their phones all the time. Now, when you try to tell a pupil to put the phone away, it often results in a huge arguments, so eventually teachers gave up.
- johnnyanmac 10mo ago
  no seizing of phones, no detention/disciplary action? It's not even about the phones at that point, it's just general disrespect to staff. What changed overtime? Or maybe it was always this way and I simply had a better environment?
  - kelnos 10mo ago
    As usual, it's the parents, as a result of decades of creeping helicopter parenting. Without district-wide policy, if a teacher were to confiscate a phone, that would lead to a parent calling the school administrator to complain. The administrators, absent a policy, are spineless, and assure the parent it won't happen again. The teacher then gets chastised by the administration. So then the teachers just stop caring: doing something about the phone distraction will only cause them grief. If the kids don't learn, whatever, not their problem, really, as long as the same thing is happening in every other classroom, which it is. A school-wide policy, or, even better, a district-wide policy gives the teachers and school administrators cover: they can make sympathetic noises when the parents complain, but tell the parents there's nothing they can do, because the policy comes from above their pay grade.
_vqpz 10mo ago
It became "acceptable" because the teachers and admin were already on their phones constantly. I went to grade school from 2005-2017, when iPhones came around the adults got them years before kids did, I had numerous teachers that would sit on their phones half the class.
stonemetal12 10mo ago
Never. There has never been a time when it was OK to use a phone in class. What happened is A) Some kids do take their phone out and play with them and either get caught or not B) Something happens and kids record it aka school fight videos. C) giant moral panic that has very little basis in reality.
- johnnyanmac 10mo ago
  I think it's less about what's okay and more about enforcement. It does seem like post pandemic schools lost all their teeth.
- ErroneousBosh 10mo ago
  > B) Something happens and kids record it aka school fight videos. A friend's kid got in a small amount of trouble for something along these lines. He was "present at but not involved in" a fight at school, where some of the other kids were shooting it on their phones. Then one of the teachers came round the corner to break it up and take the guilty parties off to the headmaster's office. My mate's son, kind of similar thinker to his dad, clever guy, bit of a windup merchant, sprung into action. "OKAY, CUT! Right, you and you - " pointing at the antagonists " - reset please, everyone else places right now please, " and rounds on the teacher "... and you can be here but you have to be out of my shot." There's no way to prove they weren't trying to make a film. There was a note home from the school that basically said "We know he's at it, we just can't prove he's at it, but we do know that he's not going to do that again, right?"
phantasmish 10mo ago
We weren't allowed to have any of several different individual devices the functions of which are present in a smartphone. Banning that stuff was more-or-less uncontroversial. Obviously kids in an ordinary classroom shouldn't have instant cameras, and video recorders, and audio recorders, and Walkmen, and radios, and game boys, and TVs, and flashlights, and... Now we have devices that are all of those things in one and parents will fight you if you try to keep kids from having or using them. Go figure. What's baffling is why so many more people started thinking all those devices were OK when they're combined into one device. Like, not much of this is novel, we could have had devices that did most of the relevant things a smartphone does, in class. But we didn't because of fucking course they weren't permitted.
- johnnyanmac 10mo ago
  I really don't understand why the parents would fight for them. My theoretical kid is there to learn, enforce any reasonable rules that can disrupt that goal. It's also in general a good way to form work habits for future aspects. Be it college, a job, military, etc. You can't fight over having your phone out to your boss. You can do it to your professor, but that's your $20k/yr tuition talking.
  - knollimar 10mo ago
    >You can't fight over having your phone out to your boss Give me a company phone or you don't get this rule. I'm not using my phone for work if I can't have it out during work. I use it 99% for work related things during work, though, with the 1% being happy birthday texts or something similar
    - dhussoe 10mo ago
