I don't know why this is hard. At least in the classroom if not during the entire school day.
You get a cabinet with a bunch of cubbie holes, kids put their phone in at the beginning of class, they take it out at the end of class. They can even lock and each kid takes a key with them if theft is a concern. It doesn't seem that complicated. They have these things outside every SCIF. I know they exist.
I'm young enough that smartphones were just hitting the market when I was in high school, but old enough that using your phone in class was still totally verboten. (We all tried to skirt the rules[1], of course, but we knew the rules were unambiguously a thing, and knew there'd be consequences if we got caught.[2]) And for the most part, teachers didn't have to implement any special solutions; we kept them on us at all times, and if a teacher heard/saw your phone, they were liable to take it for the class or for the day.
So the current situation with out-of-control phone use in schools is interesting/puzzling to me, because clearly something's changed since then—but I don't think "better smartphones" are the differentiating factor here. Something's shifted with how schools enforce (or don't enforce) these policies, or with kids' relationship to their phones (and believe me, I was plenty hooked on mine back then too :P), or something else entirely.
It's also puzzling when people argue that smartphones have opened a Pandora's box that makes it impossible to control student behavior—because I know firsthand that that's not true!
[1] I think the threat of punishment also forced us to be relatively discreet about it. If you're texting in class, you have your phone on silent, brightness all the way down, barely sticking out of your bag...
[2] Some teachers admittedly gave more of a shit than others, but I rarely saw students taking advantage of that in a disruptive way—the most blatant thing you'd see is a kid listening to music on headphones during art class or something. I might've been the biggest offender in that regard, because I would occasionally bust out a Wiimote and N64 emulator to play Mario 64 on my phone, but I knew when I could get away with that and when I couldn't.
The problem is that districts and schools have tried this, but then parents complain and threaten to sue about "stealing the phone" and such. The district doesn't have a leg to stand on.
They need a state law to back them up so that they can tell the parents to take it to their legislature instead of the principal.
California already implemented that separately. Los Angeles Unified district opened the fall term enforcing the prohibition; the statewide mandate begins 2025.
You can't enforce silly laws. Who would enforce this ban? Teachers? That would be a school regulation, not a state law. Or do you want police walking around school arresting kids with phones? Do you enforce all of your guidance for your kids using legislation? A real solution to the distractions and harm that phones cause when used at school is harder, of course.
My child goes to a charter school in Arizona. Their policy is that phones are stored in lockers. If a kid is caught with their phone in the building then the phone is confiscated and brought to the office. The parents are notified and the phone is only given back to the parent. I don’t understand why something similar couldn’t be implemented in public schools thus requiring no state law.
as a parent with kids in school I am 100% in favor of this. In my son's middle school schools are not allowed in class but that puts the burden of enforcement on the teachers instead of just making it a blanket rule that you can't have it at school period
I use to be pro-phone ban in schools but with all the creepy crap going on in public school systems, I think kids should be able to record their teachers/other students/staff.
Hungary just banned phones (and also all devices capable of connecting to the internet, and/or capable of recording audio and video) from school.
I'm a student in an IT technical school. The only thing this affected is now instead of my classmates playing on their phones during class, they're now loudly playing card games - and now people who do want to learn can't because the teacher has to constantly stop and yell at the people playing cards.
I think students should be able to do whatever they want during breaks - they can do actually useful things with their devices, other than scrolling social media or playing games.
Also, this new ban completely eliminated kahoot and similar, since phones are collected at the start of the day and giving them out for a class involves incredible amounts of paperwork. (So much for modern teaching/learning methods)
i’m so glad to be finished with high school with all this happening. as a trans girl who was closeted in high school, being able to use my phone in between classes to text my accepting friends was the only way i survived. it sucks seeing that legislation doesn’t seem to consider that at all really.
If you listen to legislators pushing social media bans, they are taking cases like this into intense consideration in order to maximize the damage it would have on kids like you.
From [1]:
> A co-sponsor of a bipartisan bill intended to protect children from the dangers of social media and other online content appeared to suggest in March that the measure could be used to steer kids away from seeing transgender content online.
