[finnh]

Seattle Public Schools has seen enrollment drop 30% (!!!) over the past couple years because it is an utter shambles [0]. (correction: many schools have that level of decline or higher, but the decline district-wide is much lower). Cancelling as many advanced classes as possible, without grandfathering, so (eg) my two sons were both forced to repeat a year of math when they cancellled year-up math. An administration that is roundly hated, by parent and teacher alike.

This feels like grasping in the dumbest possible way while ignoring the actual problem: if you bore the heck out of the kids, the ones who can afford to leave will. Also being bored 8 hours/day isn't good for mental health...

[0] https://www.kiro7.com/news/local/public-school-districts-exp...

[kube-system]

Maybe the dopamine addictions that many of these kids experience are the reason they’re bored with school. Maybe they’re a contributing reason that remote learning was ineffective.

When I was a kid, going to school was the social medium. Even the kids who skipped class physically came to school to meet up. Now that we’ve removed that incentive for attendance, no wonder kids don’t show up.

[asdff]

I know for sure if I was saddled with remote learning during elementary/middle/highschool I would waste all of my time playing games and try skirting by with the bare minimum. After all, that's exactly what we did with the computer lab in the school whenever we got access to it.

[Fire-Dragon-DoL]

I still hated every minute of school lessons in school, even without social medias st the time. I know it's a one off, but boring people for 6 hours per day in high school is bad. All I wanted to do was stop being there for 6 hours.

I'm pretty sure I hit depression due to that, but was never diagnosed

[broast]

It seems inevitable we will have to adapt to the new normal expected dopamine frequency

[tempsy]

i don’t know anything about the other issues facing the school but to say social media addiction is a “dumb” thing to address seems incredibly naive to me.

growing up is hard enough as it is and social media absolutely can be detrimental to mental health if used excessively.

imo the only reason we haven’t properly addressed the issue as a society is because it’s incredibly difficult to “prove” from a research perspective given the newness of social media.

[idopmstuff]

Social media addiction is an important thing to address, but a school district filing lawsuits against social media companies just seems like the worst possible way to address it.

This is an organization whose entire purpose is educating kids. If they want to address social media addiction, why on earth would they not start by educating kids about it?

[LarryMullins]

I expect that'll work about as well as gym teachers teaching kids not to have premarital sex or smoke drugs. Such admonitions might sometimes work for individual kids, but on the whole they don't work.

TikTok/etc is unlike sex and illicit drugs in that it's a commercial enterprise that is operating openly and can in theory be sued into submission. You can't sue a plant anybody can grow in their closet, but you can sue a tech company.

[idopmstuff]

Gym teachers telling kids not to have premarital sex or smoke drugs isn't teaching them. You can teach kids how condoms work and that STDs stay with them for life. You can teach kids that drugs these days can be laced with fentanyl and how to acquire and use fentanyl test strips.

Those things won't stop kids from having sex or doing drugs, but they can certainly and do mitigate some of the harm.

You can take a similar approach to social media. Gym teachers telling them not to use TikTok will obviously not work, but you can teach them about how their data is shared and monetized. You can show them examples of people who posted things on social media and had their lives ruined over it. If the leaders of a school district have adopted the approach that you just can't teach kids anything they don't want to hear, I think they ought to find different jobs.

As for the lawsuit, sure, you can sue a social media company? Will you win? Maybe, after extensive and costly litigation. Will those companies be forced to change their behavior in meaningful ways that will impact your students? Maybe, or maybe they'll just pay a fine and make superficial changes that last until the next lawsuit concludes in half a decade, then repeat.

And besides that, even if you manage to win and dismantle Facebook, TikTok, etc., you'll have an infinite number of other companies coming in to fill the void. You can sue a tech company, but you can't sue a general class of software. You can legislate against it, but at best that is a long, hard road.

[LarryMullins]

Teach kids all you like, however you like, they're not going to stop using social media on their own. It's a digital drug engineered to be addictive, and the kids are already hooked.

[brianwawok]

Parents control if they get a phone till 18. Generally the more upper class the parent I know, the later they give their kids access.

It’s not like kids are born with an iPhone glued to their hand.

