Category: The Conversation

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By Justin Heinze, Associate Professor of Health Behavior & Health Equity, University of Michigan

What is the best way to handle cellphones in schools?

That’s a question Michigan educators are grappling with this spring after Gov. Gretchen Whitmer signed into law a ban on smartphone use in Michigan schools.

The law goes into effect in the school year that begins in August 2026. It requires public and charter K-12 schools to adopt rules prohibiting students from using smartphones during instructional time, but it allows educators and school officials to determine the best way to do that.

The new law includes several exemptions, including medical or emergency use, and does not apply to Michigan’s private schools.

We are University of Michigan faculty in the schools of Public Health, Public Policy and Education, and we are interested in how cellphone access both helps and hurts students in schools.

Many districts already have cellphone policies, but the new law creates an opportunity to look at which policies best support student well-being and academic success.

Drawbacks and benefits to student learning

Cellphones were used by 97% of young people ages 11-17 during the school day in 2022, with both good and bad effects.

Cellphone use can distract students and lead to disengagement from school, impaired learning and poorer mental health. It can also lead to exposure to interpersonal violence, such as bullying or fights, and harm broader well-being.

But students also use phones in beneficial ways, such as monitoring their blood sugar levels, connecting with family and peers, and even contacting digital tip lines to prevent violence.

Defining the array of cellphone policies

As part of a CDC-funded project focused on cellphone policies and health, we collected data on existing cellphone policies in the 2025-26 school year for every school district in Michigan. Our team checked hundreds of local and regional education authority webpages and consulted student handbooks. When digital information was missing, we contacted districts directly. Building on a national teacher survey called Phones in Focus, we recorded not only when phone use is restricted but how schools restrict it, noting cases in which the district policy varied by grade level.

At the time of this writing, our data reflects 779, or 95%, of publicly funded traditional and charter school districts in Michigan.

At the start of the 2025-26 school year, 94.7% of districts had existing mandates, compared to 2.5% of districts that required individual schools to set their own policies.

Just under 3% of all Michigan districts had no stated policy at all. It is possible that these districts communicated a set policy through informal channels or, in practice, were letting schools decide on their own rules.

Among districts with mandated policies, there were important differences in rules relating to cellphones. To help think through policies, we sorted them on two criteria: when policies are enforced and how policies are enforced.

About half of the district policies provided different rules by grade level. In these cases, we include the policies for high school students to generate the statistics below.

When and how to limit use

Let’s start with when: In districts with stated policies, 50% specified “bell-to-bell” restrictions, meaning that students were not permitted to use their phones at any point during the school day, including during lunch or passing periods. The remaining 50% of districts mandated “schedule-based” restrictions, which typically meant that phones were prohibited during instructional time but could be used at other times, such as lunch or between classes.

When it comes to the “how,” districts specified a number of different approaches to enforcing cellphone restrictions.

The most common approach, adopted by 62% of districts, is what we describe as a “no show,” meaning that students are required to keep their phones out of sight, such as in their backpacks or pockets. This policy is used in Alanson Public Schools, for example.

Seventeen percent of districts require students to keep their phones in their lockers throughout the school day. Sturgis Public Schools, a school district that provides special education and early childhood services, is one.

Other school districts enforce stricter policies. Detroit Premier Academy, a charter school, implemented a “no phones” rule that bans phones inside school buildings. Roughly 8% of districts surveyed use this approach.

Another 8% collected phones in each classroom, often using structured, numbered pocket charts or a designated bin.

Less common was the “centralized collection” approach, meaning when students arrive at school, staff collect their phones and store them for the remainder of the day. Stockbridge Community Schools was among the 21 school districts, or about 3%, we found that follow this policy.

The final 2% used lockable pouches.

Location and type of school mattered

We found that policy features were associated with the type and location of districts.

Charter and urban districts were substantially more likely than suburban or rural schools to adopt bell-to-bell policies that prohibit phones during the school day.

Roughly 20% of charter districts prohibited students from bringing phones to school, while 2% of traditional districts adopted this approach.

Traditional districts relied more on “lockers” – 22% – and “classroom collection” – 11% – approaches.

Twenty-five percent of rural, 15% of suburban and 5% of city districts used the lockers approach.

These approaches have important implications for enforcement.

The “no show” and “classroom collection” approaches place most of the enforcement burden on teachers, and both methods require monitoring throughout the school day.

