[HN Gopher] School cell phone bans and student achievement
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School cell phone bans and student achievement
Author : harias
Score : 53 points
Date : 2025-12-02 17:58 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nber.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nber.org)
| harias wrote:
| Two years after the imposition of a student cell phone ban,
| student test scores in a large urban school district were
| significantly higher than before, David N. Figlio and Umut Ozek
| find in The Impact of Cell Phone Bans in Schools on Student
| Outcomes: Evidence from Florida (NBER Working Paper 34388).
|
| Paper: https://www.nber.org/papers/w34388
| aschla wrote:
| I'm not particularly old yet, in my mid-thirties, but I reacted
| like someone much older when I learned kids are allowed to carry
| around their phones all day at school.
|
| Back in my day (when we walked to school uphill both ways), we
| weren't allowed to carry around basic flip phones. They had to be
| in our locker and only used before or after school.
|
| When and why did it become acceptable for much more distracting
| and stimulating devices to be allowed in class?
| jdalgetty wrote:
| When parents themselves also became addicted and decided it was
| easier to give their kids phones than to parent them.
| AAAAaccountAAAA wrote:
| I think it is precisely because they are more distracting. When
| the most addictive thing in phones was the snake game, kids did
| not bother to insist in using their phones all the time. Now,
| when you try to tell a pupil to put the phone away, it often
| results in a huge arguments, so eventually teachers gave up.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| no seizing of phones, no detention/disciplary action? It's
| not even about the phones at that point, it's just general
| disrespect to staff. What changed overtime?
|
| Or maybe it was always this way and I simply had a better
| environment?
| ikamm wrote:
| It became "acceptable" because the teachers and admin were
| already on their phones constantly. I went to grade school from
| 2005-2017, when iPhones came around the adults got them years
| before kids did, I had numerous teachers that would sit on
| their phones half the class.
| stonemetal12 wrote:
| Never. There has never been a time when it was OK to use a
| phone in class. What happened is A) Some kids do take their
| phone out and play with them and either get caught or not B)
| Something happens and kids record it aka school fight videos.
| C) giant moral panic that has very little basis in reality.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| [delayed]
| phantasmish wrote:
| We weren't allowed to have any of _several_ different
| individual devices the functions of which are present in a
| smartphone. Banning that stuff was more-or-less
| uncontroversial. Obviously kids in an ordinary classroom
| shouldn 't have instant cameras, and video recorders, and audio
| recorders, and Walkmen, and radios, and game boys, and TVs, and
| flashlights, and...
|
| Now we have devices that are all of those things in one and
| parents will fight you if you try to keep kids from having or
| using them. Go figure.
|
| What's baffling is why so many more people started thinking all
| those devices were OK when they're combined into one device.
| Like, not much of this is novel, we _could_ have had devices
| that did most of the relevant things a smartphone does, in
| class. But we didn 't because _of fucking course_ they weren 't
| permitted.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| I really don't understand why the parents would fight for
| them. My theoretical kid is there to learn, enforce any
| reasonable rules that can disrupt that goal.
|
| It's also in general a good way to form work habits for
| future aspects. Be it college, a job, military, etc. You
| can't fight over having your phone out to your boss. You can
| do it to your professor, but that's your $20k/yr tuition
| talking.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| Yeah I'm not that far out of high school but my school in the
| late 00's had a library policy on phones. You can keep them in
| your pocket, but don't bring them out during school. Otherwise
| they get taken for the class time, and it escalates from there.
|
| This included recess and pretty much extended to all non-
| calculator electronic devices, but it was generally more lax
| when you weren't disrupting someone. I couldn't imagine
| brazenly having my phone out while a teacher was talking unless
| it was an emergency.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| It's beyond obvious that they should be paying attention to the
| classroom and not their screen. Future generations will equate
| our screentime addictions to smoking and drinking. Just putting
| it down doesn't work. It needs to be out of reach and in certain
| locations, taken away from us entirely for the betterment of
| humanity.
| HPsquared wrote:
| I wonder if there's a hidden confounding selection bias here,
| i.e. "ability of the school to ban phones". This is probably
| easier in less chaotic schools where the students listen to the
| teachers, say.
