Maybe I'm out of the loop... smartphones are allowed in the first place? When did that happen? In my high school, cell phones and ipods (at the time) were to be in lockers and turned off during the day. It was an insta-detention if you were seen using one.
What's wild to me is that almost all the individual devices a smartphone represents, not even counting the phone itself, would have been confiscated if used in class, for my generation (and I'm a millennial!)
Flashlight? LOL, they might not even wait for you to use it, just assume there's no way you're not going to do something dumb with it, and take it.
A handheld gaming device? Insta-yoink.
Note-passing? Notes confiscated.
Basically an ordered-from-a-back-of-magazine-ad spy kit of a miniature camera and voice recorder? GONE. And you might be on the way to the office for a chat, and parents called, if you'd actually been using any of it.
A glossy fashion magazine, seen out at any point that's not explicitly totally-free time? In the teacher's desk. (and that's on the tame side of the kind of thing one might be looking at on one's phone...)
A portable mini-TV or small radio? Jesus, of course you can't have that in class.
But smartphones? Nope, they can have those. Which is the exact same as having all those things above, and way more.
It's such a crazily-different direction for policy.
This policy isnt about use in class. Afaik every school bans devices in class. The question is whether they should be allowed during lunch, in between classes, before/after school.
Part of your job is to keep kids on a schedule. Shit gets messed up and learning is disrupted for many students if you don't. It's also your ass on the line if you don't know where kids are, within reason, all day long.
Devices that don't necessarily, but do tend, to make keeping the schedule harder, exist and aren't needed for education.
("What does a CD player at lunch have to do with that?" if enough kids start listening to music at lunch I 100% guarantee you issues getting them to the next class on time increase in frequency a ton, and that's before you consider that every thing you add like that to a school environment increases the rate and severity of, ah, physical disputes)
So yeah, of course you ban their use.
"You could just only ban them for students for whom they're a problem."
Yeah, you could, but now you're dealing with even more angry parents up your ass because "you're not being fair, and you're singling out my kid". And you're burning more time you don't have dealing with these issues ad-hoc. No, it has to be a blanket ban.
Schools could be a lot less authoritarian if they didn't have to serve kids (or parents...) who can't handle a looser approach, and if they could simply kick out very disruptive kids, et c. But they can't, so they're a lot worse, in a lot of ways, than they hypothetically could be.
Can't speak for the rest of the country, but in our district smartphones were allowed for a couple years. I don't know the rationale about allowing them in the first place, but it happened in 2020. It took them two years to decide it was an unmitigated disaster and they promptly re-banned all electronics. No music players, phones, headphones, etc. Get caught and it gets confiscated and your parents have to come retrieve it.
Maybe that's draconian. But maybe it's just good sense -- our high school is close to #1 in the state for academic performance, so they are doing something right.
My 4 year old son has an iPhone, and we’d sooner homeschool him than keep him enrolled if the only schools we could send afford would confiscate or ban it.
I recognize we’re an exception, but he has type 1 diabetes, and his iPhone is essentially a medical device that sends us updates on his glucose levels throughout the day.
I’d hope schools at least make exceptions for cases like this.
This right here. Parents ultimately run schools, and a surprising proportion of them get really pissy if their kids can't have phones in class. Schools aren't letting kids have phones because they want to.
My wife used to teach and had multiple parents, over a handful of years, who'd semi-frequently call their kids while they were in class. Just to, like, chat. A lot more would text with them, again, usually just to shoot the shit. Lots of parents are... let's be kind I guess and go with really fucking weird.
What's worse, in states with voucher systems, parents can remove not just their kid from the school, but their tax dollars too--so the teachers have to tolerate the phones or funding will dry up for the other students who are trying to pay attention.
I think coupling where your kids go to school with where your tax dollars are going severely misunderstands the point of having there be tax dollars for schools in the first place. Having kids shouldn't give you special powers re: how your taxes are used.
> I think coupling where your kids go to school with where your tax dollars are going severely misunderstands the point of having there be tax dollars for schools in the first place.
It makes some sense considering the people with kids probably care much more about the details in how those dollars are spent. Not that there are not people without kids who are equally interested (esp. those who work in education), but on avg parents will have much more interest and much more visibility into how it's spent.
What's weird to me is thinking that parents shouldn't get some "special powers". It's like saying the people who live in a particular police precinct shouldn't get any special consideration about how that precinct is run.