The “centralized collection” and “lockable pouch” approaches place more burden on school administrators, but in theory they require enforcement only at the beginning of the day.

It is less clear how the “lockers” and “no phone” approaches are enforced in practice, but they rely more heavily on an individual student’s adherence to policy and resisting the temptation to use a phone throughout the day.

Is one approach better than others?

With so many policies, it’s natural to ask which one is best. No doubt, education leaders across the state will be debating that question with a renewed focus on policies. Here’s some guidelines to help guide those debates:

• Set and communicate clear policies: This will make it easier on school staff responsible for making sure students do not access their phones during the school day. Implementation will be critical. No policy can be effective if it is enforced inconsistently or not at all. Ideally, students should get the same message from the district, principal, teachers and their parents or caregivers.

• Consider difficult trade-offs: “Classroom collection” and “no show” policies allow for parents and students to stay in touch as needed and call less attention to students who use their personal devices for medical or other permitted reasons. On the other hand, these approaches will require teachers to monitor students and enforce the rules throughout the school day, which may be less effective in preventing student phone use than the “centralized collection” approach or rules that completely prohibit phones on school premises.

• Watch out for unintended consequences: Some policies are cheap to implement. Others require the purchasing of expensive equipment or a good deal of staff time. Think about what protocols need to be in place to keep up and enforce those rules. That will enhance resource efficiency and protect teachers who report challenges with monitoring phone use and even violence when they try to enforce the rules.

Justin Heinze receives funding from the Centers for Disease Control, including for the data collected for this article (R01CE003837).

Brian Jacob receives funding from the Centers for Disease Control, the Arnold Foundation and the Smith Richardson Foundation. He is currently conducting an evaluation of Yondr lockable pouches and, as part of this project, has interacted with Yondr staff to obtain data and gain greater understanding of how Yondr is implemented in schools.

Elyse Thulin receives funding from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. She is affiliated with Sandy Hook Promise Foundation’s National Research Advisory Council.

– ref. We collected data on how 779 Michigan school districts are regulating student cellphones − here are the trends – https://theconversation.com/we-collected-data-on-how-779-michigan-school-districts-are-regulating-student-cellphones-here-are-the-trends-275544

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By Jerrid Kruse, Professor of Science Education, Drake University

Some school districts, including ones in Maine, New Mexico, Iowa and Oregon, are shifting to standards-based grading, where students are graded on the skills and concepts they learn instead of points accumulated from assignments and tests throughout the school year.

Jerrid Kruse, a professor of education at Drake University, studies how people learn and teach science, and standards-based grading is one aspect of this work.

The Conversation has collaborated with SciLine to bring you highlights from the discussion, edited for brevity and clarity.

What is standards-based grading, and how is it different from traditional grading?

Jerrid Kruse: The main thrust of standards-based grading is really an increased transparency between what teachers are teaching and how they are assessing their students.

I think when most people think of traditional grading, they think of accumulating points or making deposits like in a banking model, where if I turn in the homework every day, I get 5 points. And I keep building those points up so that even if I do poorly on a test, I still end up with a B in the class, even though I may have gotten a C or even lower on a test.

Standards-based grading is a shift away from that. Instead of focusing on student behaviors, such as completing homework and showing up to class on time, standards-based grading focuses on if the student is actually learning the things we’re trying to teach them.

How exactly does it impact student learning?

Kruse: If teachers can assess student learning more transparently, then teachers have more accurate information about what students do and do not know, and students also have more information about what they themselves do and do not know. Then teachers and students can act on that information; that’s the key.

We cannot expect standards-based grading to magically fix the teaching and the learning that’s happening in the classroom. Instead, what it does is provide a more transparent assessment of to what extent the learning is happening in the classroom. And then it’s up to the teachers and the students to act on that information.

So the student can go home and study the particular things that they’re having trouble with, and the teachers can say, “OK, my class is really struggling with standard number 4, so let’s spend some more time on standard number 4.” It’s really about what teachers and students do with that information.

What are some of the challenges?

Kruse: One of the big things is teacher buy-in. Top-down initiatives oftentimes end up with really poor implementation or superficial implementation. In my experience, the best standards-based grading efforts have come from the teachers themselves rather than from an administrator. So I think it’s important to spend time getting teacher buy-in and maybe even making it optional at first to let it be more of a grassroots effort.

