I'm glad to hear this. They're currently trying to shill the magnetically sealed pouches in the UK, but the flaws are obvious: massive bottleneck at the pouch station would delay entry and exit from the building, phones would be unavailable during emergencies or to record incidents of crime or staff malpractice, and financial burden on schools.
Students can be trusted to obey a simple "no phones in class" rule.
They also begged parents to help pay for them: https://www.govtech.com/education/k-12/portland-schools-ask-...
A friend's kid needs an exemption from their doctor because their phone is also their glucose monitor and diagnostic tracker, and the exception only allows them to unlock the pouch under supervision when necessary.
Which I guess gets looked the other way, since they aren't using it in class.
It's definitely a hard problem over all balancing their completely disruptive nature if there's no bounds to the issues around safety and parental worry from not being able to contact their kid all the time which phones have made the norm.
Anybody who has spent even a day teaching knows how wildly inaccurate this statement is
You'd think it would be a huge deal with rebellious teens, but my daughter says it has basically been a non-issue.
I'm honestly not educated on the topic right now since I haven't been in school for 15 years and have some time left before my daughter starts, but is this rule really not in place in most schools? How could any school justify not having this rule at the very least, regardless of how well-enforced it is?
I always assumed it was a lack of enforcement due to understaffing that was the problem
in most regions’ school districts.
My kid’s school had a similar policy. I didn't mind having to go out of my way to collect the phone and didn’t pass any of that on to my kid, they were annoyed enough about having it confiscated that it only took a few times before they modified their behaviour accordingly.
And what if they don't? En masse?
That's such bullshit.
- There is no emergency that require students to contact anyone. Communication can go through the school
- Parents have no business tracking their kids when they're at school
The tracker sends a notification when they're not at school, that's the point. Plus, I can lock down social media apps only during school hours. Blanket statements like this are plain ignorant. Also, I'm glad Utah finally passed a similar ban. Phones in use in class are a tremendous distraction 99% of the time.
That was the general policy before these bans. It was not working.
Honestly, get the tech out of classrooms. A few 8 bit machines that can run LOGO are far more genuinely educational than all the gunk they have today.
You're spot on with classrooms not needing tech though. They add complications and distractions on top of an already difficult task.
I then let a teacher use it because he was frustrated half of his search results would get blocked. From there, it spread like wildfire. Eventually they blocked it and from then on the IT guy would give me a side eye whenever we crossed paths.
Anyways, I can only imagine the clever ways kids get around things now. If it’s not per device, all a kid would need is a mobile hotspot to be king.
I decided to sidestep the whole game and run my own proxy at home. I didn't have enough bandwidth for multiple users, so it was just me. I don't think IT ever caught on.
Which is about 1-2 per _week_.
Many schools have similar bans but they don’t get support from many of the pupils or their parents as both groups have members that just believe it is the school choosing to overstep their authority.
Now it is a diktat from above it makes the school’s job in enforcing it much easier. They can just point to the relevant legislation/diktat and say that their hands are tied, if you disagree here are the places you can go to voice your opinion. Meanwhile we (as a school) have no choice but to apply the rules, etc.
I know there's a billion other reasons, but I've heard parents say they want their kid to have a phone so they can keep in touch if they need to.
When I was a kid, cell phones weren't a thing (at least for kids) so the once or twice a year I needed to call a parent I went down to the office and asked to use their phone.
Then I got to have whatever, usually embarrassing, conversation with my mom while everyone in the school office stared at me. Good times.
- iPods? Taken away
- didn't have fancy smart watches, so those were fine. But I'm sure a modern smart watch wouldn't fly
- graphing calculators were fine. Just don't make it too obvious you were playing Pokemon Red on it.
However this isn't the only problem. They also force us to pay monthly for iPads with wonky ass Logitech cases to be issued on which they do everything on Google classroom.
Google Classroom is an abhorrently bad bit of software on an iPad. It's just horrible in every possible way. Clunky, interface sucks, slow, unreliable.
Then they give detentions when children can't submit work, some auth issue means the entire device goes down the toilet for two days, documents won't open because the staff use Office instead, they keyboard case craps out and you can't type with anything but the screen, the staff forget to submit the work until an hour before it's due, the entire school wifi network is down for a week and they have no backup.
They should ban that too. Technology MUST be fit for purpose in a classroom and most of it isn't.
Go back to paper for everything. Work, journals, timetables, the lot. And the teachers can use whatever to drive projectors in the classroom.
