For months, a battle has raged in New York City over whether students should be allowed to have cell phones in public schools. In fact, in April the city ran something of a dragnet operation in schools looking for weapons and instead ended up confiscating 129 phones at one school alone.

Parents say their children need the phones to keep in touch with them on the kids’ way to or from school. The Bloomberg administration counters that having the phones in schools can be disruptive, that they are sometimes used for cheating on tests, and are even employed in gang activities. And now the dispute has reached the point where the City Council is getting involved, promising to pass legislation permitting children to carry phones.

All of this, of course, is ridiculous. Gangs operated in school for decades without cell phones, and for years NYC schools have successfully practiced a sort of “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy that let kids carry phones as long as they didn’t go off in class or get used for nefarious purposes. But this is what happens when you force everyone to support a single, government-run, school system: People fight over everything because only one group’s values and opinions can ultimately become policy. The result: All kinds of stupid arguments, and schools that are constantly paralyzed by politics.