| moduspol wrote:
| If the teachers and schools cannot implement a phone ban
| because the students won't listen to them, it might be time to
| reassess what their purpose is.
| c22 wrote:
| These sorts of schools already make kids pass through metal
| detectors on their way in so phones can just be confiscated
| at that point.
| phantasmish wrote:
| Ever watch The Wire? The school in that show is a _very_
| accurate depiction of what a... middling-bad inner city
| school is like. There are tons of ones worse than it (they
| may have shied away from one of that sort either because it
| didn 't suit the story, or because they thought too many
| viewers would think they were exaggerating)
|
| There are schools where the administrators are too busy
| dealing with violence to have time for much else.
| QuercusMax wrote:
| In our local schools, they _don 't_ make *teachers* responsible
| for enforcing the bans. Students have to keep their phones in a
| Yondr pouch. If they're caught with their phone it will be
| confiscated (and require a parent to pick it up), and the
| _administration_ will give also give additional consequences
| such as being banned from extracurriculars or school activities
| like Prom.
|
| My student tells me that in practice many students don't keep
| their phone in the pouch, but they are very careful about how
| and when they use them. Many teachers have a "don't ask, don't
| tell" policy - if I don't see you using the phone, and it's not
| disruptive, then they don't care.
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| The increase in scores is really small. It's 1.1 percentage
| points.
|
| My interpretation is, the pandemic is a root cause of lower test
| scores for many reasons, one reason is that kids started using
| cell phones way more during the pandemic, and that new stuff on
| the phone (TikTok, let's be real) causes lower test scores.
| Reducing usage during school is addressing a real problem, but
| it's one of many real problems, and some are way bigger.
| eitally wrote:
| I think you're correct, but another piece of this is that
| students (especially in HS, but probably also in MS) have
| realized they can accomplish most assigned tasks in a fraction
| of the time using online resources (whether copies of old
| tests, agentic AI, or other sites), so they lean on their phone
| for this. A big piece of the missing equation here is the fact
| that home PC/laptop use has also been consistently decreasing,
| in favor of phones & tablets, causing phones themselves to be
| even more indispensable for youth.
|
| I read a position paper last week suggesting the solution to
| this is to take a zero tolerance policy in the classroom and
| move all course testing back to pencil & paper / bluebooks. I
| would support that (as a parent of two current high schoolers).
| phantasmish wrote:
| Funnily enough, as a parent, I'd have _loved_ for my (young-
| ish at the time) kids to have been on old-school pencil and
| paper stuff during the pandemic.
|
| Tear-out worksheet books or a weekly trip to the schools to
| grab a packet of physical papers with the week's lessons and
| work (or, hell, send the buses around to drop them off) would
| have been SO MUCH easier to manage and help with than all the
| online horse-shit.
|
| Like, I truly think my 80s and 90s classrooms would have been
| better prepared to deal with the pandemic than the modern
| computerized ones. You'd think it'd be the other way around,
| but from what I saw, no. It's just so much harder to keep
| track of what's going on in several different computer
| programs, than a stack of paper and a couple books for each
| kid.
| pavon wrote:
| I think there is a typo in the paper, that was carried over to
| the article. These two sentences appear to contradict one
| another as written:
|
| > Interestingly, we observe significantly improved student test
| scores in the second year of the ban (about 2-3 percentiles
| higher than the year before the ban) when suspensions revert to
| pre-ban levels.
|
| > Overall, we show that student test scores improved by 0.6
| percentiles, with the ban increasing spring test scores 1.1
| percentiles in the second year relative to the spring test
| right before the ban took effect.
|
| Instead, I think the 1.1 percentile gain should be about the
| _first_ year, and a 2-3 percentile gain by the second year.
| That is consistent with the graph.
|
| But yes, a fairly small gain. I agree that much of the gain
| could be recovering from losses during the pandemic. Also the
| FAST is a new test that started in the 2022-2023 school year,
| so some of this could also be due to students and teachers
| adjusting to the new test and improving over time.
