That’s certainly true but at the same time, when I was a kid in the early 90s, we watched TV but cartoons ended (we did not have cable or a computer). I came home from school, ate a snack, watched TV for about an hour with a friend, cartoons were over and we went outside. With the internet and YouTube etc. you’re never “done”

That's true, the arguments were also made for television, movies, radio, and fiction books. However, during the times of movies, television, radio, and written books being introduced, the trend line of student performance seemed to be going upward. It now seems to be trending downward. It's harder to convincingly make the argument that cell phones are no worse than TVs when student performance was increasing during the TV era and is decreasing during the smartphone era. Even if the correlation is totally spurious, it's an uphill climb to ignore it.

Yeah, but were those coupled with an enormous, precipitous reversion in literacy rates?

yes, and none of those things are just available to you while you're also learning in the classroom. no school should allow phones in the classroom.

Yes and it was a fair argument then, too. It's likely only a matter of degree of distraction.

And? Maybe those things had an impact also? And maybe this is the last straw our backs can bear?

Like if you take a bunch of steps running from a road to the edge of a cliff, only after the last one over the edge do you experience all the problems