School cell phone bans and student achievement
nber.org
nber.org
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.
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.
Living as if it might happen any time and I must be available for it is not healthy IMO.
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.
This is something I also believe. Thanks for saying it.
I've been thinking and reflecting a lot on what I've been calling for myself "generative constraint". It's sure as heck not something that is the same for everyone, but I think we all have a set of them that might help us be our best person.
We've universalized constraints and expansivenesses in a way that seems really poor judgement. And yes, there is a capitalist critique in this too, as any good theory should have :)
My slightly cynical view is for many of us we're more often lazy than not and default to doing the most frictionless thing. Introduce friction and very quickly I find it forces you to think about what you're actually doing
In the 90s a later boss called me out for spending my days attached to the Slashdot firehose. I had sort-of known that it was a wasteful time sink, so I resolved to completely stop using the social media of its time, and have avoided most incarnations of it ever since (but here I am).
As a scouter working with teenagers, I feel that most kids with a supportive backgrounds will tame this beast for themselves eventually, so I hate to make hard "no phones" rules. I would rather they come to terms with this addiction for themselves. I know that some simply won't finish school without strong guidance, but delaying exposure to this might just be worse in the long term.
I know not everyone will have the same experience as me, but I just feel like learning to manage it on my own was overall beneficial for me in the end.
Having rules about what you can and can't bring into school is nothing new. I went to high school in the 90s, and there were plenty of things we weren't allowed to bring with us into class; back then, the closest analogue to smartphones would have been pagers, probably.
It seems entirely reasonable to ban smartphones (and dumb phones, even) from schools. Frankly, I think it's absolutely insane that they were ever allowed.
And sure, maybe these students who go to high schools where smartphones are banned will get to university and go nuts, sitting in lecture halls with their phones out all the time. They'll learn very quickly that their grades will suffer, and will clean up their acts or fail out of school. But this is like everything else: the first year of university is the big year of independence, of being away from parents for the first time, and college students do plenty of dumb things in the name of that independence. That's always been the case; I'm no stranger to that phenomenon myself. They either work it out on their own, or they fail out.
That approach doesn’t work so well for people with drug and alcohol addictions/dependancies.
What makes you think this is different?
Some however do, which is why drugs and alcohol are controlled to some degree.
So probably part of the reason it was so difficult to realize there is a problem is because everybody was coked out of their minds, so it all seemed normal. And I think the exact same is true of phones today. Watch a session of Congress or anything and half the guys there are playing on their phones; more than a few have been caught watching porn during session, to say nothing of the endless amount that haven't been caught! I can't help but find it hilarious, but objectively it's extremely inappropriate behavior, probably driven by addiction and impaired impulse controls which phones (and other digital tech) are certainly contributing heavily to.
I find it difficult to imagine a world in the future in which phones and similar tech aren't treated somewhat similarly to controlled substances. You can already see the makings of that happening today with ever more regions moving to age restrict social media.
Be careful with that comparison. The cocaine infused drinks of the past are not comparable to modern cocaine use for several reasons.
The route of administration and dose matter a lot. Oral bioavailability is low and peak concentrations are much lower when drinking it in a liquid as opposed to someone insufflating (snorting) 50mg or more of powder.
You could give a modern cocaine user a glass of Vin Mariani and they probably would not believe you that it had any cocaine in it. The amount, absorption, and onset are so extremely different.
> So probably part of the reason it was so difficult to realize there is a problem is because everybody was coked out of their minds
That’s an exaggeration. To be “coked out” in the modern sense they’d have to be consuming an insane amount of alcohol as well. We’re talking bottle after bottle of the wine.
Be careful with these old anecdotes. Yes, it was weird and there were stimulant effects, but it’s not comparable to modern ideas of the drug abuse. It’s like comparing someone taking the lowest dose of Adderall by mouth to someone who crushes up a dozen pills and snorts them. Entirely different outcomes.
Obviously you're right that the absorption is going to be different and a modern coke head with high tolerance likely wouldn't even notice it had anything in it. But give it to a normal person, and they're indeed going to be coked out - in very much the same way that small doses of adderall to non-users can have a very significant effect. The obvious example there being college kids buying pills around around finals.
Following your argument shouldn't anything that can induce addiction be controlled? Seems that is not the case e.g. looking at sugar.
Depending on a risk profile -- totally. There are talks of taxing sugar drinks and not selling "energy drinks", which are coffeine + sugar, to kids for this very reason.
I also mean controlled in the broad definition, not as in the "controlled substance". The culture of consumption prescribed by society is a way of regulation too, more effective than laws even.
Thousands of deaths every year are caused by drivers on cell phones. You'd think they'd have a reason to put them away.
The main idea here is that overuse not equals addiction.
[...] the majority of research in the field declares that smartphones are addictive
There's obvious reasons why it's not encouraged to wait that long though.
