Cell phone bans in schools could improve student well-being, but not test scores, new study suggests

Banning cell phones in schools has been touted as a silver bullet for poor test scores and low student well-being and attendance, but new research suggests the results are more mixed.

By Claire Cameron edited by Jeanne Brner

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Cell phone bans in schools work: At least kids generally don’t use their phones at school, according to a new working paper. But the bans, which have been touted by researchers, educators and policymakers as a way to increase children’s attendance and academic success and to tackle mental health issues and online bullying, are not delivering on all these promises, findings reveal.

In the years that followed cell phone bans took effect in schools, students and teachers in those schools reported higher levels of well-being, but average test scores and attendance records did not move. Perceived levels of online harassment have also not improved, according to the newspaper.

THE research was released Monday by a nonprofit organization called the National Bureau of Economic Research. The study authors looked specifically at schools where children were required to keep their smartphones in a magnetically sealed location. pouches which will only be unlocked at the end of the school day. They then compared these schools with others that did not impose pockets, more than 40,000 schools in total between 2019 and 2026. The researchers analyzed the schools’ testing data, attendance reports, disciplinary records, GPS data and student and teacher surveys.

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By 2026, about two-thirds of U.S. states have passed laws to restrict access to cell phones in schools — and those laws aren’t entirely popular with kids. A recent Pew research center investigation found that 41 percent of U.S. teens ages 13 to 17 supported banning middle and high school students from using cell phones during class, while about half were completely opposed. Even fewer students favor restricting cell phones during the entire school day: Only one in five say phones should be banned all day, including during lunch and between classes, while 73 percent oppose such policies.

In the new paper, researchers found that when schools first adopted the pouches, suspensions tended to increase and student-reported well-being decreased, but that these trends did not last long and that over time, discipline stabilized and well-being increased.

The analysis has some limitations, the researchers wrote. Test and survey results do not necessarily reflect all results of telephone restrictions. And even in schools that had the pouch system the longest, researchers had no more than three years of post-adoption data to consider. And some schools have used other forms of phone restrictions that might have different effects than the pouches.

“Assessing the long-term impacts of phone restrictions and comparing alternative policy designs are important priorities as schools continue to experiment with digital access management approaches,” the researchers wrote.