The Fidget Spinners Are Banned in 32% of the Largest High Schools in the U.S.

Date: May 10, 2017
Author: Alexi Roy ([email protected])

 

When I first heard that fidget spinners were starting to get banned in schools across the country last week, I was shocked. I am a big fan of spinners, and I was skeptical that this could really be happening. Are schools really banning these toys, or is the media telling us bullshit? I needed to find out for myself. I had the idea to conduct my own study in order to see exactly how many high schools did, in fact, ban fidget spinners. This is how I did it.

IN SHORT:
- I contacted the 200 largest high schools in the USA (100 public and 100 private).
- I got a reply from 177 of them (89% of the dataset).

MY PROCESS:
1) First, I got the list of the largest public high schools in the United States from the Common Core of Data (CCD), maintained by the National Center for Education Statistics for the U.S. Department of Education. For public schools (PK-12), I used: http://www.data.gov/education. For private schools (PK-12), I used: http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/pss/.
2) I programmed a small PHP script to process and extract the needed data from these huge public CCD datasets. I took the top 100 public and top 100 private high schools according to enrollment in 2016.
3) I found the contact information of these 200 high schools using Google. Via their websites, I got their email addresses and phone numbers.
4) I reached out to all the schools one by one. This took a long time: about 1.5 weeks to be precise. I mostly got answers from school secretaries. I let them know that I was conducting a study about fidget spinners and asked them if these toys were currently banned in their schools. I started by sending an email and followed up with a call a few days after if I had not received a reply to the initial email. I made sure to kept a record of all emails and calls.
5) I compiled all the data and wrote up this article! :)

THE RESULTS:
- 63 high schools told me that fidget spinners are currently banned or will be by the end of the week (32% of the top 200).
- Out of these 63, 27 are public high schools (27% of the top 100 public high schools).
- Out of these 63, 36 are private high schools (36% of the top 100 private high schools).

 

This is crazy...  As of May 10, 2017 the fidget spinners are banned in 32% of the largest high schools in the United States.

 

THE DETAILLED RESULTS:

Study by Alexi Roy, creator of Spinner List, the biggest fidget spinner database.