School Phone Bans
The researchers behind a 2025 working paper looking at the impact of cellphone bans in Florida schools on student outcomes found that students demonstrated significant improvements in test scores and a substantial decrease in unexcused absences, especially in middle and high school settings following the implementation of these bans.
They posit that the latter might contribute to the former: fewer absences may help explain the higher test scores, though other variables, like better focus, may also be contributing to those outcomes.
That said, they also found that in the short-term outcomes were a lot worse. The first year after the implementation of these bans, there was a significant increase in student suspensions, especially amongst Black male students; suspensions rose about 25% overall that first year, but around 30% for Black male students. The data they examined for this paper also showed that those exam score improvements didn’t show up until the second year, after a one-year adjustment period (for staff and students).
They suspect the outcomes were more pronounced amongst middle and high schoolers because smartphone ownership is a lot more common in those age groups, and the general sense after looking at all this data is that cellphone bans work, at least for the purpose of helping students attain better test scores and fewer unexcused absences, though it could take a while for the benefits to emerge and the initial negative consequences (probably related to students adjusting their habits to the new rules and expectations) to subside.
We don’t yet know what the long-term effects of this kind of ban might be, positive or negative (or both), and there’s a good chance the devil’s in the details with these sorts of bans, as the school distinct whose data the researchers used for this paper applied a stricter policy than the rest of Florida, requiring that students keep their phones silenced and stored in backpacks for the whole of the school day, including during lunch and in between classes.
Distinctions in local culture and the makeup of student populations will almost certainly lead to different outcomes, then, but the nature of the bans, in particular how and how stringently they’re enforced, also likely contributes to the eventual outcomes of such policies.