      This is kind of a weird example to begin with on a forum mostly populated by software engineers, because I'd find it very weird if a manager ever objected to someone using their personal phone at a SWE or similar office job, but I'd guess that the sets of jobs where a "boss" would object to someone using their phone during work (but still getting their work done) and those that would potentially have a company phone are mostly disjoint... a complete prohibition on using your phone seems like entry-level retail job type rules. excepting corner-case stuff like some very high security facility where you wouldn't even be allowed to bring any outside electronics in.
johnnyanmac 10mo ago
Yeah I'm not that far out of high school but my school in the late 00's had a library policy on phones. You can keep them in your pocket, but don't bring them out during school. Otherwise they get taken for the class time, and it escalates from there. This included recess and pretty much extended to all non-calculator electronic devices, but it was generally more lax when you weren't disrupting someone. I couldn't imagine brazenly having my phone out while a teacher was talking unless it was an emergency.
japhyr 10mo ago
I was a classroom teacher from 1994-2019, so I watched the transition through the advent of phones until just before Covid. It's not as simple as it seems, for a few reasons. One, there's the very real pressure from parents to be able to contact their kids when they need to. In the US, regular school shootings have made this a complicated issue to navigate. Also, it requires much more consistency from school staff than most people realize. If it's top down and not supported by just about everyone, then many teachers and staff find themselves in endless battles. It takes more consistency and clarity of vision, and consistent enforcement than many schools are capable of. Last, the devices students carry with them are often more capable and reliable than school based technology. So when students need to look something up, it's easy for them to just pull out their device. Super-addictive devices in a society that's prioritizing many of the wrong things is a hard thing to manage. How many of you would give up your tech salaries to make $40-60k to take on these issues?
- Mistletoe 10mo ago
  If they need to contact their kids they can call the school to talk to them in the very rare case that is actually necessary. It was quite nice and refreshing to have the umbilical cut to your parents while you were at school in the past. You had to learn how to be on your own. If there is a school shooting, what is texting their kid going to do?
  - makeitdouble 10mo ago
    I feel too few people apply the same logic to themselves. For instance would you put your phone in a locker for the time you're on the clock for work ? Some professions require that, it's not an unreasonable proposition in itself. But how many actually can/would do it ? Some people see it as a guilt thing and just assume they're succumbing to some tentation. Another way to look at it is the generic message being just wrong, we're doing fine _enough_ as we do now, and pushing moral principals nobody actually cares about on kids isn't as smart as people want to make it.
    - kelnos 10mo ago
bluedino 10mo ago
In the 90's only drug dealers had pagers and cell phones, at least in the eyes of the board of education. If you were caught with one you'd be expelled.
wiredpancake 10mo ago
[dead]
kelnos 10mo ago
I'm a little older than you (mid forties), and back in my day (when we walked to school uphill, both ways, in the snow, with no shoes), they banned pagers. (And the penalties could be pretty bad, since "only drug dealers have pagers".) (The thing that annoyed teachers was when we played games on our graphing calculators, which they of course couldn't ban, since the school required them in the first place!)
- accrual 10mo ago
  > played games on our graphing calculators Block Dude! I also spent quite a bit of time writing functions and tools on my TI-84+, probably the closest thing I'll have to "growing up writing BASIC" since I missed that bus.
- welcome_dragon 10mo ago
  I'm a little older than you (mid fifties) and back in my day we couldn't have walkmans/headphones on inside the school. I walked so in the winter I would wear headphones instead of earmuffs/hats (had to rock that 80's hair) and got in trouble all the time. Like one step in the building and busted. I think the biggest barrier to a phone ban being more widely adopted is parents. My wife works in the front office of a middle school and parents lose their minds if a kid gets their phone taken away. "But but but what if I NEED to get ahold of my kid during the day?". Umm... You ask the school to get your kid? I dunno seems pretty straightforward. Then again I'm in an affluent area where moms against liberty (as I call them) are prevalent so maybe it's just the people here?
accrual 10mo ago
In my case phones were just starting to become commonplace, the Razr was the coolest phone to have, we had iPods but not iPhones, etc. Most instructors didn't want to see any phones and would threaten to take them away, so we became skilled at using T9 under the desk or in sweatshirt pockets, etc.

