However this isn't the only problem. They also force us to pay monthly for iPads with wonky ass Logitech cases to be issued on which they do everything on Google classroom.
Google Classroom is an abhorrently bad bit of software on an iPad. It's just horrible in every possible way. Clunky, interface sucks, slow, unreliable.
Then they give detentions when children can't submit work, some auth issue means the entire device goes down the toilet for two days, documents won't open because the staff use Office instead, they keyboard case craps out and you can't type with anything but the screen, the staff forget to submit the work until an hour before it's due, the entire school wifi network is down for a week and they have no backup.
They should ban that too. Technology MUST be fit for purpose in a classroom and most of it isn't.
Go back to paper for everything. Work, journals, timetables, the lot. And the teachers can use whatever to drive projectors in the classroom.
My intent isn't to trick anybody with hard questions, but rather to force the knowledge through their head out through their hand, then back through their eyes and through their hand again.
Next semester I'm doing in-person paper readings, where the first 20 minutes of the class are reading a paper I print out and hand to them, we discuss the paper in class, then they submit their annotated papers to me for a participation grade.
An irony of the AI era.
1:1 programs are a waste of money and time. Students don't need continuous access to a computer. Shared computer labs with a set goal for the time will always have better outcomes.
Kids frankly aren't learning more today with all this tech in the classroom than they were twenty years ago with paper and whiteboards, and the metrics prove it.
Absolutely agree.
It’s just bad luck that your kid is in a school that can’t get it right.
My 16yo kid’s (state) school is far from perfect but the school provided laptop works well, is reasonably locked down and policed, and is fixed or swapped out quickly if there is a problem. Sure we have to contribute towards it but we can (and we pay extra to help cover the cost for someone who isn’t able to pay for it). There are no similar tales of broken WiFi, unavailable servers or whatnot.
They went through some problems where there were multiple systems in use and the kids regularly got confused about where they had to check for homework, with different teachers for the same subject using different systems, but that was resolved eventually.
Phones are officially banned but enforcement is sometimes sporadic. If they do take the piss with it then it gets confiscated and a parent has to come in to get it released (the school has some generic Nokias to hand out at the end of the day if the kid has to have some way of being in contact). That deals with the majority of it.
They seem to have got the balance mostly right in terms of doing enough to keep the lessons mostly distraction free, and also reducing access to keep FOMO down (if hardly anyone has access to their phone during the school day then they, as a group, don’t think they are missing out on much).
Not a fan of them going back to paper for everything, but 100% on screens isn’t good either, especially as the exams are pretty much all paper based.
That's the only bummer here. I do agree with this policy, but no one voted for it. The governor just said "you're going to do this".
Yes, yes, I know - people elected the governor. But this sort of policy seems like something that should require legislative approval, not just one person deciding the whole state must do something.
For every time something good comes of that kind of behavior, there's 10 times when it's a disaster.
My daughter got a 0/20 for a test that she sat and did. Now she's not a complete idiot so this was suspicious. I asked about it and they said that it was likely that she didn't get any questions right. I asked for them to provide me with a copy of the exam paper so I could independently verify that.
Magically she got a 17/20 grade updated but no paper appeared. I pushed it further and was told it was resolved. I raised a formal complaint immediately and they did a full investigation. The conclusion was there was a defect in the system used for tracking progress and it was losing information imported from the exam system. They had to manually enter over 200 student papers again due to this.
No one had noticed or actioned it or saw it was a serious issue until I raised a formal complaint.
When technology is in the loop it's very difficult for anyone to take personal accountability as demonstrated.
We had some student portal thing online for submitting assignments, MS Office was "required", but the portal was weird and it was right after the .doc/.docx fiasco so everything related to office was a shitshow. Some of our profs simply gave up on the blessed tech stack, issues assignments as Google Docs files, and had us submit assignments through Google Docs. So much easier. I know Google gets a bad rep because of weird perceptions about surveillance, but no one does cloud syncing better. And because most of their software is browser based, it does basically "just work".
