Will This Be The Year That Schools Shut Down Cellphones?

Just a couple of decades ago, teachers at conferences heard that smartphones were the education tool of the future. Now it appears that the national mood is to take broad steps to keep those devices out of classrooms.

Since students could pass notes in class, student personal communication technology has been a classroom challenge. Teachers of a certain age can remember when digital pagers posed a problem. But smartphones represent a whole new problematic level; students could be distracted by everything from checking their socials to starting or continuing a fight to arranging a rendezvous in the hall, all while the teacher tries to explain quadratic equations.

Schools, trying to embrace current technology or just caught flatfooted, have for years left teachers to develop their own policies and procedures for dealing with the ubiquitous devices. Larger bans have fared poorly. In 2006, the Bloomberg administration banned cellphones in New York City schools, raising an uproar from parents and teachers, with outspoken opposition from everyone from Councilman Bill De Blasio to UFT President Randi Weingarten opposed the policy and parents threatened to sue.