1970-01-01 10mo ago

It's beyond obvious that they should be paying attention to the classroom and not their screen. Future generations will equate our screentime addictions to smoking and drinking. Just putting it down doesn't work. It needs to be out of reach and in certain locations, taken away from us entirely for the betterment of humanity.

HPsquared 10mo ago

I wonder if there's a hidden confounding selection bias here, i.e. "ability of the school to ban phones". This is probably easier in less chaotic schools where the students listen to the teachers, say.

moduspol 10mo ago
If the teachers and schools cannot implement a phone ban because the students won't listen to them, it might be time to reassess what their purpose is.
- c22 10mo ago
  These sorts of schools already make kids pass through metal detectors on their way in so phones can just be confiscated at that point.
- phantasmish 10mo ago
  Ever watch The Wire? The school in that show is a very accurate depiction of what a... middling-bad inner city school is like. There are tons of ones worse than it (they may have shied away from one of that sort either because it didn't suit the story, or because they thought too many viewers would think they were exaggerating) There are schools where the administrators are too busy dealing with violence to have time for much else.
- lmm 10mo ago
  Are you saying that from a perspective where the purpose of schools is to offer an education, or to keep kids locked up and be cheaper than daycare?
  - moduspol 10mo ago
    My phrasing suggests that. I was having trouble thinking of a non-offensive way to say, "I don't think the kids can possibly be learning much if the teachers and administration are incapable of implementing a phone ban." Parent comment described them as "chaotic." I'm not even sure I'd describe them as "schools." But to more clearly answer your question: I think it's fair to question what their actual purpose is (and it doesn't seem to be education), but I don't think it was anyone's explicit intention to make them that way.

doctorpangloss 10mo ago

The increase in scores is really small. It’s 1.1 percentage points. My interpretation is, the pandemic is a root cause of lower test scores for many reasons, one reason is that kids started using cell phones way more during the pandemic, and that new stuff on the phone (TikTok, let’s be real) causes lower test scores. Reducing usage during school is addressing a real problem, but it’s one of many real problems, and some are way bigger.

eitally 10mo ago
I think you're correct, but another piece of this is that students (especially in HS, but probably also in MS) have realized they can accomplish most assigned tasks in a fraction of the time using online resources (whether copies of old tests, agentic AI, or other sites), so they lean on their phone for this. A big piece of the missing equation here is the fact that home PC/laptop use has also been consistently decreasing, in favor of phones & tablets, causing phones themselves to be even more indispensable for youth. I read a position paper last week suggesting the solution to this is to take a zero tolerance policy in the classroom and move all course testing back to pencil & paper / bluebooks. I would support that (as a parent of two current high schoolers).
- phantasmish 10mo ago
  Funnily enough, as a parent, I'd have loved for my (young-ish at the time) kids to have been on old-school pencil and paper stuff during the pandemic. Tear-out worksheet books or a weekly trip to the schools to grab a packet of physical papers with the week's lessons and work (or, hell, send the buses around to drop them off) would have been SO MUCH easier to manage and help with than all the online horse-shit. Like, I truly think my 80s and 90s classrooms would have been better prepared to deal with the pandemic than the modern computerized ones. You'd think it'd be the other way around, but from what I saw, no. It's just so much harder to keep track of what's going on in several different computer programs, than a stack of paper and a couple books for each kid.
pavon 10mo ago
I think there is a typo in the paper, that was carried over to the article. These two sentences appear to contradict one another as written: > Interestingly, we observe significantly improved student test scores in the second year of the ban (about 2-3 percentiles higher than the year before the ban) when suspensions revert to pre-ban levels. > Overall, we show that student test scores improved by 0.6 percentiles, with the ban increasing spring test scores 1.1 percentiles in the second year relative to the spring test right before the ban took effect. Instead, I think the 1.1 percentile gain should be about the first year, and a 2-3 percentile gain by the second year. That is consistent with the graph. But yes, a fairly small gain. I agree that much of the gain could be recovering from losses during the pandemic. Also the FAST is a new test that started in the 2022-2023 school year, so some of this could also be due to students and teachers adjusting to the new test and improving over time.

