New York City Backs Off School Cell Phone Ban, Though Some Officials Still See Cellular Tech As The Worst Sort Of Foul Devilry

from the my-cell-phone-made-me-do-it dept

Wed, Jan 14th 2015 1:35pm — Karl Bode

Roughly nine years ago, then New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg decided to impose an outright ban on cell phones in city schools, proclaiming that the devices were both a distraction and a safety issue (the latter never really being explained coherently). The ban, of course, wasn't well-received by parents who were suddenly unable to reach their children, nor was it well-received by students who were just truly entering the smartphone era. To make things worse, the city developed a revenue stream whereby students could store their phones outside of school (in "Pure Loyalty Electronic Device Storage" vans, to be precise) -- for $1 per day.

Fast forward nearly a decade and Mayor de Blasio -- the first New York City Mayor in city history to have a child in public school while in office -- has decided to do away with the ban. In what seems like a far more sensible and streamlined policy decision, it will now be up to individual schools to enact and enforce their own cell phone policies. That's not to everybody's liking; some school officials still apparently see cell phones as foul devilry that somehow magically amplify all of the very worst aspects of human behavior:

"But the phones, which would be regulated on a school-by-school basis, can pose numerous problems. Some principals, particularly those of schools with high rates of behavioral problems, have privately said they oppose lifting the ban. They worry about the potential for cheating and the risk of theft. When fights break out, they say, students with cellphones in their pockets can summon a much larger crowd."

That's right, because cheating, theft and fights are the sort of things that just don't normally happen in the Utopian New York City public school district. One anonymous principal agrees, similarly telling the Times that allowing cell phones means not only more theft (again, because nothing valuable normally gets stolen in schools), but oddly will also result in an increase in "staged fights" for the benefit of social media:

"A principal of a high school with metal detectors, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk publicly on the matter, said he was extremely disappointed with the decision. “This increases the potential for incidents,” he said, adding that iPhones make appealing targets for theft, which would be recorded as a major incident on a student’s record. "Kids are going to stage fights so they can put up posts on social media," he said."

Staged fights? How about oh, just making them stop fighting (or pretending to fight) like we used to do way back in the old-timey times? Or does cellular radiation now somehow magically mutate child DNA empowering them with superhuman strength, preternatural speed and omniscience? Banning cellular tech completely because somebody might video a fight doesn't seem like much of an argument, especially in light of the benefits cell phones bring in moments of disaster or emergency, something the next decade's sure to hold no shortage of.

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Filed Under: ban, bill de blasio, mobile phones, new york city, schools

45 Comments

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Sheogorath (profile), 14 Jan 2015 @ 1:58pm

The fact is that students will attack others whether or not they're filming it, but if they can and the resulting film winds up on YouTube, it'll be a lot easier to detect and punish these felonies. Simples!
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Anonymous Coward, 14 Jan 2015 @ 2:00pm

So how do you tell the difference between a staged fight and a bully determined to have a fight? Look the same to me. So NYC school departments are saying they have gotten rid of all the bullies? Right.
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Karl Bode (profile), 14 Jan 2015 @ 2:15pm

Re:
I wish I had thought of that argument. :)
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Chris Brand, 14 Jan 2015 @ 2:16pm

Translated quote
One Principal said he was extremely disappointed with the decision - "by leaving it up to individual schools, the mayor is making it very difficult for me to pass the blame on to somebody else if something bad happens as a result of whatever policy I enact at my school"
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jupiterkansas (profile), 14 Jan 2015 @ 2:22pm

If a student can cheat with a cellphone, then perhaps what you're teaching isn't really useful anyway since anyone with a phone can look it up. We need to revise learning in an age when simple information is so readily available so that people know how to make creative and beneficial use of that information. That's where the future lies.

But I believe the best way to fix public schools is for public officials to enroll their kids in public schools - and join the PTA. Kudos to the mayor for that.
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PRMan, 14 Jan 2015 @ 2:30pm

Re:
Yes. At the middle school my kids went to, they got rid of bullying by blocking the students from the Administrative offices by placing teachers at the doors.

Bullying complaints went way down, so it must be working, right?
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Laura, 14 Jan 2015 @ 2:32pm

I CAN'T WIN.
Being a public school principal is like being a step-parent. If the kids turn out well, it was despite you. If they turn out bad, it was because of you.
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limbodog (profile), 14 Jan 2015 @ 2:34pm

They must be worried about the mobile phone guns that the police keep telling us about.
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Anonymous Coward, 14 Jan 2015 @ 3:06pm

If parents need to be in contact with their kids they can call the front office and get the message to the student or have the student come to the office to talk on the phone.

