Smartphones are banned at school in Aus, for a strong net positive. Kids still sneak them into toilets and so on (and vapes), but the overwhelming impact has been positive.
It’s surprising that more schools haven’t done this. I suspect that we’ll look back in 10 years with it being common and ask ourselves what took so long.
In the US we've completely given up on stopping school shootings, and parents have instead decided that the better thing to fight for is their children having cell phones so they can hear the child's last words when the school shooting happens.
It’s not actually about school shootings in the US, as much as that might be cited as justification. Some parents just want to be able to text their kids all day.
I think the phones are one thing. It was a bit distressing to hear that US schools have “school shooting drills” like Japan schools have “earthquake drills”.
Wait until you hear about how teachers started stocking emergency toilets because of those multi-hour drills, and the right wing in the US responded by using it to accuse schools of setting up litter boxes for self-identified 'furries' in the student body.
You're just making things up, just like those people perpetuating the litter box hoax.
> The only known official instance of cat litter being placed in school classrooms for potential use by students was in the late 2010s by the Jefferson County Public School District in Colorado, where the 1999 Columbine High School massacre took place. Some teachers were given "go buckets" that contained cat litter to be used as a toilet in an emergency lockdown situation, such as during a school shooting.
_Only known official instance_ and not for drills, but in case there was an emergency situation.
> Parents and teachers in a Colorado school district were surprised by some new additions to the list of necessary back-to-school supplies—including kitty litter, buckets and trash bags.
> The products are part of Jefferson County's "Emergency Go Bucket," a way for students to relieve themselves in the event of a prolonged lockdown because of an active shooter.
I really can't tell if you're trolling or not. Did you read my comment? It talks precisely about Jefferson County in the late 2010s. This was the only known official case, and it was about lockdowns, not drills like you claimed.
> Did you read my comment? It talks precisely about Jefferson County in the late 2010s. This was the only known official case, and it was about lockdowns, not drills like you claimed.
Honestly, it didn't take long to find this article either:
> Dale Munholland’s classroom at Pomona High in Arvada is equipped with the necessities in modern-day America: a touch-screen projector, a computer — and a bucket filled with kitty litter, just in case an active-shooting drill lasts longer than a student’s bladder can handle. (https://www.denverpost.com/2018/03/03/school-shooting-prepar...)
It seems it really was for drills and not just lockdowns
Right now anyway, the wikipedia article which says "The only known official instance of cat litter being placed in school classrooms for potential use by students was in the late 2010s by the Jefferson County Public School District" also says it's for "an emergency lockdown situation, such as during a school shooting" so I guess drills can also count as "an emergency lockdown situation"
I’m not sure what ‘the US’ means here. In California it’s now required (as of next year) for schools to limit or restrict student phone use, and several other states have done similar things as mentioned in the article [1].
I think it is reasonable for a teacher to say you can't actively use your phone while class is in session but not appropriate for them to say you can't have your phone on you. It is also inappropriate to say your phone must be in some special pouch that only they can open, etc.
This is just my own opinion, of course. I think it is also inappropriate to say you need someone's permission to use the restroom. All my opinions of appropriate ness is mostly about adults behaving like adults though. They probably don't make sense when it comes to children?
I tend to agree, and the vast majority of policies that I've seen (e.g. US states) do in fact target the use of phones, not possession. Schools in the CA bill can continue to implement or exceed those requirements as they see fit.
At least in Australia the phone ban doesn’t mean you can’t have a phone in your pocket, you just can’t take it out.
Taking your phone out when I was in school meant having it placed on the teachers desk until the end of class, and possibly some other kind of penalty if they particularly didn’t like you. But you always got your phone back before leaving the class.
So, exactly how it was when cellphones first became commonplace? I started high school in 2008 and had a flip phone at that time. Yea, literally everyone was texting behind their back, under a desk, or whatever but it was fine. If we got caught, the teacher picked it up and we could come pick it up at the end of the day.
I can imagine if the current “meta” is literally holding your phone in your hand for the entire school day that problems would indeed arise.
Personally, I think banning phones in the classroom similar to what I grew up with is the minimum. If students still have poor outcomes or are being bullied by other kids sneaking phones, then yea, collect them at the door or implement stricter punishment for students caught with a phone.
