Oh, don't get me wrong I'm all for use of technology early on for developmental reasons. In today's digital economy kids need to be educated using tools that will better prepare them for the workforce. Regardless of whether they will be in a manual labor type of position or desk job. If I'm going to have work done on my house, the general contractor better come to me with a project plan and breakdown of costs in a spreadsheet - not some back of the napkin write-up. 10 years ago, when you went into a corporate meeting, everyone came with a notepad and pen. These days almost all show up with a tablet. The school issued devices, whether they are tablets or laptops can and should be centrally managed by the school system to prevent them from visiting inappropriate websites, installing non-approved software, or disabling features like cameras. There are a suite of mobile device management solutions that provide for implementation of very granular settings. Also, I would think that digital versions of books will result in cost savings as well as more recent content being readily available to students.

This challenge exists in the corporate world too... Organizations are concerned about data leakage and sometimes implement policies to block access to social media and personal email accounts. Blocking email results in pushback from the workforce as parents rely on email for communication with their kids school. If you make the employees computer overly restrictive, they will spend more time on their personal device... Then there is the whole BYOD (bring your own device) approach for personal devices on the corporate network. A one size fits all approach has not been formulated here yet and its still quite the mess.

I can see the argument a parent can make for a child to always have their personal phone on them, for example in emergencies, including the unfortunately all too frequent school shootings that happen these days. At the same time, the parent needs to act in a responsible manner when providing their child with a cell phone. The situation described below by /u/fitzmoon where a parent is texting their kid all day long is simply inappropriate. I would be curious to know if this parent then blames the teacher when their kid does not perform well in a class...

Use of technology in school = good. Allowing use of personal cell phones in the classroom = distraction / harmful to learning environment. Asking educators to police content on a student's personal cell phone = unreasonable