i_c_b 10mo ago

Back in the late 90s, when I first entered the video game industry to work (when it was quite scruffy, countercultural, and populated by some pretty odd people), one of the first things I encountered was a new co-worker who, next to his giant tower of used Mountain Dew cans, had a black and white TV in his cubicle. This struck me as very odd at that moment in time - as I understood things, obviously the point of work was supposed to be that it was a place where you worked, not a place where you watched TV. (Now, granted, everyone else was playing the recently released Diablo on their work PCs during lunch in network mode, and we were a game studio after all, so my reaction wasn't totally coherent). Still, no one else had a TV, and that guy was young and single with no work-life balance, he was a recent transplant, and it still seemed unusual at the time. Fast forward 28 years later, and now everyone has an amazing TV in their pocket at all times when they commute, sit in their work space, go out for coffee or lunch, or go sit down in the bathroom, all with a near infinite collection of video via youtube, netflix, and even massive amounts of porn. How little did I know. And that's to say nothing of texting and twitter and reddit and instant messaging and discord and ... Several years ago, I was working on a college campus, and there were giant corporate-flavored murals beside some of the city blocks students walked, full of happy multicultural clip art people and exciting innovative technological innovation, and adorned with the message, "Imagine a borderless world!" Clearly that message was meant to be rhetorical, not a call to reflection, critique, or reevaluation. There did not seem to be the suggestion that one might imagine the borderless world and then, having done so, decide it was a problem to be corrected. I wonder a lot, these days, if we're not deep into a Chesterton's Fence situation, where we have to rediscover the hard way the older wisdom about having separate spheres with separate hard constraints and boundaries on behaviors, communities, and communication pathways to facilitate all sorts of important activities that simply don't happen otherwise - something like borders and boundaries as a crucial social technology, specifically about directing attention productively. Phones and tablets are, in their own Turing complete way, portals to a borderless world that pierces the older intentional classroom boundaries.

kragen 10mo ago
The older wisdom was that you worked on the farm with your husband and children for your entire life, breastfeeding while you peeled the potatoes, putting down your spindle to comfort a crying child. Millers lived in the mill; even blacksmiths lived at their smithies. Except for rituals, separate spheres with separate hard constraints was a novelty of the Satanic mills where the Victorian proletariat toiled.

NegativeLatency 10mo ago

Having grown up in the "no cellphones allowed at school" age, and now having a kid, I'm super glad that my local school district is finally banning phones. There's always going to be exceptions but speaking for myself there's no way I'd be able to resist the allure of a cellphone in class.

gpt5 10mo ago

This is an area where hacker news shows its weakness. We have: 1. A chart showing a very low increase (1-2 percent) 2. Nothing to control scores rising in every school in America in the last school year (due to reduction of COVID effects). 3. Scores not moving immediately after the ban, but only after the start of a new school year, which means a new cohort of students muddying the data. Yet the data fits people's biases here (regardless whether it's right or wrong), so the celebrate it and add anecdotes and explanations why it's true.

uniqueuid 10mo ago
To be fair, all those details are in the paper. And a 1-2 percent increase does not seem low to me for such a measure.
nineplay 10mo ago
I'd go further and say its a global weakness and unbelievably destructive. The bulk of current discourse today is: 1. Read a headline/tweet/instagram. 2. Decide whether or not it fits in your worldview. 3. Move forward with the confidence that you are better informed than everyone else who agrees/disagrees with it. You see it everywhere on all sides of all beliefs. It didn't use to be like this. We used to read articles, we used to read common news sources, we use to not have media overrun with bad actors who know exactly what to say to get the most engagement and solidify people in their own world views. It's all over HN and I could have hoped there'd be more willingness to say "let me consider the contents and the source before deciding if I accept it". That attitude is just lost and I don't think it will be regained and I think it's the reason we are all in a death spiral.
- nemomarx 10mo ago
  When was it not like this, though? I think people are rosey about the past here. A small educated set was different in the past but probably the bulk of the population has always done something like this - now you can hear them online easier.
  - 10mo ago

ryuhhnn 10mo ago

Some very important context that the researchers don't mention: during the same period that they are claiming test scores improved because of phone bans, Florida changed the way they administer standardised tests. Starting in 2024, they switched from doing one end-of-year assessment and started administering more frequent tests throughout the year in order to better gauge a student's progress and provide a tighter feedback loop. (source: https://www.educationadvanced.com/blog/florida-standardized-tests https://www.educationadvanced.com/blog/florida-standardized-...) It's much more likely that simply changing the way they administer these tests had a more significant impact on test scores than phone bans.