I am more worried about dogs in school. Many teacher are fine to blame 11 years old for "provoking" dog attack! It is ok to send a kid to hospital, for eating a sandwitch!
Teachers at my school do not believe allergies are real! If there is asthma attack, it is an uncorrelated event! School will stab my kid with epipen, call ambulance and send me hospital bill! Avoiding it is too much work!
Once school brought unrestrained police dogs to school for a demonstration! Those had a record of attacking and torturing suspects!
> parents have instead decided that the better thing to fight for is their children having cell phones so they can hear the child's last words when the school shooting happens.
What's a ridiculous appeal to emotion. Between 2020 and 2022 there were 131 school shooting deaths, including suicides. Let's put those all in 2022, and assume that there were actually 0 suicides.
That means you have a 0.0026% chance to be killed (at most) in a school shooting. This is too much, but this is not the reason to allow cell phones in schools. Come on.
School shootings are extremely rare. If you want to protect kids you will be much more effective if you work on pedestrian safety, or anything related to driving at all really.
In Australia all the private schools have done it for ages, it’s just only recent that public schools did it.
Sure we still did sneak in a bit of phone usage in the bathrooms and behind secluded buildings but it’s a huge difference from being able to freely scroll social media all day.
How do you know that it has had an overwhelmingly positive impact? Can we, for example, see a marked increase in PISA scores for Australia from after the ban?
Or is this one of those "I hate phones, therefore banning them must be good for kids" things?
These are the key findings from the UK research which was part of the reason we started banning phones in schools here in Denmark.
> our results indicate that there is an improvement in student performance of 6.41% of a standard deviation in schools that have introduced a mobile phone ban.
> Finally, we find that mobile phone bans have very different effects on different types of students. Banning mobile phones improves outcomes for the low-achieving students (14.23% of a standard deviation) the most and has no significant impact on high achievers. The results suggest that low-achieving students are more likely to be distracted by the presence of mobile phones, while high achievers can focus in the classroom regardless of whether phones are present.
I believe OECD and Pisa results have also pointed towards banning as a net postive since their 2022 report.
I think it's fair to say that it's not a "black-and-white" thing. As the research points out, digital devices aren't the only factor in the equation. I believe OECD research has also found that using a digital device with a parent can be a benefit while using it alone will most certainly be a negative for children aged 2-6. I'm sure you can imagine why there might also be other factors that make a difference between parents who can spend time with their children and those who can't.
Aside from that there are also benefits from digital devices for students with learning disabilities like dyslexia. In most class-rooms this can be solved by computers + headphones, but for crafts people (I'm not sure what the English word for a school that teaches plumbers, carpenters etc. is), having a mobile phone in the workshop can often help a lot with insturctions, manuals and such.
So it's not clear cut, but over all, banning phones and smartwatches seem to be a great idea.
California GPA average is about 3.0 with 1.5 standard deviation. A 6.4% SD improvement would be a 0.1 point improvement in GPA. Certainly not an overwhelming result, compared to the subjective reactions how phones and screen are “obviously” destroying kids lives/attention spans/ability to hold a conversation, etc.
Given that teachers are no longer competing for student attention in class, that is one single and quite important positive which doesn't require an academic study and referencing to demonstrate.
I'm not sure what you were hoping to achieve with the request for evidence, but what you're asking is not yet subject to a longitudinal study. The move has certainly been praised by educators, and that should be enough given it's the first or second year year of implementation in many cases, and what they are advocating for isn't a social taboo, nor draconian.
But phones shouldn't be competing with the teacher during class in the first place!
Are we going to draft laws to ban fiction books from school because kids might be reading books during class? Because I literally saw that happen when I was in school. Obviously unrelated things to the class shouldn't be used during class, but these phone bans go beyond just the classroom.
I ask for evidence, because all the evidence I've seen on it has been effectively nothing. The studies are vague, get weak results or draw conclusions that aren't supported by the study. Eg there were some Spanish regions that banned phones in school. Soon after they scored higher on PISA, this was naturally used to support the ban. But the next round they scored lower than before the ban.
Banning phones in schools seems almost entirely to me about "kids these days are ruined". Phones are just the easy culprit to point to. Meanwhile phone bans do infringe on the liberties of the kids. You are taking something away from them.