Writer’s org’s founders include Meta, among many others: https://itif.org/our-supporters/
I’m no expert here, so leaving this as a datapoint
The rollout of LTE data and more-modern smartphones + social media during that area was a nuclear bomb on teenagers's ability to focus in hindsight. I can distinctly remember the divide between dumb phones/ipods/early smart phones with slow data, and modern social media + fast cellular data to get around school network bans. Things went from the occasional student thinking they were clever with a wired headphone down their sleeve to near constant distraction very rapidly.
The "innovation" has been basic leadership -- setting policies at the school/district and in this case state level. Consistent expectations make it easier for students to follow the policy. Some schools have gone as far as physically locking phones away for the day, though reading the article it sounds like that's not what Oregon is doing.
The local schools I'm familiar with allowed phones in backpacks, but if you got caught using it during class there were consequences.
Enforcement was never perfect. Some teachers didn't care, some students were sneaky enough to not get caught. Yet the consequences seemed to keep the kids afraid of using phones for the most part (from what I've been told, obviously I wasn't sitting with them in class).
Some of these articles are written like entire classrooms were just scrolling their phones during class? I don't get it. Was there just a total lack of enforcement?
Honestly, get the tech out of classrooms. A few 8 bit machines that can run LOGO are far more genuinely educational than all the gunk they have today.
Pushing the ban to the state level acknowledges the broad inability of district level leadership to self-police these problems.
Any ban above school level is silly.
> The kids also weighed in on the debate around the extent of the ban. The two options bandied in Salem were a “bell-to-bell” policy or just inside classrooms. The latter would allow kids to use their phones during passing period and lunch. Several advocated for that change. That mirrored the debate within the Oregon legislature. It ultimately led to a stalemate and the need for Gov. Kotek’s executive ruling.
It sounds like the legislature broadly agreed on the ban, but couldn’t agree on a couple final details. Insofar as an executive is useful, that’s the case for it: calling the shot in the face of several good (or bad!) options but no clear winner.
I think the right approach is finding teaching techniques that still work when every human has all the world's info at their finger tips 24/7.
At some point, an uninterruptible, 24/7 live connection to the rest of the world is inevitable.
I'm not convinced a human teacher is a required part of this.
State schools cannot charge for essential equipment needed for the curriculum. Some schools are taking the p. If all parents told them to do one they would have no leg to stand on, and it is rather scandalous that nothing is done to stop this at Council and government level (they probably prefer to turn a blind eye rather than footing the bill).
Laws like this give the school cover to confiscate the phones and say "talk to your congressperson if this bothers you, my hands are tied".
I then let a teacher use it because he was frustrated half of his search results would get blocked. From there, it spread like wildfire. Eventually they blocked it and from then on the IT guy would give me a side eye whenever we crossed paths.
Anyways, I can only imagine the clever ways kids get around things now. If it’s not per device, all a kid would need is a mobile hotspot to be king.
I don't think that explains anything.
We're entering pretty substantial numbers of parents who grew up or at least spent their entire adult lives with cell phones and the expectation of constant communication. In fact, from my anecdotal experience, the mid-older millennial cohort is the worst at expecting immediate replies at all hours to any form of communication be it social or work.
One of the things I realize I'm grateful for in hindsight is parents who didn't grow up with that, and had no problem calling the front desk of the school if there was a legitimate emergency that needed to involve pulling me out of school. And it turns out for anything short of that, the news could wait until 4PM.
That seems like one of the easiest excuses for kids to make that is hard to argue against.
I decided to sidestep the whole game and run my own proxy at home. I didn't have enough bandwidth for multiple users, so it was just me. I don't think IT ever caught on.
The old Nokia in school wasn't a problem. You get in trouble for playing snake. The iphone 1 wasn't really a problem. There weren't that many, and it served as a calendar.
But year after year, release after release, the industry deliberately loaded more and more addictive machinery, pushed more and more boundaries, until it's beyond unacceptable.
As an aside, it's amazing how hard it is to turn the modern phone into a no-nonsense tool, and I'm an adult with self-control, a deep understanding of dark patterns, and a fully-functioning brain after 3 cups of coffee.
This will have limited impact because, at some point shortly after that, the moon will hatch and the lunar dragons will consume our satellite infrastructure, disabling all comm devices.
