Fast forward 28 years later, and now everyone has an amazing TV in their pocket at all times when they commute, sit in their work space, go out for coffee or lunch, or go sit down in the bathroom, all with a near infinite collection of video via youtube, netflix, and even massive amounts of porn. How little did I know. And that's to say nothing of texting and twitter and reddit and instant messaging and discord and ...

Several years ago, I was working on a college campus, and there were giant corporate-flavored murals beside some of the city blocks students walked, full of happy multicultural clip art people and exciting innovative technological innovation, and adorned with the message, "Imagine a borderless world!" Clearly that message was meant to be rhetorical, not a call to reflection, critique, or reevaluation. There did not seem to be the suggestion that one might imagine the borderless world and then, having done so, decide it was a problem to be corrected.

I wonder a lot, these days, if we're not deep into a Chesterton's Fence situation, where we have to rediscover the hard way the older wisdom about having separate spheres with separate hard constraints and boundaries on behaviors, communities, and communication pathways to facilitate all sorts of important activities that simply don't happen otherwise - something like borders and boundaries as a crucial social technology, specifically about directing attention productively. Phones and tablets are, in their own Turing complete way, portals to a borderless world that pierces the older intentional classroom boundaries.

Back in my day (when we walked to school uphill both ways), we weren't allowed to carry around basic flip phones. They had to be in our locker and only used before or after school.

When and why did it become acceptable for much more distracting and stimulating devices to be allowed in class?

It's much more likely that simply changing the way they administer these tests had a more significant impact on test scores than phone bans.

> When comparing high-effect and low-effect schools, the researchers note significant reductions in unexcused absences during the two years following the cell phone ban. They posit that increased attendance could explain as much as half of the test score improvements noted in their primary analysis.

Seems to me like there wasn't a huge improvement, and the improvement seen could easily be attributed to other things, no?

I'm not sure how they generated the error bars but that, to me, would suggest the relevant error could be +/- 1 percentage point. Meaning the delta could be at little as two percentage points.

My intuition says cellphone bans would have a positive impact, but I don't think I'd call this data conclusive. I'd want to see more data from earlier and later.

Also, if these are the same students, then test scores might be reflecting increased maturity. If it's different students of the same age, it could be a shift in some extra-educational factors affecting the younger generation.

Too many unknowns and not enough signal.

There's always going to be exceptions but speaking for myself there's no way I'd be able to resist the allure of a cellphone in class.

> Our identification strategy relies upon our ability to calculate school-specific measures of smartphone activity that we can attribute to students, rather than adults in the building. To do so, we use detailed smartphone activity data from Advan between January 2023 and December 2024 that we link to LUSD schools using point-of-interest coordinates.13 In particular, we focus on the average number of unique smartphone visits (pings) between 9am and 1pm on school days (a common time frame that elementary, middle, and high schools in LUSD are all in session during school days) in the last two months of the 2022-23 school year (right before the ban took effect) and the first two months of the 2023-24 and 2024-25 school years.14 To disentangle student activity from the smartphone activity of teachers/staff, we subtract the average number of unique smartphone visits between 9am and 1pm on teacher workdays (in the same school year) from the same average on regular school days.

Paper: https://www.nber.org/papers/w34388

I find it completely unremarkable that test scores went up post-COVID and feel it's very hard to tell what is causing what.

When I was in high school, we didn't have smartphones, but we had game boys, flip phones, and graphing calculators that could play games.

If we were ever caught playing with any of these things we got in trouble. That seemed sufficient at the time, but is that not the case anymore?

https://edpolicyinca.org/publications/california-test-scores...

That's why they're being banned all over. Citizens and governments finally got savvy to how bad these devices can really be, especially in the hands of the inexperienced.

Imagine if history had gone differently. Maybe history still can go differently. A portable computer in the hands of every child. One that actually works for them, not against them.

Are there people already working on this?

(I do know about eg. F-Droid, which is an improvement due to strict curation)

edit: Think of eg 'A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer' : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diamond_Age

TVs? Newspapers? Magazines?

Well those are on-way, with limited feedbacks. What's the better alternative except phones?

Anyone know how to interpret that chart?

Not something particularly worth worrying about.

Restricted to adults over 21 years of age.

But also, complete inability of schools to adapt.

Refusing to adapt to the reality that is, students will be living their entire lives with these devices, and that they should be working out ways to ensure student productivity despite their existence, is not the same thing as success.

Teachers are inherently lazy. Its one of their more human qualities. But really they need to adapt, or fail and be replaced.

There was a kid in my class in highschool. We had a school that permitted laptops, one of the first near us, but situationally. Teachers could exclude, or instruct the student to not use the laptop for periods during class. However policy was that students were allowed to use the laptop any time they could use a workbook. This kid was the only one who both had access to a laptop and was willing to risk damaging it by bringing it to school.

Math class with this kid was:

1. He plays games on his laptop unless the teacher was looking, in which case he would be solving problems in excel or notepad. Proficient alt tab user.

2. At the end of class, he would copy out all the answers from the back of the textbook to his workbook, and he would hand that in.

English was different. In english the teacher built a relationship with him and engaged him directly. If he was unresponsive he might be forced back to attention somehow, asked a direct question about the text, but that was true of a lot of the students. The entire class was a discussion on book content. When he used the laptop, he was using it to write notes because he was engaged through positive reinforcement. If the teacher caught him playing, the teacher would on those rare occasions, engage him about the game. Often, he had finished his assigned reading\tasks early and simply drifted over. In that case he was left to play because he wasn't disrupting anyone.

Phone bans are a crutch for lazy, uninterested educators. Kids need to be prepared to live in a world with these things in their pockets. The correct dopamine reward feedback loops are not going to be built by banning them entirely. And being better at rote learning and regurgitating ancient course material isn't a strong indicator, if it was even an indicator, of better student outcomes.

Ban advertising to children & youth and the device itself will be harmless

1. A chart showing a very low increase (1-2 percent)

2. Nothing to control scores rising in every school in America in the last school year (due to reduction of COVID effects).

3. Scores not moving immediately after the ban, but only after the start of a new school year, which means a new cohort of students muddying the data.

Yet the data fits people's biases here (regardless whether it's right or wrong), so the celebrate it and add anecdotes and explanations why it's true.

My interpretation is, the pandemic is a root cause of lower test scores for many reasons, one reason is that kids started using cell phones way more during the pandemic, and that new stuff on the phone (TikTok, let’s be real) causes lower test scores. Reducing usage during school is addressing a real problem, but it’s one of many real problems, and some are way bigger.