Whatever influence a non-elected person has over their police precinct should be equal to that of all the other non-elected people in that precinct. The voucher thing is like if you had a different sized influence based on whether you have a criminal record, since presumably you would then have a different relationship with the effects of that funding.
It's just not how democracy works.
(It is, however, how pre-revolution France worked, the revolution was as much about getting rid of the system of privileges as it was about getting rid of the king. I think we should think twice about the extent to which we legitimize the practice of treating different types of people differently.)
We need to educate parents better. The children of tech billionaires aren't permitted to use all of these devices or social accounts... because the tech elite know they are harmful to social and intellectual development.
I posted elsewhere in the thread that, with the limited dataset I have (which includes families at a few schools of very different kinds, not just, like, my friend group) it sure looks to me like there's a sharp difference between the way the culturally upper-middle (under Fussell's model—the working "professional" class like doctors and lawyers, executives, that sort of thing) and higher, and the culturally middle-or-lower handle device use & access with their kids.
It's a big enough difference that, unless phones turn out not to have much of an effect (an... unlikely proposition, I think) on educational outcomes, I fully expect this to manifest as a widening gap between already-very-inequitable educational outcome stats for the (loosely) rich vs. the poor.
(Example: middle-class public school, 5th grader gets teased for not having a phone. "Your family must be so poor, hahaha!" Nearly the whole class has phones, and most of those have them on their person in class.
Bottom-edge-of-"fancy" private school—only like 25% of the kids in 5th grade have one at all, half of those aren't allowed to bring them to school, and the rest keep them put away, out of reach, during class and lunch and such—there is no teasing, not having your own phone, especially at school and certainly in class, is the overwhelming norm.)
Pretty wild.. what's the point in even making them go to school if you're just going to let them goof off on their phone all day? Just let them sit around at home watching TikTok until they turn 18 and have to get a minimum wage job
At my work, there are certain areas that we are not allowed to have any cameras, and that includes all personal cell phones. I have a colleague whose daughter was at school during an active shooter incident, and she was able to use her phone but he was not able to receive her calls or texts. She was not killed, but I am glad she had a cell phone that day, and I wish he had his too.
I've run the numbers on "average likelihood of a given student being present during any kind of shooting on school grounds—the overwhelming majority of which aren't the kind of shooting one thinks of when one sees the term 'school shooting', anyway—at any point during 13 years of k-12 school, in the US" and it helped me conclude it's not a thing worth worrying about, even a little. (I do have kids in school)
School shootings come up a lot in these kinds of conversations.
Of course you can run the numbers and realize this plainly falls way below the level at which anyone should be using that use-case as a justification for anything.
(nb. the vast majority of school shootings you'll see in the statistics aren't the sort where kids having phones matters, they're e.g. targeted attacks on a single person, gang- or otherwise crime-related targeted attacks, violence that just by happenstance takes place on school grounds outside and perhaps not even involving any students or staff; all of which tend to be over almost as fast as they start and aren't an ongoing threat to bystanders once they're over, and even those aren't terribly likely to be something a kid is present for during their school career, on average)
During every school I attended growing up (and I graduated in 2007 so this isn't that ancient history) my parents would just call the school office if something urgent came up, and the faculty would use the intercom system to page the room I was in. The teacher paused their lesson, acknowledged the request, and asked me to pack my things and head up to the front office, no questions asked. It was infrequent, but very well understood and executed efficiently.
I'm not sure smartphones have improved on this? If a kid gets a call in class the teacher's almost immediate reaction is annoyance, because there was no chain of authority that led to that distracting element. Now the kid's on the defensive and has to explain that it's their parent, and the whole class gets to wait while the kid awkwardly has this conversation while simultaneously communicating with the teacher that it's a legitimate request, etc. And that's for legitimate emergencies, to say nothing of the troublemakers that will intentionally coordinate fake calls to get out of class and hang out with their friends.
Agree with you, but also, I feel like my imagination is lacking here. What kinds of "emergencies" even exist that require a child to resolve them? In all my K-12 education I feel like I think my parents only needed to contact me in class without prior arrangement maybe... once? Or twice? Zero times? Honestly I can't think of a single instance, I'm just assuming there must've been one I've forgotten about, certainly not an "emergency". Even other students being called from class seemed incredibly rare, and even in those cases I would have just assumed things were prearranged and they merely got a notification that the parent had come to pick them up, or something.
A lot of people have become very adept at conjuring up edge cases for why being out of instant communication is just not acceptable any longer.
I am somewhat sympathetic to arguments that lots of things we took for granted growing up really are not especially acceptable today but there are limits.