jobs_throwaway 10mo ago
> It's much more likely that simply changing the way they administer these tests had a more significant impact on test scores than phone bans. Why do you think that's more likely?
- ryuhhnn 10mo ago
  Put yourself in the student's shoes: instead of being required to rote memorise every detail and hold that in your head until the end of the year, you are now only required to be assessed at the time that you are learning the material. Do you think you'd fare better on that type of test, or a test done months after you actually studied the material? One of the first things they teach you in educational research is that standardised test scores are significantly impacted based on how the tests are administered and what the test is actually assessing.
  - johnnyanmac 10mo ago
    A good student would do well regardless, a bad student would do bad regardless. Cell phones might help a bad student do a little less bad, but only a little. For the middle, it really depends on the material covered. if it's cumulative, then results might not change as much. if it's "learn and forget", then it might be testing the wrong incentives.

uniqueuid 10mo ago

You have to admit that it's quite clever how they approximate phone use: > Our identification strategy relies upon our ability to calculate school-specific measures of smartphone activity that we can attribute to students, rather than adults in the building. To do so, we use detailed smartphone activity data from Advan between January 2023 and December 2024 that we link to LUSD schools using point-of-interest coordinates.13 In particular, we focus on the average number of unique smartphone visits (pings) between 9am and 1pm on school days (a common time frame that elementary, middle, and high schools in LUSD are all in session during school days) in the last two months of the 2022-23 school year (right before the ban took effect) and the first two months of the 2023-24 and 2024-25 school years.14 To disentangle student activity from the smartphone activity of teachers/staff, we subtract the average number of unique smartphone visits between 9am and 1pm on teacher workdays (in the same school year) from the same average on regular school days.

pcchristie 10mo ago
Nice spot. Very clever!

mikemarsh 10mo ago

Since when is a study needed to confirm that enabling a dopamine addiction, especially in developing minds, is a bad idea? Isn't our own direct experience as adults/parents struggling with said addictions enough?

immibis 10mo ago
Since a study is needed to determine if anything is true. Sometimes the study is simple: look out the window and see if it's raining. But this is not one of those.

RandallBrown 10mo ago

Are students really allowed to be on their phones during class at a lot of schools? When I was in high school, we didn't have smartphones, but we had game boys, flip phones, and graphing calculators that could play games. If we were ever caught playing with any of these things we got in trouble. That seemed sufficient at the time, but is that not the case anymore?

nomel 10mo ago
iPads are required in some public school classrooms, in place of textbooks! There no "lockdown mode" that the teacher can enable, to lock to the apps/websites related to the lesson. It's INSANE.
- mavhc 10mo ago
  Apple's Classroom says it allows locking to a single app https://apps.apple.com/us/app/classroom/id1085319084 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/classroom/id1085319084
  - nomel 10mo ago
    Then it can't work. Textbook, website for the problems, notes app, etc. Multitasking is required when the answers are input online (which is a problem itself).

protocolture 10mo ago

Correlation/Causation issues as others have pointed out. But also, complete inability of schools to adapt. Refusing to adapt to the reality that is, students will be living their entire lives with these devices, and that they should be working out ways to ensure student productivity despite their existence, is not the same thing as success. Teachers are inherently lazy. Its one of their more human qualities. But really they need to adapt, or fail and be replaced. There was a kid in my class in highschool. We had a school that permitted laptops, one of the first near us, but situationally. Teachers could exclude, or instruct the student to not use the laptop for periods during class. However policy was that students were allowed to use the laptop any time they could use a workbook. This kid was the only one who both had access to a laptop and was willing to risk damaging it by bringing it to school. Math class with this kid was: 1. He plays games on his laptop unless the teacher was looking, in which case he would be solving problems in excel or notepad. Proficient alt tab user. 2. At the end of class, he would copy out all the answers from the back of the textbook to his workbook, and he would hand that in. English was different. In english the teacher built a relationship with him and engaged him directly. If he was unresponsive he might be forced back to attention somehow, asked a direct question about the text, but that was true of a lot of the students. The entire class was a discussion on book content. When he used the laptop, he was using it to write notes because he was engaged through positive reinforcement. If the teacher caught him playing, the teacher would on those rare occasions, engage him about the game. Often, he had finished his assigned reading\tasks early and simply drifted over. In that case he was left to play because he wasn't disrupting anyone. Phone bans are a crutch for lazy, uninterested educators. Kids need to be prepared to live in a world with these things in their pockets. The correct dopamine reward feedback loops are not going to be built by banning them entirely. And being better at rote learning and regurgitating ancient course material isn't a strong indicator, if it was even an indicator, of better student outcomes.

