How did we get here: Phones in Schools

Why did seemingly every school embrace distracting technology with open arms?

Author

James Shanahan
January 02, 2025

First, some housekeeping. I am writing publicly again. I’d kept a blog on Google’s Blogspot platform from 2009 to 2019 and I feel like it’s time for me begin writing again for an audience (even if it’s only one I’m imagining). I plan to keep this newsletter free for the first three months (~early March ‘25) and then move it behind a paywall. When that happens, I will provide a parallel version of the newsletter on a second platform for those of you who do not want to give Substack any money. I’m here because network effects matter but I respect that many have ethical problems with a platform that platforms literally anyone. I’ll post those details at that time but for now the free option gets you all my posts.

So, phones in schools

I originally planned a very different first post to launch this newsletter, but the Pew Research Center just published its updated Teens, Social Media, and Technology data for 2024. It’s full of all kinds of interesting tidbits, like how about half of teens describe themselves as “constantly online”. This is clearly relevant to schools because we have seen much handwringing about students being distracted in school, primarily by social media accessed on their personal phones. The tide seems to be turning as some school systems are instituting bans on phones in the classroom, but the changes are as varied and uneven as our schools. One thing that I see again and again in various comments and hear in conversations is wondering about how schools could let it get this bad in the first place. Why didn’t schools do more to prevent what seems like an obvious problem? Why couldn’t they have banned phones a decade ago before social media really grabbed hold of the youth? To be fair, it’s not only cell phones. I hear parents upset that they try to limit their kids’ screen time only to have the kids need a school-supplied Chromebook where they secretly watch YouTube instead of working. But, again, they ask, why do schools do this?

And my reply is, well, because that’s what we all asked for. We, as a society, wanted more tech in the classrooms. We, as a society, wanted teachers to leverage the power of kids’ personal phones. We, as a society, felt that a connected classroom was a relevant classroom that would better prepare students to work and thrive in the digital 21st century. Teachers, administrators, and district leaders leaned into this zeitgeist because, believe it or not, schools are generally quite responsive to the demands of the public. Let’s revisit a few key moments that defined this trend.

Shift Happens

If you worked in schools from about 2005-2010, then you probably came across a version of the Shift Happens video. Sometimes titled Did you know 2.0?, this early viral video contained an initial barrage of facts about China, India, and America, our demographics, and educational achievement before switching to a new set of facts about how much the internet was changing the world, largely in terms of scale, and how we could all keep up. All this is set to trendy, fast-paced music such as Fatboy Slim’s Right Here, Right Now. Later versions focused even more on education.

It’s hard to overstate how influential this video and its sequels were. The National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) titled their 2008 national convention, Because Shift Happens: Teaching in the 21st Century. The then incoming NCTE president wrote about this decision in her official conference invitation:

Yet, in relation to our hurtle through change, our schools seem to be moving more slowly. We still move large groups of students from class to class with a shrill bell (reminiscent of the factory whistle during the Industrial Age). We still group kids by age and label them with As or Bs, though few can articulate what differentiates them. We’ve added technology—but it’s in a lab down the hall where only certain websites can be accessed. We’ve said we want kids, the kids of the only nation that has put a man on the moon, to use technology in the classroom, but for students in a remedial class, that might be only an electronic workbook, and for those in a gifted class, a PowerPoint presentation instead of a poster.

. . . We’re teaching the Millennium generation, that group of kids who arrived at school as “digital natives” who have a new set of 3 Rs in mind: Relevance, Relationships, and Responsiveness.

. . . At NCTE 2007, we explored the topic of diverse literacies in the twenty-first century literacy; now, for the 2008 convention, we invite you to push this thinking even further by joining the national conversation about how to juggle those diverse literacies while addressing current technological, political, social, and cultural shifts. Do this by explaining how you’re effectively working with English language learners, coping with political pressure to pass high-stakes tests, addressing the ever more diverse student populations, and teaching with and through technology to all levels of students across all the language arts. Explain how you use technology to enhance your own learning and how you use it to communicate not only with colleagues, but with parents, politicians, and administrators. Share how technology has affected assessment of students and of yourself.

She concluded:

Join us there, where together we’ll discuss all that it means to teach toward tomorrow—something we must do, because, after all, shift happens.