| tylermw wrote:
| When you're dealing with large populations (here, the study
| include 230,065 students--a very large number), even small
| shifts due to some treatment can be significant. It is very
| hard to generate top-down policy interventions that shift the
| mean of a population in significant ways: if this treatment
| effect (banning phones) is real, 1.1 points represents a very
| big policy win that can easily be applied elsewhere. The devil
| is in the details, however: they exclude some recent data based
| on the pandemic, but baseline off of 2022-2023, which was still
| in the throes of the pandemic. The data they show looks to have
| around a 0.5-1 sigma variation in percentile from 2022-2024, so
| the shift from the baseline of around 1 to 4 definitely looks
| significant, but it will be interesting to see if sticks over
| time.
| i_c_b wrote:
| Back in the late 90s, when I first entered the video game
| industry to work (when it was quite scruffy, countercultural, and
| populated by some pretty odd people), one of the first things I
| encountered was a new co-worker who, next to his giant tower of
| used Mountain Dew cans, had a black and white TV in his cubicle.
| This struck me as very odd at that moment in time - as I
| understood things, obviously the point of work was supposed to be
| that it was a place where you worked, not a place where you
| watched TV. (Now, granted, everyone else was playing the recently
| released Diablo on their work PCs during lunch in network mode,
| and we were a game studio after all, so my reaction wasn't
| totally coherent). Still, no one else had a TV, and that guy was
| young and single with no work-life balance, he was a recent
| transplant, and it still seemed unusual at the time.
|
| Fast forward 28 years later, and now everyone has an amazing TV
| in their pocket at all times when they commute, sit in their work
| space, go out for coffee or lunch, or go sit down in the
| bathroom, all with a near infinite collection of video via
| youtube, netflix, and even massive amounts of porn. How little
| did I know. And that's to say nothing of texting and twitter and
| reddit and instant messaging and discord and ...
|
| Several years ago, I was working on a college campus, and there
| were giant corporate-flavored murals beside some of the city
| blocks students walked, full of happy multicultural clip art
| people and exciting innovative technological innovation, and
| adorned with the message, "Imagine a borderless world!" Clearly
| that message was meant to be rhetorical, not a call to
| reflection, critique, or reevaluation. There did not seem to be
| the suggestion that one might imagine the borderless world and
| then, having done so, decide it was a problem to be corrected.
|
| I wonder a lot, these days, if we're not deep into a Chesterton's
| Fence situation, where we have to rediscover the hard way the
| older wisdom about having separate spheres with separate hard
| constraints and boundaries on behaviors, communities, and
| communication pathways to facilitate all sorts of important
| activities that simply don't happen otherwise - something like
| borders and boundaries as a crucial social technology,
| specifically about directing attention productively. Phones and
| tablets are, in their own Turing complete way, portals to a
| borderless world that pierces the older intentional classroom
| boundaries.
| kragen wrote:
| The older wisdom was that you worked on the farm with your
| husband and children for your entire life, breastfeeding while
| you peeled the potatoes, putting down your spindle to comfort a
| crying child. Millers lived in the mill; even blacksmiths lived
| at their smithies. Except for rituals, separate spheres with
| separate hard constraints was a novelty of the Satanic mills
| where the Victorian proletariat toiled.
| Ferret7446 wrote:
| They still had clear boundaries. They slept in the sleeping
| place and at the sleeping time, they worked at the working
| place and at the working time. See, they didn't have
| smartphones to fiddle with in bed.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| > they didn't have smartphones to fiddle with in bed
|
| This is solvable for people who want to. We have a
| dedicated charging station in our house for all electronic
| devices. Before bed, all of those devices get put there.
| Including me and my wife's phones.
| krferriter wrote:
| This definitely is the way to do it. I have started
| keeping my phone in my living room at night instead of my
| bedroom, but am still bad about doing this every night.
| Phones are addictive and it is mentally hard to break out
| of the addiction. It is essentially a "you just have to
| do it" situation, but "just do it", while technically
| simple, is still difficult if you're addicted.
| kragen wrote:
| https://www.ou.org/holidays/the_thirty_nine_categories_of_s
| a... outlines those "clear boundaries" in detail from a
| pre-medieval or early medieval perspective.
