The Case for Banning Phones in School

I am generally reluctant to embrace “bans” as a solution to a problem. I think the War on Drugs is/was among the gravest injustices of my lifetime. I believe prohibitions on gambling and sports betting are dumb—who cares if someone wants to put 20 bucks on the Timbers to lose. The current book banning spree conservative culture warriors are pushing is gross and ripped straight out mid-twentieth century European history. I thought the recent congressional hearing and talk about banning Tik Tok was a flashing red light on the US’ slide into both state censorship and stupidity. I could go on.

But given all that, I still think I am down with a ban or more precisely a time, place, and manner restriction on adolescent phone use at school. Because smartphones are a fairly recent innovation, we don't have a ton of long-term research on the topic. But what we do know is bad. Here’s the skinny from the National Library of Medicine:

An observational study showed that spending more than a few hours per week using electronic media correlated negatively with self-reported happiness, life satisfaction and self-esteem, whereas time spent on non-screen activities (in-person social interactions, sports or exercise, print media, homework, religious services, working at a paid job) correlated positively with psychological well-being, among adolescents. Other observational studies have linked spending more than 2 hours a day on social networking sites and personal electronic devices with high rates of suicidality and depressive symptoms among adolescent girls, although youth who sustained high levels of face-to-face socializing were relatively protected against the negative consequences of too much time online.

That part about “in-person social interactions” having a positive impact on well-being is essential. Listen, I am not C. Doleres Tucker and this isn’t a screed about banning kids from the internet. Online connectivity, like cured meats, are gifts from on-high. My life would be fundamentally more poor without the internet and without salami. But I wouldn’t try to subsist on a diet of salami, prosciutto, chorizo, and bacon (and if I did, I hope someone would intervene). That’s basically where I am on this topic. Too many students in too many schools have a diet of laptop screen time in class and social media screen time out of it. Schools should be a place where we encourage prosocial behavior and human interaction. Banning phones on campuses would encourage more of that.

You all felt the same way. Here’s a reply from a reader P.C. that is representative of the feedback that was sent:

FWIW, one of the reasons we chose [redacted: description of school], was because they have a pretty decent social media policy—they have a big board with a bunch of pockets hanging by the door, and on the way into the classroom the kids just drop their phones in.

Boom. Easy peasy for the teachers, now, because there's a very absolute no-mobiles policy, and if you see a kid with their phone in their hands (or on their desk or anything) then it's immediately confiscated and sits in the head's office for at least a day or two (he's notoriously slow to contact parents and arrange a pickup... intentionally) before it goes back.

And somehow, breaking that physical connection kind of leads to the kids not being quite so glued to the damn things even OUTSIDE of the classroom.

Reader R.G. added:

 It's for the social-emotional well-being of these kids. My own [redacted info about the gender of RG’s children] get anxiety about having interactions with people when they have business to take care of. We ALL have that anxiety. But because these kids are always on their phones, normal social interactions become HARD because they don't engage with them that often. The more you interact with others, the easier it gets.

Although some folks get squeamish about it, schools are tools and venues of socialization into a culture's norms. The three decisions that I have made that had the biggest impact on my happiness are marrying Hope, taking the plunge to teach overseas, and getting the hell off Twitter. I am still online. Like, obviously I am not writing this on a typewriter like Cormac McCarthy (who sadly we lost this week) but I think getting students off their phones on campus would in the long run have the same positive impact on students.

Fighting the Klan in the Ozarks and Teacher Bias in Grading

I go through seasons where I get deeply fixated on topics. If you’ve followed me online, you likely know this. In quick succession, during the worst parts of Covid, I went in hard on fantasy and sci-fi books. I read A Song of Ice and Fire (the Thrones books) and Dune (well, the first three—Herbert really lost me at God Emperor of Dune). I also read N.K. Jemisen’s Inheritance Trilogy, and the Foundation books (again, up until they became incoherent). 

As I’ve mentioned on the blog before, I’ve spent much of the last year or so pouring through crime and noir novels. The most recent one I got my hands on is Ozark Boys by Eli Cranor. I’ve talked about Cranor here before. He was a guest on the podcast and is genuinely a chill dude. He cut his teeth reading Elmore Leonard novels and teaches English to incarcerated youth in Arkansas.  I like his vibe and his choice of setting for his novels. I am notably not Southern but I have an affinity for Arkansas. I spent several summers as a kid on a farm in Camden living with my aunts & uncles. They were the siblings of my grandmother who had remained in the state when my mom’s side of the family made their way to Washington. They were all born around the turn of the century: Uncle Walter & Aunt Sal and Uncle Peach & Aunt Willamay. I’m sure I was more of a nuisance than a help but they tolerated me. I helped Uncle Walter pick melons and  load them in the truck to take them to market. I fed hogs and picked & cleaned collards. On Sundays,  I helped make scratch biscuits.  I once snuck a pinch of Aunt Sal’s chewing tobacco and regretted it immediately. I really don’t think anyone knew what to make of me when we went into town and to church. I spoke (still do) at a rapid clip and was verbose in a place where kids were supposed to be in the background. But I remember summers on the farm as clearly as anything from my childhood. I realized recently what a stroke of genius this was by mom—a plane ticket was cheaper than summer camp—and shipping me off allowed her to work more overtime (or turn-up, who knows?) without worrying about my giant headed self getting into trouble.

Eli Cranor's new novel "Ozark Boys" is a banger

Cranor’s first book played in a pretty safe sandbox. It was equal parts Romeo & Juliet and Friday Night Lights, set as a Southern Noir. Ozark Dogs is in the same universe but it feels more ambitious and expansive. In this second novel, the setting moves from the fictitious town of Denton in Eastern Arkansas (closer to Memphis) to the Ozarks. The shift in setting creates a change in character vernacular that highlights the regional diversity of the state.  

