New York governor to launch bill banning smartphones in schools

I very much think smartphones do not belong in the classroom.

That said, I also very much think that assault rifles don't belong in schools. And until we can prevent that, we can't really take away the only way for parents to figure out if their kid is dead or just traumatized.

The problem with this position is that your child being a victim of a school shooting is extremely rare. Phones are ubiquitous. You're trading the risk of something that will likely not happen to any one student (and won't really help anything anyway), for a near guaranteed risk of serious damage to many kids education.
- I actually have a child, unlike some of the people downvoting you, and I agree with you. I’m not willing to watch my kid’s educational environment destroyed by smartphones all for the sake of some “but muh child” panic. My kid doesn’t even own a smartphone. Anyone want to tell me that I’m somehow risking their life? If there’s a shooter at their school, me knowing what’s happening in real time will not save their life.
  As a footnote, the top commenter hinted that if someday we could solve the gun / danger thing, THEN we could remove smartphones. But the reality is that that panic will never be satisfied. There will never come a point when people say “I’m content that there are no dangers to my child during the day.”
  Ban fucking phones in class. Maybe it’s just me living through my whole childhood without one just fine, but ffs people don’t even see how addicted to them we’ve become. Kids deserve a chance at at least a few years of life without that.
Flip phones still exist.
- Are increasingly unavailable on basically any real phone plan and effectively require a dedicated purchase. Rather than giving the kid yoru old motorola you kept in the drawer.
  Also, as 9-11 and other "holy shit" moments taught us, having a wide range of ways to communicate with people when EVERYONE is trying to call or even text people (SMS is a best effort protocol for a reason) is important.
  Again, if we actually care about the children? Stop fucking shooting them to death. Maybe then we can figure out why they don't need to be constantly connected to everyone they know.
- And so do AR-15s.
I mean, you could get social media companies to turn posting off during school hours, that'd sure take the wind out of the sales of most of the most blatant things students do when they pull their phones out in class
Little derps get their news from that shit anyways, let's treat it the same as the 24 hour news cycle crisis and just make the companies stop for the parts of the day where people need most to be focusing on other shit. No airwaves, no airwaves occupying everyone's eyeballs and sending them into doomscroll mode.
Honestly that could be a pretty good gimmick for a new social media company in general, you can write, snap, record, photograph whatever, BUT all posts publish in the morning or evening "editions" and comments are open for 2 hours after (you can go back and comment on old posts), I feel like it could be an artificial scarcity thing, if people only have limited time when they can use the platform in a day, they'll make the most of that time whenever they're able.
- Got it. Fuck the "little derps". Their blood makes great gun lube, huh?
  ANYTHING to prevent people from actually approaching the real problem of the mass availability of firearms that puts children in a situation where they need to be able to say goodbye to their parents before they are sacrificed to the altar of the AR-15.
This wasn't possible 10 years ago so why does it matter today?
Besides, the cops are just going to arrest you if you try to go in, they have to stand outside and let the shooter play themselves out shooting your kids before they'll let anyone in.
- You know there were smart phones in 2014 right?
- Vaccines didn’t exist 200 years ago, so why should we allow them today?
You understand that a lot of communication in that scenario can, at worst, lead to crucial misinformation about what's going on and, at best, is unnecessary, don't you?
Obviously, these shootings happen, but the solution is not to arm each student with a cell phone, just as it sure as hell isn't to arm each teacher with a firearm.
The detrimental effects of cell phone usage in the classroom are well documented and plain as day if you just walk into a high school or middle school lesson. Even with highly engaging teachers and lessons, there are kids who slip through the cracks because nobody can compete with the newest fad app designed to melt a child's brain and possibly drain their parent's bank accounts.
This move addresses a significant issue within our school system. Addressing gun violence in the US is a very complex issue that needs to be tackled through a lot of different fronts. Kids having smart phones in school will not address that issue.
- Obviously, these shootings happen, but the solution is not to arm each student with a cell phone, just as it sure as hell isn’t to arm each teacher with a firearm.
  You're right. The solution is fucking gun control. Not isolating those kids out of fear that they might give the cops misinformation and there won't e a safe space to play flappy bird while children are being executed.
  So how about you shut the fuck up about how it is more important to isolate the kids than to protect them? Hmm?
- Would you allow the children to have a cell phone in school so they can say goodbye to their parents before they are shot to death? Seems a fair concession vs the apparent need to prevent the kids from spreading misinformation about a gunman roaming the school.

