Giving cellphones as a reward for good school work

There is something of a multi-faceted flap underway, as reported this afternoon in the New York Times, that has come up yet again publicly because word of a proposal under consideration slipped out from a class at Harvard. The proposal would be to give cellphones to kids who excel academically (but no mention of using the phones for education). Yet another wrinkle has thus emerged to the controversy in the New York public schools about cellphones. I have worked as outside staff and a volunteer for nearly 30 years with these schools, which form the largest system in the world — so I know something about them. My opinion is informed; I think cellphones can help students big time.
The current cell phone brouhaha in New York schools goes like this:
The students virtually all have cellphones in their pockets,
Many parents see the phones as important for their keeping in touch with their children and for their children’s general safety.
School regulations forbid students to have cellphones on school premises because some of the kids use them as distractions and, it is said, worse.
And, to quote the Times story today: “The ban has been attacked by parents and politicians, who call it a draconian policy that endangers students. Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, who would have to approve . . . , has repeatedly refused to budge on the ban despite the outcries.”

Without trying to sort out the issues here, I will simply recommend today’s NYT article as something to read (and weep) to catch up on how things are going in the world’s largest school system.”

Against the backdrop of the cellphone flap, the article sketches some pieces from something else related to the pervasive troubles in the New York public schools: racism. Harvard economist Professor Roland G. Fryer is the fellow who has proffered the idea of rewarding good schoolwork with cellphones. His home page at Harvard points visitors to the website of the American Inequality Lab that he heads, from which I took the above image of the Robert Taylor Homes in Chicago. What a great place that lab is! And it includes suggestions for how we can get involved.

All of the above jells for me into this question: Why not use the cellphones as devices to learn and teach and solve several of the flap-facets at once? The phone in a kid’s pocket is an individual device, and using it individually and/or privately to learn does not raise inequality issues — it empowers without group influence. The individual emergence of kids who have knowledge holds great hope, and the personal computers that the cellphones are can deliver knowledge in richer and richer doses with every passing month. It has been endlessly frustrating through my 30-year experience for schools to attempt to educate flocks of children from projects like the Robert Taylor Homes: it keeps not happening. It is a very real hope to imagine individual youngsters in these places using their cellphones to practice vocabulary on a project like FREE Rice (if only educators would put stuff like that on cellphones and assign using them to students).

Why don’t the schools use the cell phones to deliver education?

BTW: I usually call the devices under discussion here mobiles, but since cellphones is what they are called in NY schools, I used that term in this post.

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