Thinking About Smartphone Bans in Schools

 by James Pethokoukis

America’s war on student smartphones is intensifying. Roughly two-thirds of US states have moved to restrict phone use in schools. The educational logic is straightforward enough. If these devices distract our kids, lock the gadgets away and learning will naturally improve—a strong prima facie case, to be sure. Yet new nationwide evidence suggests the story is more complicated than this basic common parental and teacher intuition.

A fresh NBER working paper by Stanford University’s Hunt Allcott and co-authors, “The Effects of School Phone Bans: National Evidence from Lockable Pouches,” examines one of the most stringent approaches—lockable phone pouches that physically prevent access during the school day. Using a dataset spanning thousands of schools, the researchers take advantage of a kind of natural experiment by comparing outcomes before and after adoption against similar schools that didn’t adopt the policy.

If the goal is to keep kids off their phones while at school, mission accomplished. On those terms, the policy works. Phone use plunges with pouches—fewer GPS pings on campus and far less in-class use, according to teachers.

Yet as the paper points out, “Parents express support for pouches and expect improvements in academic, social, and mental health outcomes.”

This intervention is supposed to have numerous downstream effects. As for better classroom focus and achievement, there is little sign of improvement. Student survey measures of classroom attention barely budge—same with bullying and attendance—and may even dip slightly, suggesting that removing phones doesn’t automatically translate into more engaged students. 

What’s more, disciplinary incidents rise and student well-being falls in the first year. No one said students would be happy or that enforcement would be easy. Over time, however, those effects fade: Discipline normalizes and well-being rebounds, even turning modestly positive.

For many parents, of course, academic improvement is the big goal, and their evidence of a big payoff is elusive. Average test scores show essentially no change. High schools register small gains, particularly in math, while middle schools see slight declines. These results suggest that while phones may be irritating to teachers, they may not be a meaningful constraint on learning.

None of this means phone restrictions are altogether misguided. Schools may value quieter classrooms or reduced screen time for reasons beyond test scores. And it’s worth pointing out, as the authors do, that the longer-term effects remain unknown. And even minor drawbacks may be significant if any upsides—such as digital literacy or as an addendum to traditional instruction—are hard to pin down. (The paper doesn’t go there.) In that case, parents will likely continue to trust their instincts.

Perhaps the most useful way to view this research is a serious data point that cuts against any sort of sweeping claims that view phone bans as an educational panacea. Even if the phones are gone, plenty of work remains.

https://www.aei.org/economics/thinking-about-smartphone-bans-in-schools/