Another challenge for teachers is identifying the key standards. So rather than thinking, “Okay, I’m going to teach Chapter 3,” it’s shifting that thinking to: “What is the thing or concept that I want students to learn out of Chapter 3?” From there, they can better communicate that to students.

Also, what will the report card look like? Are we going to continue to report A, B, C, D and F grades? Are we going to report all of the standards? These are questions teachers and school administrators need to decide together.

Then finally, in terms of helping parents and students understand why a school might move to standards-based grading, I suggest leaning into the transparency piece. The goal is more communication and more accurate communication between schools and kids and parents. That’s going to be a key piece for any district considering this.

Why should people care?

Kruse: Grades are a consistent source of struggle for students. For some kids, it’s really about how we can help them be less concerned about the grade and more concerned about the learning. And so standards-based grading can help push in that direction.

And then on the other side, we have kids who have been underserved by traditional education, and a standards-based approach can help these kids see school as something that they can do because they can see incremental progress on the standards rather than just a C or other letter grade. It’s the difference between “I got a C,” and “I got a C, and these are the three standards that I need to work on.”

I think it helps all students, including high achievers and traditionally low achievers, but in different ways.

SciLine is a free service based at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a nonprofit that helps journalists include scientific evidence and experts in their news stories.

Jerrid Kruse receives funding from the National Science Foundation and the William G. Stowe Foundation.

– ref. Standards-based grading offers a different model of assessing student learning in the classroom – https://theconversation.com/standards-based-grading-offers-a-different-model-of-assessing-student-learning-in-the-classroom-277792

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By Ryan Creps, Assistant Professor of Educational Leadership, University at Buffalo

The Department of Justice announced in March 2026 that it is suing Harvard University and the University of California, Los Angeles.

The lawsuits allege that both universities failed to adequately address antisemitism on campus, violating students’ civil rights.

These cases follow earlier efforts by the Trump administration in 2025 to block federal funding to several major universities. The Trump administration has also – largely unsuccessfully – pushed universities to sign agreements that would give the federal government greater oversight over their day-to-day operations.

In 2025, the Trump administration launched broad Title VI investigations into 60 colleges and universities. These investigations focused on whether schools had done enough to protect Jewish students from discrimination and harassment, particularly in the wake of the Oct. 7, 2023, attacks on Israel, the subsequent war in Gaza, and widespread protests across U.S. college campuses.

Many of those investigations continue. Title VI is part of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color or national origin in any program that receives federal funding.

These federal investigations have prompted scientific researchers, among others, across higher education to ask whether the government can invoke claims of civil rights law violations to justify cutting off federal research funding that supports their labs and projects.

As a scholar of educational leadership and policy, I think it is helpful to place the Trump administration approach to higher education within a broader understanding of how courts have interpreted civil rights laws within the past few decades and the nuanced way the Supreme Court has found they apply to universities.

Supreme Court weighs in

In 1964, Congress passed the Civil Rights Act. This law banned discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex or national origin in employment, education and public places.

Congress then passed the Higher Education Act in 1965. This law significantly increased the federal government’s investment in colleges and universities. It also created the Pell Grant program – the first federally funded need-based financial aid program for undergraduate students.

In addition, the Higher Education Act spelled out that schools that receive federal funding need to comply with civil rights laws.

Leaders of Grove City College, a small nondenominational Christian college in rural Pennsylvania, were concerned that this law would bring unwanted government oversight.

At the time, the college did not accept any direct federal funding. But some of its students received Basic Educational Opportunity Grants. These grants helped undergraduate students pay for college. Unlike loans, these grants did not have to be repaid.

In 1975, the Department of Health, Education and Welfare asked all universities and colleges with students who received federal grants to agree to comply with Title IX, a 1972 law that prohibits discrimination based on someone’s sex.

In 1976, Grove City refused to sign on to this agreement. A legal back-and-forth ensued.

Grove City College argued that the federal government’s request amounted to unwarranted government intervention, because the college did not directly receive federal funding. The Department of Health, Education and Welfare threatened to cut off the federal grants Grove City students received.

The Supreme Court eventually ruled in 1984 that Grove City’s financial aid program – but not the entire college – needed to comply with Title IX in order to receive federal aid. That’s because this specific office directly handled federal student aid.