If you're more worried about your kid at school getting shot than them getting distracted during their education, You might be the one living in a shit hole country.

I believe in educating kids to know how to ignore distractions. The phone will be there in every work/life situation and will be a tool used to get them further in their careers and life in general. It's stupid to let them use them openly during class... It's also stupid to make legislation about them. Notice we don't have country wide dress codes for schools. Just legislation that says when such codes have gone to far. Banning students from having items they carry daily is just a stupid over abuse of power being instated for what reason? Failed parenting and failed educators?
You text during class you get told to stop, happens again you get detention/thrown out of class/sent to the dean and eventually thrown out of the school. Always was that way. No need for laws around it.
- You text during class you get told to stop, happens again you get detention/thrown out of class/sent to the dean and eventually thrown out of the school. Always was that way. No need for laws around it.
  It's more complicated. Teachers can't take away the phone because it's an expensive piece of property and it opens all kinds of doors for the school being liable if it goes missing or gets broken. Not to mention if something does happen, the parents might sue the school.
  And we aren't talking about mere distractions, but things designed to keep kids addicted to them. You're pitting school teachers and admins trying to get kids to pay attention to something often found as boring, against billion dollar businesses pushing punping money into keeping and grabbing kid's attention. Plus having kids miss school because of a cell phone just doesn't make sense, especially if the parents are pushing the kid to bring it.
  The law just makes it clear and reduces liability for the school, and it's better for kids.
  I wish the world were the way our describe it, and that would work. But it doesn't.

I don't understand how a state governor can "introduce" a bill.

Isn't that the legislature's job?

Anyone can introduce a bill, including you. Only the legislature's vote on it counts.

Great,I fully support this

Schools should be places to learn, not to be distracted by continuous alerts from phone addicted children

I fully support this as long as they put the pay phones back in the schools so kids can call their parents when they need to
- A school shouldn't make kids pay to call their legal guardian. Make phone calls free.
- Why would even that be necessary? It's school, not jail or drug den...
  Kids survived fine without phones for millenia, I'm sure they can survive now. If there is a real emergency, then I'm sure some supervisor can make a call...

This sucks, because smartphones could be such fantastic tools in a classroom. Not that I'm under the illusion that they're being used in any sort of productive way (or even would be), I was once a kid scrolling through shitposts and memes in class. But having all of the textbooks in one place, the ability to record lectures and whiteboards for later review, and automated schedule management would've definitely made my high school education a lot smoother.

The other side of the coin on this. Cell phones as day planners are invaluable. So kids who have spent their lives organizing their schedules on digital calendars are being told "Oops! Sorry. You can't use that anymore. We caught someone else using it incorrectly."
Incidentally, I'm old enough to remember how every graphing calculator in the school had video games installed on them and half my class carried a gameboy someone on their persons. This is going to be pure wack-a-mole as a policy. Selectively enforced, with lots of high profile punishments for minor infractions and inevitably highly intrusive misconduct by individual teachers and principles. Richer, whiter students will almost certainly be exempted from the policy through loopholes. Poorer, blacker students will be shoved even more forcefully through the School To Prison Pipeline. Cops will inevitably get involved in the worst possible way.
And all of this will be sold as a means of "reducing distractions".
- Yea, I had my phone taken a few times in school. It’s fine.
  But I was programming on my calculator more. My history teacher was the only one to say anything about it since it was very distracting for me. But he never took it.
When using the right tools, phones are already incredibly powerful in an educational environment. There's a reason why Kahoot achieved meme status: it's because students love it.
Yeah, and there are some analytical apps for smartphone cameras and sensors, like measuring physio with accel or gyro. But I guess that’s okay to include as a part of a course and not really needed for rest of the school day

https://www.capitolhillseattle.com/2024/06/police-investigate-shooting-outside-garfield-high-school/

5 days ago. Glad they have their priorities straight.

