alt Hacker NewsI think you're correct, but another piece of this is that students (especially in HS, but probably also in MS) have realized they can accomplish most assigned tasks in a fraction of the time using online resources (whether copies of old tests, agentic AI, or other sites), so they lean on their phone for this. A big piece of the missing equation here is the fact that home PC/laptop use has also been consistently decreasing, in favor of phones & tablets, causing phones themselves to be even more indispensable for youth.
I read a position paper last week suggesting the solution to this is to take a zero tolerance policy in the classroom and move all course testing back to pencil & paper / bluebooks. I would support that (as a parent of two current high schoolers).
Funnily enough, as a parent, I'd have loved for my (young-ish at the time) kids to have been on old-school pencil and paper stuff during the pandemic.
Tear-out worksheet books or a weekly trip to the schools to grab a packet of physical papers with the week's lessons and work (or, hell, send the buses around to drop them off) would have been SO MUCH easier to manage and help with than all the online horse-shit.
Like, I truly think my 80s and 90s classrooms would have been better prepared to deal with the pandemic than the modern computerized ones. You'd think it'd be the other way around, but from what I saw, no. It's just so much harder to keep track of what's going on in several different computer programs, than a stack of paper and a couple books for each kid.