Within the first few dozen pages, stark moral lines are drawn between the warring factions—the ordinary toughs who were meant to empathize with, the Fitzjurls, and the meth dealing-Klan-fascists, the Ledfords. Something that’s important to me in a book like this is that when we meet a neo-Confederate or Klansman, they can't be a sympathetic character. IDGAF—that's non-negotiable for me. Cranor passes this test and I am going to try to stretch this one out until SA Cosby’s All Sinners Bleed comes out next month. If I’ve piqued your interest in Ozark Dogs, pick up a copy and share your thoughts as you read it.

Let’s Wax Pedagogic and Get Wonky About Grades - We’re nearing the end of the school year and many of the conversations at school are turning toward next year. It will be my fifth year here in the Gulf. As a school community, we’re moving to a new campus next year. This brings in other changes. They’re building a new daily schedule better suited to the larger campus and UAE’s recently implemented four and a half day work week. We’re also transitioning to a new tool for managing our grades. Each of these: the move, the reworked schedule, and the new grading system, represent an opportunity to rethink the way we do things but education is a profession that is uniquely averse to change. 

The whole point of this week’s newsletter is that I am prone to fixating and as of late I find myself particularly unsatisfied with my grading practices and all the noise and variability inherent to the process. What does an “A”  mean to parents? What minimum skills should a student demonstrate in order to earn a “B” in a given course? What are you communicating when you give a student a “B-” rather than a “C+”? You’ll get as many answers as people you ask. All this ambiguity is compounded by other factors including teacher bias. It doesn’t matter how justice-oriented you are, we all have our internalized prejudices and preferences. Anyone saying otherwise is lying. This video and the study that inspired it made the rounds in the past but they’re worth revisiting. If you accept that bias is real and there’s ample research telling us it is, it’s worth considering how we can remove bias as much as possible from our assessment practices. 

Yesterday afternoon, I recorded a winding interview with Arthur Chiaravalli from Teachers Going Gradeless that I will link to when it comes out. A point I tried to make repeatedly in that conversation is that we should try to control for our personal and cognitive biases as much as possible and we should also lean into professional practices that remove or limit subjectivity in grading. I think we pay lip service to this in the profession but many of us, if asked to defend a given grade, would find ourselves at a loss. There’s a move against calculated grades in the profession that I think is well-intended but takes us further into the subjective and thus introduces more opportunities for bias.

Look, I’m a Greener—the ideal is to nuke grades and move to wholistic narrative evaluations (written by teachers in cooperation with students)—but until that day comes, we should be wary about how we allow bias, prejudice, and the application of selective benefit of the doubt to creep further into assessment.  

I have more to say here but I want to put a pin in this for now. I have a piece coming out on this topic later this month and I will share that and the podcast interview when they come out.

As always, thanks for reading the newsletter. If you'd like to opine just hit reply on the  email. I welcome your feedback (especially if you think I am wrong about something) and if you like the newsletter, share it with somebody you love. 

See you next week!

Demanding a Seat at the Table

In the days of yore, I used to digitally accost education beat writers and other reporters for the way they covered issues impacting schools. Way too often in discussions about education policy, students and teachers are the subjects of the reporting but absent from it. When writing about legal matters, reporters quote attorneys. When writing about medical matters, they cite doctors or medical researchers. But when it comes to education, the voices of practicing teachers are almost always absent. 

Instead, they talk to economists, legislators, even hacks like Liv Finne at allegedly “non-partisan” “think-tanks” (I put both terms in quotes because non-partisan ≠ non ideological and because the amount of thinking that goes on at the Washington Policy Center is debatable). Ideologues get column inches but teachers aren’t worthy. That paradigm never sat well with me and being the (occasional) brute I am, I’d make it my business to call it out.

My Twitter fingers have been quiet for a minute now but I am asking you to call this nonsense out whenever you see it

You’ll never get what you don’t ask for—each one of those resulted in a response from the publication. The Seattle Times story about the Tacoma strike was updated to include quotes from local teachers; Crosscut added State Teacher of the Year, Lyon Terry, to the panel at their event; The Times later published my op-ed offering a differing perspective about pending teacher evaluation legislation.

If I took the time to go for people’s necks about excluding teacher voices in the past, it makes sense to give flowers when they’re due today. Anne Helen Petersen, wrote this week about the burden of school spirit days and themed dress weeks/months in elementary schools. As a teacher in high school much of this was (thankfully) foreign to me. I don’t have a dog in the fight—I can’t be bothered with dressing up for Halloween, forget about the “100th day of school” or “Bling in the Holidays.” It all  sounds exhausting and a distraction from the business at hand. But I’m bringing this up to highlight how Helen Petersen covered the issue. In setting up her story she wrote the following:

Still, I knew my annoyance was missing some vertical and horizontal contextualization…. I also knew that these days were meant to engender community, infuse the school day with some level of joy, and incentivize attendance — all things most schools are desperate for, particularly post-Covid shutdowns….

For today’s post, I asked educators to offer that context. The sampling you’ll find below comes from 150 responses from all corners of the country, in all types of schools, at all different levels, and with different levels of animus or apathy towards these days.

Look how easy that was: she saw an issue in schools that she knew was fraught in some circles. She sought input and context from educators and then shared their stories. If we can do this when it comes to themed dress days, then we can do it around compensation, evals, authoritarian book bans, and the myriad other issues facing schools. It’s a matter of taking the time and valuing teacher voices.

Publications and individual journalists respond to pressure. It’s often an oversight, rather than malice. If you find yourself reading a story about schools but ignoring the people who work in them, I encourage you to call it out.