Our middle school has banned phones during school hours, and it's been great. Even though most kids own phones and have them in their backpacks, they aren't seen. There are less problems during classes and kids have to talk to each other during lunch instead of going head down in their phones. Parental pushback has been really minimal - most parents love it, and it's good for the kids.
Making no phones a blanket policy in all schools should be an absolute no-brainer.
it's all good until that thing that happens at American schools, happens... That is my one hang up here. It would be idealistic to believe that the Police would protect kids, but in reality there are far too many cases of them being grossly negligent in this exact circumstance... in many of those cases, having a phone played a pivotal role in security. I don't want to get too far into details on HN for the sake of keeping things civil, but I hope you catch my drift.
Im sure there is some happy medium solution here, like putting your phone in a basket or cubby or something like that, at the very least. But I think this is something that has to be seriously addressed and considered. Phones are obviously bad for all of us, more so for children whose minds are far more elastic and far more prone to social alienation. The endless stream of notifications is almost at a gambling / casino level. I think you have to address the root cause of that as well
Between teachers phones, intercoms, cameras, and hardline phones there should be plenty of communication equipment available for a crisis. If anything having a phone could put someone in jeopardy by making noise and giving away position or distracting owner. What is the scenario that it has helped? Have police coordinated response based upon students phoned in reports and telemetry?
>Between teachers phones, intercoms, cameras, and hardline phones there should be plenty of communication equipment available for a crisis.
How does that stuff help when the kid isn't actually at school, but is between home and school somewhere? If the kid can't bring the phone to school at all, then that means the kid can't have the phone on the way to school either. Allowing the kids to bring phones but lock them up during school hours would solve this problem though.
Also, this is US-specific, but what if there's a school shooting? You don't want someone's kid to be able to call their parents and say some last words to them before they're brutally shot, while the entire town's police force is simply standing outside and preventing anyone from entering?
This is the policy at my kid’s school. In fact if a student is caught with a phone then the phone is confiscated and only the parent can pick it up from the office.
Not really. There have been phone calls to 911 during school shootings but reading a few reports, it's never made a difference since schools tend to be hardwired straight to dispatch which is most important. Big failings like Uvalde has been terrible response by first responders which is "Push forward till threat has ended."
Yes, parents have been called by students during incident but that generally makes situation worse as parents run to the school causing delays for first responders.
I was in an American school when 9/11 happened and the school was trying to punish students for calling their parents who worked in the towers to see if they were still alive.
Fucking dictatorship we are in. Let people use technology, especially in an emergency.
Or live in a country where the last school shooting was more than 25 years ago?
Seriously this is such a weird comment. You don't want to say "school shooting" at risk of being uncivil but you think kids should always be prepared for a live gunman to walk into their lives. From my perspective, that's the uncivil part of your comment.
People can vote for things all day but that doesn’t mean anything could be implemented that would guarantee the end of school shootings. We’re talking about a country with estimated an estimated half billion guns in circulation and plenty of those undocumented.
More realistically the phone would be good for calling for advice after you get molested by a teacher. a million times more likely than getting shot. If it's so bad, why not just homeschool?
I went to high school when cell phones were common and most students had them. But, at least at my school, if you had one out during class it was instantly confiscated and returned by the front office after school. I assumed this was the norm, so articles about "cell phone bans" as a new policy are surprising to me. I assumed it always was this way.
When did schools start allowing cell phone use during class? Do teachers no longer have the power to confiscate devices that are used at inappropriate times?
There are teachers out there asking students to look up words in their phone. They forget to add "and please ignore all notifications, games, etc. while you're at it".
And then there are kahoots, which makes learning a game (you don't need effort!) and exercises are automatically corrected (so teachers don't need effort either).
Using a phone during class was indeed never an option, but, can I ask you since you went to school with smartphones (I am much older): Is your experience that most students pull their phone out as soon as they exit the classrooms? Do they spend most of their breaks on their screens? If so do you have the feeling you have poorer conversational skills because of this and would you not rather have just enjoyed school engaging with the people around you?
I see youngsters now that have hundreds of messages a day, on many platforms, and consequently hours of screen time a day. Does it not feel like this time would be better spends in face to face engagements?
I read about girls that are just tired, they have a good time, everybody gossips on Social Media, they have to maintain "status" there, streaks, presence, likes, it never ends, last thing before sleep, first thing after waking up. It sounds so exhausting.
Banning cell phones from class hours doesn't actually change the social media rat race in any way. You still have to maintain presence. That's just part of being social.
We had the same distractions before smart phones. We would just hide in the computer lab and browse the Internet while playing games and trying to look busy. A hundred messages sounds like about a half hour of conversation on any chat platform.
We would still play games on our calculators, sign in to IRC, and post on forums. Now it's cell phone games, discord, and twitter but really it's the same shit.
The idea behind banning cell phones is more about attention span and the unfortunate reality of constant dopamine hits.
Yes, there were distractions in my time as well, but I would say it's quite different because now you don't have to go anywhere, you can just pull out your phone mid-conversation and 'be somewhere else'.
I do think (hope?) the temporary removal of dopamine hits works in the long run. If I'm regularly not near my phone to check on whatever, the impulse to grab my phone is removed, because I'm engrossed in other things. Do that often enough and it may just wean people off of this online crack.
I went to grade school in the 80’s and high school and college in the 90’s.
It wasn’t anything like you describe at all. For better or worse people did actually talk to each other.
And while we did call each other on the phone reasonably often, generally when you weren’t in the room with someone you weren’t communicating with them at all.
I believe most UK schools have the same policy. However, I've heard from teacher friends that it's difficult and time-consuming to enforce -- kids will do anything to sneak in a bit of phone time during lessons.
If you really needed to use it, you had time between periods and during lunch.
The people campaigning about this are concerned about that too.
> When did schools start allowing cell phone use during class?
I wonder to what extent this is an effect of the age of the teachers themselves. The median age of a teacher in the US is ~40 years old, so a significant proportion of them are accustomed to phones being an essential part of social life and hence may be a bit more lenient to students occasionally checking their phone when it appears to be non-disruptive. Needless to say though, this easily becomes a non-fallacious slippery slope.
Kids are great at detecting hypocrisy. As a teacher, you can't tell a kid to make it through the day without "checking" their phones if you can't make it through the day without checking your own phone.
No, it's 100% the parents. The parents are younger, and phone addicted too. And I don't know what happened in the past 20 ish years but parents are unbelievably entitled.