A lot of public school districts now provide laptops or Chromebooks to the students to use during class while doing... let's say...minimal oversight at best.

So most of the same inappropriate garbage behaviors and distractions will just be offloaded from the personal phone to the school device.

Ontario has now passed two different bills banning cell phones in school. It's a great distraction from actual problems. I fully expect we'll pass a third in a few years if our provincial government is re-elected

Teachers don't need a sheet of paper at a legislature somewhere to take away cellphones. They can do that already, and if the kids disobey a legislature won't help. I assume no one is expecting kids to go to prison for having a cellphone

The key thing is that teachers can ban phones in their individual classrooms if the school permits it.
There are many schools in which the senior admin don't institute phone bans (you'd be surprised how common this is).
Legislating it helps maintain consistency and parity between schools nation wide, which is important as it's a quality of education issue, so the policy should be consistent across all schools.
I'm not from North America, but the situation is similar across most western democracies.

It's dumb as fuck.

Hate it if we want (and I have major problems with how young phones and similar devices become glued to kids), but they're here to stay. They're a part of modern life, and trying to completely ban them is the most idiotic waste of time and resources possible.

You gotta find a way to limit use in a consistent and evenly applied way so that parents and school staff are all on the same page. Then you just keep enforcing the rules amd explaining them over and over. Eventually, it becomes a manageable annoyance instead of the chaos it currently is

so that parents and school staff are all on the same page.
That's the problem, they aren't on the same page. Teachers and admins have to live in the reality of kids having these devices in school, while parents just live in the anxiety of the very rare "what if something happens?"
A lot of things are here to say that you don't bring to school.

Every teacher I know is happy with this move. Personally, I think kids could do fine with a flip phone. Maybe this will bring them back more on the market, too.

I work in a high school in a California school district where they're discussing banning cell phones.
Most teachers I've talked to about it think it's really fucking stupid because you're not going to be able to ban them, partly because a TON of parents showed up at the school board meeting to say they would send them with their kid anyway for a variety of reasons. The board also talked about different things they could buy to take phones and lock them up during class or as students come in. Most of the solutions were pretty expensive, and some of the schools are literally falling apart, so that also pissed people off.
A great start would be to have a campus-wide rule that is CONSISTENT. Some teachers give out a detention if they even see the phone. Some do activities with QR codes and use them as tools. Some have boxes on the corner of their desk and students are required to keep their phone in the box so the teacher can see if they reach for it. We have students with free periods, and if they don't go home, they hang out outside around campus or in the library. Should phones be banned then too? Or just during class?
There are so many ways to try to deal with it, and at least in my school (not even the district as a whole), every teacher deals with it differently. I doubt the state of New York is all that different.
- That makes sense, too. Admittedly, my circle of teachers I know may be less than yours, but the ones I know seemed very exasperated with them. What do you sense a good, consistent rule would be?

LOL good luck with that guys

This is the best summary I could come up with:

“I have seen these addictive algorithms pull in young people, literally capture them and make them prisoners in a space where they are cut off from human connection, social interaction and normal classroom activity,” she said.

The smartphone-ban bill will follow two others Hochul is pushing that outline measures to safeguard children’s privacy online and limit their access to certain features of social networks.

In New York, the bills have faced pushback from big tech, trade groups and other companies, which collectively spent more than $800,000 between October and March lobbying against one or both of them, according to public disclosure records.

This differs from other state-level bills across the country, which place some reliance on self-policing by tech companies to decide which features could be harmful by completing assessments of whether products are “reasonably likely” to be accessed by children.