A 1988 law clarifies the ruling

Many House Democrats perceived this Supreme Court ruling as a loophole that would let universities and colleges sidestep civil rights laws by applying them only to the specific programs that received federal funds.

In 1984, a group of Democrats unsuccessfully tried to pass legislation that would have extended civil rights protections across all programs within colleges and universities that receive federal aid for any program. A different version of this bill passed Congress with bipartisan support in 1988, on the brink of the presidential elections.

President Ronald Reagan vetoed the bill. Reagan stated in his explanation to the Senate that this bill “would vastly and unjustifiably expand the power of the Federal Government over the decisions and affairs of private organizations.”

However, many Republicans seeking reelection in Congress feared that rejecting the bill could alienate women and people of color in the upcoming election.

Within a week, Congress voted to override the veto and enacted the Civil Rights Restoration Act in 1988. This law clarified that any college accepting federal funds must comply with civil rights laws in all of its programs. This law also allowed the government to withhold federal research funding from colleges based on civil rights violations.

Enforcing civil rights laws today

The Trump administration is testing just how much the federal government can exert power over colleges and universities that receive federal funding. Some Trump administration supporters say they see this strategy as overdue enforcement against discrimination.

On the other hand, the Association of American Universities, an organization made up of American research universities, is among the opposition arguing that the administration is trying to weaponize civil rights laws to control how colleges and universities are run.

Antisemitic incidents are on the rise in the U.S., including on college campuses. But some observers have noted that the issue is nuanced, and that the administration is likely exploiting a controversial issue to achieve ideological goals.

Federal courts’ interpretations in the Harvard and UCLA lawsuits will further shape how civil rights protections are enforced at colleges and universities. Specifically, these cases will help determine whether the mere allegations of civil rights violations against a university can justify a sweeping freeze of federal research funding.

Ryan Creps does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Trump administration’s lawsuits against Harvard and UCLA have roots in a decades-old fight over civil rights law – https://theconversation.com/trump-administrations-lawsuits-against-harvard-and-ucla-have-roots-in-a-decades-old-fight-over-civil-rights-law-276586

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By Christina Grozinger, Professor of Entomology, Penn State

North America’s bee populations are in trouble, but don’t blame the honey bees. While some people argue that an overabundance of managed honey bees – those raised to help pollinate crops and produce honey – is causing native bees to disappear, the evidence doesn’t support the claim.

What is true is that populations of many species of bees, including honey bees, are struggling.

Half of all honey bee colonies die every winter in the United States, on average. Commercial beekeepers experienced their highest losses on record – more than 60% of their colonies – in the winter of 2024-25. Overall, one-fifth of pollinators in North America are considered to be at risk for extinction due in large part to habitat loss, rising temperatures, extreme weather, diseases and pesticides.

We study bees and other vital pollinators, and we can tell you that there are good reasons to love all the bees. In fact, they’re essential.

Why care about pollinators?

Bees help farmers grow the foods people love to eat, everything from apples to almonds.

Along with other pollinators – such as flies, butterflies and moths – bees help nearly 80% of flowering plants produce fruit and seeds, which in turn support birds and other wildlife.

About 75% of the world’s agricultural crops, including vegetables, fruits and tree nuts, benefit from pollinators. Additionally, pollinators contribute to production of feed for livestock and fiber crops, such as cotton.

In the United States, pollination by insects contributes $34 billion to the economy.

Among the pollinators, honey bees are the most important for agriculture crops. Managed honey bees, which beekeepers can move from field to field, are particularly essential in intensively farmed areas that lack the natural habitat to support wild bees.

So, why are people concerned about honey bees?

Honey bees were introduced to North America by European settlers in the early 1600s.

Since honey bees are not a native species, the most common concern you might hear is that they will outcompete wild bees for pollen and nectar. This is typically portrayed as a numbers game: If resources are limited, the more bees present on the landscape, the less food there is to go around.

Honey bees live in large social colonies and are adept at capitalizing on high-quality patches of flowers, leading to the concern that this species in particular may have a rapid, outsized effect on native bees that share the same food.

Managed bees can also carry viruses and other pathogens that may infect native bee species. Because viruses are shared among colony members, viruses can persist in managed honey bee colonies and then be spread to other bees that forage on the same flowers.

Scientists and farmers also have a concern about economic sustainability if farms are too reliant on honey bees alone for crop pollination. Threats to honey bee health and high colony mortality in the United States could put crops at risk if other pollinators aren’t in the vicinity to do the job.

