School Cellphone Bans Gain Momentum

More than two-thirds of American adults now support banning phones during class time, and a collection of both red and blue states, including New York, Louisiana, Florida, Virginia, California, have adopted statewide restrictions of varying intensities. More than a decade since teens began using smartphones en masse, school districts are now trying to put the digital genie back in the bottle—at least during school hours. 

Classroom phone use wasn’t always seen as negative, though. “Generally, with education and technology, all of the enthusiasm is for ‘more, more, more,’” Frederick M. Hess, the director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, told TMD. In the 1990s, there was an effort to provide schools with internet access, and later a push for laptops and tablets to be made available to students. “Phones just kind of felt like part of that continuum. So, 10 years ago even,” Hess said, “schools would brag about having kids on their phones.” 

As phone use in school became ubiquitous, however, parents, teachers, and administrators started to notice growing problems, especially after the pandemic. “We started to get good data suggesting that phones were really harmful for academic performance, for mental health, for wellbeing, and scholars like Jean Twenge and Jonathan Haidt did remarkably important work bringing that to public consciousness,” Hess said. “So what you saw was the first baby steps into this probably three to four years ago.” 

Haidt is a major player in the newfound push to ban phones in schools. In his 2024 book, The Anxious Generation, Haidt made the case that smartphones—and particularly social media—have led to declining mental health and other adverse outcomes among adolescents. Sabine Polak, a co-founder of a nonprofit called the Phone-Free Schools Movement (of which Haidt is a member of the Board of Advisors), told TMD that Haidt’s book coincided with significantly increased conversation around the issue of smartphones in schools. Just over a year after the book’s publication, more than a dozen states have implemented restrictions. The governors of Arkansas, Arizona, and New York all signed bans into law just this year. 

The recent uptick in legislation around the issue also coincides with more available data on how phone ownership affects children. Studies over the last several years have shown significant downsides to students having access to phones during school. More than half of public school leaders say that phones hurt academic performance, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. One study showed that teenagers are spending an average of 1.5 hours during the school day on their phones, especially on social media. An older study demonstrated how technology prevented students from staying focused on a single task, showing that even incorporating “technology breaks” into a classroom can negatively impact learning.

“The research on this isn’t ‘gold standard.’ Partly, it’s really hard to study this.” Hess said. “People can certainly raise reasonable questions about causation and some of the ins and outs of the data. But the patterns are painfully clear.” 

Reading and math scores for students have noticeably declined since the early 2010s, corresponding to the rise of smartphones and social media.. Anecdotally, educators are overwhelmed by distractions in the classroom and disruptions to learning. And the issues go deeper than just academic performance. As Haidt points out, mental health issues and self-harm have skyrocketed since the advent of social media—the suicide rate for girls aged 10 to 14 rose 131 percent from 2010 to 2019.

More than 75 percent of schools had technically banned phones as of 2021, according to a federal survey. But the survey did not measure enforcement, and phone use is still reportedly extremely high, with as many as 97 percent of students using their phones at some point during the school day. “We kind of had this assumption, like many parents, that schools had policies in place and they were being enforced, and what really happened after COVID was that most schools stopped enforcing the policies and became more relaxed,” Polak said. “It just quickly seemed to spiral out of control.” 

Several states have started implementing stricter rules around phone use, but there is debate as to how far these measures should go. New York’s ban, for example, takes a “bell-to-bell” approach, requiring school districts to create a plan to store students’ cellphones for the entire school day. Florida, on the other hand, allows high schoolers to use phones outside of the classroom, and Georgia only extended its ban to elementary and middle school students. Opinions about restrictions vary—while 68 percent of adults want to ban phones in class, that number plummets to 36 percent when asked whether the ban should be in place for the entire school day. Parents against a full-day ban are most concerned about being able to reach their child during the school day, an issue that arises regularly in discussions about cellphone restrictions. 

But the biggest challenge with phone bans is enforcement, and states haven’t found a one-size-fits-all solution. Some districts lock students’ phones in pouches, but even that cannot eliminate all technological distractions. A school district in California, for example, found that when it banned phones, students were texting with Google Chat and Google Spaces on their school-assigned Chromebooks. Additionally, it is difficult to get teacher buy-in. “Teachers don’t want to be in the business of confiscating kids’ phones,” Hess said. There are liability issues if a phone is damaged or stolen, and if teachers do not feel supported by administrators in enforcement, they may be reluctant to take students’ devices. 

Time will tell whether the bans are effective enough to boost students’ learning and mental health. In the U.K., a study found that phone bans had little effect on academic performance, but it will be some time before the results of recent bans in the U.S. are felt. “There’s certainly a lot of really positive anecdotal evidence,” Hess said. “But one of the challenges with so many education interventions is drawing a straight line to effects on academic outcomes.” Teachers at one Florida school that implemented bans in 2023 said students were more engaged during class. But anecdotes will only tell us so much before a scientifically valid study is conducted. “It will probably be a few more years until you start to see anything that would feel like valid and reliable data of the impacts on outcomes,” Hess said. 

One of the things that data might reveal is whether addressing phone use at school is effective without changes at home. Restricting cell phones in school can definitionally apply only to school hours, and many of the activities sparking the largest mental health concerns happen after class. “If the school is kind of an island, and as soon as kids are out of school they are still doing six or eight hours of phone time, and you still have the same bullying, and kids are staying up until 1 a.m., and parents aren’t imposing restrictions,” Hess said, “[a phone ban] will help create a distraction-free zone, but there is question about how much it will help as opposed to really changing habits.”

Ultimately, the efficacy of cellphone bans will likely depend on parental buy-in. “This is all obviously much easier when you’ve got communities where the parents are supportive,” Hess said. “As you get downstream to districts and states that were slower to do it, if you have a lot of parents who aren’t on board … you could see these bans being more effective in the places that have adopted them first.”

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