My intent isn't to trick anybody with hard questions, but rather to force the knowledge through their head out through their hand, then back through their eyes and through their hand again.
Next semester I'm doing in-person paper readings, where the first 20 minutes of the class are reading a paper I print out and hand to them, we discuss the paper in class, then they submit their annotated papers to me for a participation grade.
An irony of the AI era.
We had some student portal thing online for submitting assignments, MS Office was "required", but the portal was weird and it was right after the .doc/.docx fiasco so everything related to office was a shitshow. Some of our profs simply gave up on the blessed tech stack, issues assignments as Google Docs files, and had us submit assignments through Google Docs. So much easier. I know Google gets a bad rep because of weird perceptions about surveillance, but no one does cloud syncing better. And because most of their software is browser based, it does basically "just work".
State schools cannot charge for essential equipment needed for the curriculum. Some schools are taking the p. If all parents told them to do one they would have no leg to stand on, and it is rather scandalous that nothing is done to stop this at Council and government level (they probably prefer to turn a blind eye rather than footing the bill).
My daughter got a 0/20 for a test that she sat and did. Now she's not a complete idiot so this was suspicious. I asked about it and they said that it was likely that she didn't get any questions right. I asked for them to provide me with a copy of the exam paper so I could independently verify that.
Magically she got a 17/20 grade updated but no paper appeared. I pushed it further and was told it was resolved. I raised a formal complaint immediately and they did a full investigation. The conclusion was there was a defect in the system used for tracking progress and it was losing information imported from the exam system. They had to manually enter over 200 student papers again due to this.
No one had noticed or actioned it or saw it was a serious issue until I raised a formal complaint.
When technology is in the loop it's very difficult for anyone to take personal accountability as demonstrated.
Kids in Gen Alpha and beyond cannot fathom using analog tools for school work. Their collective minds would break.
1:1 programs are a waste of money and time. Students don't need continuous access to a computer. Shared computer labs with a set goal for the time will always have better outcomes.
Kids frankly aren't learning more today with all this tech in the classroom than they were twenty years ago with paper and whiteboards, and the metrics prove it.
The people buying it have shoddy qualifications to evaluate it.
Absolutely agree.
It’s just bad luck that your kid is in a school that can’t get it right.
My 16yo kid’s (state) school is far from perfect but the school provided laptop works well, is reasonably locked down and policed, and is fixed or swapped out quickly if there is a problem. Sure we have to contribute towards it but we can (and we pay extra to help cover the cost for someone who isn’t able to pay for it). There are no similar tales of broken WiFi, unavailable servers or whatnot.
They went through some problems where there were multiple systems in use and the kids regularly got confused about where they had to check for homework, with different teachers for the same subject using different systems, but that was resolved eventually.
Phones are officially banned but enforcement is sometimes sporadic. If they do take the piss with it then it gets confiscated and a parent has to come in to get it released (the school has some generic Nokias to hand out at the end of the day if the kid has to have some way of being in contact). That deals with the majority of it.
They seem to have got the balance mostly right in terms of doing enough to keep the lessons mostly distraction free, and also reducing access to keep FOMO down (if hardly anyone has access to their phone during the school day then they, as a group, don’t think they are missing out on much).
Not a fan of them going back to paper for everything, but 100% on screens isn’t good either, especially as the exams are pretty much all paper based.
The old Nokia in school wasn't a problem. You get in trouble for playing snake. The iphone 1 wasn't really a problem. There weren't that many, and it served as a calendar.
But year after year, release after release, the industry deliberately loaded more and more addictive machinery, pushed more and more boundaries, until it's beyond unacceptable.
As an aside, it's amazing how hard it is to turn the modern phone into a no-nonsense tool, and I'm an adult with self-control, a deep understanding of dark patterns, and a fully-functioning brain after 3 cups of coffee.
They disappeared for a few years, but now you can buy a dumb phone, for example running KaiOS, that charges with USB-C and supports modern cell networks. You can even get a Nokia!
There is absolutely no need to buy a smartphone to any kid younger than 15. Now for high school students it's a bit different, they should be old enough to have self control and respect rules to keep their phones in their bags during class.
There's also the normalization problem at the teacher level where kids are used to using them in other classes so it's a bigger lift to get different behavior in one specific class.
My kids' school banned phones during the school day. The principal promised that the office would relay any messages if parents call, and they do. I would be interested to see if there are already statistics showing academic success. That is, are grades and test scores affected by phone bans? The article talks about graduation rates, but doesn't directly address grades and scores.
