U.S. barrels ahead with school smartphone bans — despite weak evidence that they help

Something is happening in the lunchrooms of America’s middle and high schools: They’re getting louder.

In the past few years, the aural environment has been dominated by clanging trays, pinging registers, and scraping silverware. Now, raised voices are once again soaring above the cacophony. Educators are generally happy with the trend. It’s an audible sign that smartphone bans are working. No longer glued to their screens, students are speaking to each other again!

Adam M. McCready, an assistant professor-in-residence of higher education and student affairs at the University of Connecticut, hears this anecdote over and over. He and his colleagues are exploring the effects of smartphone bans in public schools, but a handful of anecdotes does not constitute convincing scientific evidence. As policymakers barrel ahead with purging smartphones from classrooms, will these efforts benefit students?

The social media generation

For the past decade and a half, children have been guinea pigs in an unprecedented social experiment. What happens when they are given powerful, pocket-sized personal computing and communication devices outfitted with addicting software with relatively little supervision? Can their immature prefrontal cortexes handle such distractions, especially in educational settings? Now that 95% of American teenagers have access to a smartphone and spend hours on it daily, the consensus among adults appears to be a resounding “no.”

Overall, 68% of US adults responding to a 2024 Pew Research Center survey say they support a ban on middle and high school students using their phones during class. The biggest reasons these Americans gave for backing the move? Fewer distractions (98%), better social skills (91%), less cheating (85%), and reduced bullying (70%).

Buffeted by resolute public opinion, politicians are taking action. As of November 4, 2024, eight states — California, Florida, Indiana, Louisiana, Minnesota, Ohio, South Carolina, and Virginia — have passed policies that ban or restrict phone use in schools. These broadly take effect during the current school year. Twelve more states have introduced such legislation.

The movement to ban smartphones in schools extends globally as well. France, Spain, Switzerland, Canada, Israel, and Sweden have all introduced policies at a national level, with Chile, Denmark, and England on the same trajectory. In 2023, the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) called for a global smartphone ban in schools to “tackle disruption by smartphones in classrooms and protect children from cyberbullying.”

But just as putting smartphones in teens’ pockets was a grand experiment, so too is taking the devices away. Parents, educators, and policymakers hypothesize that restricting phone use will improve teens’ social lives, boost academics, and cut down on bullying. Does science bear this out?

Unconvincing early research

The evidence collected thus far is unconvincing. Any positive effects of restricting smartphone use in middle and high schools are small or nonexistent.

Schools started to implement smartphone bans in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Researchers have taken these opportunities to compare metrics before and after policies are enacted or, more commonly, to weigh outcomes in schools that ban smartphones versus schools that don’t.   

In one review published in August, researchers at the University of Augsburg in Germany aggregated and analyzed five research studies looking at schools in Europe. Combined, the research suggests that bans can reduce social problems, the reviewers found. With reduced access to social media during school, kids couldn’t cyberbully each other as much. The reviewers also discovered a slight boost to academics.

Based on the early research, they recommended that “smartphone bans be introduced in schools, accompanied by educational measures, and evaluated regularly.”

In a widely touted study published in February 2024, Sara Abrahamsson, a postdoctoral researcher with the Norwegian Institute of Public Health, looked at the effects of smartphone bans in schools in Norway. She found that bans greatly boosted girls’ mental health and slightly augmented their grades, while boys were unaffected. Abrahamsson theorized that girls’ higher phone use compared to boys could account for the difference in effect. 

In another study carried out in South Australia, researchers compared schools that had instituted a ban requiring students to keep phones off and away during the entire school day versus those without such a policy.

“Overall, the results indicated that the ban and no ban schools either did not differ significantly, or there were minimal differences, in terms of problematic use of mobile phones, academic engagement, school belonging, and bullying,” the authors reported.

Marilyn Campbell, a professor in the School of Early Childhood and Inclusive Education at Queensland University of Technology in Australia, has conducted the most scoping review of the research on smartphone bans to date. She and her coauthors looked at 22 published and unpublished studies carried out across the world. Their assessment wasn’t exactly glowing.