You can't make policy now based on nebulous ideas about possible futures, particularly not when those ideas aren't based on any reasonable inference.
"I dunno Mom, at the start of 4th hour I put my iPhone in the basket Mrs. Wormwood makes everyone drop their phones in, and when I got it back after class the screen had this big crack in it. It wasn't because I dropped it in 3rd hour in Mr. Lockjaw's PE class while walking and checking Instagram, nuh uh. Can you get me the iPhone 17 Pro Max instead of the iPhone 17e this time?"
And then at conferences (or worse, at the PTA meeting or school board meeting) Mrs. Wormwood is going to hear from Mom how she broke Johnny's phone and cost them $1100.
Now it's state law. It's not Mrs. Wormwood's decision to confiscate phones from students, preventing little Johnny from texting Mama when there's a lockdown, it's the law and her hands are tied.
Some schools may do things differently, but it seems like the one highlighted in the article allows the kids to keep phone in their backpacks: "Rather than use pouches or lockers, students are allowed to keep their phones safely stored in their backpacks"
I didn't see anything in the article or the text of the EO about confiscation. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1R5kfyMYsA6cg3VQKutUxLTIGVpI...
Parents calling their kids in class isn't as rare as you might think...
Even when I was in high school "I was responding to my mom" was the go-to excuse when caught using a cell phone. I had one teacher who would actually read what was on the screen (this was before locking your phone was common and probably lawsuit material today, but things were different) and call kids out when they were lying. The threat of having a teacher read your text messages was enough to put an end to cell phone usage in class.
It’s proven very useful a few times where a few ND-unaware teachers have confiscated phones that the ND kids use to help them focus.
They don’t get it to use it whenever they want but there are some situations where they are allowed to use it and where having a phone is tricky given the lack of trust some teachers have.
Old school technology fallbacks are sometimes useful. Who knew.
There needs to be a politics of rejection, because I an assure you 95% of humanity does not want a device implanted in their skull where communication sent to you is unblockable.
SV has clearly cooked a generation of engineers that think working on ad surveillance tech is the pinnacle of humanity and not just another American moral failing that is wrecking the world while a select few profit off it.
Not to mention we have plenty of studies that show even a silent phone sitting quietly in your pocket or on your desk can be an attention drain, as you're subconsciously waiting for a notification to go off.
I'm amazed it took this long for the schools to finally ban the damn things.
All I actually mean is I'm sure that soon there will be some cell phone equiv tech that teachers won't be able to ban/control without scanning their entire bodies every day for RF signals.
My only disagreement is that bans on cellphone-like tech will be at all enforceable in the near future.
Frankly, I believe the world would be a better place if we did a lot more banning of smartphones for adults, too. They are like crack.
It's not up to the teachers' discretion in the schools near me.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/25/style/yondr-pouch-school-...
Consider that lots of these people have kids, and when they do, they tend to have a very friend-like relationship with them. Like, they aren't just magically better at this stuff when it's their kid.
These situations are a source of a great deal of this behavior, and the "I can't contact my kid-friend!" anxiety.
For ~$60 you get a device that can play every type of audio file and has better sound quality than your cellphone + streamer combo.
I've been reading more about Chinese hardware and if you've been sleeping on it there are a lot of great Chinese consumer products that are both extremely high quality + very cheap.
Turns out when you have tens of millions of engineers they pump out banger after banger. Also always hilarious, in an enduring way, finding the factory engineers engaging with consumers on random forums that take their feedback seriously.
There was plenty of uncertainty and debate about the effectiveness of a cell phone ban decreed by executive order last summer.
But at least in Estacada, the policy has earned two thumbs up, including approval from a “grumpy old teacher.”
Jeff Mellema is a language arts teacher at Estacada High School. He has worked in the building for 24 years, and he said the new policy that prohibits students from using their phones during the day has been a breath of fresh air.
“There is so much better discourse in my classroom, be it personal or academic,” Mellema said. “Students can’t avoid those conversations anymore with their phones.”
“This ban has brought joy back to this old, grumpy teacher,” he added with a smile.
That is the kind of feedback Gov. Tina Kotek was hoping for as she visited Estacada High School on Wednesday afternoon, March 18. Her goal was to visit classrooms, speak with administrators, and meet with students one-on-one to hear about the effectiveness of her phone policy.