With the rise in school shootings (I graduated in 98, Columbine was for me the first, and one of the deadliest obviously, but ever since it's just escalated).. I've got two boys 4 and 6, they don't have cellphones now, but I freak and feel I need to do damage control/therapy with them everytime they have an active shooter drill. We only ever had to deal with Tornado, and Fire drills.
ADHD tangent aside my point is: I can see the need these days, however I like the idea of a dumb phone that just has the basics. Definitely no tiktok, facebook, etc.
To be honest, I think your fear is overblown, but I understand how it is having kids you love.
But let's assume a rare mass shooting actually happens (I forbid this thought)...will there be any point calling your kids? A phone will be more of a liability than an asset at that point..
The fear of harm from shooter drills that the parent expressed is, sadly, not overblown.
That we have so many school shootings is shameful.
That we've decided a good reaction to them is to traumatize huge numbers of students (and staff! My former-teacher wife has stories...) over something that's, as shameful as the cases of it are, in fact extremely unlikely (specifically, an indiscriminate mass shooting at a primary or secondary school) is also shameful.
An emergency like active shooter, not your child had an accident.
During active shooter situations, the school isn't going to call the parents of the students. They have other things to worry about. The kids are calling their parents directly.
> the school isn't going to call the parents of the students
Schools have communication plans for exactly this situation.
If you have a kid in school, you will be aware that schools have no qualms about communicating directly with parents via automated texts, emails, and phone calls, constantly, about nonemergencies. The volume of communication from schools is overwhelming. Putting out a notification about an active shooter incident would be easy. The trick would be getting the school admins to just send it out as a simple message, and not as a link to a Google doc containing a scan of a printout of the notification.
an automated text from your school saying there's a situation does absolutely nothing to alleviate the parent's concern. what a disingenuous thought that this is actually helpful in the least.
the parent wants to know if their special snowflake(s) is okay. these automated systems are absolutely not going to tell them that, and aside from that information, anything else is just seen as the school trying to placate people.
That would probably be the primary thing I'd imagine the parent is worried about. If you have a kid in a school with feckless police that stand outside while kids are getting shot at, then yeah, some parents probably are a better rescue option.
It's a boarding school, so something a bit different than your standard high school. Imagine if the school rules were no smartphones... at all, except on the school holidays and maybe weekends.
They're expensive. ~300 USD, while the e-ink and design is nice that's a pretty big bill for something that does less than a modern phone that is also cheaper.
I think the most cost effective solution is probably buying the cheapest used A12+ iPhone one could find. Factory restore, then setup Assistive Access or parental controls, which can limit any ability to install apps or settings without a different passcode to unlock the phone. Have a friend or partner set that passcode so you can't be tempted to add anything smart to your Dumb Phone.
Why can’t someone just make a phone. I don’t need a phone that plays music or can listen to podcast. I just need a phone that can make calls and make texts. I think their problem is they wanted this phone to still be like a smart phone.
You can still buy a super basic Nokia phone that pretty much only does that, and it lasts like a month of battery - I own one, it's great to carry around in places where you might not want to risk your super expensive smartphone.
I'd happily give this to my own child so they can reach me in emergencies, but there is no risk of them going on TikTok or anything else. It's "just" a phone.
I don't know. And maybe you're right - but I'd bet it's the attempt by the school the quell all kinds of complaints from parents like "what if my kid gets suddenly lost on the way home? what then????" by giving them a phone that has some mapping capability, it's just crap - but I guess it will do in an emergency.
By the time you build a basic phone, adding these features only costs a few cents more, so they include them to increase market share.
These days phones are generally built from a SoC which already includes more capabilities than just calls and text, and run an operating system which already supports those capabilities.
If you don’t want certain features they can be turned off (check how locked down you can make an iPhone via parental controls, for instance) but it’s hard to avoid paying for them in some way.
You’re not including the fact that they need some sort of wonky website for you to upload photos and add Podcasts. So it’s not just the phone they’re building but the whole infrastructure behind it.
And if what you said is true, then why give these kids light phones in the first place. I’m almost wondering if someone from the light phone company has some connection with that school.
Sorry I’m not actually familiar with light phone, so I’ve had a look, and it is something sold that anyone can buy.
They’re trying to build something which people need to find at least a bit palatable. A phone without the ability to play music and podcasts would have very little chance of selling for $300, they’d be up against those senior-oriented big button phones which sell for incredibly cheap.
Edit: I’m also not seeing anyone say that their school allows only light phone
