What's wild to me is that almost all the individual devices a smartphone represents, not even counting the phone itself, would have been confiscated if used in class, for my generation (and I'm a millennial!)

Flashlight? LOL, they might not even wait for you to use it, just assume there's no way you're not going to do something dumb with it, and take it.

A handheld gaming device? Insta-yoink.

Note-passing? Notes confiscated.

Basically an ordered-from-a-back-of-magazine-ad spy kit of a miniature camera and voice recorder? GONE. And you might be on the way to the office for a chat, and parents called, if you'd actually been using any of it.

A glossy fashion magazine, seen out at any point that's not explicitly totally-free time? In the teacher's desk. (and that's on the tame side of the kind of thing one might be looking at on one's phone...)

A portable mini-TV or small radio? Jesus, of course you can't have that in class.

But smartphones? Nope, they can have those. Which is the exact same as having all those things above, and way more.

It's such a crazily-different direction for policy.