Banning cell phones is best left to the individual schools. If there is a problem with distractions, cheating, theft, etc. the Principal of the school is in a better position to implement a solution to the problem than a blanket ban by the city.
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John Fenderson (profile), 14 Jan 2015 @ 3:17pm

Re: I CAN'T WIN.
Parents who think this way are a real problem. They should remember one of the harsh truths about parents (symbolic or otherwise): parents tend to take both too much credit and too much blame for how their children turn out. Outside of being abusive, parents have much less of an effect on who their children become than they think.
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Anonymous Coward, 14 Jan 2015 @ 3:21pm

Mayor Bloomberg never had any business in the first place creating rules for public education. Mayor in my town would never cross that barrier for any reason. Mayor should have nothing to do with the education system in the first place.
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Jeffrey Nonken (profile), 14 Jan 2015 @ 4:37pm

Yes, it's devilry...
because it could lead to dancing.
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Anonymous Coward, 14 Jan 2015 @ 5:05pm

Am I the only person here that thinks ringing phones in the middle of lectures, business meetings, tel-conferences, et al is not only rude but inappropriate? I'm not in favor of a flat out ban, but teaching children manners about technology will go a long way to better our future and their future in the real workspace. I try to balance out cheating, because I'm not sure whether real world research vs I can't add 2+2 because the computers are down is a legitimate excuse either way, as it seems that SATs are now allowing calculators. Knowing the flower references in Genji Monogatari and their symbolic meanings vs that the only Fibonacci twin primes are 3, 5 and 13 are vastly different for the fields of study. Sadly, I'm just a math and nippon geek that works in networking, so neither really matter to me irl. But the point remains, what is core knowledge that everyone needs and what is something you should just look up?
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KRA, 14 Jan 2015 @ 5:16pm

Re:
If a student can cheat with a cellphone, then perhaps what you're teaching isn't really useful anyway since anyone with a phone can look it up.

The cheating is more along the lines of the period 3 kid sending a picture of the test to a period 7 kid who will be taking it later in the day.
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pixelpusher220 (profile), 14 Jan 2015 @ 5:16pm

Re:
my thought was "When fights break out students with cellphones in their pockets can summon a much larger crowd"

...or a teacher/adult?
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Anonymous Coward, 14 Jan 2015 @ 6:07pm

Cellphones in schools is a health and safety issue. If there's an armed gunman in the school, kids need to be able to dial 911 to call for help. Shame on school officials for trying to make kids less safe and secure.
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Anonymous Coward, 14 Jan 2015 @ 7:01pm

Re:
I know right. I mean back in the dark ages of the last few millennia before cell phones came along in the early aughts schools were a flat-out war-zone and nobody had the ability to call for help. Kids and teacher died by the thousands, and all seemed lost.

But now, thanks to cell phones school shootings and other *ruckusi have not only gone way way down, but those that perpetrate them have become far less effective at achieving their goals.

*Not sure what the plural of ruckus is, so i'll go with ruckusi.
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dàvep, 14 Jan 2015 @ 7:37pm

Theft is a real problem in NYC schools. There aren't too many things kid carry that are worth $600+.
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Sheogorath (profile), 14 Jan 2015 @ 7:43pm

Re: Re:
That's what airplane mode is for...
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Anonymous Coward, 14 Jan 2015 @ 8:08pm

So, all the parent has to do is tell the school they are going to allow their children to have a cell phone in school anyway, to hell with the rules.

When I used to chat on CB years ago, there was one woman on their who let her sons carry handeld CBs to school, despite the rules, becuase she wanted them to be able to get a hold of her if they had to and to hell with the rules
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Anonymous Coward, 14 Jan 2015 @ 11:15pm

Re: Re:
Which is why you have multiple versions of the test, and don't grade any of them until all students have been tested.

This is not a new issue; we've been dealing with these foms of cheating for far longer than cellphones have existed.
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Anonymous Coward, 15 Jan 2015 @ 6:24am

allowing cell phones means not only more theft (again, because nothing valuable normally gets stolen in schools)
What other valuable thing would a child normally be carrying, apart from maybe a few bucks in lunch money?
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John Fenderson (profile), 15 Jan 2015 @ 7:58am

Re:
"what is core knowledge that everyone needs and what is something you should just look up?"

