Last summer, Governor Mike DeWine signed the Ohio state budget into law. The budget made Ohio’s income tax flat, made a number of changes to the state property tax system, included provisions to decrease state Medicaid support if the federal government reduced its support, and put $600 million toward a new Cleveland Browns stadium. But probably most important to Ohio’s 1.8 million school-age children was that this bill banned cell phones in schools.
Cell phone use in general and social media use in particular has come under scrutiny by people in the public health field, especially those focused on mental health. Researchers argue there is a relationship between heavy social media use and depression, anxiety, loneliness, and suicidal ideation. A survey released last year by the National Center for Education Statistics reported that most of the public school leaders they surveyed believed cell phone use was hurting student academic performance.
These opinions have led to policy adoption in states across the country. According to a Newsweek report in January, over half of U.S. states have enacted statewide school cell phone bans. These bans occur in states across the country, with states in the Northeast, Midwest, South, and West enacting bans, though bans are most prominent in the South, with every Southern state besides Mississippi enacting a statewide ban.
In my daily life, I hear about this ban. My fiancée is a high school geometry teacher at Columbus City Schools, and she has to enforce this ban day to day. It has been a challenge to say the least.
Since some of these bans have been in place for a few years now, we are starting to get some evidence back about their effectiveness.
I was interested in this topic after I saw a recent National Bureau of Economic Research working paper on the topic. This change studied a 2023 policy in Rio de Janeiro that banned cell phone use in schools. The researchers compared the test scores of students in schools that adopted the policy before and after the district-wide change to test score changes among students in schools that already had a no cell phone policy before the districtwide policy was put in place. The researchers estimated the cell phone ban caused a 0.06 standard deviation increase in test scores, an increase comparable to small-group math instruction programs studied in Norway and free school meal programs in New York City.
These results reflect a study on English cell phone bans a decade earlier that compared schools that enacted bans versus schools that did not, finding a 0.07 standard deviation increase in test scores among schools that enacted bans compared to schools that did not.
A study by Swedish researchers on data from Swedish schools in 2020 gave more pessimistic results. They used the same approach researchers used in the study on English schools but found no effect. This may have been due to more strict environments in place in Swedish schools already: a schoolwide ban is unlikely to have an impact if teachers are already effectively banning cell phone use at the classroom level. A 2024 study of an Australian cell phone ban also was unable to find any academic or social results from cell phone bans.
A 2024 study out of the Norwegian Institute of Public Health found social and academic benefits from cell phone bans in Norway, particularly for girls. The researcher found smart phone bans led to less health care take-up for psychological symptoms and disease, less bullying, higher GPAs, and more likelihood to enroll in high school among girls. She also found less bullying among boys caused by the bans.
The first prominent study on U.S. cell phone bans focused on a cell phone ban in Florida. Researchers found a significant increase in suspensions among students right after bans were put in place and that these were higher among Black students. They also found that this suspension spike dissipated after a year, suggesting there was an adjustment period associated with the new policy. They found test scores increased in the second year after buildings adopted the policy and that attendance also improved in those schools. The researchers suggested this may be a mechanism for increases in test scores: less cell phone use in school leads to high attendance, which then increases test scores for students.
Last month, a nationwide study of U.S. cell phone ban data compared students in schools across the country that banned cell phones versus schools that did not. The results were not particularly rosy. In the first year of adoption of a cell phone ban, student discipline rates increased and well-being fell. While these bans led to less cell phone use, the researchers did not find increases in test scores, attendance, or attention in class. There was some silver lining to the study, though: by year three, the disciplinary spike had dissipated, and student well-being rebounded and ended up even better than it had been before the cell phone ban.
There are few things I take away from these studies. One is that while test score increases have not been observed in all contexts where bans were put in place, there are a number of contexts where test scores did improve after cell phone bans. This does seem to suggest that cell phone bans can be a tool for increasing student academic performance, though not a perfect one.
Another takeaway I have is that transitions matter. Some interventions might be needed in the first year of a cell phone ban to ensure that disciplinary incidents do not rise too quickly. But on the other side of a first year of implementation, cell phone bans can lead to better attendance and better academic performance for students.
If there is anything that makes me most encouraged as a policy analyst around cell phone bans, it is that the truly negative impacts of cell phone bans, disciplinary increases, are temporary, while the benefits have seemed to last. This suggests that if schools are willing to deal with some short-term disruptions, cell phone bans could be an effective tool at increasing student academic performance and well-being.