This gets messy because you already have problems with (mostly substitute) teachers ripping out implants (ex: insulin pump), cutting wires/tubes, or preventing kids from using their phone to monitor blood sugar, etc because they try to be "tough" on the no phones rule.
I really wish legislation like this was structured as an experiment, so we could robustly determine if it worked. Otherwise someone will come along in ten years and rip it out, saying there’s no evidence it improved things.
The sad thing is that politicians who get these laws passed don't want to collect data about whether the laws were successful.
If they collect data and it turns out the laws aren't helpful or the laws are actually harmful, then the politician's career and reputation may be trashed. But if they pretend like the law can't possibly be bad and never check on that, then they're protected.
The US is structured like an experiment; different states have different policies, so in ten years we can compare the mental health of teens in California with teens in other states without this bill and see if it made any difference.
Laboratories of democracy, I get it… but simply allowing law to vary by state is just the enabler. There’s a lot of structure you could add to make it an actual experiment.
Each company's policy of seting an age limit is a legal tool to protect the company, not a social tool to protect the children. This law, while also being a legal tool, is specifically designed to be implemented with social tools by the professionals who work with children.
Instagram and TikTok saw this coming. Both have recently dropped features to meet the spirit of this law.
TikTok now has "feed mirroring" for adults to use with their teens, so they can see what the algorithm is pushing at them. And Instagram now has a teen mode that lets parents choose which topics show up in their feed and disables notifications at night.
If I am reading the legislation [0] correctly, teenagers now have to tell Spotify what song to play one after another, every single time one track ends. Unless someone has previously made a playlist (I think) - in which case you can only listen to playlists that you or (someone else has made) if you are a teenager.
I'm surprised that the music industry let this happen to them.
For this interested in topic, you might enjoy reading The Anxious Generation, which has been on the NYT nonfiction bestseller list for a while. It goes into the data on how teen mental illness rates greatly increased when smartphones (apps + the front-facing camera) and social media algorithms were developed. The harmful effects are obvious to anyone who ever interacts with kids. The book also proposes several basic changes like delaying when kids are given smartphones and disallowing phones in schools, as well as advocating for play-based schools.
Debunked isn’t the correct term here. That would imply that the data is false or it’s misinformation. Instead the article you linked states:
On the other hand, data on this issue is mixed, and some studies contradict one another.
So a better way to talk about it is that the data doesn’t yet make a cut or dry case one way or another.
Another quote from the article you linked
Haidt argues that waiting for stronger evidence could be even more dangerous. He writes: “If you listen to the alarm ringers and we turn out to be wrong, the costs are minimal and reversible. But if you listen to the skeptics and they turn out to be wrong, the costs are much larger and harder to reverse.” … as a mother, as someone who writes about the harms of tech and tech companies, I see his point.
So even if we don’t take the data to be 100% convincing, it’s by no means “debunked” and something that we should just completely ignore.
> prohibits online platforms from knowingly providing an addictive feed to a minor without parental consent
totally onboard with the concept; but what is the burden of proof that a feed is "addictive"? If it falls on the state, then this probably won't have much effect (other than maybe to scare tech companies to be a bit more careful, which is maybe the best we can hope for)
It’s addictive if the state says it is, according to the state’s technical definition of “addictive” (personalized content, etc. - the bill has a detailed definition).
I'm sad about how smartphones have turned out. The effects are entirely dependent on how they are used. If used as a portable information retrieval device, camera, and communications tool, they make us smarter than ever before. But it seems most people have instead chosen to focus on attention-stealing data collection apps that encourage neuroticism, narcissism, and anxiety.
We had envisioned something like PADDs on Star Trek or the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, but what we got was an jingly electronic mirror that bullies you. I don't know how we are so okay with this. Keeping phones out of schools is not the cure. Keeping evil and harmful apps off the phones is a more precise solution.
> But it seems most people have instead chosen to focus on attention-stealing data collection apps that encourage neuroticism, narcissism, and anxiety.
Most didn't actively make that choice. They were coerced, peer pressured, or otherwise tricked into making it.
> We had envisioned something like PADDs on Star Trek or the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, but what we got was an jingly electronic mirror that bullies you.