It's fair to expect that data, though honestly at this point, it might also be reasonable to expect data that increased screens IMPROVE the outcomes before allowing or issuing them.
I don’t have a solution to that problem, but I also think it’s important to acknowledge it’s not all sunshine and roses.
I’m saying this as a person with close friends in Oregon school systems, based on the experiences they’ve shared with me.
As opposed to what? Enforcing rules of the classroom is part of the teacher's job.
I don't understand this objection. What's the alternative? Just let the classroom be a free for all because we don't want to burden teachers enforcing rules? Put a separate security officer in the classroom?
Enforcement becomes easier, not harder, when the rules are uniformly applied everywhere and without exception. There's no gray area and less temptation to bring the phone out because they know they'll lose it wherever they use it, even if it's in the hallways.
Pushing the ban to the state level acknowledges the broad inability of district level leadership to self-police these problems.
Any ban above school level is silly.
(This article mentions that not only are cell phones banned at the featured school, but these kids have hobbled laptops that supposedly help them focus on school work, although the imperfect nature of the hobbling has unintended consequences).
1. I use an app called SelfControl, which blocks websites temporarily.
2. I have a script which watches `/etc/hosts` with launchd and reverts it to a version pulled from a server if the file changes. This blocks websites I never want to go to.
3. I setup a 'focus mode' with hammerspoon prevents me from launching certain apps, and makes me wait 30 seconds and type a string of text when I want to switch it off.
Yes, all of these things can be disabled when I want to, but the point is that they all add some fiction and give me a chance the reconsider the distracting action I was about to take.
I've been doing it for about 2 weeks, so far it's working pretty well!
Another thing that helps is recording your screen for the whole day. Once you start doing review in the evening it will create back-pressure on the monkey brain that jumps to distractions.
Yet another thing is to setup a separate computer. You can browse crapnet as long as you want, but you have to walk to another desk. The back pressure is subtle but has long-term effect and requires very kittke will power.
Yes, I got as far as creating a separate account on my MBP a few years ago and I do programming and open source stuff with that account. And it has helped quite a bit! Although it's not perfect (case in point, I am here on HN right now).
The laptop would come with a study mode button.
You would push it and turn off distractions.
Then 5 minutes later you would disable it just to send a chat.
Then since it was off, you'd just quickly check TikTok.
Then while you're at it, it just a quick break, you'd pop over to Twitch.
3 hours later...
If you can't teach yourself restraint, a button won't help.
Granted it won’t work for 100% of people but I’m sure it would work for lots of people.
Something as simple as a button you have to press to disable it is often enough of a barrier to prevent people from doing that as it makes the context switch from work to non-work more obvious than simply alt-tabbing to a different browser window.
We had the oboe tune from a tuning fork, then the rest of the band tunes off of that. Or everyone tunes from a piano.
A whole band tuning by ear? Ouch!
None of my children have phones, and when they do get one, it will be when they are driving and will be a dumb phone for sending text messages and making calls.
They ALL cave lol
That's the only bummer here. I do agree with this policy, but no one voted for it. The governor just said "you're going to do this".
Yes, yes, I know - people elected the governor. But this sort of policy seems like something that should require legislative approval, not just one person deciding the whole state must do something.
For every time something good comes of that kind of behavior, there's 10 times when it's a disaster.
> The kids also weighed in on the debate around the extent of the ban. The two options bandied in Salem were a “bell-to-bell” policy or just inside classrooms. The latter would allow kids to use their phones during passing period and lunch. Several advocated for that change. That mirrored the debate within the Oregon legislature. It ultimately led to a stalemate and the need for Gov. Kotek’s executive ruling.
It sounds like the legislature broadly agreed on the ban, but couldn’t agree on a couple final details. Insofar as an executive is useful, that’s the case for it: calling the shot in the face of several good (or bad!) options but no clear winner.
Laws like this give the school cover to confiscate the phones and say "talk to your congressperson if this bothers you, my hands are tied".
We're entering pretty substantial numbers of parents who grew up or at least spent their entire adult lives with cell phones and the expectation of constant communication. In fact, from my anecdotal experience, the mid-older millennial cohort is the worst at expecting immediate replies at all hours to any form of communication be it social or work.
One of the things I realize I'm grateful for in hindsight is parents who didn't grow up with that, and had no problem calling the front desk of the school if there was a legitimate emergency that needed to involve pulling me out of school. And it turns out for anything short of that, the news could wait until 4PM.
That seems like one of the easiest excuses for kids to make that is hard to argue against.
