An Epidemic of Vicious School Brawls, Fueled by Student Cellphones

Across the United States, technology centered on cellphones — in the form of text messages, videos and social media — has increasingly fueled and sometimes intensified campus brawls, disrupting schools and derailing learning. The school fight videos then often spark new cycles of student cyberbullying, verbal aggression and violence. At Los Angeles public schools, reports of student fights more than doubled — to nearly 4,800 incidents in the 2023 school year, compared with 2,315 fights in 2018, according to a district safety report. A New York Times review of more than 400 fight videos from schools in California, Georgia, Texas and a dozen other states — as well as interviews with three dozen school leaders, teachers, police officers, pupils, parents and researchers — found a pattern of middle and high school students exploiting phones and social media to arrange, provoke, capture and spread footage of brutal beatings among their peers. In several cases, students later died from the injuries. Click here to read more.