In my opinion, core knowledge is about how to think, how things work, how to solve problems, etc. Established facts and figures can always be looked up. The important thing is that people know what to do with those facts and what facts they need.
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John Fenderson (profile), 15 Jan 2015 @ 7:59am

Re:
"If there's an armed gunman in the school, kids need to be able to dial 911 to call for help."

Not really. They just need to know how to pull a fire alarm.
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John Fenderson (profile), 15 Jan 2015 @ 8:00am

Re:
Laptops.
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Anonymous Coward, 15 Jan 2015 @ 8:22am

Re:
Sneakers. The kids are wearing shoes that cost more than a cellphone or laptop ;)
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nasch (profile), 15 Jan 2015 @ 8:43am

Re:
Theft is a real problem in NYC schools. There aren't too many things kid carry that are worth $600+.

That is their (or their parents') choice. Cell phones can be had for $30 or less if they're worried about theft.
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Josh in CharlotteNC (profile), 15 Jan 2015 @ 9:36am

Re: Re: I CAN'T WIN.
Gotta disagree here. Parents have a huge effect on who their children become. The issue is that most of the direct conscious decisions parents make only have a small effect. Yes, much of the behavior kids learn is from their environment and community - but remember that the people those kids are around the most during their development are their parents.

It's not that your kid turned out ok *because* you took him to a museum or helped him with his homework - but that *you're the type of person* that would want to take your kid to a museum and help him with his homework that matters more, because its the type that impacts all the things you do.
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Anonymous Coward, 15 Jan 2015 @ 9:40am

Is this really the best Techdirt can do with this?
This is a disappointingly slanted article that reads more like a diatribe than a well-reasoned analysis. Sort of like that complaint filed re: the Ferguson grand jury process as just revealed by...Techdirt.
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John Fenderson (profile), 15 Jan 2015 @ 9:50am

Re: Re: Re: I CAN'T WIN.
Yes, that may be the case. However, there are far, far too many cases of kids being raised by terrible parents and turning out awesome as well as kids raised by great parents turning out to be terrible for me to put a lot of weight on parental actions. Again, excluding cases of abuse (physical or otherwise).

I think the truth is that human development is enormously complex and it's the next best thing to impossible to know how much of an effect any particular influence has on children. Too many variables are involved, including the baseline personality of the child. That's why I don't claim that parents have little or no effect, but that parents usually think the effect they have is greater than is the usually the case.

"but remember that the people those kids are around the most during their development are their parents."

This is not usually true. The people most young school aged children interact with the most are their friends and schoolmates.
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jupiterkansas (profile), 15 Jan 2015 @ 10:03am

Re: Re:
I can think of a dozen ways to fix this problem that don't involve banning phones.
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nasch (profile), 15 Jan 2015 @ 10:20am

Re: Re: Re: Re: I CAN'T WIN.
However, there are far, far too many cases of kids being raised by terrible parents and turning out awesome as well as kids raised by great parents turning out to be terrible for me to put a lot of weight on parental actions.

Be careful with drawing conclusions like that. Among all the people you know or have ever learned anything about, there are bound to be many who are exceptions to whatever the rule is, just because of normal variance. If 80% of people with "good" parents turn out "good" and vice-versa, that's still a lot of people who turn out the opposite way, more than enough to muddy the picture. Yet 80% would be way above the margin for a significant effect.
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nasch (profile), 15 Jan 2015 @ 10:27am

Re: Re: Re:
I can think of a dozen ways to fix this problem that don't involve banning phones.

1. smash the cameras on all students' phones
2. give only vampire tests that don't show up in photos
3. ban friends
4. automatic F on all tests after the first period
5. give out all answers ahead of time to level the playing field
6. give the test to everyone at the same time (this may require a classroom that is larger on the inside)
7. ban cell phone batteries
8. cut off students' fingers after the test
9. oral exams only
10. pass out marijuana at the end of the test - then students will be too high to bother cheating

Well I did most of the work, maybe you can come up with a couple more.
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John Fenderson (profile), 15 Jan 2015 @ 11:09am

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: I CAN'T WIN.
Yes, I agree. Your criticism is well founded. I'll even offer another one: sampling bias on my part.