Many parents freak out if you take their kid's phone. That's not okay anymore, I guess. Detention doesn't really exist either because parents don't want it. Even summer school is just a suggestion at this point. Parents have bullied their local ISD's into being weak.
Having used a Palm Pilot to genuine benefit in highschool in the 90s, and having finally just gotten a smart watch in part specifically to reduce smartphone usage, I have mixed feelings about broad restrictions. Networked smart phones absolutely have major addictive and disruptive effects, and are hard to police in practice. But watches provide some pretty useful health and emergency benefits, while IME have lived up to my hopes of being high enough friction/miserable enough to use for browsing or the like that the effect is nothing like a phone. Putting it all in the same bucket feels overboard, though maybe is necessary in practice. But pendulums seem to often have a tendency to swing between extremes and I wish officials were willing to try more tailored measures before sledgehammers more often. Still I think the overall trend looks positive.
Public payphones? Going into a bakery or a post office or any shop and politely asking to place a call from their landline to mom&pop's, having their number memorised, possibly placing a reverse charged call? "you are here" public maps/carrying a paper map? Learning how to use a compass+map or just sun and stars? Eating home-cooked meals and walking/biking around a lot to go from A to B?
For better or worse, the world is both more of the same and very different from what it used to be. Direct comparisons are not really useful, and quips like "how did people drive without a gas gauge / survive without seatbelts" are missing a ton of context.
I really, really hate this mindless, lazy line of argument in general. It gets tossed out with absolutely everything, from the internet to vaccines to modern farming. The simple answer in many cases to "how did anyone survive before X" is "well, often they didn't". Life expectancies were in fact lower in the past. More people died, or were maimed, with no hope of treatment. Or sometimes it's "they did, but much less efficiently and we come to depend on each growth of the economy which at the foundation is literally about being able to do things more efficiently". Ease of communication, knowing what the weather is, all sorts of things mean less wasteful use of time and energy. Sometimes "they did, but perhaps less happily". A loved relative was in and accident, went to the hospital and you never got the chance to be involved when it mattered. And of course in some cases it's "new things have created downsides that create a need for other new things, the world has changed". Sometimes we can do something about that in the near term. Sometimes we cannot.
Low effort responses like you made are discouraged on HN for good reason. Yeah, absolutely new negatives have come with the new positives and seeking to reduce the former matters. But productive discussion and activity tends to focus on specifics vs generalities. Reducing the benefits of real time communication devices to a binary "life/death" and then NOT grappling with modern trends in everything from natural disasters to school shootings to reduced bussing doesn't strike me as great Walter.
I stand by my assertion. How many times in your 12 years in school was instant 24/7 communication for everyone in the school been of significant benefit, or would have been if they had it?
It's zero in my case.
Then look at the downsides, which are pervasive - inattention, disruption, distraction.
If you still want it, put a landline phone in each classroom on the teacher's desk. The principal can also have a switch to turn it off in an emergency.
>I stand by my assertion. How many times in your 12 years in school was instant 24/7 communication for everyone in the school been of significant benefit, or would have been if they had it? It's zero in my case.
Yeah, there were no school shootings in my state in the 90s either. But since Columbine objective fact is there have been over 400 affecting almost 400k students [0], and the trend doesn't seem to be going down. Events like sudden wildfires going out of control in a real hurry are now also radically different then even 20 years ago. And yes, some of the scheduling and health features watches offer would have been very helpful to me in school thanks. The communication features of watches are pleasantly minimal and also almost necessarily public. They only work well 2-way with voice, which is not something one can do silently by definition and thus highly policeable in class. The information consumption capability is highly minimal. Watches also do not have cameras with all the associated issues. And it'd be possible to take the communication restrictions further with cellular restrictions in school and forcing everything through the school's firewall.
>Then look at the downsides, which are pervasive - inattention, disruption, distraction.
Out of genuine curiosity: can you show me some good studies on this with respect to watches, not phones? On the smart phone side yes, I've absolutely both seen studies and personally experienced the addictive and distracting aspects. But I have not seen anything like that with watches, and my personal experience is also that it's completely different in usage.
I stand by my assertion: you threw out a form of argument that is lazy, shallow, and constantly misapplied. Even if in this specific case the balance of factors weighs against any smart devices at all (which I both extremely doubt and think will become extremely problematic for other reasons longer term), the form of argument "how did anyone survive before X" is so regularly bad faith, aggressively stupid, or both that it coming out instantly makes me more not less suspicious of whichever side the person stating it is supporting.
Why does a health monitor need to be in constant connection with the internet? If there's a problem, it can just beep at you.
Yes, school shootings are a problem. But why does there need to be 30 cell phones in the classroom? The landline on the teacher's desk can be enough. Or even a button to turn off the jammer.
For wildfire, call the principal who then hits the fire button. We had tornado drills in elementary school. No phones were required, it was a siren mounted on a pole. It worked fine.
>Yes, school shootings are a problem. But why does there need to be 30 cell phones in the classroom? The landline on the teacher's desk can be enough. Or even a button to turn off the jammer.
A single landline isn't going to help 30 kids call their parents and say a final good-bye before the shooter kills them, while the town police force stands outside.
That's a rare circumstance that is made to seem more common by very wide media coverage. And even in that sort of situation, it seems doubtful that it actually helps anybody either. Some parents will show up and get in the way of emergence responders. Most kids who call their parents will end up surviving anyway, and the phonecalls end up increasing the number of people who get PTSD from the whole thing. If a modest sized school of 500 kids has an above average shooting which kills 20, then you have 480+ parents getting a premature ""last call""; all would have been better off hearing about the incident after they already knew their kid was safe.
These kinds of calculations aren't useful to a typical US parent who, after the Uvalde disaster, has absolutely no reason to trust law enforcement to handle such a situation competently, and every reason to distrust them. Why should they assume that the cops in their town are any better than Uvalde's? They're going to hear "your kid can't have their phone in our school" and think of this.
I don't understand, do you guys think the children's phones are being vaporized by the Phone Vaporizer 5000?
When people say "no phones in class" they don't mean kid's can't have phones. They mean they can't use their phone in class.
I think, probably, this rule does NOT apply during an active shooter. That's my guess. I would imagine the teacher isn't going to start enforcing that rule while under lockdown. What do you think?
> A single landline isn't going to help 30 kids call their parents and say a final good-bye before the shooter kills them, while the town police force stands outside.
