Should schools ban phones?
William Schnider, a rising senior in high-school in Los Angeles, didn’t see how a phone ban at school would work. If he’s getting good grades, why should his phone be banned?
But he also admitted that it’s easy to base your worth on how many likes you get from an Instagram post. At school, he’s seen students in class turn to their phones when a math problem gets hard or start playing games on their phone if they finish an assignment early.
Schnider is one of millions of students in the US encountering new restrictions on phone usage and access in schools as young people, educators, legislators, and parents grapple with big questions.
Do phones adversely affect the learning process?
Does banning them prevent parents from reaching their kids during an emergency?
Instead of banning phones, is it better to help kids develop a healthier relationship with their devices?
While there is a growing chorus of experts calling for restricting phone usage at school, phone bans—a term that encompasses restrictions ranging from collecting phones at the beginning of the school day to limiting access to phone usage to certain times—have produced only mixed results.
In this week’s newsletter, we’re exploring what’s at stake when schools ban phones, the research on whether bans are effective, and how implementation might work.
// The case for restricting phone usage
Parents and educators are concerned that ubiquitous access to phones impacts childhood development and learning. A 2023 study from Common Sense Media, a Project Liberty Institute Alliance member, found that 97% of 11-17-year-olds used their phones during school hours for a median of 43 minutes. Those students received a median of 237 notifications a day, with 25% of those notifications happening during school time.
According to Pew Research, 72% of high school teachers say students being distracted by their cellphones in the classroom is a “major problem.” What kind of problem? Critics point to two main reasons:
Reason #1: Phones can interfere with the learning process.
Studies that compare students with and without phones in classrooms found that those without phones have better academic performance, higher attention on class material, better memory of information learned, and lower feelings of nervousness during class.
According to the National Parents Union, one in every two K-12 parents worry that phones interfere with their child’s learning. One in three K-12 teachers believe that students distracted by their phones is a major problem in their classroom.
After a school ban, one teen in New York said, “I definitely think that not having my phone during my free periods, and even during my lunch, I was able to focus. It kind of just made me and other kids focus on their schoolwork more than just sitting on their phone and watching TikTok through the whole period.”
Reason #2: Phones can threaten kids' social development and mental health.
Phone use during the school day could interfere with in-person social interactions and heighten risks for cyberbullying. Jackie Goldberg, the Los Angeles Unified School District Board President, expressed a common concern amongst educators and parents about how phone usage is hampering connection, “It's gotten to the point that students don't talk face to face, but instead text one another when they're sitting right next to each other!”
The US Surgeon General, Dr. Vivek Murthy, who issued an advisory on social media and youth mental health said in a New York Times op-ed earlier this summer, “Schools should ensure that classroom learning and social time are phone-free experiences.”
Push-back
But there isn’t consensus that phones should be fully banned.
- Parents have expressed concern that a phone ban would prevent them from reaching their children during an emergency. The growing fear of school shootings and campus lock-downs has fueled a desire by parents to be able to communicate with their kids.
- Phones can be useful devices in the learning process, and some students believe educational apps, note-taking apps, and other phone-based tools that enable the learning process are necessary.
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97% of 11-17 year-olds used their phones during school hours.
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// Back at school, away from devices
Across the United States, private schools, public school districts, and entire states are grappling with what to do about phones in schools.
In 2024 alone, eight states have passed laws, and many more are considering similar bans. If all the proposed bans in states across the country pass, then nearly 20 million kids, or one out of every four Americans under the age of 18, would live in states where phones are banned at school.
// What the research says about phone bans
But for all the policy momentum to ban phones in schools, the results are mixed. Research from Europe reveals less conclusive evidence that reducing phone usage increases academic performance.
- A study in Spain (2022) found that standardized test scores increased for middle-schoolers and bullying decreased in one region that banned phones for personal use in classrooms.
- A study in Norway (2024) looked at a variety of phone policies—from banning phones to keeping them on silent—and found only small improvements in GPA and reductions in bullying, but only for girls, and especially for those from lower socioeconomic backgrounds.
- A study in Sweden (2019) found that phone bans in schools had no impact on ninth graders’ academic achievement.
More research is needed. A 2024 meta-analysis of existing academic research on phone bans found weak and inconclusive results.
// Implementation matters
The devil is in the details of implementation, and there isn’t widespread agreement on how to implement restrictions. The implementation quandary hinges on three big questions:
- What kind of ban? Should phones not be allowed at school at all? Or just during class time, leaving lunch and breaks between classes for students to use their phones? Such tradeoffs come with enforcement challenges; it’s more challenging for educators and administrators to police phone usage if phones are allowed at certain times throughout the day.
- Who enforces the ban? Bans imposed at the state level are more uniform, but they might lack the nuance and context of a decision made by specific educators who are closer to students.
- How does it work each day? The mechanics of confiscating or hiding thousands of devices each day can be costly, time-intensive for educators, and logistically complex. In one school in New York, teachers and administrators verify that students have their phones in secure pouches made by Yondr (cost $15-30 per student), which can only open with magnetized keys. Students are allowed to carry around their Yondr bags, but they can’t access their devices until the end of the day. Other schools use different methods: phone safes, baskets, hanging pocket holders, and phone lockers.
Most schools are already doing something. More than 80% of K-12 teachers in the US say their school or district already has a cellphone policy.
// When is a ban the right move?
One argument against banning phones in schools goes like this: By banning devices, do we prevent the opportunity for young people to develop a healthy relationship with their devices? Could school be a good forum to learn these skills in real-time?
This question touches on a deeper debate at the heart of the responsible tech movement. How do we balance broad-brush approaches to creating safe and healthy spaces while also giving individuals greater control and agency over their experiences online? But for today’s teens, half of whom say they are online “almost constantly,” it’s reasonable to consider school a space where phones should be more restricted.
Long-term, the right approach might be multidimensional and nuanced: working in the short-term to restrict a student’s ability to even access their device during the school day, while working in the long-term to build new technology that gives everyone greater agency control over their digital experience.
In the meantime, more and more students like Schnider will get practice navigating school and building friendships without the help from their phone.
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