New York governor to launch bill banning smartphones in schools
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
But I also recognize the usefulness of my being a first responder, even with some training, is negligible to negative.
Your FreeStyle Libre pings your phone when you have low blood sugar. When your watch detects a serious fall or a heart abnormality your phone calls emergency services. You use your phone to let the dog walker in, check the camera to see if you turned off the garden hose or left it running, use it to find your lost wallet/keys/bag, etc.
Childhood is where you teach positive behaviors and responsibility. Just chucking phones out the window to avoid the problem teaches nothing.
I think that's the strongest argument against this. The ideal case would be a room full of kids who are taught to have the discipline to not touch their phones when inappropriate. However, I think the real issue is that teachers aren't able to effectively police this... probably partially due to class sizes, and our society's cultural lack of respect for rule-following and self-discipline.
We specifically engineer acculturation processes to incrementally add responsibility for a reason.
Nobody gives a 2 year old a loaded pistol and then tells them they can't have candy.
IMHO, a smartphone with unregulated addictive apps is too much responsibility for grade-level children during school hours. (Hell, it's too much responsibility for many adults I know)
(Written on a smart phone while at work)
Surely this could just be an exemption? If you have a medical device (not just low blood sugar devices) that uses a phone then you can keep your phone.
> When your watch detects a serious fall or a heart abnormality your phone calls emergency services.
I'm curious how far your phone can be away from your watch for this to still work?
Regardless, most kids aren't far away from others so a serious fall probably isn't a big risk since the kids nearby can get a teacher or some other adult.
> You use your phone to let the dog walker in, check the camera to see if you turned off the garden hose or left it running
Are these things that kids need to do?
> use it to find your lost wallet/keys/bag, etc
Seems like a kid could go to the office and the school can provide the phone to them for a while.
Also, kids were able to get by without using a phone to find their wallets for centuries. It might do a kid some good to walk around the school and get exercise.
As for your medical examples - those devices work fine without a smartphone. Certifying a medical device that includes the user's smartphone as a key part of the therapy is very challenging, and avoided if possible.
Good!
I'm hard pressed to enunciate an argument for why having social media during a school day, at school, is beneficial to early childhood development.
>> “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,” [New York governor, Kathy Hochul] said.
>> “These addictive algorithms have been used against young people since 2011,” Hochul said. “If [social media companies] were going to self-police and manage this themselves, what has stopped them thus far? Clearly as a government, we need to step in.”
https://www.education.govt.nz/school/digital-technology/cell...
Pretty successful at doing what?
Our children are getting destroyed by the attention economy. I tried to setup a mobile game the other day and I immediately deleted it because every single popup was a psychologist-optimized addiction machine designed to suck every bit of dopamine from undeveloped children.
This is the #1 issue plaguing children in my opinion and it will only get worse without regulation.
Which IMHO, is what publicly-funded school should be: an island of normalcy regardless of whatever else is going on in a child's life.
From my perspective, that's an unfortunate but ultimately good reason for some kids to have smartphones.
The law could also use indirect leverage to gradually separate students' medical monitoring from the smartphone over the medium to long term. For example, they could begin a multi-year transition period after which NY-regulated health insurance plans would have to cover a non-smartphone version of these monitoring devices with at least equivalent functionality to any smartphone version they cover, at no greater out-of-pocket cost to the patient, unless no comparable non-smartphone product is on the market from any manufacturer. Then they could eventually require the non-smartphone version in class once it exists, with a fully insurance-paid (no cost-sharing) transition available at that time to children who use the existing smartphone monitoring system.
To avoid a gap in insurance coverage, NY could continue to mandate that some version of these devices be covered, so nobody would go without affordable medical monitoring. But as soon as one company decides to make a non-smartphone version, their competitors would have to do the same or else lose market share in NY, so they all would. (Why would that first company take the leap? They'd get a lot of insurance-paid device purchases for the transition for children's existing devices.) And then teachers would have an ADA-compliant way to remove the distractions of smartphones in class even for kids with medical monitoring needs, without causing harm to anyone.
I think there are a few issues here.
T1D is already incredibly intrusive in the daily lives of children. Continuous glucose monitors (device 1, on body with bluetooth connection to a smartphone, device 2) track one's blood sugar every 5 minutes or so and gives the child, the parent, and the school nurse the information they need to jointly replace the functionality of the child's pancreas. This might be dosing with insulin through a pump (device 3, sometimes managed via smartphone) to lower blood glucose or cover carbohydrate consumption. Or it might be eating to raise blood glucose.
If the student's blood glucose gets either too high or too low (which can happen in a matter of minutes) the consequences can be fatal or lead to lifelong complications like nerve damage in the extremities or eyes. High stakes stuff.