I’ve had this scenario in training at work before deploying to certain global locations (Afghanistan, Gaza, Somalia etc)
That it even crosses your mind suggests that the US is a country broken beyond repair.
if you really want to optimize for a very-low-probability event, just don't live in a school district with cellphone bans
you'll trade for a near-guarantee that your kid will have some social anxiety or attention issues...but if you really want to make sure they have a phone available in the low-probability event of a school shooting, this is the tradeoff you will make
To look at life expectancy, you need to normalize for the fact that numerous things have shifted dramatically in society. For instance smoking rates have completely plummeted relative to the past, to say nothing of the fact that up until the 90s you could generally smoke everywhere, even on airplanes! Then there have also been major changes in typical occupations, reductions in youth driving, and so on.
Given that life expectancy increases have been coming at a snail's pace, and on occasion reversing, I suspect if one normalized for these sort of non-medical shifts in society, we'd see that life expectancy is most likely decreasing, likely due to things like widespread obesity, mental illness, and other ailments which modern gadgets are significantly contributing to.
Walter's comment could be applied exactly as well to an argument that there shouldn't be electricity in schools (after all, kids survived without electricity just fine for decades).
The talk is about having a client for tiktok but with ability to phone - on your Math lesson. When the phone used to have no tiktok the situation is tolerable even if the phone rings occationally.
Now the tiktok client successfully competes with teacher for kids' attention and some dumbheads are shouting - "Look, the tiktok client still can phone police/firefighters/parents! What else are you going to prohibit, maybe a paper?"
I've made the comment before that all the schools really need is a classroom, desks and chairs, a chalkboard, and a teacher. Pen & notepaper helps.
The rest is just useless fluff.
Note that Caltech was exactly that. A prof, a chalkboard, a lecture hall. I learned more in 2 weeks with that than a year of high school. I've suggested to college students that they'll learn better if they leave their laptops in the dorm. And I say this as a computer professional.
You need much more than that for a good education. While I do agree that smart devices are not necessary, you still need a lot of extra materials for most subjects. You need various kinds of maps for geography and history, you need many images of animals and plants for biology, you need teaching manuals for every subject, you need various books for literature to read poems and prose, you need various materials for arts and crafts. Not to mention when you get to advanced subjects you need a heck of a lot more, at least for practice.
Having many of these materials in a digital format on a smart device can help a lot in terms of cost and availability. It's not critical, and I very much understand the downsides of having an always-connected device that kids are used to play with, but it's also not at all 0 cost to go entirely to paper.
I'm sure your time in math classes at Caltech that were only chalkboard and notes was extremely productive. But some lectures require more materials (you can't have a good lecture on Alexander's conquests without a map of what he actually conquered), and a full education requires much more than lectures. You're not going to be a good EE student if you can't model a circuit in Spice or draw one in some *CAD.
> You need much more than that for a good education.
No, not really. At Caltech, about half had a textbook, but the textbook was not referred to during lecture, and what was taught tended to diverge from the textbook.
> maps
The prof would freehand the salient aspects of a map and any other drawings required.
> literature
I never took any literature classes, as I saw no value in them. Even so, I cannot see the utility of a textbook during class.
> You're not going to be a good EE student if you can't model a circuit in Spice or draw one in some *CAD.
I had to laugh. None of that was available in the 70s.
I drew circuits freehand on paper. OMG. There were labs available for students building circuits, where the rubber really met the road.
I was not majoring in EE, I just enjoyed the classes. But the EEs Caltech turned out were all first class engineers. Taught by lectures with a blackboard and chalk.
Quantum physics was taught the same way. Not even a textbook.
The engineering work I did on the 757 was pen and paper, with a calculator as a crutch.
The most damning evidence against all these materials is that there is zero evidence of any improvement in K-12 results in the last 50 years, and things just seem to be getting worse.
You mean, make my own entirely different argument? Passive aggressive dig is not an argument either.
No, what Walter wrote what what he wanted to say. However, since you agree with the conclusion, you will defend the argument even if it is not too good.
That "How ever did anyone survive before" answer means absolutely nothing. Yes, we survived the 1990s, if we didn't we wouldn't be there to talk about it, thank you Captain Obvious.
I know, I know, this is sarcasm, but where is the argument? If anything, it is a textbook example of the "appeal to tradition" fallacy. There are many good arguments against smartphones in classrooms, that one isn't. For the details, see xoa's answer.
Amusingly, at Caltech the only phone in the dorm was a payphone down the hall. The only time I recall ever using it was to make flight reservations to visit my parents.
My first cellphone was in 1994 or so. It took many years before I was acclimated to using it, and didn't get an internet phone until 2015.
I was a very early adopter of computers, but pretty late with phones.
> watches provide some pretty useful health and emergency benefits
Fitbits let you “see calls, texts & smartphone app notifications on your wrist when your phone is nearby” [1]. It has all the attention, focus and de-socialisation problems of a smartphone.
Unless a fitbit has a convenient keyboard I've been missing for years, no, it does not remotely have all of the attention, focus and de-socialisation problems.
Me and my wife were discussing this earlier, and we both agreed we missed the days of cellphones + PDAs. That era was so much less predatory to our time, and there’s something to be said about the mental separation between “fun text time” and a dedicated work device. It’s just a shame that given the current technological landscape the closest we have to PDAs are tablets, which are typically too large to pocket (and nonetheless an attractive option).
Man I miss PDAs. My dad worked for 3com so I had a palm since about when I learned to read.
I was early with smartphones because I thought they'd essentially be PDAs with a modem ("They're just working out the kinks.") Smartphones have to be the most disappointing thing that's happened to consumer computing.
It's kind of funny that with pervasive networking I miss having to be mindful and sync everything I wanted to take with me.
I can sort of squint and see the logic in your argument but I'm not convinced that allowing smart devices in schools and especially during class hours has enough good to consider seriously.
I don't let my kids use a smart phone for entertainment. They use it sometimes for chatGPT and Google translate especially when they study but not beyond that and I intend to keep it that way till they're old enough (17 or so).
One way, inbound sms is like 1 out of 100 in distractions, whereas having a phone with internet, social media, bidirectional messaging is 100 out of 100.
Good idea. If individual parents prohibit their kid from using a cellphone in school, it would be standing out in a weird way, thus creating a classical collective-action problem, tragedy of the commons etc.
The school taking the step to ban the devices fixes it.
There is a striking divide between how the rich and FAANG employed treat technology around their kids versus everyone else. The single most potent difference I’ve seen as a result is their kids’ ability to maintain eye contact during conversation.
