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By the way, many (if not most) schools have gone to online grade books and even online homework/quiz/test submission. Kids who don’t have a laptop with them at school often do their homework or testing on their smartphone.
Locking phones when they need them for schoolwork is counterproductive.
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New York gives all students laptops, so that’s not really an issue.
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Only if it’s with them, charged, and working. Something the phone is more likely to be, or more likely to become quickly, more often.
I’ve seen the kid do entire English papers on a phone. Then, finish them off later on a bigger device.
The things that can be done on a phone today vs a full size computer vs in person only for our parents is amazing.
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Until it crashes or is otherwise unavailable, as @mmascari points out.
And what is the difference between being distracted on a phone vs being distracted on a laptop?
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(and @mmascari)
I don’t think these are reasons to support smart phones in schools. After all, not every student has or can afford a smart phone. Expecting/relying on a student to have a smart phone as their backup is clearly non-equitable.
If schools require screens, it’s far more equitable to provide chromebooks, and have enough backups and a system of repairs that students generally have them. In all schools that I’ve worked in, this has generally not been an issue.
School accounts generally can’t log into Tiktok or Insta or other distracting sites. Bullying is kept way down because you can’t be anonymous. And teachers can usually see what students are working on during their own classes.
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I’ve seen it be an issue with my kids. Chromebooks aren’t the most reliable devices and are often less powerful than smart phones.
Kids definitely know about VPNs and are guaranteed to always be ahead of school IT.
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But again, depending on students to have a more powerful personal smartphone as an alternative is in no way equitable.
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The blocked web sites (same reason kids use cellular vs school WIFI) and the teachers oversight monitor that lets them see everything you’re doing.
My kid likes to repeat the story where the teacher kept closing a student’s browser because they were not on the class page. After the third time, they finally realized they were still looking at the students from the last class and that student wasn’t even in the room, after the kids in the room told the teacher.
Shared documents, used by group projects, are how the kids chat on school issued computers without phones. Avoids issues of blocked websites too. The kids aren’t dumb. Well, lots of them are dumbasses, but they’re not stupid.
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Yup, kids are generally able to do basic chatting that way. However, cyberbullying – at least during school hours – is pretty much non-existent because all those messages leave a history with a student account attached. (Obviously plenty of other forms or occasions for bullying exist.)
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And this argument echoes the one from the 80’s when graphing calculators came out. Thank you for recycling!
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This has not been an issue in schools I’ve worked in. Chromebooks with student accounts are locked down pretty tight. (And, to be honest, the majority of kids are way less technical than they were when you and I were kids. That said, I think the major issue is the well-locked-down chromebooks.)
Ok, this conversation is just spinning at this point. I can just tell you that in my experience, schools with permissive policies towards smartphones in classrooms suck for both teachers and kids. But I guess some people are gung-ho about allowing them in class. I won’t keep trying to change your mind.
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True, but they’re super easy to provision. Using them, there’s generally nothing on the device at all. Nobody ever “fixes” a kids Chromebook while they wait. They just give them a replacement and then repair the broken one, ready for the next kid who needs a replacement. The beauty of the thin client. 
It still takes time.
Even simple stuff, like it isn’t charged, requires plugging it in long enough to charge. They only need another device for 15 minutes maybe. The room can/should have a few spares, but they can all get used up. If there was one spare, and two kids needed it, one of them having a phone subsidized both kids, not just the kid with the phone. Both kids came out ahead able to work for the short period.
Teaching is clearly hard. Kids are a super pain. They can be disruptive and distracted with something as silly as just a rubber band. The technology is just a thing that’s there, not more or less. I remember kids being disruptive when I was in school, back in the before days when a computer was trash and a phone wasn’t even a brick yet.
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I think we all agree that kids shouldn’t be spending class time on their phones watching TikTok, Snapping, or getting just the right glamor shot. Policies that kids shouldn’t be on their phones when not using them for school work is completely fine.
Expecting teachers to be the phone police and disallowing the technology as a blanket restriction is different.
The grid @apenzott posted was very creative. They even supplied charging to make it more attractive. We’ve had teachers give out awards for keeping a phone in one of those.
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Ah, they may have gotten better about this than when my kids were dealing with them.
That is not my experience AT ALL. The average high schooler is way, way ahead of where I was at their age, and I was a STEM-heavy digital native valedictorian/National Merit Scholar.
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Sounds like you’ve had a lot of negative experiences, in general.
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You realize an OS can be sideloaded onto laptops though a thumbdrive? Right?
With a single, easily pocketed Samsung drive that can be easily lost in a pocket a student could sideload a wide variety of Linux distros leaving the current installed one completely alone. That’s what I easily done when I tried Chrome OS Flex on my crummy Black Friday windows laptop. Chrome OS Flex, Linux Mint, Ubuntu or even Tails OS if the kid is super paranoid of adults snooping around. All for the simple single cost of a few saved up dollars here and there
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It’s a field that, like cops, attracts folks with dark traits and want control over the vulnerable - it’s an issue specific to the K12 environment… once you get to college sometimes you have a dispute but in those rare cases you can circle back to the syllabus or formally request a reasonable accommodation.
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Odd:
I’ve never had a friend die because a teacher shot and killed him with a firearm. Sadly, I can not say the same of law enforcement officers.
So while I can agree that I have also had some subpar teachers over the long course my academic career, I cannot say that I agree with the false equivalence.
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I’d also say that probably lots of teachers go in with the best of intentions, and all the endless bullshit that many have to put up with takes a toll. I think the job of cop probably is more likely to attract power-trippers than teaching. Because what actual power do teachers have in this country? There are certainly ones who abuse their generally limited power over students (sometimes in absolutely horrific ways) but most are not in any real position of power in society, and can’t exploit what power they do have in the same way cops can…
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