“I knew when I put out the order, not everyone would love it from day one,” Gov. Kotek said. “I appreciate all the feedback today.”
“You have an amazing school. Go Rangers,” she added with a smile.
For years, educators had reported that cell phones were disruptive in classrooms and hindered effective teaching. Research supported those anecdotal claims, showing that phones undermine students’ ability to focus, even when they are just sitting on the desk, unused.
So the governor issued her executive order prohibiting cell phone use by students during the school day in Oregon’s K-12 public schools. To help implement the ban, her office worked with the Oregon Department of Education to share model policies for schools that already have prohibitions in place, as well as guidance on implementation flexibility.
“We are grateful to have Governor Kotek here today to see with her own eyes the positive effect this has had,” said Estacada Superintendent Ryan Carpenter. “We can now demand this expectation for our students’ well-being and success.”
Since that order was issued, every single public school district in Oregon is in compliance with the band.
“The goal is for every student to have the best opportunity to be successful,” Kotek said. “They need to know how to talk to people, learn, and go out into the world.”
The governor visited two classrooms during her trip to Estacada High — Mr. Schaenman’s history class and Mrs. Hannet’s algebra class. Gov. Kotek assured the kids that she still uses algebra in her day-to-day life, no matter how unlikely that may seem to the youngsters.
In the classrooms, she was able to take a straw poll around the cell phone ban and then get specific, direct feedback from the kids.
Overall, it was positive. The Rangers said they noticed changes in how they interact with teachers and peers. They don’t feel that “siren’s song” tug of their phones as often, and the changes are bleeding into everyday life as well — think less reminders to put phones away during family dinners. Phones also led to issues around bullying and online toxicity during the school day.
There are some hiccups. The students spoke about difficulties in tracking busy schedules. Many athletes relied on their phones for practice times and locations. Some advanced placement kids said the overzealous programs monitoring school laptops blocked access to needed resources for studying/researching schoolwork. There is even a strange quirk with school-provided tech that prevents them from accessing their calculators.
“Maybe the filters are too strong right now,” Gov. Kotek said. “That is why we are working with the districts to best implement the policy.”
The kids also weighed in on the debate around the extent of the ban. The two options bandied in Salem were a “bell-to-bell” policy or just inside classrooms. The latter would allow kids to use their phones during passing period and lunch. Several advocated for that change.
That mirrored the debate within the Oregon legislature. It ultimately led to a stalemate and the need for Gov. Kotek’s executive ruling.
“When you make a decision like this, you don’t know how it will ultimately work,” Kotek told the students. “I appreciate you adapting to the situation and making it work for you.”
While things could change in the future, the governor is pleased with the early results. The phone ban is here to stay.
Estacada School District is reveling in its status of public school “Golden Child.”
The visit from the governor is the latest feather in the cap of the rural, small district. In 2025, Estacada High had a 92.5% graduation rate. That is a stunning turnaround from a record-low of 38.5% in 2015. The district credits policies aimed at retaining talented teachers and empowering students to take a more active role in their learning.
“We are proud of these results,” Carpenter said. “This is a reflection and reward for a ton of hard work. This district literally changed its stars to be seen as a true academic powerhouse in Oregon.”
That mindset continues with the cell phone ban. Like many others, Estacada had a version of this in place before the official edict. But with the governor’s push, it empowered administrators and teachers to learn fully embrace the ban.
“Any policy is only as good as the teachers who enforce it,” Carpenter said.
In crafting its policy, Estacada incorporated feedback from parents. That led to some key decisions around the cell phone ban. Rather than use pouches or lockers, students are allowed to keep their phones safely stored in their backpacks. That was for two reasons — it allows students to contact loved ones during emergencies, and many parents use phone trackers to keep tabs on their kids.
The district has also leaned on direct, immediate communication. The flow of information reaches parents directly, avoiding some of the miscommunication that occurred in the past.
“Even I’m surprised by the impact this has had,” Kotek said. “I’m thankful for the educators who took up the charge when I said we’ve got to do this.”
“We can model what Estacada is doing for other districts across the state,” she added.