Why don’t studies find a honey bee impact on native bees?

Humans actually know little about bee interactions. The U.S. has more than 4,000 native bee species, but there is enough data to estimate population sizes and ranges for less than half of them. Meaningful data examining the effects of honey bees on other species are even more scarce.

In a recent analysis, we found that only 15% of 116 published studies on resource competition involving honey bees measure how competition from honey bees affects the survival, reproductive output and long-term population trends of native species.

The majority of published studies on honey bee and wild bee competition address different versions of a narrow question: Do honey bees and native bees visit the same plants?

Because honey bees are “super generalists” that thrive worldwide well beyond their native range, most scientists would predict that the answer to this question is a resounding “yes.”

However, about half of the research suggests that honey bees don’t change the way native bees go about their day at all. From the perspective of a wild bee, the honey bees simply don’t exist in their world.

Different bee species can coexist with very little evidence of direct interaction. An analysis of bee communities measured across diverse agricultural, urban, grassland and forested environments found the abundance of honey bees and the abundance of native bees were positively associated about five times as often as they were negatively associated. In other words, rather than landscapes supporting one bee species at the expense of another, the same habitats support both.

Calls to restrict honey bees from certain locations also often miss a key reality: Native bee hot spots and urban and commercial beekeeping rarely overlap.

Beekeeping is anchored in agricultural lands. North America’s rarest bees thrive in environments like the Sonoran Desert – habitats that are poorly suited for managed colonies.

If competition occurs, it is typically the product of agriculture practices that strip the land of flowering plants that bees need.

Research that has artificially introduced hives into natural areas like the high Sierra – places beekeepers don’t typically go – has generated competition that left less pollen and nectar for the native bees. But frequently competition involves common native bees that are not under threat.

So, if honey bees aren’t to blame, what is?

The top drivers of pollinator declines are considered to be land use – the spread of cities and agriculture, as well as the way land is managed – along with rising temperatures, extreme weather and pesticide use.

Agriculture and urbanization reduce the amount and diversity of flowering plants, and droughts can reduce plant flowering and the resources bees rely on. Pesticides can reduce bees’ ability to lay eggs and care for their offspring, or they can kill bees outright.

The U.S. Geological Survey’s Native Bee Inventory and Monitoring Lab tracks bee populations in the U.S. mid-Atlantic region. Studies using its data have found that urbanization and weather changes have been the major drivers of changes in wild bee abundance and diversity in that region.

As temperatures rise, wild bee populations are expected to decline there. Warmer winters mean bees active in spring emerge earlier from their nests, and increased spring rain and temperature fluctuations can limit their ability to feed their offspring, meaning fewer bees.

The western bumble bee, Bombus occidentalis, was once widespread and abundant across western North America, but it has been in decline since the late 1990s. Long-term monitoring of its populations from 1998 to 2020 shows the primary reasons are land management changes, increasing temperature, drought and pesticide use.

What can you do to support pollinators?

The biggest threat to pollinators is the disappearing variety of flowering plants.

You can help reverse this by filling your garden with more flowering plants, trees and shrubs to give bees, butterflies and other pollinators a variety of food sources.

You can also advocate for bee-friendly behavior in your community, such as creating pollinator habitats in public and private spaces and reducing the use of harsh pesticides and herbicides. Planting more flowers in parks and along roadsides, and protecting wildlands where the rarest native bees live, can help keep these wonderful species thriving.

Christina Grozinger receives funding to study honey bee and wild bee health, management and conservation from the National Science Foundation, US Department of Agriculture, Foundaiton for Food & Agriculture Research, Human Science Frontiers Program.

Andony Melathopolous receives funding from USDA-NIFA – 2022-08511.

Clare Rittschof receives funding from the National Science Foundation, the Kavli Foundation, the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, USDA-AFRI, the Bill Gatton Foundation, and the Research Corporation for Science Advancement.

Harland Patch has received funding to study pollinator heath, floral traits and plant-pollinator interactions from the National Science Foundation, US Department of Agriculture, Gates Foundation and the Horticultural Research Institute.

Jay Evans receives funding from USDA-ARS and USDA-NIFA

– ref. It’s OK to love all the bees (the honey bees, too) – https://theconversation.com/its-ok-to-love-all-the-bees-the-honey-bees-too-279849