| georgeecollins wrote:
| I am also older and I see that my kids don't have certain
| things that I perceived as disadvantages at the time but may
| have helped develop useful habits. These things include quiet
| and boredom, which helped with focus; lack of ready answers or
| information, which may have helped imagination or generative
| reasoning.
|
| I think we can recreate these things if and when we need to,
| but that recreation may be for the elites. I heard an interview
| with a professor who said he had to reintroduce Socratic exams
| to get around chat bots and the fact that kids now have very
| poor handwriting. At an elite school you can do that.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| _Your Phone Isn 't a Drug. It's a Portal to the Otherworld._
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46115659
| rootusrootus wrote:
| I had an early experience with a Palm III and a cell modem
| strapped to it. It was _intoxicating_. I still find the pull of
| the phone to be very strong sometimes. It 's an ongoing battle
| to maintain a healthy relationship with it. Such a useful tool,
| but also a massive time suck if you let it.
| NegativeLatency wrote:
| Having grown up in the "no cellphones allowed at school" age, and
| now having a kid, I'm super glad that my local school district is
| finally banning phones.
|
| There's always going to be exceptions but speaking for myself
| there's no way I'd be able to resist the allure of a cellphone in
| class.
| gpt5 wrote:
| This is an area where hacker news shows its weakness. We have:
|
| 1. A chart showing a very low increase (1-2 percent)
|
| 2. Nothing to control scores rising in every school in America in
| the last school year (due to reduction of COVID effects).
|
| 3. Scores not moving immediately after the ban, but only after
| the start of a new school year, which means a new cohort of
| students muddying the data.
|
| Yet the data fits people's biases here (regardless whether it's
| right or wrong), so the celebrate it and add anecdotes and
| explanations why it's true.
| uniqueuid wrote:
| To be fair, all those details are in the paper. And a 1-2
| percent increase does not seem low to me for such a measure.
| nineplay wrote:
| I'd go further and say its a global weakness and unbelievably
| destructive. The bulk of current discourse today is:
|
| 1. Read a headline/tweet/instagram.
|
| 2. Decide whether or not it fits in your worldview.
|
| 3. Move forward with the confidence that you are better
| informed than everyone else who agrees/disagrees with it.
|
| You see it everywhere on all sides of all beliefs.
|
| It didn't use to be like this. We used to read articles, we
| used to read common news sources, we use to not have media
| overrun with bad actors who know exactly what to say to get the
| most engagement and solidify people in their own world views.
|
| It's all over HN and I could have hoped there'd be more
| willingness to say "let me consider the contents and the source
| before deciding if I accept it". That attitude is just lost and
| I don't think it will be regained and I think it's the reason
| we are all in a death spiral.
| nemomarx wrote:
| When was it not like this, though? I think people are rosey
| about the past here. A small educated set was different in
| the past but probably the bulk of the population has always
| done something like this - now you can hear them online
| easier.
| nineplay wrote:
| We didn't always have bad actors directly injecting rage-
| bait into our blood streams.
| nemomarx wrote:
| Not as tuned for engagement as now, but we had to have
| yellow journalism laws for a reason too. There's always
| been lots of propaganda and manipulation and bad actors
| in journalism.
| uniqueuid wrote:
| Ok here is the crucial part of the paper:
|
| It's a difference in differences design, using individual-level
| test scores and de-seasonalized data (p. 13). Their wording is:
|
| > Y_igst is the outcome of interest for student i in grade g in
| school s in time period t, HighAct_s is an indicator for high
| pre-ban smartphone activity schools, D_t is a series of time
| period dummies (t = 0 indicates the first period after the ban
| took effect), d_s is school fixed effects, and th_g is grade
| fixed effects. In this setting, b_t are the parameters of
| interest, reflecting the difference in the outcome of interest
| between treatment and comparison schools for each period, with
| the period before the ban serving as the omitted category,
| holding grade level constant.
|
| To me some modeling choices seem a bit heavy-handed, but I'm
| not an economist and could not do better.