Meet kids who have smartphones in school. A lot of them aren’t able to maintain eye contact in a conversation. It’s a remarkably jarring change that looks like it will wind up stunting the development of low-income kids for a generation.
Folks on the spectrum are different in a way I can’t quite explain. I’m talking about full-blown can’t have a conversation or express an interest in anything.
The iPad kids are more prevalent and highly recognisable. They’re also highly concentrated in the lower and lower-middle classes. (The country’s richest communities and private schools are banning devices in schools.)
There are neurodivergent people who have a low threshold for how long "normal" eye contact lasts. Using smartphones is also an excellent excuse to avoid eye contact.
Basic common sense? We are dealing with CHILDREN IN CLASSROOMS here. Leaving aside the obvious psychotropic properties phones and social media have on people of all ages, in what universe can preventing children from diverting their attention from live classes ever be good?
No, we are not. The post I'm replying to is talking about banning phones in schools entirely, not just during class time. (Why else would the implication be about kids sneaking phones into bathrooms?)
I would also like to point out that children who grow up without using technology will be bad at using that technology. We already have a generation of kids who suck at using computers. Will the next generation be the same way for phones too? Who are we building all this digital infrastructure for then? Look at the older generations and how helpless they are with technology. That's what we're going to get with kids who don't use technology growing up.
What sort of argument is that? Anybody who lived long enough anywqhere saw many times what a cancer screens are to kids and their development, the smaller the worse. You can't make any sort of strawman out of this topic, its proper cancer.
If you want to measure something for this measure happiness or strength of social circles. Good luck with that.
>What sort of argument is that? Anybody who lived long enough anywqhere saw many times what a cancer screens are to kids and their development, the smaller the worse. You can't make any sort of strawman out of this topic, its proper cancer.
That's not science, that's a demonstrably false assumption that everyone thinks smartphone usage is bad for kids.
In my experience with kids and smartphones, kids of the young generation (gen Z) are way better informed (and less brainwashed) than kids of their parents' generation were, whose only access to information about the world when growing up was through the captured, centralised legacy media.
So what needs to happen to ban smartphone use while driving? I mean not "formally forbidden" but "thoroughly enforced".
Personally, I avoid phone use even as a pedestrian in busy city spaces - I think the time it takes to fully switch attention to be fully aware of things like a reckless driver running a red light is too long to not affect safety.
Every phone has sensors that can tell when they're being used in the car and how many other phones are near them. An increasing number of cars have cameras pointed directly at the driver and sensors that detect how many passengers are in the in vehicle. Thanks to our glorious surveillance state it's likely that all the data we need to detect people using their phones while driving is already being routinely collected.
In the Netherlands we have 'focus cameras' now that specifically detect smartphone use while driving, with hefty fines of €430. These cameras are mobile as well, so they get placed on different spots over time.
You definitely need a source for that comment given that it only just happened.
Smartphones are neutral pieces of technology. It can create the next Einstein or radicalise the next terrorist, the 1's and 0's don't mind.
Why not ban them at universities also? Are these kids suddenly protected the moment they leave high school?
Like your opinion I have my own, and banning smartphones in Australian high schools will turn out to be overwhelmingly negative for outcomes. I predict it will be reversed and looked back upon as a failure.
Khan academy taught me more than dozens of different teachers. Kids are now blocked from accessing it for their entire time at school and when they would be most intruiged to learn.
Just like terrible having internet, Australians seem intent on being left behind in a hypercompetitive world.
"Our team screened 1,317 articles and reports as well as dissertations from masters and PhD students. We identified 22 studies that examined schools before and after phone bans."
"Our research found four studies that identified a slight improvement in academic achievement when phones were banned in schools. However, two of these studies found this improvement only applied to disadvantaged or low-achieving students."
"In a sign of just how little research there is on this topic, 12 of the studies we identified were done by masters and doctoral students. This means they are not peer-reviewed"
Do you really want to keep wasting people's times here because I'm more than happy to debate it with someone who actually cares.
Nothing in that article suggests it's of overwhelming benefit. I'm talking much bigger than teachers having an easier job too, education outcomes like this take decades to be seen.
I'm not sure why you're so aggressive. I didn't state any benefit, just that your timeframe was wrong and provided links indicating that. No mate, I'd say not correct.