Readit News
You get a cabinet with a bunch of cubbie holes, kids put their phone in at the beginning of class, they take it out at the end of class. They can even lock and each kid takes a key with them if theft is a concern. It doesn't seem that complicated. They have these things outside every SCIF. I know they exist.
So the current situation with out-of-control phone use in schools is interesting/puzzling to me, because clearly something's changed since then—but I don't think "better smartphones" are the differentiating factor here. Something's shifted with how schools enforce (or don't enforce) these policies, or with kids' relationship to their phones (and believe me, I was plenty hooked on mine back then too :P), or something else entirely.
It's also puzzling when people argue that smartphones have opened a Pandora's box that makes it impossible to control student behavior—because I know firsthand that that's not true!
[1] I think the threat of punishment also forced us to be relatively discreet about it. If you're texting in class, you have your phone on silent, brightness all the way down, barely sticking out of your bag...
[2] Some teachers admittedly gave more of a shit than others, but I rarely saw students taking advantage of that in a disruptive way—the most blatant thing you'd see is a kid listening to music on headphones during art class or something. I might've been the biggest offender in that regard, because I would occasionally bust out a Wiimote and N64 emulator to play Mario 64 on my phone, but I knew when I could get away with that and when I couldn't.
Almost every kid has a phone...if the phone isn't in the cubby they aren't counted as being there. Cabinet locked at beginning of class.
There are only 2 students out of his entire year that don't have a phone and he makes allowances for them.
But you don’t even have to take the phone out of the possession of the student.
They use these at some phone free concerts.
https://www.overyondr.com/phone-locking-pouch
They have done well in districts my kids have been in.
State wide top down rules is too disconnected from the front lines for me to believe they’re anything but legislative theater.
They need a state law to back them up so that they can tell the parents to take it to their legislature instead of the principal.
Dead Comment
I'm a student in an IT technical school. The only thing this affected is now instead of my classmates playing on their phones during class, they're now loudly playing card games - and now people who do want to learn can't because the teacher has to constantly stop and yell at the people playing cards.
I think students should be able to do whatever they want during breaks - they can do actually useful things with their devices, other than scrolling social media or playing games.
Also, this new ban completely eliminated kahoot and similar, since phones are collected at the start of the day and giving them out for a class involves incredible amounts of paperwork. (So much for modern teaching/learning methods)
From [1]:
> A co-sponsor of a bipartisan bill intended to protect children from the dangers of social media and other online content appeared to suggest in March that the measure could be used to steer kids away from seeing transgender content online.
[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/nbc-out/out-politics-and-policy/sena...
Dead Comment
If they collect data and it turns out the laws aren't helpful or the laws are actually harmful, then the politician's career and reputation may be trashed. But if they pretend like the law can't possibly be bad and never check on that, then they're protected.
Deleted Comment
TikTok now has "feed mirroring" for adults to use with their teens, so they can see what the algorithm is pushing at them. And Instagram now has a teen mode that lets parents choose which topics show up in their feed and disables notifications at night.
If I am reading the legislation [0] correctly, teenagers now have to tell Spotify what song to play one after another, every single time one track ends. Unless someone has previously made a playlist (I think) - in which case you can only listen to playlists that you or (someone else has made) if you are a teenager.
I'm surprised that the music industry let this happen to them.
[0] https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtm...
I’m curious, have you read the book?
Another quote from the article you linked
So even if we don’t take the data to be 100% convincing, it’s by no means “debunked” and something that we should just completely ignore.totally onboard with the concept; but what is the burden of proof that a feed is "addictive"? If it falls on the state, then this probably won't have much effect (other than maybe to scare tech companies to be a bit more careful, which is maybe the best we can hope for)
Daily use growing? So basically social media companies' KPIs.
We had envisioned something like PADDs on Star Trek or the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, but what we got was an jingly electronic mirror that bullies you. I don't know how we are so okay with this. Keeping phones out of schools is not the cure. Keeping evil and harmful apps off the phones is a more precise solution.
Most didn't actively make that choice. They were coerced, peer pressured, or otherwise tricked into making it.
> We had envisioned something like PADDs on Star Trek or the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, but what we got was an jingly electronic mirror that bullies you.
Beautifully put.