I must not find the divide as strikining because it's not clear to me whether your comment intends to highlight rich+FAANG parents as better or worse at appropriately managing technology around their kids.
> whether your comment intends to highlight rich+FAANG parents as better or worse at appropriately managing technology around their kids
Rich and FAANG parents tend to be better at restricting their kids’ phone and tablet use. Far from universal. But take this article—Greenwich is a rich town.
in my experience parents in tech and especially those who work in engagement/addiction farming apps are far more reticent to allow their children to use screens, allow it later in their life, and more heavily police screen time.
Limited anecdata, of course, but it makes sense that they’re aware of the dangers (they’re building them, know people are, or at least understand them) better than the median civilian.
Same situation here. Everyone loves how much and how well our kids can speak despite being trilingual (we speak three languages at home), and how rich their vocabulary is compared to monolingual kids around us (studies show delayed language development in bilingual and trilingual kids) The difference is that their screen time is around 30 mins to 1 hour per week. While for other kids I observe easily that amounts to at least a couple of hours per day.
Obviously parenting becomes easier with screens around. But being a parent is not about choosing the easiest path for yourself.
> I’ve never been able to maintain eye contact with anyone and I grew up long before smartphones were a thing
Sorry. I was using eye contact as an indicator of involvement, focus and a general ability to engage in conversation. I didn’t mean to suggest it’s bad per se.
I have colleagues on the spectrum. They don’t tend to maintain eye contact when they speak. But their conversation is deeply engaging. The cell phone kids, on the other hand, have a specific vacant gaze that, once you see it, almost gives an “is anybody home” vibe. Their sentences are short and abrupt, diction well below where it should be at their age. (And these aren’t stupid kids. They’re just bad at interacting off screen.)
Same, I can barely string two words together in an interactive conversation, and I got my first smartphone at age 20-something. We're just wired differently.
These bans will come worldwide. Soon we will also understand the realtionship between mental disorders in teens and "always on". Not to mention the distraction these devices generate in schools.
In some countries (namely Portugal and France) you are not allowed to be contacted by your employer out of office hours, so that you can get that disconnect.
At the same time, children are targeted to be constantly "on" and "engaged", and we seem to be OK with that.
The general agreement for the IT services sector in Finland says that we're entitled to an hour's wage if we need to take phone calls outside working/on-call time. Two hours for 21-06, Sundays and holidays. Granted, it's one of those clauses that can be negotiated down in one's contract.
my kid has a phone that is so boring to use (only snake, texting and calling) that he has it in the bottom of his backpack and only takes it out when he needs to call me
its truly amazing and i hope to keep it this way forever. meanwhile the rest of his class mates have smartphones and stare at it from the moment they leave their home ... and i assume till it runs out of battery. they dont even watch where they're going.
I dread the day when my daughter (who is now 3) tells me that she is a laughing stock and pariah because she misses out on every event that happens at school because she doesn’t have a smart phone/no social media. The only way to correctly do this is to outright ban kids from having smart phones and accessing social media nationwide. Being the handful that selectively buck the system is a hard road.
I had a gameboy with a special cartridge loaded with roms I ordered from a strange European import site that took 3 months to arrive, and this was 2002! I played video games in every class. I was a bad student. I set a bad example.
Yet learning how to load roms on it, the firmware, the command line. My poor mother didn't know what to do with me - I was constantly late, skipping school, in detention, hanging out with burn outs. My siblings didn't do that stuff until college.
And now I'm wealthy and the most successful graduate of a 700 person class! Food for thought for the parents of "burn out" tech addicted youths...
I think we got very lucky that "computer know-how" happened to translate into well-above-gainful employment over the past 40 years. When my dad bought me a Commodore 64 at 11 years old, he surely didn't do it thinking that my obsession with learning about computers would carry my entire adult career into retirement. He just thought he was getting me a video game machine and it would have nothing to do with whatever I ended up doing for the rest of my life.
In a parallel universe, where computers didn't take off and become important, we'd have run-of-the-mill jobs today, and our fascination with firmware and the command line would be mere nostalgic childhood memories.
And yet for every one "you", there are thousands of "them" who simply type out a few commands, load the firmware once, and then just play the games.
Maybe two decades ago, there was an article going around about a person who became a commercial pilot thanks to World of Warcraft (WoW improved his English through raids). That doesn't really mean that playing WoW is a good way to become a pilot though.
I suspect that in your case, even without the Gameboy, you'd end up where you are now.
I don’t know. I was always anti-authority and hated rules. I just did what I wanted. My point is there is hope for the rule breakers, and technology obsession combined with a poor school record doesn’t instantly mean someone should be written off
Sure you made it but that’s probably not the norm. Also, there are plenty of people that do a three month boot camp course late in life and end up doing well in software and tech careers. You don’t really have to be loading roms when you’re seven years old for it to work out.
I forget who originally suggested this so I can’t take credit.
But what if device manufacturers worked with schools to implement some kind of “School Mode” on these devices? Students could retain their access in exchange for schools setting policies on what’s allowed, e.g. you can keep wearing your watch, but it’s effectively in collection-only mode during the school day. Nothing intrusive to the students; more like Apple’s “Focus” modes but mandatory on school property.
I can also imagine all kinds of technical issues with this, but as our devices become increasingly wearable and integrated with daily life, it seems like a ban is only a temporarily viable solution, even if it’s the right option at this moment.
> what if device manufacturers worked with schools to implement some kind of “School Mode” on these devices?
How would you enforce this?
> as our devices become increasingly wearable and integrated with daily life, it seems like a ban is only a temporarily viable solution
I’m a strong proponent of these technologies. But the truth is we mandate, and as a result do, zero testing on how it affects kids before deploying them. For the consumer market, test after selling makes sense. For kids, European-style whitelisting might be better.
We are trending towards a world where kids of the poor and middle class are addicted to screens. That’s a horrifying class divide.
If we are assuming manufacturer cooperation in designing and implementing "School Mode" for their devices maybe make is so as part of parental controls the parents can enroll a device with their kid's school.
A device that has been so enrolled would detect when it is at school, maybe by looking for a particular Bluetooth beacon that the school deploys. When the device determines that it is at school, it would connect to the school's wifi network authenticated and secured with a certificate generated for the device when it was enrolled. It could then use a provisioning server on that network to find out what usage is allowed or not allowed while at school.
Such a system could allow for pretty fine grained control. For example the article mentions that one thing kids use their phones for is taking photos of notes on the board. With a School Mode that works as describe above they could make it so the teacher can use their phone or tablet near the end of class to grant temporary camera permission to all the enrolled phones in that classroom.
