For the 2024-2025 academic year, more than half of states have implemented or taken steps toward implementing school cell phone restrictions. Florida became the first state in the nation to limit student phone use in May of 2023, followed by Alabama in February of 2024, and then a slew of states in the eight months since: Indiana, Minnesota, Ohio, Louisiana, South Carolina, Virginia, New York, Connecticut, and then California, with more likely to follow.
While there are still kinks to be worked out in terms of implementation—especially because most states with bans in place require individual school districts to make their own policies—the widespread legislative interest in school smartphone restrictions marks a positive and bipartisan development toward improving our nation’s schools.
Who Benefits From Cell Phone Restrictions?
While research on school cell phone restrictions is still emerging, some initial studies are promising. Sara Abrahamson at the Norwegian Institute of Public Health found that, following school smartphone bans, mental health improved among girls, bullying decreased among both sexes, and girls’ GPA improved, with effects largest for girls from lower socioeconomic backgrounds. Likewise, economists Louis-Philippe Beland and Richard Murphy found that student performance increased in English schools that implemented smartphone bans, and that this increase was driven by improvements in the performance of students who had previously been the lowest achieving. In other words, struggling students may have the most to gain from restricting smartphone use in schools.
Restrictions are also helpful to teachers: even the best teachers who are fully in charge of their classrooms ultimately can’t control what students do on their phones, so restrictions allow teachers to do their jobs. A Pew Research Center Survey conducted in the fall of 2023 found that 72% of American high school teachers, 33% of middle school teachers, and 6% of elementary school teachers felt that cell phone distraction was a “major problem” in their classrooms. Restrictions on classroom cell phone use nip the distraction in the bud.
It’s no wonder that teachers, students, parents, and administrators across the country have positively received cell phone restrictions. Per Bloomberg, when KIPP NYC College Prep high school implemented a phone ban this year, test scores rose, attendance at extracurricular events rose, and grades rose to where they had been before the pandemic—students even thanked the principal for the ban! A 7th-grade teacher in Niagara Falls, NY told WKBW-TV that she saw a “night and day” difference in her students after the implementation of a cell phone ban; multiple students at the school corroborated what she said, reporting that they felt the ban helped them learn free from distractions such as TikTok. Heather Kreider, the principal of Edgewater High School in Florida, told Education Week that the school’s students were “way more engaged” and that “the result of [the ban] on a very wide scale has been extraordinarily positive for [students’] mental health from an anecdotal perspective.”
Moreover, according to a 2022 study, 61% of parents support banning phones in schools. One mom told the Washington Times that she is “all for banning phones in schools” because she “[believes] children are losing the ability to engage in the real world” due to cell phones.
Potential Pitfalls
It should be noted, however, that many parents are less enthusiastic about phone bans. Many are worried that with a phone ban in place, their children will not be able to reach them from school in case of an emergency. In fact, New York City schools’ Chancellor David Banks paused on implementing a phone ban that would have had students lock their phones up for the day—primarily because a school in the district went on lockdown due to an active shooter threat (which, thankfully, turned out to be a false alarm) without properly notifying parents. There are also ideological reasons parents are worried about these bans. The Washington Times noted that some parents are worried that without phones, students will not be able to document objectionable far-left ideological content in classrooms, which, unfortunately, is all too prevalent in schools across the country.
Of course, students can still come home from school and tell their parents about ideologically extreme content—no phones needed. And while the question of communication during an emergency is more difficult to answer, it’s important to keep in mind that phone use in the moment of an emergency can lead students to miss important guidance from teachers or administrators, as Kim Whitman, co-founder of the Phone-Free Schools Movement, told VOA news. That is to say: there are trade-offs even when it comes to phones and security concerns, and it’s not obvious that phones always protect students’ security.
At the same time, it’s hard to blame parents for being skeptical of school policies. With most state-wide school cell phone restrictions leaving individual schools to develop their own cell phone policies, individual school districts in most states will be the ones creating and implementing their own restrictions—of course, these are the same school districts that have in many cases lost the confidence of parents, especially in the aftermath of COVID-era school closures. Parents’ concerns—whether about their children’s physical safety or the ideology their children may come across during the school day—primarily come down to this loss of trust, and the onus of rebuilding that trust is on school districts, not on parents.
As schools implement policies restricting phone use, they must consider parents’ concerns and actively involve parents in the implementation process. It’s reasonable for parents to worry about what their children will encounter in school, and district cell phone restriction policies will only help students if their parents can rely on schools to act in their children’s best interest.
The Upshot
We should acknowledge good news when we see it: cell phone restrictions are clearly helping students and teachers alike and should be encouraged.
That said, between COVID-era learning loss caused by prolonged school closures and the toxic ideologies endemic in far too many schools, school districts across the country have lost trust with parents over the past several years (if not longer). School districts will not rebuild that lost trust by implementing cell phone policies without parental input. Rather, schools must commit to transparency and rebuilding trust with parents in order to implement cell phone restrictions that balance student learning with parental concerns. Districts and parents will likely have to find compromises: for instance, instead of mandating that students lock their phones up at the beginning of the day, districts may instead mandate that students put their phones in cubbies at the start of each period (so that students can more easily access phones if the need arises).
Ultimately, the bipartisan nature of these restrictions is good news: moving toward restricting cell phone use in schools will allow teachers to teach, students to learn, and our nation’s schools to thrive.