Sign up for Chalkbeat’s free weekly newsletter to keep up with how education is changing across the U.S.
Charles Longshore distinctly remembers the tipping point that led his Alabama middle school to ban cell phones, two years before the state adopted its own ban.
Longshore, then the assistant principal at Dothan Preparatory Academy, had gotten wind that two girls planned to fight in the courtyard between classes and pulled them into the office about 10 minutes before the scheduled rumble. That prevented the fight, but it didn’t stop hundreds of other students from racing to the courtyard hoping to watch a spectacle advertised through texts and chats, with their own phones out ready to record it.
Stories like these — along with countless less dramatic moments of distraction and disengagement — have made cell phone bans a rare point of bipartisan agreement on education policy. Twenty-six states now have state-level bans or restrictions on cell phone use in schools. Two-thirds of principals said their school had a bell-to-bell ban in a recent RAND Corp. survey.
But so far there hasn’t been much concrete evidence about the impacts of school cell phone bans.
“The policy action is just happening at a level that far surpasses the available evidence,” said David Figlio, an economics professor at the University of Rochester. “The available evidence is largely people’s hunches.”
Figlio and Umut Özek, a senior economist at RAND Corp., a research organization, set out to address that gap. Their study, released Monday as a working paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research, analyzes data from a large, county-level urban school district in Florida, which was the first state to adopt a cell phone ban.
The study found modest improvements in test scores in the second year of the ban, after an increase in suspensions in the first year.
The Florida school district had adopted a bell-to-bell ban, more restrictive than the state law, which requires that students not use their phones during instructional time. Students violating the ban had their phones confiscated but got them back at the end of the school day. Students could also face discipline, including suspension, for violating the ban.
Florida students take standardized tests three times a year, and schools report discipline and attendance daily, giving researchers a lot of information to work with.
Using data about cell phone usage coming from each school building, the researchers first identified schools where students used cell phones at higher and lower levels before the ban, which went into effect in 2023. Middle schools had higher cell phone use than high schools before and after the ban.
Researchers then used data from the 2023-24 and 2024-25 school years to compare changes in schools with the highest cell phone use before the ban and those with the lowest.
This study design, known as difference within difference, allows researchers to draw stronger conclusions about causality.
In the second year of the ban, average test scores on the higher-stakes spring test went up by 1.1 percentiles more in the schools where students previously used their phones a lot, compared with low-activity schools. The results were more significant for middle and high school students, and boys seemed to benefit more than girls.
But the gains came with tradeoffs. Suspensions went up in the first year of the ban, the study found, especially for Black boys.
And white students saw greater test score growth than Black students.
“Black students seem to be accruing fewer of the benefits of the cell phone ban and more of the disciplinary costs,” Figlio said.
The study can’t answer why Black students — who often face disproportionate discipline — were suspended more often. The increase largely went away in the second year of the ban. Still, Figlio said, the finding calls for schools to be thoughtful about how they approach enforcement.
The study didn’t directly measure school climate — the kind of improvement Longshore and other principals often notice most after they adopt a ban — but researchers did track unexcused absences and students changing schools, potential proxies for how content or safe students feel at school.
Both metrics improved after the cell phone ban was in effect. In fact, the study found that the improvements in attendance contributed to about half the increase in student test scores after the ban.
Figlio called the test score increases “meaningful but not game-changing.”
“It’s not transforming test scores,” he said. “But we’re observing palpable improvement. We’re observing kids attending school more.”
Test score declines blamed on cell phones
American students’ scores on key national and international tests have been trending down for the past decade, well before COVID disruptions. Researchers are not entirely sure why, but one theory is that the rise of cell phone and social media use among children has had deleterious cognitive and social effects.
“We lack direct evidence of a causal link between smartphones and learning, but I’m convinced that this technology is a key driver of youth mental health challenges, a distraction from learning, both inside and outside of schools, and a deterrent to reading,” Harvard education professor Martin West told the Senate education committee at a hearing last month.
Because social media wasn’t introduced to children through a randomized controlled trial, it’s hard to isolate the effects, West said at the hearing. Cell phone bans provide an opportunity to study what happens when social media is removed from the school environment.
But West urged policymakers and parents to address social media use outside of school as well. A study published in JAMA earlier this month found that children who used more social media did worse in reading, vocabulary, and memory tests in their early teen years than those who used little or no social media.
Figlio said he’s prepared to say that cell phones are a driver of test score declines, but there’s not enough evidence to say whether they’re the primary driver.
Longshore, whose school was not involved in the study and who had not read the study when he spoke to Chalkbeat, said state test scores didn’t change significantly after the school started requiring students to leave their phones in a lockbox all day. The school maintained its trajectory of slow but steady growth.
But far fewer students failed their classes, he said. Longshore referred roughly 80 students to summer school the year before the ban. This past summer, it was just 20.
Longshore, who left Dothan at the end of last school year to take a principal job in another district, didn’t suspend students who violated the ban. Instead, after the first offense, the school would hold onto the phone until a parent could pick it up. At a high-poverty school where many parents work multiple jobs, students might go days without their phones — and the parent usually made sure the child didn’t bring it to school again.
With chronic absenteeism already high, Longshore said the last thing he wanted was more students out of class as a result of the ban.
And in fact, discipline at the school improved significantly. There was less drama, Longshore said, and far fewer fights. The lunchroom got loud again with students talking to their classmates.
Future research on cell phone bans could dig into school climate surveys or examine academic or discipline data in different school contexts, Figlio said. The question of impact is “not asked and answered,” he said.
“I care a lot about test scores, but I care even more about kids’ life outcomes — graduating high school, attending college, workforce participation,” he said. “These are things we won’t know for a while.”
Erica Meltzer is Chalkbeat’s national editor based in Colorado. Contact Erica at emeltzer@chalkbeat.org.