Enforcement is definitely one of the sticking points, but seems solvable.
The simplest option would be a geofence on school grounds, but I realize this comes with issues and kids will figure out how to bypass it.
Another approach is to have some kind of scan-in/scan-out system where you’re allowed to maintain physical access by scanning some device upon entering the school which has been programmed to safely enable the mode without requiring intrusive access to the device itself. It’d unlock upon scanning out for the day or by a parent. This would require deep integration by Apple/Google/etc. similar to Apple’s work on digital driver’s licenses.
I describe a beacon-based approach in a sibling reply.
I think a feature set like this would need to be fairly dumb in that it should not require positive identification of individuals and should instead be focused on a fairly simple binary “you scanned into a limited area” type of decision.
I don’t know how I feel about these options or even the whole approach, but I’m bringing them up mostly as a way to explore the concept.
It doesn't really need to be enforced. The problem is when kids are using their device in a way that the school considers inappropriate (because of distraction, etc...). "School mode" is supposed to help kids stay in focus. If the school notices a kid is using his device inappropriately (ex: responding to social media notifications), then the school can say "why wasn't that phone in school mode? it wouldn't have happened if it was" and take disciplinary action.
A kid that is able to stay attentive and resist the barrage of notifications and all the addictive things smartphones are known for without help from "school mode" would show an impressive level of self-control and should be praised, not punished because he didn't press the right button.
I...don't really understand what the purpose of any of this would be? How are wearables "integrated with daily life" for most people right now? And to the extent that they are for a particular subset of adults...why is this something that we should allow, expect and not even try to stop children from doing?
I get the impression that the logic you are following here could be more accurately described as "we should never ban any tech ever for anyone because it MIGHT in the future became important for most people's daily lives...assuming we didn't ban it". It seems like a circular argument to me and doesn't make any argument whatsoever about whether or not said devices SHOULD become part of children's (and adults) daily lives.
> as our devices become increasingly wearable and integrated with daily life
This is a forward looking statement. The point is that the integration of wearables is just beginning. Banning them might work for now, but assuming the integration continues and increases, banning them might not be viable in the future.
Imagine a scenario where an Apple Watch is also monitoring blood glucose. Or where someone's prescription eyeglasses are also connected to the Internet. These are things that are already happening today, but haven't yet permeated society.
Another 10, 20, 30 years of progress will bring new issues and consumer expectations that may make bans less viable. The point of all of this is to think about potential ways to navigate such a future.
How would you enforce this without invasive surveillance?
How could a teacher check that school mode is on without gaining control of the device? How could they ensure that the mode isn't turned off when they aren't looking?
This would require deep OS-level features from Apple/Google/etc. See my reply to a sibling comment for spitballing ideas, but I don’t think it’s necessary for this to be invasive.
Another approach would be beacon-based, where the devices would operate with limited capability if in range of an actively broadcasting cryptographically secure “At School” beacon.
I think there are plenty of ways to do this without surveillance or any specific knowledge about individuals using the phones, but it would require collaboration between schools and device manufacturers, and would understandably raise questions about whether disabling devices in this way is a slippery slope to other things.
Although I wouldn’t be too mad if this was generalized to concerts and movie theaters. Finding the balance between policy enforcement and safety would be the top issue.
If this wasn't mandated by law, this would inevitably create a market for devices and tweaks that didn't support this (mis)feature.
Older devices, jailbroken iPhones, rooted Androids or just straight up Chinese knock-offs would be a lot more desirable in such a world, and Tiktok would make sure that the smart kids knew how to break their devices themselves. The not-so-smart ones would inevitably have smarter buddies willing to do them a favor in exchange for a few bucks.
You'd also have to be extra careful to prevent misconfigured beacons and overzealous school administrators from interfering with the phones of neighbors, staff, those who have an exception, or even random passers by.
> This would require deep OS-level features from Apple/Google/etc. See my reply to a sibling comment for spitballing ideas, but I don’t think it’s necessary for this to be invasive.
This is by definition invasive; having the device maker or OS maker integrate it makes it more invasive, not less.
I don't think we're using the same definition of invasive. To me, invasive would be a solution that compromises the privacy of the child or parents or both.
Apple's work on driver's licenses comes to mind. The deep integration is exactly what allows such a feature to not be invasive. Limits on what "School Mode" can actually do and the actual implementation approach will determine whether or not such a feature is invasive.
It certainly could be implemented in an invasive way. But being invasive is not intrinsic to such a solution.
And keep in mind the alternative is an outright ban, which in terms of absolute outcomes is far more "invasive" to individual carrying devices if you're using a definition of the word that covers "limits access to your device when on school premises".
We definitely have different definitions. "can't use your device" is obnoxious but not invasive. "we control what you can and can't do with your device", no matter what mechanism it uses, is invasive. Think "invasive" in terms of "invades the boundaries of".
If the TSA seizes my (still-encrypted-and-locked) device, that's obnoxious and wrong, but not invasive. If they try to get me to unlock it so they can see what's on it, that's invasive (and will get a "no", followed by them deciding if they want to escalate to seizing it or not).
That would be terrifying in the case of an emergency; and no, the police aren't the only people you should want to be able to access in case of an emergency.
And if there are exceptions, you can put anyone on the exception list (because it's just a list) and it makes the change as useless as any other feature.
Parents already have parental modes on phones and they're not using them to this degree, it would seem.
The "but what about emergencies" subject comes up often in the context of outright device bans. Such a feature would be no worse than a ban, nor do I think the concern about emergencies is justified.
I realize that parents have become reliant on constant contact and never being out of touch, but this is a whole other conversation to have about whether or not that is actually of benefit to anyone involved.
Plenty of reasons to believe it's a net-harm.
> Parents already have parental modes on phones and they're not using them to this degree, it would seem.
This is a good point, and I think one path forward would be to require parents to implement these modes. The solution to phones in schools can't just be policy - parents need to parent. Perhaps they'd be more likely to use those features if the alternative is an outright ban.
If there is a "school mode" you are not the owner of the device and it will be hacked very soon. It is important to realize that there are zillions of different devices beyond the Apple brand.
Our school district is implementing identical thing, very similar, justifying this with health and emotional wellness and anti-cyber-bullying. They are checking in the phones into Yondr pouches.
I wish them luck on the implementation... I think there have a steep challenge ahead of them. One thing my boys told me is that they have QR codes for homework/assignments/worksheets that everyone used phones to scan and do work on there with GSuite - and the school provided laptops won't be able to do this. The that everyone in K-8 everyone has can do QRs okay though.
