In a recent post, I highlighted a new study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) examining the effects of cellphone bans on student outcomes. The researchers reported that in the large Florida district they studied, banning phones coincided with small yet statistically significant improvements in test scores by the second year. These findings have been cited as evidence that removing smartphones from classrooms boosts academic performance. But the study contains an important limitation: it never identifies the district. It offers only a vague description, referring to a “large urban county-level school district (LUSD), one of the ten largest in the United States.” That anonymity makes it difficult to interpret the results or understand what else may have been happening in the district during the same period.
My preliminary assumption was that the district was likely Miami-Dade County Public Schools, based on contextual clues. However, after publication, several colleagues pointed out that the description could also apply to Orange County Public Schools (OCPS), who was widely reported as the first large Florida district to adopt a full-day, bell-to-bell cellphone ban in the 2023–2024 school year. Students were required to silence and store devices in a backpack or purse for the entire day, including lunch and transitions. In retrospect, a more accurate phrasing would have been that Miami-Dade was one possibility, not the only likely candidate.
So let’s assume the district was OCPS—did they have similar increases in disciplinary enforcement, which could have helped produce the student achievement gains the study observed?
Florida’s statewide framework began with CS/HB 379, the Technology in K–12 Public Schools Act, enacted in 2023. The law prohibits students from using wireless communication devices during instructional time unless a teacher authorizes it for educational purposes. It also requires districts to designate where students must place their devices during class and obligates them to block access to social media platforms on district-owned devices.
However, the law did not prescribe penalties for lack of compliance; it leaves enforcement entirely to local districts. For example, OCPS’s 2023-2024 Code of Student Conduct established clear expectations and consequences: Students must silence devices and put them away for the full school day. Violations can result in confiscation, detention, a Positive Alternative to School Suspension (PASS), or an out-of-school suspension.
NBER’s study observed a surge in disciplinary action in its chosen district once the phone enforcement ban began, including an increase in in-school suspensions. State data show that in OCPS, disciplinary incidents did not suddenly spike with the cellphone ban; they had already been rising sharply for two consecutive years. Total incidents jumped from 4,896 in 2020–21 to 10,230 in 2021–22, then climbed again to 12,142 in 2022–23, which the NBER study treats as its neutral baseline year.
If the anonymous district in the NBER study was OCPS, this context matters. The study treats 2022–23 as a neutral pre‑ban baseline, but in OCPS, that baseline reflects a discipline system already dramatically intensified. That was the environment into which the cellphone ban was introduced.
This raises an important question: Is the cellphone ban itself driving improvements, or are the real effects coming from the increase in disciplinary actions that were taken in the preceding years? Did the cellphone ban simply provide one more easy-to-enforce infraction within an already strict environment? If schools with higher pre-ban cellphone use also had higher concentrations of disruptive students to begin with, then stricter enforcement triggered by the broader 2021-23 discipline shift—not the phone ban specifically—could explain much of the observed improvement in classroom stability. The NBER paper cannot fully disentangle these possibilities.
Because the NBER study does not identify the district, we lose the ability to examine the local conditions that shaped the results. That lack of context limits our understanding of what drove the improvements.
This does not mean that cellphone bans are irrelevant. Phones are distracting and introduce numerous other challenges, and reducing their presence likely helps teachers recapture some attention and instructional time. The broader lesson is that policy debates about technology often hinge on the wrong thing. The key is not just what we remove but what we restore. Eliminating phones may help, but improvements materialize when schools also rebuild structure, reestablish behavioral norms, and support students and teachers with the tools they need to succeed. Sustained academic progress requires a strong and coherent curriculum, targeted tutoring, and high-quality instructional materials.
The post Cellphone Bans, Part Two: What Discipline Patterns Reveals appeared first on American Enterprise Institute – AEI.