kelnos 10mo ago
Perhaps I'm just lacking in imagination, but I'm not sure how having smartphones in class meaningfully enhances the educational experience. I could see a tablet for note-taking being useful, perhaps. (Or a more limited device like a Remarkable, which IIRC isn't a general-purpose touchscreen computer.) Kids can prepare to live in a world with these things in their pockets outside of school. Sure, primary school is about learning all sorts of things, not just what the teacher is lecturing about. But it doesn't have to be about everything, and I think it's fair to make the call that the distraction caused by smartphones (especially with all the apps designed to addict users) outweighs any positive teachable moments with them present. Your anecdote is interesting because it didn't really bring me to the same conclusion. Kids aren't going to be interested in every single subject, but we believe it's important to expose them to a bit of everything regardless. Maybe your classmate just didn't care about math, but enjoyed English and reading, and found that much more engaging. Maybe there was absolutely nothing the math teacher could have done to get that kid to pay attention all the time, even if they were the best teacher in the world. > he would copy out all the answers from the back of the textbook to his workbook, and he would hand that in. That's really the big flaw here. If he hadn't been able to do that, his grades would suffer, and someone, whether the teacher or his parents, would have (hopefully!) stepped in to see what was going on, and find a way to curb his game-playing in class. Maybe that would have meant he wasn't allowed to have the laptop out in that particular class until he could demonstrate that he could use it appropriately. > Teachers are inherently lazy. I know quite a few teachers, and calling teachers lazy is so mind-blowingly, disrespectfully inaccurate that it's really hard to take your opinions seriously. Sure, in every walk of life you'll find lazy people, but I see no evidence that teachers are on average lazier than people in any other profession. My take on it is that teachers might be on average less lazy than your average human.

adrr 10mo ago

Test scores fell off cliff when covid hit, they've been slowly rising nationally since. Here's California. https://edpolicyinca.org/publications/california-test-scores-show-little-improvement-after-pandemic https://edpolicyinca.org/publications/california-test-scores...

trgn 10mo ago

Crazy we need studies for this

cadamsdotcom 10mo ago

2021-2022 vs 2023-2024. Has anyone asked what Covid had to do with it?

TimPC 10mo ago

This seems like the single worst way to measure this because by looking at chronological data you get all kinds of temporal effects. A better baseline would be to look at the difference between pre-cell phone ban scores and post cell-hone ban scores compared to other districts where the cell phone ban didn't occur. I find it completely unremarkable that test scores went up post-COVID and feel it's very hard to tell what is causing what.

NatTheBat 10mo ago

To expect children/teens to outsmart big tech companies putting billions of dollars into getting us all addicted to our phone seems... naive. Removing availability to a vice has always been a somewhat effective strategy to mitigate temptation, i.e. food, drugs, etc.

socalgal2 10mo ago

I can hardly wait for all the WFT->RTO charts :P

danans 10mo ago
> I can hardly wait for all the WFT->RTO charts :P Work from ... Texas?
- kelnos 10mo ago
  Ah yes, those years when we were all allowed to Work from Texas, and then all our bosses wanted us to Return to Ohio.

est 10mo ago

If phones were totally banned for kids, where would the kid get to know the world? TVs? Newspapers? Magazines? Well those are on-way, with limited feedbacks. What's the better alternative except phones?