> The Economist: American parents want their children to have phones in schools | But phones in the classroom are disruptive. What should schools do?
> The adults unlock the [Yondr] pouches with special magnets as pupils leave for the day.
> Unsurprisingly, pupils have hacked the system. (“What do you expect?” Eva says. “We’re middle-schoolers.”) The girls recite a list of workarounds. Those magnets have become hot commodities, and a few have gone missing. Pupils have been seen banging pouches open in the toilets. Other pupils have faulty cases that no longer lock but have kept that information to themselves. The girls say that since phones have become a forbidden fruit, pupils only crave them more.
Today's active learners have a need for speed. The Blackboard App gives students the information they want, the connections they crave, and the personalisation they demand, on the go. We're putting learning directly in the hands of your students, so they can stay connected with their educational journey anytime, anywhere.
Good. School is not the time or the place for that. I think there's something to be said for banning smartphones while allowing cellphones that can take calls like feature phones. Nevertheless, I hate to be that guy -- one of the Gen Xers now seen yelling at clouds on TikTok -- but we seemed to manage just fine when anything called a "phone" was connected to the wall, not constantly on our person; and if our parents wished to reach us at school they had to call the front office and ask for us.
Smartphones, those endless distraction generators, have about as much place in school as do Game Boys and Nintendo Switches. The ability to focus is a habit you can develop; school is a great place to learn that habit while you're still young.
My daughter's school gives all the kids ipads and she got a new one this year. The IT guy gave it to her before locking it down so she installed all the dumb apps she wanted on it before handing it back over. The point, aside from how proud I am of my daughter, is that kids are going to find a way to get what they want. This is an arms race. It'll be interesting to watch.
I've never heard a good, convincing explanation as to why on earth children need iPads for any reason. Are the schools just not doing their jobs, and letting the iPads "teach" the children rather than a person doing it?
My backpack in primary school times was about 3kgs on worst days - school lockers aren't a thing here. We carried our books, notebooks, exercises, PE suit, boots and lunch day after day; home to school and back again - a scoliosis story /s. Secondary school times were more chill - while it was mandatory to have all of that stuff, teachers were turning blind eyes.
So slowly seeing how tablets or laptops are replacing all that paper I'm envy those kids. But at the same time I see the dangers, how kids are addicted to the mobiles and the Internet; school should set such devices to be tools and not potential form of entertainment as much it's only possible.
That's a really good point. My kids have tablets but they barely carry books. They could probably get 90% of the same stuff done if they were given an eReader instead of a tablet. It would have several benefits now I think about it.
* frame rate sucks too much for tik-tok to be any good
* easier on the eyes
* useless for doing homework on, so the kids go back to paper where they have to show their work anyway.
I dunno this might be the way. Instead of artificially limiting platforms, let the platform's natural limitations do the work.
I totally agree. Many assignments are on the ipad, and they come via shitty sass products that regularly crash, taking their homework with them. Additionally for stuff like math you need to show your work, which is impossible for higher level math so the kids have to turn in a paper version along with the ipad assignment.
A number of years ago when my daughter was in the second grade the school expected them to turn in homework via this crappy power point knock-off app that would constantly crash.
I had her eventually just take screen shots and send them to the printer. From there? She would fill in her answers, take a picture of the work, and then drop the image into the power point knockoff.
We got a note from the Principal about how "printing" was not supported.
Local morons gave ours an ipad with its own data plan, free access to youtube, and screentime disabled. I had zero control but to physically take it. Bet you can’t wait to find out what happened next!
Many months later we got a stern letter that yt had to be blocked because students weren’t using it for assignments. Who could have predicted such a thing? :-P
It all started during covid too so I had very limited ability to say no.
I think that's two separate battles which are part of the same topic.
Battle #1 is combining the complexity and abundance of electronic devices with the time, dedication, and cleverness of kids requires (literally) writing a bug free operating system & application ecosystem as well as nearly every school employee having a completely accurate understanding of how to manage them. The goal here is never to get to 100% compliance but to add friction to noncompliance so it's easier for workers to do their job and get through the day.
Battle #2 (the part these kinds of bans focus on) is on setting expectations for when electronic devices are allowed at all. Whether or not students always comply isn't even the goal of this battle, it's all about making the problem clear and swift to deal with: "I saw your phone during school hours so you're caught and it's confiscated" isn't about preventing kids from being sneaky, it's about making the enforcement easy.
Our son’s high school (Shropshire) requires a phone - homework is set via app (no website option), sometimes homework requires an app to do it, all comms is via app (so parent also need an app)
They are sometimes told to get their phones out in class to perform work.
In theory phones are banned outside these hours, but unless a teacher is in the room that’s not enforced.
OP may send their child to a private secondary school, like 18% of secondary school students in the UK. Private schools tend to have kids from wealthier backgrounds as well as the resources to provide devices to those who can't afford them.
A friend of mine works in a boarding school where the pupils are provided tablets in order to do their work, join video calls etc... .
Can't speak on behalf of GP, but I suspect when they said "require," it's more loose than that. I've experienced UK schools that have a shared pool of iPads for students who haven't got a compatible device (for a multitude of reasons). So in that sense, students "require" a device from the perspective of learning, but don't "require" to own one outright (so it's not a barrier to education).
Here in the Netherlands many (middle) schools have banned them by now, just in time for my son to enter school. Looking forward to him having nice conversations with his schoolmates. I hope his generation is not like some of the students we got at our company who join the lunches but picked seats at the very edge of the table and had their eyes on their screen the whole time.
Yes, every youngster has some fears communicating with people experienced in their proffssion of choice, but it is up to the experience people to engage with them and up to them to do the same. Locking themselves out of conversations during lunch is not a habit that builds good and valuable relations with colleagues. It really feels like these youngsters are addicted, or at least they are not in the habit of joining conversations, lacking the skill as everyone does at the start, but now also a method available to avoid honing those skills.
My guess is that they had prior experience with asking students not to use cellphones and they observed students start using wearables to skirt the ban, which led them to just ban all of them.
An interesting consequence about the wearable ban is that they also banned medical electronic devices (e.g., heart monitors or blood sugar monitors) and parents are required to meet with administration to approve their use [1].
We have videos of kids attacking teachers for taking away devices. These things, whether we like it are not, are ingrained in society. Taking a phone away can be akin to saying you are going to cut a part of my brain out.