Again, I'm not saying that parents have no, or an insignificant effect. I think parents have a great deal of effect. I'm just saying that most parents overestimate the amount of effect they have.
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Uriel-238 (profile), 15 Jan 2015 @ 11:22am

And tests are still meaningful how?
In the old days, when the state of the art of cheating was shoulder-surfing, teachers merely had different versions of the test. They could have different versions across periods, and even, with today's technology, have different versions for each student.

But, and I ask this as someone who couldn't fill out a scan-tron with a #2 pencil to save my life, exactly what is the purpose of standardized tests, except to determine what students are good at taking tests?

Because we've long since determined that they don't show which students learned the material. And given that grades often depend more on a student's relationship with the teacher than anything to do with the material, it's frustrating and disappointing that we're still using the lecture / lab model of academics anyway.
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Uriel-238 (profile), 15 Jan 2015 @ 11:28am

There are no good police officers either.
So far all I've seen of school systems is the same kind of corruption / abuse problems that we see in hospitals and prisons.

These days, if you are endorsing the system we have, you are endorsing tolerance of the continued abuse. You're part of the problem.

Until the our school systems go through drastic reform, and modernize to adapt to the different ways that students learn, and are prevented from being an institutionalized abuse system where might or authority preys openly on the meek, you're part of the problem for participating in it.

I suggest considering a different career, or finding a better vector by which to enrich children's lives, because as things are, they are famished for enrichment.
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Uriel-238 (profile), 15 Jan 2015 @ 11:52am

There's also the matter that parents are also a product.
As the embittered 70s / 80s child of neglegent parents I've had to come to terms with the truth that they were both expected to work as well as parent, and that exhausted, overworked adults make for grouchy, disinvested parents, and that here in the United States, this has been an increasingly accepted norm.

These days, workers are expected to work for less, commute futher, pay more into their work-related expenses, skip lunches and work odd hours, holidays and overtime with no additional compensation. In the service industries.

A given mid-twenties single mother in California works two jobs, about sixty hours a week in order to provide food and shelter. How much quality mom time do we think her toddler gets?
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Uriel-238 (profile), 15 Jan 2015 @ 12:01pm

Core Knowledge
As a programmer, I realized it was more important to know that a think could be done, rather than how to do it. You can always look up the how.

There are caveats, of course, especially if you want your process to be accomplished within a given time frame. 3D projections of physics simulations with countless triangles and post-render processes created real-time at sixty frames-per-second tends to require some awareness of the how just to know what your constraints are.

But generally, it's less important to know one of the several proofs of the pythagorean theorem than it is to know that it can be proven, and eligantly.
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Uriel-238 (profile), 15 Jan 2015 @ 12:06pm

Cellphones are a menace to School faculty the samw way they are to police
When a teacher is being abusive or beligerent, a student can video the event and post it online, allowing all the world to see the sort of thing that goes on unchallenged within schools.

Some of these can be found on YouTube, usually taken by clandestine phones.

If you can effectively remove cellphones from school grounds, then the school's fine reputation as well as that of its faculty, is preserved.

Keeping up appearances.
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Anonymous Coward, 15 Jan 2015 @ 3:38pm

Re:
Use a cell phone jammer. I had a homemade one I used in college to silence one annoying cellphone from another who also needed it for her work, but it was annoying when it rang in the classroom, so I built my own homemade jammer, and that took care of the problem, and she never had any clue her cell phone was being jammed.

Just build your own jammer. I did that back in college to silence annoying cellphones. I kept it hidden in my backpack, and other students never knew their phones were being jammed.
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nasch (profile), 15 Jan 2015 @ 5:06pm

Re: Re:
Use a cell phone jammer.

Isn't that illegal?
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KRA, 15 Jan 2015 @ 5:40pm

Re: Cellphones are a menace to School faculty the samw way they are to police
LOL I remember when someone said they were going to explain cyberbaiting to the staff. I was thinking they meant cyberbating and couldn't understand why we'd get professional development on that.
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Ninja (profile), 16 Jan 2015 @ 3:49am

I know it has been commented but it can't be emphasized enough:

A politician using stuff provided by the Government to the citizenry?! Something snapped in my brain, this must be some time-space anomaly.
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John Fenderson (profile), 16 Jan 2015 @ 8:43am

Re: Re: Re:
Yes, very.
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mobile4price, 28 Jan 2015 @ 8:41pm

ban on mobile phone
government should ban on mobile phone usage on school
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