BenFranklin100 10mo ago
For those of us who grew up before 2000, we somehow managed. I think younger people today will as well.
- ojame 10mo ago
  Also it's important to note the topic is during school hours. There's a wealth of knowledge to learn at school, and there's also a wealth to learn outside of school. Knowledge about the world can, and will, happen in both. Many hours outside of school to 'grow your knowledge' through your phone.
- lmm 10mo ago
  > For those of us who grew up before 2000, we somehow managed You had TV, newspapers and magazines - and perhaps more importantly, public libraries. The current generation doesn't, not if you take away their phones.
- card_zero 10mo ago
  No we didn't. I never learned how to write games for 8-bit computers in assembler, like commercial games. No source of information would tell me about anything other than BASIC. There was no way to find out.
  - kelnos 10mo ago
    Not sure how having a smartphone in class would have allowed you to do that, though. And regardless, if you're in a physics or language class, you should be focusing on those those topics, not learning how to write computer games. My high school did offer a computer science class in the 90s, and students who took it got to use the school's computer lab. If your school didn't have something like that, that's a shame, but that doesn't suggest that you should have been able to ignore the presented curriculum and do whatever you wanted.

BenFranklin100 10mo ago

Learning requires focus; cell phones destroy focus.

FilosofumRex 10mo ago

The discussion here is so misdirected - It's not the device that's addictive or destructive, it's the exposure of young developing minds to endless, pointless advertising/sponsorship. Ban advertising to children & youth and the device itself will be harmless

AndrewDucker 10mo ago

A difference of 1-2%. Not something particularly worth worrying about.

Kim_Bruning 10mo ago

This is actually very sad. Finally every child had a computer in their pocket, but it turned out to be a locked down attention exploitation machine. I sincerely wish it wasn't. That's why they're being banned all over. Citizens and governments finally got savvy to how bad these devices can really be, especially in the hands of the inexperienced. Imagine if history had gone differently. Maybe history still can go differently. A portable computer in the hands of every child. One that actually works for them, not against them. Are there people already working on this? (I do know about eg. F-Droid, which is an improvement due to strict curation) edit: Think of eg 'A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer' : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diamond_Age https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diamond_Age

sharperguy 10mo ago
I'm thinking of this as I read this thread. How do you solve the problem of social media firehoses while still allowing kids to have access to the vast wealth of information and advice that the internet provides? It hasn't been so many years since many were predicting that the internet will make schools themselves obsolete.

lazy_afternoons 10mo ago

I am reasonably confident that Smart Phones will take the route of cigarettes. Restricted to adults over 21 years of age.

TheOtherHobbes 10mo ago
And then progressively banned in public places. Which won't work. The model isn't an exact match. I'd rather see hard content filters in certain contexts than a complete ban. No social media sites, games, or messaging would remove most of the problem. But the ultimate driver of addiction is ad-tech, and all of these measures would cause a significant hit to the ad industries. So in practice it's easier simply to ban phones.

gcanyon 10mo ago

"Differences in test scores" Anyone know how to interpret that chart?

derelicta 10mo ago

Only slightly tengential, but am so happy to have invested in a remarkable and ony taking (most of) my notes during classes with it (when I dont break the tip and forgetting the replacement ones at home)

graybeardhacker 10mo ago

If I understand the graph correctly, it looks like there's maybe a three percentage point increase. But given there is a 1 percentage point delta in the pre-ban data, that would seem to indicate there is at least a 1 point variation that must be ignored as irrelevant. I'm not sure how they generated the error bars but that, to me, would suggest the relevant error could be +/- 1 percentage point. Meaning the delta could be at little as two percentage points. My intuition says cellphone bans would have a positive impact, but I don't think I'd call this data conclusive. I'd want to see more data from earlier and later. Also, if these are the same students, then test scores might be reflecting increased maturity. If it's different students of the same age, it could be a shift in some extra-educational factors affecting the younger generation. Too many unknowns and not enough signal.

pavel_lishin 10mo ago

> There were no statistically significant changes in test scores during the first year of the ban, when disciplinary rates were high. During the second year of the ban, in contrast, test scores increased significantly, with positive effects concentrated during the spring semester (scores increased 1.1 percentiles, on average). The researchers suggest that this may be due to the higher stakes of spring tests, which can affect grade advancement and high school graduation. Test score improvements were also concentrated among male students (up 1.4 percentiles, on average) and among middle and high school students (up 1.3 percentiles, on average). > When comparing high-effect and low-effect schools, the researchers note significant reductions in unexcused absences during the two years following the cell phone ban. They posit that increased attendance could explain as much as half of the test score improvements noted in their primary analysis. Seems to me like there wasn't a huge improvement, and the improvement seen could easily be attributed to other things, no?