If I understand correctly, your proposal would introduce a fourth device to separately monitor blood glucose and, I assume, manage the process of uploading this data and sharing it with all parties. This fourth device would mean a few things:
- Yet another piece of expensive, and durable medical equipment you are required to pay for, that insurance rarely fully covers.
- The child would have to tote around now four devices daily to manage a chronic condition.
- Another device to manage and maintain (batteries need to be charged, etc).
- Paying for another 5g plan to ensure that the monitoring device can share information with parents etc.
Despite some of the cons to these systems being integrated into your smartphone, there are considerable advantages to using the networked compute you always have in your pocket. Not to mention that these devices suffer from painfully slow development and approval cycles. Durable medical goods often have to go through federal approval and even small changes to firmware can take years.
Also, just some quick figures. The school age population in NY state as of 2021 was 2,622,879. About 1/400 children ages 0-18 have type 1. So around 6.5k students. This is neither the extreme edge case that others have described (and just one of many chronic diseases that are managed via smartphones) nor is it likely a large enough segment to change product development at these large health tech companies.
I don't think the solution is to try to engineer incentives and overhaul the entire health insurance coverage of durable medical goods. Nor do I think the solution is to require children with T1D to carry around and pay for yet another expensive device.
I think we just need to be careful in the design of legislation like this, as you suggest, especially when it comes to ubiquitous devices that have been integrated into so many facets of people's lives. There is no such thing as a 'trivial exception' to a state law (responding to a commenter further down).
In the world where that is common, smartphones can still be banned in the classroom except for people with a medical accommodation, and those people would need to set their phones to classroom mode. The teacher would then have an app to alert them if the number of classroom mode broadcasts deviates from what is expected.
If that number of broadcasts is too low, that’s cause for investigation either because someone with an accommodation is using nonmedical apps in class or because someone’s medical monitoring is impaired due to a depleted phone battery. The former case would lead to discipline for using nonmedical apps in class outside the scope of their medical accommodation; the latter case would lead to whatever medical assistance is appropriate.
There would of course be plenty of other considerations to balance anti-abuse measures, convenience, and privacy. But the basic idea would work.
Maybe alternatively, they could just teach their kid to be responsible?
Making one’s child’s health utterly dependent on a smartphone sounds like... not a well thought out idea. What did people use to manage t1d prior to smartphones? Does that no longer work?
These ways are still widely used but they still require a secondary device (a glucometer, or test strips) and also lead to much less frequent readings. This means that high and low blood sugars were more difficult to detect and correct.
Because you get far fewer readings (unless you're pricking your fingers every 5 minutes) there are very real health consequences. Having a high blood sugar for too long (oops, that apple had more carbohydrates in it than expected) can lead to nerve damage and blindness in the long term and potentially fatal diabetic ketoacidosis (DKA) in the immediate term. There are similar negative outcomes for low blood glucose levels.
Before CGMs people managed T1D but the short and long term health outcomes were/are much worse and the risk of death due to undiagnosed hyper/hypoglycemia was also much higher. Of course, we still carry glucometers and urine test strips (very inaccurate + coarse measurement) everywhere we go and the school has these as well.
Things like "insulin pump control" had separate, non-phone devices for a long time. Consumers flocked to the ones on the phone even when they sucked and had 1/10 the features.
I'm no defender of medical companies, but the blame for your complaint falls squarely on the consumers, themselves.
I also think for many smaller medical device manufacturers it can be advantageous to build on an existing platform like android/iphone. You're already solving one challenging hardware problem, why add another when you can take advantage of a mature development ecosystem that consumers 1) seem to have a preference for and 2) have already paid for, thus lowering the cost of treatment delivery.
Unfortunately we could not because of school policy preventing kids from using smart phones in class, BUT they were happy to follow the teacher around and point at plants to ID. It significantly increased classroom participation cause it’s interactive learning. Information that used to be incredibly out of reach is now readily in front of them.
Overall, I think it’s good to extremely limit use of smartphones in schools, but I think there’s some amazing stuff we can do now like bird ID with Merlin and kids should know how to do it.
Schools in the US have become some sort of retrograde distopian bubble of a time that never existed.
Now you're going to remove the one check that kids had vs this system? Cause we haven't seen videos of teachers being awful, stupid or misinformed, we dont want to give kids the option to fact check bull shit on the spot?
If you think that cell phones harm kids, or social media harms kids, this bill does fuck all to change that. IT does remove the one context where an internet connection and camera might be useful to how the kids deal with the world going forward.
Fund schools year round, with smaller classes, better teacher pay and 8 hour fucking days with meals provided to kids. These are the things that will change outcomes, not cell phones bans.
