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Comment by NDlurker | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand what the controversy is in the US about banning phones in schools. I graduated highschool in the mid 2000s and cell phones were just starting to gain adoption in my town in the last couple years I was in school. I don't recall anyone using a phone in class, but Game Boys were definitely not allowed. I was surprised when I found out that kids were regularly on their phones in class. Why was that ever allowed? Did it get too hard to enforce and they gave up on it until recently?

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I've heard a big problem is the parents - they want to be able to communicate with their kids while they are in school, so many parents oppose phone bans.

a large florida school district banned cell phones in schools, and after two years, the total benefit that was measured to be likely caused by this was +0.9 percentiles on their standardized achievement test.

in comparison, if you study ONE HOUR for the SAT, you gain approximately 0.9 percentiles on the test.

how do dozens if not low hundreds of hours of time you are not spending on your phone at school translate to only the same benefit as doing ONE hour of studying? well, if there is no mechanism, then yeah, that's what happens.

so why was it ever allowed? either tests are severely limited in what they measure, or the impact of cell phones on education is actually quite small. it cannot be both.

Why was it allowed in the first place because why was it treated any different than other distractions in the classroom?

i don't know if you've been in an american classroom lately but the typical experience is that they're not that strict.

> in comparison, if you study ONE HOUR for the SAT, you gain approximately 0.9 percentiles on the test.

[citation needed]

Schooling is more than just exams, I'm sorry. There is no need for a cell phone in a classroom.

Just ignoring the flimsy SAT metric, there's something most aren't considering in these sort of data. Cell phones enable and are fairly widely used for all sorts of cheating. Banning them gets rid of that, and so if there was no positive effect from a phone ban you'd actually probably expect a slight decrease on scores because of this effect.

So the fact that basically every school region that bans phones is seeing marginal to moderate gains is just huge. And as others have mentioned, test scores are but one aspect of this. Breaks where kids are playing and interacting more regularly are a million times better than ones where everybody whips out their screen and turns into a zombie.

A "million times better," or 0.9 percentiles better? You have no idea.

Of course I don't want kids to be distracted in school. I just think that if things were as easy as a ban, or some other kind of coercion, education would be easy.

You don't need to quantify things like socialization and real life interaction to know it's vastly better than not, and that's not even touching on the academic side of things where you are seeing clear quantifiable differences. Ultimately, education is easy. A century+ ago this [1] was a college admittance exam, which students were expected to be able to pass, and the overwhelming majority did.

It's not like we're making incremental progress over time. Education has become a dumpster fire, and it's getting worse. The solution is simple - stop changing stuff, and just go back to classical education methods that did work, phenomenally. Tech is clearly having detrimental effects on education, so get rid of it in the classroom. Starting with phones there is a mind bogglingly obvious low bar.

[1] - https://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/education/harvard...

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