I'm a little confussd... was there a point they were allowed? I went to school in the late 2000s, and even at that point if a teacher saw you with a cell phone it was immediately confiscated.

In the last 10 years, driven a lot by school shootings, the tide shifted and parents started fighting schools about letting their kids keep their phone "so they can be contacted in emergencies". The schools gave up fighting with the parents.

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".

Around 2015 or so they became a lot more accepted. From talking to teachers, a surprisingly large amount of the distraction is parents texting kids while they're at school.

When I was in high school in the early 2010s it was down to every teacher to enforce their own policy on phones. In practice, this meant that it was wildly variable, kids were getting texts from kids in more permissive environments (the gym teachers had no issue with you playing on your phone as you did a mile walk) which was driving FOMO and leading to students leaving the classroom to check their phones, lots of trying to sneak a look when teachers were distracted, etc.

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.

From my teacher spouse's perspective, a lot of it seems to be the monetary value of smartphones. Some kids are coming to school with the latest and greatest $1000+ smartphone, so if the teacher drops it, scuffs it, misplaces it, etc, the parents are coming after the teacher about an item with real value. Teachers don't want any part of that battle so confiscation is now off the table.

I'm also confused by stories that imply that kids were allowed to use their phones during class.

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?

Right? when I graduated HS in 2008 phones had always been banned. If you got caught with one out, you could have them just not out and in theory off, you would get detention and your parent would have to come get it. When did it suddenly become OK to have phones out.

Late 2000s was just after smartphones became a thing, and before they became a crack epidemic. In my personal experience, it has really been bad for about the last 10 years, getting better over the last few years however. Took a few years for everyone to really understand how bad the problem had become and how quickly.

I was in high school in the early 2010s. In 2010 I went to a school that gave all students ipod touchs, which seemed futuristic at the time. By 2012 phones weren't banned from school, but a teacher would still take it if you were blatantly using it during class.