Kids fe still going to bring them, and kids are going to still feel as it’s their right to have them. On top of that only a few people in the sv bubble would agree with taking phones away.
The rich SV bubble is actually the most restrictive because they build the dangr and understand it. The C-suite at FAANG and friends don't let their kids have nearly as much time on screens as Alabama trailer park families do.
> We have videos of kids attacking teachers for taking away devices
I’ve seen kids screaming for iPads on flights, too. I don’t have high expectations for them in life.
Also, when did we normalise violent kids? If a kid attacks a teacher for any reason, they should be automatically suspended at a minimum.
> only a few people in the sv bubble would agree with taking phones away
I live in a rich town in the Rockies. Most parents don’t let their kids take phones to school. (None of the private ones permit them.)
There is an emerging class divide on phones is schools. When you meet them, you can clearly tell which kids need their phones to function and which do not. (Eye contact during conversation.)
I mean, I somehow understand the motivation behind a phone ban. But Fitbits?
I understand there's probably a problem creating a clear separation, but in times where lack of movement and exercise is causing major health problems, we probably shouldn't disincentivize young people using fitness devices.
I'd guess it's because even small thing as band can provide some of kids distraction. It's not about if you can play games on such device but play with it, touch, wander around the interface - had enough distraction to not focus on class and teacher. Bands are being perceived as digital rattles here.
It will track some things you do to improve fitness.
I had a fitbit (until it crapped out, and i lost faith in the company) and would walk in the mornings, lunchtimes and - if i hadn't got my steps in - I'd walk at night, too.
Without a tracker - as i am now - up, work, home: and certainly not as fit as i was when using a tracker.
I was in Greenwich Public Schools from K-12 and graduated GHS 2016.
One kid in my elementary school, Alessandro Espa, brought his first-gen iPod Touch to class in 4th or 5th grade. He was showing off the magic trick apps of the age: the lighter, soda/beer.
The only tech hardware we'd used before then was old iMacs with yellowed vinyl keyboard covers and ancient Windows XP desktops. The Touch was like a magic alien object. Everyone was magnetically attracted to looking at it. It looked like a shiny stainless steel candy bar. Everyone in the room knew immediately they'd be the coolest if they got a phone by high school.
Previous generations got flip phones in high school - around the time they got their learner's permit. The only apps were calling, SMS, or tetris. You could tell how cool a phone was by its color. Forget swappable screen backgrounds; the coolest phone of 2006 had colorful swappable front and back plastic plates.
Sending text messages was powerful before phones arrived. It was basically telekinesis. I missed that entire era.
My generation was not satisfied with just SMS. They needed to be organizing parties through emails. They needed to be trading drugs and candy through Snapchat. They needed to be covertly taking photos of classmates and teachers and emailing them to each other. They needed to be coordinating fractal-style bullying strategies through group chats.
By the time I got to 9th grade, every one of my peers had phones: first gen Androids, Blackberries, Samsung S, their parents' old iPhones. Everything happened at once. Facebook. Twitter. Instagram. Temple Run. Minecraft. Tumblr. Hidemyass. Snapchat. Pinterest.
I missed the boat on most of those, but Tumblr was fun. Some friends from Syosset and I did wacky role-playing games via the anonymous question asking boxes. It was the highlight of the year.
Bart Palosz committed suicide after some kids (whose names GPS has still managed, or been bribed, to conceal) bullied him and smashed his phone. Did they ever see any consequences?
In 11th grade, was told by a teacher that I should be happy when I scratched my laptop because it meant I wouldn't be able to worship it anymore. The teacher was right.
After my 10th grade the school instituted a Chromebook program. I never picked mine up. As far as I know students only ever used them to write Google docs, watch porn, play Miniclip flash games, cyberbully each other, and click through shitty Aplia homeworks. Did any of you HN readers work on or found Aplia? If so, fuck you. Especially you, Paul Romer.
As far as I'm concerned the $250 the Chromebooks cost apiece would have been better spent on $100 of books, $100 of legal pads, and $50 of nice pens and pencils and erasers. But tragically, one just can't hustle your way to the top of GPS IT and earn a six-figure salary in Connecticut by promoting old-fashioned tech that has worked for hundreds of years. No; you need to be selling Silicon Valley dogwater HTML and plastic.
The district has a history of being dependent on technology to appear forward thinking. It aims to appear 2-3 years ahead of the rest of the country, so nobody can say "GPS should have known better!"
The only reason they're so happily agreeing to "ban" phones is that nothing has changed in the last 5-6 years. Students have gotten dumber and more addicted to technology. There's no more new technology to get a raise from introducing except maybe LLMs.
P.S. I would bet $10,000 GPS won't genuinely enforce the ban due to threats from the 20ish students in the system with paranoid billionare helicopter parents.
Haha, I'm certainly from your generation and feel the same.
But the tech isn't going away, and it can be pretty useful, empowering, cool and democratisering.
We just need to learn how to deal with the tech in a healthy way, and these bans are progress if you ask me.
I think the smartphone is just too much of a slotmachine, but we are just learning about that, and learning about what to do against it. Smartphones took a whole generation by surprise, the kids, but also their parents. I received rotten.com style videos on the family email address, havging a good conversation about it with my flabbergasted father... then smartphones came. That generation grew up quickly, and differently, and the parents were just slapped in the face with it. But it's changing, we're learning.
Edit: You deleted your comment, anyway, was going to answer this:
Hmm, now that I look more closely indeed I'm probably >10 years older. We had our first dumbphones at around 16-17 (Ericsson GF768 at ~17).
I do remember the thrill of sleeping with it next to my bed and receiving a text during the night. Magic.
You sound like my generation though ;) I bet you had a hard time in between your year mates. The current generation also has people like you btw. Not many though.
Do you have a source for this? Dog attacks being more common than car accidents seems extremely unlikely to me, given how prevalent car accidents are.
I really wouldn't expect a cellphone ban for students to result in a significant rise of delayed treatment for injuries caused specifically by dog attacks.
Even if dogs attacking students is such a common occurrence that it warrants consideration in this proposal (which I doubt), it's still a school. Teachers and other staff are around. Just have them call emergency services in case of injuries.
Sniffing and licking are not “attacks”. If they are, a car honking or braking suddenly is a crash.
> If students have no cameras, many more teachers would bring their "pets" into school
How many teachers brought pets to school before the 2000s? How many people brought pets to the office? (If anything, there are more pets at the workplace now than ever before.)
The taking of a cell phone seems to have emotionally provoked you. Reflecting on why you’re responding to a phone like a crack pipe might be a better use of your time than pretending to have a phobia of dog licks.