Reasoning from exceptionalism isn't reasonable.
The majority of kids aren't using their phones to complete extra Khan Academy lessons in their free time...
1) That their freerange land has been wiped out and replaced with narrow strips of moving vehicles. Kids have ~no alternatives to being cooped up in adult-filled buildings.
2) False stranger danger alarms have wiped out peer time and 20k years of adultfree self-sufficiency training.
3) Wiping out multi-generational households and walkable communities. Kids used to have many parenting adults but have two. Or one. Or none.
4) Besides needing the wisdom of 100, parents now need to parent 24/7, every day of every week of every year. It's massively more time than the last x0000 years.
Maybe what is ruining kids are adults who've eliminated kids' natural growth builders and now are hell bent on sabotaging their last peer connector.
Smartphone use and plummeting grades has been a global phenomenon.
Forcing social media companies to collect a bunch of personal info for age verification is bad for privacy and doesn’t solve the problem of companies being legally allowed to build dopamine casinos.
I like smartphone bans for school, though.
Not an icebergs chance in hell I’d let that happen.
There are multiple shootings a year at your kids school? Do you live at the worst school in the country?
It turns out you only need one school shooting in your network to decide never to leave your kids without a communication device, ever.
Now I see this and I can't help but think some Google lobbyist authored a bill (this absolutely does happen), handed it to a staffer in New York and now we're getting a bill that says parents have to buy their kid a Google Kids Watch (since you want your kids location but they cant have a "smart phone").
I didn't get why Google would make such a product and why in the world parents would ever trust Google with a kids product.. but seeing this article it all makes sense. I knew it had to be some kind of gambit but I didn't immediately see how. Now I think I do.
"Kathy Hochul pushes online child safety, telling social media companies: ‘You’re not going to profit off the mental health of children’"
Of course the governor of NY is basically wrapping herself in the American flag, putting her hand on a bible and protecting our children ...
Now with this, kiddos are gong to cut their teeth using the Android ecosystem. When it does come time to get them a smart phone, what kind do you think its going to be? Of course the kids watch is going to have some kind of ecosystem the parents will get deeper in with pic storage, calendars, location tracking etc.
First, buy a law that says kids cant have iPhones. Second, produce a watch that placates the parents/politicians thats not a smart phone. Third, sleep walk the kids and family into a new ecosystem. Fourth, in a few years as the kid matures you get to sell them Google Phones in the Google Ecosystem. Fifth, cast yourself as a concerned company with a genuine concern for the wellbeing of America's Children.
I don't know whether I want to go buy Alphabet shares or go outside and yell at the sky about what a corrupt world we live in.
$10 says some rudimentary social network product will soon follow. Who doesn't want a more fun way to play hide-and-go-seek? Gotta know who your friends are so we can invite them to the game etc.
Text: it worked just fine.
The only difference is that it didn't have UI and UX stickiness to glue people to screens.
Sometimes simpler is better.
This whole essay you wrote is taking that conclusion jump and rolling straight into the worst case scenario.
What option is a parent to choose I wonder? This product seems suspiciously designed for a very specific set of conditions to emerge.
"This whole essay you wrote is taking that conclusion jump and rolling straight into the worst case scenario."
You call it a "conclusion jump", I call it a Rational Explanation.
You do know that there are other alternatives to smartphones besides a "Google Kids Watch", yes?
Edit:
> If passed, schoolchildren will be allowed to carry simple phones that cannot access the internet but do have the capability to send texts...
That's every dumb phone out there, and a far cry from Google cornering some kind of market. Plenty of options available from a variety of vendors and price points.
Maybe go outside, take a walk and get some fresh air for a sec?
It seems like the tail wagging the dog to reason back from a dominant device now being excluded to regulation shouldn't happen.
The cheapest Apple Watch is only $250.. they could obviously sell one at a cheaper point via the Education portal if there was sufficient reason to (like a nationwide ban on cell phones).
Is that relevant to the cellphones-in-school bit?
It doesn't seem unreasonable for a teacher to say "I don't like interacting via email. If you need something from me, tell me."
One teacher in particular still requires hand-written papers to be turned in and recently gave my kid a 0 on an assignment because he lost it. She had to go to his class afterschool and find it.
Someone in authority says a thing must be a way.
You're welcome to plead your case, or take them to court, or try any other redress that you want. But in the end, if you need something from them you're beholden to their requirements and favor.
It's not like they're asking a child to submit a paper at the top of Mt Everest.
If it needs to be in dead tree form, on a desk, then you plan a way to make that happen. Or you argue your case about why you shouldn't be subject to those rules.