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Under a rumored city Department of Education plan to implement a cellphone ban across all 1,600 city public schools, students would be banned from using phones in schools starting in February 2025 and required to place them in school-funded lockers or magnetically locked pouches.
Above all else, this is a damning confession that the folks in charge of city schools don’t think teachers can control their classrooms.
Yet if they can’t do that, they can’t actually teach.
Yes, making kids stow their phones is a challenge, but it’s not one that can be met by some bureaucratic fix: The teacher, for example, will still have to deal with kids who manage to sneak in their phones.
And we’re all for a ban on phone use in the classroom; we cheered when Chancellor David Banks teased last month that one was coming.
Nor is it exclusively about protecting kids from social-media addiction: Phones are a distraction from classwork.
But the fact is that the DOE has kneecapped school and classroom discipline, by mandating toothless “restorative justice” (adopted long before Banks took over, but he hasn’t repealed it, either).
Teachers who want to control their classroom can’t: The obvious approach to a student crossing the line is a “stop using your phone” first warning, followed by “go to detention.”
But teachers now get blamed if they kick disruptive kids out of class, and schools get utterly slammed for expelling anyone.
Some teachers manage to control their classes anyway, but it’s asking a lot — especially of those new to the profession, since “classroom control” isn’t taught at most schools of education.
For the record, DOE spokesman Nathaniel Styer told The Post that “no decisions have been made at this time” on the ban or the rules, but Banks’ team is plainly looking at the issues.
Sadly, we doubt they’ll confront the larger discipline problem — which is about to get worse as the demented state class-size law forces Banks to hire thousands of warm bodies and call them “teachers.”
No phones in class is a no-brainer, and the fact that it’s a huge challenge for the DOE to implement is a giveaway of the deep dysfunction that explains why DOE enrollment is plummeting as families flee the regular public schools — and even the city itself — in search of systems that at least try to put the kids’ needs first.