The rollout of LTE data and more-modern smartphones + social media during that area was a nuclear bomb on teenagers's ability to focus in hindsight. I can distinctly remember the divide between dumb phones/ipods/early smart phones with slow data, and modern social media + fast cellular data to get around school network bans. Things went from the occasional student thinking they were clever with a wired headphone down their sleeve to near constant distraction very rapidly.
The "innovation" has been basic leadership -- setting policies at the school/district and in this case state level. Consistent expectations make it easier for students to follow the policy. Some schools have gone as far as physically locking phones away for the day, though reading the article it sounds like that's not what Oregon is doing.
The local schools I'm familiar with allowed phones in backpacks, but if you got caught using it during class there were consequences.
Enforcement was never perfect. Some teachers didn't care, some students were sneaky enough to not get caught. Yet the consequences seemed to keep the kids afraid of using phones for the most part (from what I've been told, obviously I wasn't sitting with them in class).
Some of these articles are written like entire classrooms were just scrolling their phones during class? I don't get it. Was there just a total lack of enforcement?
Writer’s org’s founders include Meta, among many others: https://itif.org/our-supporters/
I’m no expert here, so leaving this as a datapoint
And sure we can vote every 2 years. Yay.
But what freedom do we have when schools can steal student's property, or a business owner can fire you for speech made outside of work.
Blankets bans and these idiotic 'oh just ban phones/computers entirely, pen and paper am i rite?' ideas have a ton of nasty externalities that no one seems to care about. They reduce the quality of life for people who rely on AAC (having your actual voice on the device you carry day to day is nice, having a lesser experience without your actual data is intolerable + 'everyone' having the kind of device that you use for this purpose prevents you from standing out at all times) in service of chasing and responding to a moral panic.
In the real world, kids just unenroll Chromebooks via the nine million exploits that have been found over the years (many of which are unpatched and some are hardware flaws) and load software that lies to the management system about the state of the device. They do whatever they want on on those devices - which is mostly 'doing their actual work without staff being able to spy on their screen/being able to play a simple game when they have no work to do'. The people using phones in class are the exact same people who were using iPods in class, were using non-smartphones in class to text constantly, using Discmans in class and so on. To pretend that smartphones are somehow different from that past involves gesturing towards pseudoscience and non-credible actors. For more on this: https://www.techdirt.com/2026/01/21/two-major-studies-125000...
These policies have both possible problems - the 'gun control problem' (you can't really achieve anything that you claim to care about while also issuing kids laptops that are used in class + you have to issue laptops in order to much of the kind of relevant teaching necessary in 2026, so there is no real way around this problem) and also the problem of the policy itself not addressing an actual real problem that exists - it's mostly a moral panic about social media, not some real problem of widespread usage of phones during class. The people who are interested in learning will learn, the others will not, that's that. People should be treated as individuals rather than a faceless blob of youth who need hostile policy designed for them. I'd also remind lawmakers that these people will be adults in about five minutes and resentment can easily carry over into the voting booth.
By the way, the Oregon ban is illegal and will be tossed out the moment that it gets to the appropriate level of judicial review - the Governor cannot make law.
I think the right approach is finding teaching techniques that still work when every human has all the world's info at their finger tips 24/7.
At some point, an uninterruptible, 24/7 live connection to the rest of the world is inevitable.
I'm not convinced a human teacher is a required part of this.
This will have limited impact because, at some point shortly after that, the moon will hatch and the lunar dragons will consume our satellite infrastructure, disabling all comm devices.
You can't make policy now based on nebulous ideas about possible futures, particularly not when those ideas aren't based on any reasonable inference.
There needs to be a politics of rejection, because I an assure you 95% of humanity does not want a device implanted in their skull where communication sent to you is unblockable.
SV has clearly cooked a generation of engineers that think working on ad surveillance tech is the pinnacle of humanity and not just another American moral failing that is wrecking the world while a select few profit off it.
All I actually mean is I'm sure that soon there will be some cell phone equiv tech that teachers won't be able to ban/control without scanning their entire bodies every day for RF signals.
Not to mention we have plenty of studies that show even a silent phone sitting quietly in your pocket or on your desk can be an attention drain, as you're subconsciously waiting for a notification to go off.
I'm amazed it took this long for the schools to finally ban the damn things.
My only disagreement is that bans on cellphone-like tech will be at all enforceable in the near future.
Frankly, I believe the world would be a better place if we did a lot more banning of smartphones for adults, too. They are like crack.