“Meta itself admits its own parental controls aren’t widely used – they’re often confusing and frequently fail to work as intended,” said Sacha Haworth, executive director of the Tech Oversight Project, a policy advocacy organization.

The major social media firms have faced increasing scrutiny over harms against children, including sextortion scams, grooming by predators and worsening mental health.

The original article contains 922 words, the summary contains 199 words. Saved 78%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

I'm 100% in favor of this move. If parents really need their kid to have a phone at school, get them a basic flip phone.

You’re free to parent your own children however you like.
- As long as it's within the legal limits where you live.

Gross! Couldn't even let schools decide, somehow it's important to ban them state-wide? Piss off.

The state is responsible for the education of children. This absolutely falls within their scope.
- A state wide mono-culture based on an unsolved cultural issue isn't "education" it's inherently heavy handed.
  It also actively harms schools that may be trying to teach students how to use cell phones productively in their lives to help them solve problems rather than pretending as though they don't exist.
Yes, education is important, and this would spare every single school the intense battle vs parents to do the right thing.

Good idea. Its of the main reason why education today is faltering. Allowing too many screen in the class room is simply a bad idea. These kids have the no ability to stay focused in any way. They way they learn guarantees many will never learn to read without a screen and the internet. I see it often in my current job.

Given the current legal climate, this really isn’t terrible. At least there are some benefits.

Taking away freedoms for some possible benefits. The patriot act would like a word
- Early testsresults in the Netherlands have shown great succes. Less cyber bullying, more socializing by students, and better engagement in classroom. The students actually prefer it too.
  I thought it was stupid too, but I've come around to it. A box full of dopamine hits is not for teenagers to decide wether they can interact with it or not.
- Out of curiosity would you argue against compulsory education?

smartphones are a distraction in schools. The teachers shouldn't have them either, tbh

Good. We already did that here.

"I have seen these addictive algorithms pull in young people, literally capture them and make them prisoners in a space where they are cut off from human connection, social interaction and normal classroom activity"

Literally? What kind of devices is she using that have these cyborg powers, and why am I just hearing about this now? Shit, mine just has cringe teens dancing.

The ability to search for answers online is important for learning

Doesn't need to be on a phone.
- But it is on phones, conveniently accessible.
At a certain age/level I agree. However, they aren’t needed or helpful in basic low level grades where you’re teaching the framework to build upon.
Reading books worked fine for a few thousand years.
- If I used books for answers at work I'd be without a job pretty quick. It's a slow antiquated technique. I don't think kids need to look up answers on cell phones at school, but it would be smart to educate students how to use tools/resources that they will need and use in their daily lives.
  The number of books that these students will reference in the their future careers in minimal. The number of phones/computer based systems is high.
  If you are just teaching kids to regurgitate text from a textbook at this point they will forever be behind any LLM that exists. They need to learn to use information, quickly, and how to source it from reliable sources.

This so government overreach. Let the teachers and school admin decide. There no need to get the state government involved.

I'm torn on this. Allow them and let natural selection take its course, or force students to pay attention, which I would've hated as a kid.

What a creep. Instead of making NYC safer for kids by reducing cars, she's making school more of an authoritarian prison.

Authoritarian prison? Calm down. All place have rules, schools are to learn, not to be on your phone all the time. We were without mobile phones for Millenia and now that they're here you're acting as if you can't live without one.
Yes, you can live without your mobile phone and if you think you can't then this new law is exactly for you

Is she going to ban hats next? Put in a law telling students exactly how they can decorate their lockers?

Surely there are more pressing things to be legislated?

As someone who went through the NY public school system many years ago, I can confirm hats were/are hard banned. Like unless it was for religious reasons you really couldn't even think about putting something on your head.
Cell phones were also banned in my youth but I guess times have changed?
- Oh yes, but by the school. Not the law. We have elected positions specifically for figuring out how schools should teach children. Also top down negative mandates about clothes are already borderline abuses of power. We want laws preventing admins from going overboard, not mega bans in state law.