The fully digital classroom, it seems, cannot come soon enough. That year, NCTE also released their new 21st Century Literacies Framework. While I can’t find the original, I have linked the updated 2013 version — the current version. Their headline summary:

Active, successful participants in this 21st century global society must be able to

• Develop proficiency and fluency with the tools of technology;

• Build intentional cross-cultural connections and relationships with others so to pose and solve problems collaboratively and strengthen independent thought;

• Design and share information for global communities to meet a variety of purposes;

• Manage, analyze, and synthesize multiple streams of simultaneous information;

• Create, critique, analyze, and evaluate multimedia texts;

• Attend to the ethical responsibilities required by these complex environments.

Although none of these explicitly direct schools to let kids bring their phones to class (although, we did get the now infamous Toys to Tools: Connecting Cell Phones to Education in 2008), it’s clear that technology more broadly is seen as an important component of educating children and making them literate. It’s not hard to imagine how smartphones became one of the digital tools teachers could leverage when trying to accomplish these goals. (Funny to read all this and still see laments about kids’ digital literacy today.)

While NCTE does not set school policy, they are an influential organization. They do directly lobby policymakers and write various briefs and white papers, but they are most involved in the practices of classroom teachers. And, beyond all that, it demonstrates the reach of the Shift Happens video and the zeitgeist it represents. Because, and this is important, the pressure was not only from within education organizations like NCTE. It was not a single viral video that caused a generation of kids to be lost to digital distractions. Rather, the video was the result of a change in the way people thought about education.

Thomas Friedman, the moustache of understanding, suggested in his widely read book, The World is Flat, that what matters most is how we teach, not how much we teach. Indeed, the flat trope was cribbed in 2010 for an important education reform book, The Flat World and Education by Linda Darling-Hammond. She argues, in part, that digital tools are essential to closing achievement gaps and that our classrooms must be technology rich as a matter of equity. Who, you might ask, is Linda Darling-Hammond? Well, she was strongly considered for Obama’s Secretary of Education back in 2008, and in 2019 she was put in charge of California’s State Board of Education.

In 2011 another influential book was published, A New Culture of Learning. That same year, speaking about the book at the Forum for the Future in Aspen, coauthor Douglas Thomas lays out the overall point of the book:

I would say that we make a distinction between a culture of teaching and a culture of learning, and argue that the latter is far more important in the world of the 21st century than it’s ever been in the past. In some ways our survival as a nation and certainly as educational institutions may depend on recognition of that fact, because the old modalities of teaching may not be sustainable for very much longer.

Later, he makes a key point about play:

The two words that we’ve come up with as the keys to imagination are “what” and “if.” In large part, the essence of innovation is the idea of making something strange. Creativity is the idea of taking something familiar and using it in new ways—a perfectly valid and valuable thing to do. But innovation is somewhat different. It’s the ability to build a world and a context around a piece of information to make the world change. that’s a fundamentally important distinction.

To do that, you need to play. We use the term “play” in the way that Johan Huizinga does in his book Homo Ludens. Play is serious. For him it is the core of who we are as people. It precedes culture. Huizinga uses it to describe war, sport, law and poetry, and says that all of the things that are essential human endeavors have their roots in play. We’re not talking about goofing off. We’re talking about some of the most serious business we do.

Our theory entails just a very simple shift in thinking. When you invert questions above answers, it’s an easy thing to do in the classroom. It doesn’t require a provost to pay more money. We don’t need new buildings. We don’t need new teachers. We don’t need new classrooms. We don’t need any of that. The infrastructure’s already there. Prioritizing imagination, passion, inquiry and questioning is a relatively easy thing to do.

The key to enabling this kind of play is the connectivity and collaboration enabled by technology. A New Culture of Learning is replete with examples of technology enabling creativity. Everything from a World of Warcraft guild conducting a dungeon raid to Andrew Sullivan’s success as a blogger is seen as evidence of their theory. Equally important, however, is the third paragraph above. This massive change requires nothing but changing our minds. We don’t need money or materials or training. Just prioritize something else. Let kids play and be creative as much as possible. Use tech to make it happen because tech is the secret sauce. Thomas goes on to say that inquiry-based education is nothing new. What is new is the tech because it enables rapid access to data, fast collaboration, and easy content production. To a budget strapped school system, this is catnip.