> why my kid needs recorder, many abusers try to down play such attacks!
Have you ever had anyone in a position of authority do anything about a dog sniffing or licking your kid? Because if so, that’s national-news level hilarious.
> Dog attacks and bites are…way more common than car accidents
This is nonsense.
There are on “average 337,103 ED visits each year for dog bites,” with an “annual incidence” of “1.1 per 1,000” [1]. This makes them “the 13th most common injury,” exceeding “those occurring on motorcycles (14th), to pedestrians (15th) and firearm gunshot injuries (16th).” These result, however, in just 30 to 50 deaths per year [2].
Motor vehicles killed over 40 thousand Americans in 2021 and 2022 [3]. They are the fourth most common injury in EDs, and by far the more fatal one.
There are over 3x more motor vehicles in America than dogs [1][2]. There are more households with cars than dogs. Our interaction frequency with vehicles is much greater. The threshold for damage, given a vehicle’s power, is much less. For any measure of “attack,” the frequency and damage from cars will always exceed that from dogs.
It’s a stupid aside that doesn’t make any actual arguments about why taking cell phones from kids is bad.
Not every attack results in damage. And not every bite is an attack.
Maybe have a look at this (cyclist chased by dogs). None of this stuff gets reported. This guy has hours and hours of similar attacks. It is pretty common.
> Our interaction frequency with vehicles is much greater.
Well I still wouldn't like to call it, because a dog will in many cases, perhaps the majority, escape the owner's control and run up to you and sniff you, which is very unusual for cars.
I got a solution for you then. Any kid caught using their phone in school is expelled. We shall put personal responsibility and consequences as the primary objective. Does this solve your issue.
> It would be very difficult to engineer this to not jam cell phones just beyond school property
Most schools are set back a fair ways from the street, with lawns and playgrounds. I doubt it would be that difficult. Or one could use jammers with an effective range of 30 or 40 feet and have several of them to flesh out the coverage.
Here in Germany, most stores have effective zero cell reception immediately once you enter in the store and everything is normal once you are near the exit. In stores where people can order online, they offer free wifi(sometimes). I can see a similar approach in schools.
I think it has to do with the building, perhaps there is a Faraday cage caused by the copper net layer in the walls. From a similar experience, the doorstep of my apartment is really close to my other 2 neighbours (ground floor), and they all have WiFi routers above the entrance, inside — it was very hard to connect and use Wifi in the house on 2.4GHz due to the bandwidth, even if I changed the channels manually, so I was forced to buy a 5GHz router to circumvent the shortage. Also, my LTE doesn't work at all at my doorstep, so it's pretty apparent.
Not that I like the idea but teachers typically also had/have phones at their desk (for the last couple decades at least) it's just easier for the teacher to have the central office deal with contacting the parents and getting the kid with a fever picked up or whatever. Similarly, it's easier for the parents to call the central number and be immediately responded to and directed accordingly than try to find the specific teacher's number and hope it's a good time for them to pick up directly. For 911 level emergencies in class the teacher would call direct as the lesson plan and class conduct is a bit less important than the kid who can't breathe.
The other problems with this solution is there is no way to just jam cell phone signals inside the school only, the signals that need to be jammed are different each place and change over time, and it's unpopular with both anyone that had a legitimate use case for cell service as well as the FCC doesn't like doing it. It's also a generally complicated solution, even if you only attempt to get "some" of it to work right.
The FCC is already on a pretty optimal answer in this case, it's physics you'd want to fix. Completely jamming all cell signals disrupts the public and private airspace well beyond the school.
It's difficult to explain accurately without making one into an RF expert but you've essentially said the radio equivalent of "my headphones aren't really useful past 10 feet" and concluding any sound so loud as to make the headphone use unintelligible across an entire school would also cease to exist a few feet away.
If one absolutely had to get rid of usable signals originating from outside the school a much more practical way would be to add RF shielding to the exterior elements. After all, if you want to get rid of a signal then subtracting it even intuitively feels a lot more reasonable than trying to add so much other signal you don't notice the original anymore.
Another way to jam would be to spoof being a tower. The cell phones would uselessly connect to the school tower. Since phones transmit their location, the spoofer could "geofence".
Or even ask the local cell phone tower people to geofence the school.
Spoofing is, by definition, not jamming but in terms of the goal if you combined a multi carrier spoofer with a DAS you could theoretically get things down to ~a million $ per high school on average and not horrifically leak signal as if you just stood up a spoofer and centrally blasted it out. It's also still carrier and technology generation specific though. I.e. if a new carrier/MVNO appears or an existing carrier rolls out new frequency bands then you need to replace the system. If it's a new technology (e.g. 5G) then you need to replace the system. If things just change in general (new MVNO on existing bands), you at least need to maintain the system accordingly (but might not have to replace it). You'd also need to convince the majority of people this is something all public companies should be mandated to support, which is a separate issue from convincing the majority of people this general approach should be taken, or you'll never get much compliance. All of that accounted for, the solution still brushes against needing to fix physics a bit in that lowers SNR in a many times larger area than the accepted dead zone - though not as badly as a jammer system.
Geofencing with cooperation of the local carriers is technically possible (with big downsides) in that if a phone is connected to 3+ towers you can decently get the position tower side to within several hundred meters (or worse) in an urban area. That means to reliably geofence a building you're still going to screw up anyone in the surrounding city blocks trying to drive by, use their phones at home/work, and so on regularly. It also still impacts noise (therefore connection quality), though not as bad, over a much large area than is excluded. You could also theoretically mandate that all devices have device side geofencing which uses the extra data from phone side (more than just tower connection data, BSSID or other local signal data) were you convince people to mandate public companies on this one as well (and even then there will be "old" devices for many years a la retiring 3G lest you want to convince everyone to throw their current devices away on top of the extra forced hardware monitoring ability). The cost for this would largely escape the schools by becoming a cost to carriers/hardware manufacturers.
Or you could, again, just build schools with RF shielding if this is really the path you want to go down. It'll probably have a higher up front cost but it'd achieve the goal for every high speed cellular service current and future without requiring any external mandates or external interference. It's still a bit silly compared to other funding requests schools typically have but it would solve the problem if the public prioritized it.
Many schools are set back a ways from other buildings.
I would just set up a jammer, and adjust its power so the nearest buildings could still use their phones, while the school phones would have problems connecting.
Making no phones a blanket policy in all schools should be an absolute no-brainer.