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| what it means is that this paper shows probable causality and
| models a lot of interesting features. it is most definitely
| not flawed.
|
| i think the tough thing is that 0.6 percentage points gain
| for the average student is quite small. it's actually less
| than you gain by studying for 1h for the SAT, which is
| probably about 0.9 percentage points, depending on how you
| interpret college board's research (it recommends 20h of
| studying). that is to say, if students studied _one fucking
| hour_ for the FAST, they would probably get a bigger benefit
| on it than _all_ the time they get back not looking at their
| phones throughout _two years_ of school.
|
| so whatever cell phone use (1) in school (2) causes, it
| causes a small effect on test scores.
|
| you would have to pick some other objective criteria, for
| example mental health assessment, for maybe a larger effect,
| or seek a larger treatment, perhaps a complete ban of cell
| phones period, to observe a larger effect.
| ryandrake wrote:
| There's no study that's good enough for HN.
|
| I don't think I've ever seen a science or research article
| posted here that didn't immediately get picked apart for this
| or that in the comment section. The methodology is flawed. The
| data is flawed. The conclusions cannot be drawn. There are
| confounding variables not accounted for. The sources are
| questionable. It's become a trope at this point. Either our
| commenters' standards are way too high, or all of science
| reporting is deeply flawed.
| uniqueuid wrote:
| Why not both? :)
| nxobject wrote:
| No study is perfect - research is and has always been
| expensive, and playing devil's advocate while seeing the arc
| of promising research is one of the fundamental skills of
| reading and doing research.
| HPsquared wrote:
| Maybe most studies actually are junk.
| tehjoker wrote:
| Yea, it's strange that the line didn't move quickly. I would
| give grace for a couple weeks to a few months, but next year?
| The timing feels really disconnected.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| The lack of control and cohort following are legitimate
| criticisms. The effect size is not. Even a single-digit
| percentage increase over a single year from policy treatment is
| _incredibly_ impressive when we open the door to cumulative
| effects.
|
| > _Yet the data fits people 's biases_
|
| It does. But it also fits priors, particularly those we've seen
| documented when it comes to teens and social media.
| ryuhhnn wrote:
| Some very important context that the researchers don't mention:
| during the same period that they are claiming test scores
| improved because of phone bans, Florida changed the way they
| administer standardised tests. Starting in 2024, they switched
| from doing one end-of-year assessment and started administering
| more frequent tests throughout the year in order to better gauge
| a student's progress and provide a tighter feedback loop.
| (source: https://www.educationadvanced.com/blog/florida-
| standardized-...)
|
| It's much more likely that simply changing the way they
| administer these tests had a more significant impact on test
| scores than phone bans.
| jobs_throwaway wrote:
| > It's much more likely that simply changing the way they
| administer these tests had a more significant impact on test
| scores than phone bans.
|
| Why do you think that's more likely?
| ryuhhnn wrote:
| Put yourself in the student's shoes: instead of being
| required to rote memorise every detail and hold that in your
| head until the end of the year, you are now only required to
| be assessed at the time that you are learning the material.
| Do you think you'd fare better on that type of test, or a
| test done months after you actually studied the material?
|
| One of the first things they teach you in educational
| research is that standardised test scores are significantly
| impacted based on how the tests are administered and what the
| test is actually assessing.
| uniqueuid wrote:
| You have to admit that it's quite clever how they approximate
| phone use:
|
| > Our identification strategy relies upon our ability to
| calculate school-specific measures of smartphone activity that we
| can attribute to students, rather than adults in the building. To
| do so, we use detailed smartphone activity data from Advan
| between January 2023 and December 2024 that we link to LUSD
| schools using point-of-interest coordinates.13 In particular, we
| focus on the average number of unique smartphone visits (pings)
| between 9am and 1pm on school days (a common time frame that
| elementary, middle, and high schools in LUSD are all in session
| during school days) in the last two months of the 2022-23 school
| year (right before the ban took effect) and the first two months
| of the 2023-24 and 2024-25 school years.14 To disentangle student
| activity from the smartphone activity of teachers/staff, we
| subtract the average number of unique smartphone visits between
| 9am and 1pm on teacher workdays (in the same school year) from
| the same average on regular school days.
| mikemarsh wrote:
| Since when is a study needed to confirm that enabling a dopamine
| addiction, especially in developing minds, is a bad idea? Isn't
| our own direct experience as adults/parents struggling with said
| addictions enough?
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(page generated 2025-12-02 23:00 UTC)