What I’m trying to get at here is that there was (and remains, I’d argue) a broad consensus in society at large that schools should be doing more to incorporate technology in the classroom and should focus their pedagogical efforts on inquiry, collaboration, and creativity. These were (and still are!) seen as key methods of preparation for being educated in the 21st century. Schools, their teachers, and administrators by and large embraced these ideas and encouraged innovative use of technology. Obviously, this was going to be highly variable because of different levels of funding, tech literacy, state policy, etc. but the push was there. Tennessee had a statewide blanket cellphone ban for all people on school property until 2014, for example. Still, one of the ways we could get internet-enabled tech into the classroom quickly was cell phones. This was an era when school districts would still do things like block access to Wikipedia because it’s not an authoritative source and when a class still had to reserve time in a computer lab somewhere else in the building just so every kid could have access to the internet. As time went on, schools largely went one-to-one with the final laggards crossing the threshold during the pandemic, but in-between many teachers drew on the internet-enabled device in their kids’ pockets. In 2015, EdWeek reported in the results of a survey (now lost to linkrot) finding that 58% of high school students reported using their own devices at school for school purposes. The same survey said 69% of principals thought this would help keep students engaged. We even got nifty lingo for this kind of thing such as blended learning — using devices in school to access online course content — and BYOD — Bring Your Own Device. By 2015, political leaders like NYC Mayor Bill DeBlasio were championing the end of cell phone bans as both an educational improvement and a safety issue, arguing parents need to be able to contact their kids in emergencies.

The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.

L.P. Hartley, The Go-Between

A few final points before I wrap up and move on to sharing links. 1) It was far from clear at the time that phones and other tech in schools were going to be a disaster. In fact, looking back, it feels more like we all thought binging on tech was absolutely essential and not even that long ago! We’re talking about less than 10 years. I think this tells us that the error was not one of judgement on the parts of policymakers or schools or even society but, instead, yet another example of technology changing faster than our institutions (both formal and social) can keep up with. No matter how nimble schools may or may not be, it seems unlikely that they’ll stay ahead of our rapidly evolving technology for long. 2) The widespread adoption of classroom-tech happened alongside the implementation of No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, and Common Core. The national and state level policy was moving toward standardization, toward sameness. It’s no surprise, then, that anyone seeking differentiation, creativity, and trying to engage kids would look at language like what we see from NCTE or Thomas and Seely Brown and be happy to head down those roads. 3) There seems to be some kind of assumption that simply using technology instead of a book or worksheet was inherently engaging regardless of the content contained therein. Like, you’d see people claim that a bog-standard research project was somehow miraculously more engaging because kids got to search about the topic on their phones. Maybe this is related to the myth of the digital native? 4) My god, this sounds exactly like how we’re talking about AI and education right now as we begin 2025. Makes me wonder if we’re just going to make the same mistakes again? I will write more about this soon.

Kickoff

And that’s it! Post number one out there in the world. Thanks for reading this far. Looking back at what I’ve written, I actually really like what I’ve covered here for another reason. It hints at several themes I intend to discuss over the upcoming year:

  • Education as a nationalist/nation building endeavor

  • Economic anxiety as a major mover behind educational change

  • Real-world complexity (what I’ll brand as Scholastic Alchemy) colliding with “it’s an easy thing to do” education reforms leading to their inevitable failure

  • Everything is curriculum

*NOTE: Links not always about education, but usually they are.

The 74 has been publishing year-end collections of graphs that “defined education” in that year. Whatever that means. Headlines and subtitles aside, the graphs are interesting and worth a look. Pandemic, Politics, Pre-K & More: 12 Charts That Defined Education in 2024

Houston Independent School District is in the middle of an experiment we should all be paying attention to. Since their takeover by the state and the appointment of Superintendent Mike Miles, the district has been ground zero for an intensely rigid education model of Miles own design called “The New Education System.” As part of that system, students take a quiz every 45 minutes. If they pass that quiz, they go sit in the library Team Center and receive above grade-level AI-generated individualized instruction by computer. If they fail, they stay in class to receive remediation from the teacher and take another assessment in 45 minutes. What to know about Prof Jim Inc, the AI company Houston ISD is using to generate reading passages. (requires you to disable ad blocker)

It would appear that Texas is at the forefront of AI and education:

That said, it seems like teachers’ use of AI products stopped going up this year. Or did it? Education Week: Teacher AI Use Hasn’t Budged in a Year.

As we enter an era where more and more states pass/expand voucher programs, it’s worth looking at the states who did it first to make sure we don’t all make the same mistakes. I think one of the key lessons is that school choice is only as good as the people doing the choosing. Why anyone would send their kid to a school that’s in a strip mall next to a cheap Chinese restaurant and an orthodontist is beyond me. Maybe, just maybe, all parents are not good at making these choices and we should structure our systems in light of that fact? Arizona Regulators Closed a Failing Charter School. It Reopened as a Private Religious School Funded by Taxpayers.