“Overall, our study suggests the evidence for banning mobile phones in schools is weak and inconclusive,” they concluded. Any potential improvements to academics, mental health and wellbeing, and cyberbullying don’t seem to be meaningful. 

They added that while one-size-fits-all policies at state or national levels may be politically popular, they aren’t in the best interest of schools or students. “Politicians should leave this decision to individual schools, which have direct experience of the pros or cons of a ban in their particular community.”

In general, the studies on smartphone bans were also poorly designed and could not root out cause and effect, Campbell and her coauthors added. 

Moreover, policies have proven to be uneven, with bans taking various forms. Some schools have students store phones inside backpacks for the day. Others use safe-like portable storage units or have students lock phones away in magnetically-sealed pouches. Some simply install classroom phone holders on desks where all students place their devices.

Although the benefits of smartphone bans aren’t apparent for students, teachers’ desires must be considered as well. Nearly three-quarters of high school teachers, a third of middle school teachers, and even 6% of elementary school teachers say that “students being distracted by their cellphones in the classroom is a major problem,” according to a Pew Research report published in April.

Here, the Digital Wellness Lab at Boston Children’s Hospital declares the science to be clearer: ”Most classroom cell phone [sic] bans are seeking to reduce the distractions presented by unstructured use of cellphones, such as social media pings, text messaging, and video games. On this topic, evidence for the negative effects of media multitasking is more clear than some of the other facets of a smartphone ban.”

Don’t ban, educate

McCready broadly agrees with Campbell and her co-authors. As he told Big Think:

“The efficacy of any smartphone ban is context dependent. We have observed that some schools that claim publicly to have implemented full-day bans are not implementing these bans with the intended fidelity (e.g., phones are not secured at the start of school). Just because a ban is in place does not necessarily mean that students are unable to access their devices or that they are not misusing school provided technology.”

McCready and Campbell also concur that educating teens about proper smartphone use is likely a better, longer-term solution compared to blanket bans. “This will help students learn how to use their phones safely and responsibly at school, at home and beyond,” Campbell wrote.

“My research team believes that fostering digital citizenship, literacy, and agency among students is vital to student well-being and success,” McCready said. “The best analogy I can give is related to driving a car. In the United States, we require teens and adults to take driver’s education courses, possess learner’s permits, and take driving tests before they earn their licenses. However, many children receive smartphones, iPads, Chromebooks, and other devices with little or no education or guidance.”

A ban simply reinforces the notion that phones are universally harmful, he says, which isn’t true. They’re a tool, one which requires instructions on proper use.

“We observed students in schools with bans immediately access their devices at the end of the school day. Their online behaviors outside of schools go unchanged,” McCready said.

Adults would probably benefit from lessons on smartphone hygiene as well, he added.

“The public discourse also often fails to acknowledge how adults model the use of smartphones and other devices for children. How are educators using their devices during the school day in front of children? How are parents, caregivers, older siblings, and others modeling these behaviors at home? If children’s smartphone use is a concern, then we need to consider adult smartphone use as well.”

A new moral panic?

Take a step back and zoom out. In many ways, the rising anti-phone fervor in schools mirrors moral panics of the past. Politicians and parents have invariably blamed all sorts of things — rock ‘n’ roll, Marilyn Manson, Dungeons & Dragons, violent video games, and so on — for corrupting the youth. Social media-equipped smartphones could simply constitute the next target in elders’ crosshairs. Again, scientific evidence suggests these new technologies aren’t inherently good or bad, and their effects on teens are nebulous.

But of course, the topic of smartphone bans in schools is far from settled and clearly merits further, higher-quality research. Professor McCready aims to provide. 

“To my knowledge, researchers have yet to parse out which methods are most effective,” he told Big Think. “My mixed methods study with Drs. Kathy Rohn [UConn] and Jennifer Phaiah [Sacred Heart] is investigating the efficacy of the using Yondr pouches to secure phones for the entire school day. We are collecting longitudinal data from seventh-grade students from four middle schools at three timepoints during the current school year. Two schools have implemented Yondr pouch bans, while the others have not. In addition, two schools (one with pouches, one without) have implemented the Common Sense digital citizenship curriculum.”

The results of the study should be available next fall.