[asdff]

Exactly. A student will sit there, arms crossed, internally opposing everything the administrator is saying because they've convinced themselves already its bullshit. They already think they will just find work as an influencer:

https://thehill.com/changing-america/enrichment/arts-culture...

[tempsy]

This is really silly. Putting the onus on kids to fight the addictive cues created by sophisticated social media companies that actively work to make their products even more addictive is absolutely not the right way to address it.

Though I do agree that if school districts actually cared enough today they should start by banning social media use on school premises and more aggressively monitor phone usage during class.

[LarryMullins]

> Though I do agree that if school districts actually cared enough today they should start by banning social media use on school premises and more aggressively monitor phone usage during class.

AFAIK they do, but it is extremely challenging for teachers. Phone use can be very discrete, "aggressively monitoring phone usage" just isn't practical. And when teachers do confiscate phones the backlash against them is frequently strong and fierce. They face hyperbolic rhetoric about such confiscations being dangerous because "what if somebody needs to call 911!?" Even when administrators don't fold to the pressure, the teachers still need to put up with deranged rants and accusations from the parents. It's much easier for teachers if they pretend they didn't see the phone.

And schools can hardly screen every kid entering the school for a phone, every day. It would be invasive, slow, and expensive. Imagine having to go to school an hour early every day because you need to stand in line for TSA before entering the building. Not practical. We can't even keep cellphones out of prisons where invasive cavity searches are permitted. Jamming cell signals on school grounds is out of the question, it isn't legal. So given all these problems, why not sue tech companies for making these systems and services available on school grounds during school hours? I think it probably won't work, but it's worth a shot.

[tempsy]

Yeah that’s not what I mean. I mean make it a policy to not allow people to have their phones out in class. You can also block certain sites on school WiFi networks. I’m sure some schools already have something like this already. I don’t mean implement body searches.

[LarryMullins]

> I mean make it a policy to not allow people to have their phones out in class.

These policies already exist but they're practically unenforceable. Individual teachers are incentivized to ignore it because enforcing these rules causes trouble for them. And even the most enthusiastic enforcement will fall flat; discrete phone use is trivial. Even paranoid proctors can't keep phones out of classrooms during exams; asking a teacher to do such policing while also trying to teach a lesson isn't going to work. This is what they're already trying to do (or were trying to do, before giving up) and it isn't working.

[KyeRussell]

This didn’t even work 10 years ago and it certainly won’t work now. A typical Seattle kids data plan is probably better than the school WiFi anyway.

[finnh]

Social media is awful and terrible; no argument there. But SPS has much larger problems to address internally before tackling this broader societal issue.

[tempsy]

You can do two things at once.

[b1ue64]

You can't do them well if you're incompetent.

[remarkEon]

I don’t think anyone is imagining that SPS is going to implement social media regulation, it’s asking the courts (and indirectly Congress) to do that.

[spritefs]

> Cancelling as many advanced classes as possible

I wish someone would compile a list of every school district that's doing this or planning on doing it, just for public knowledge purposes

[roody15]

Sadly this what happens with the “equity” push is public schools. There is no way to have “equalized” outcomes without dumbing down the content. This means less advanced courses.

It’s sad because somehow the idea of equal opportunity has been replaced with equalized outcomes in education.

[bathtub365]

Is this actually due to the “equity” push? The article linked by the parent points to staffing issues during the pandemic and the issue you point to isn’t mentioned.

[brianwawok]

You need to read between the lines.

No child left behind and similar punishes schools that don’t get their lowest students up to a certain test score. It does not mandate or encourage or anything else advanced classes. So when a budget cut happens, guess where the cut happens?

[jeffbee]

I'm skeptical of your 30% number. Their reports seem to indicate current enrollment of 51608 compared to a peak of 53627, down 4%. That doesn't seem out of line with demographic processes.

[finnh]

I'm going off the linked article, which is about multiple individual schools with that level of loss. But I appreciate the correction; I should have stated that number more carefully.

[incone123]

Linked article shows some individual schools losing more than 30%, but does not give an overall percentage.

[themitigating]

There can be more than issue causing more than one problem. Thinking that problems must be solved in some sort of order is dumb on your part