From my experience it is often too late at that point. And actually hitting rock bottom is difficult and destructive, and leaves scars. As they say, preventing is better than curing.
Children raised in cultures where alcohol is soft- rather than hard-banned for young people, and gradually introduced to it with parents around (think European teenagers having a glass of wine with lunch), tend to have healthier relationships with alcohol in later life than those raised in hard-ban-until-18/21 cultures. I think exactly the same will prove true of phones.
The more permissive cultures tend to be beer- or wine-centric. I have never been deeply interested in addictology, but the few (older) works on alcoholism I have read mentioned that beer and wine drinkers tend to develop a different sort of relationship with alcohol than hard drink consuments, in the sense that they have a hard time abstaining entirely, but fewer of them develop into the full-blown "gin zombie" type.
That's the crux of the situation, though; on hard liquor, the slippery road to becoming a non-functional alcoholic is much steeper.
There also might be a gender difference. In my experience, men who drink wine, mostly drink with friends and self-limit. The sort of men who are prone to alcoholism won't be satisfied by mere wine and will proceed to hard drinks quick. On the other hand, women often drink wine alone and might develop a daily habit that degrades into full-blown alcoholism even without resorting to hard drinks.
FYI, I barely drink at all and I dislike sloshed people (incl. myself when I rarely get intoxicated; it is an unpleasant state to be in). But even hell has layers.
And speaking of culture, as an Eastern European I would argue our rules regarding alcohol are not soft. Yes, we drink, even expected to drink on some ritualized occasions. But contrary to Hollywood depictions, it's not cool to be a non-functional alco in our lands. When society decides you can't manage yourself, it builds harsh zone of exclusion around you. Imagine you have an uncle Jim who is constantly doomscrolling and for that he has no chances with a good reliable woman, his job opportunities are limited to something non-prestigious, people talk about him like he's a dimwit, even kids look down at him. He's recognized as a failure of a man and parents don't miss a chance to remind about the bad example to their kids. That would be "not-hard" rules EE style.
Fellow Scouter here. Lots of Scout units in the USA have cell phone bans. That’s such an obsolete policy. We need to help the Scouts model good choices, and that doesn’t happen when decision opportunities are removed.
Also, if they are buried in their phones, take that as feedback on how much fun they are[n’t] having in your Scout unit.
You are misunderstanding the addiction part here. It's not about not having fun.
There are tech companies spending literally trillions of dollars on one goal: ensuring that kids keep looking at their phones.
Your framing this as a question of boredom is really naive.
Kids aren't supposed to have fun 24/7. It's impossible.
The problem is what happens the moment the "fun" stops. If everybody reaches for their phones, then that's an issue that cannot be fixed by your "just have more fun" mindset.
These kids are set up to fail.
The problem with that is without some explicit instruction or guidance or invention before they have full control of their impulses, not everyone tames the beast unscathed.
This factoid has been repeated for decades but it’s essentially a myth.
Brain development continues into your 20s, but there isn’t a threshold at age 25 where someone goes from having poor impulse control to being capable of good impulse control.
18-25 year olds are not children and are fully capable of having impulse control. That can continue to develop as they age, but it doesn’t mean age 25 is when it happens.
I would agree that actual children need some more explicit boundaries, which is also why we don’t allow children to do a lot of things that people over 18 can do.
In my experience with mentoring juniors and college students, it’s common to have some wake-up call moment(s) where they realize their phone use is something that needs to be moderated. For some it comes from getting bad grades in a class (college in the age range I worked with) and realizing they could have avoided it by paying attention in lectures instead of using their phone. I’ve also seen it happen in relationships where they realize one day that their social life has disappeared or, in extreme cases, get dumped for being too into their phone. For others it shows up in their first job when someone doesn’t hold back in chewing them out for excessive or inappropriate phone use.
In the context of high school students, I don’t see this happening as much. A big component of high school social structure is forcing students a little bit out of their comfort zone so they can discover friends and build relationships. The default for many is to hide, withdraw, and avoid anything slightly uncomfortable. For a lot of them, slightly uncomfortable might be as simple as having to make casual conversation with people around them. A phone is the perfect tool to withdraw and appear busy, which feels like a free license to exist in a space alone without looking awkward.
So while agree that most people come to terms with the problem themselves as adults, I do also think that middle and high schools deserve some extra boundaries to get the ball rolling on learning how to exist without a phone. The students I’ve worked with who came from high schools that banned phones (private, usually, at least in the past) are so much better equipped to socialize and moderate their phone use. Before anyone claims socioeconomic factors, private high schools generally have sliding scale tuition and a large percentage of students attend for free due to their parents’ income, so it’s not just wealthy kids from wealthy families that I’m talking about.
Generic comment that would fit in the comment section of any of those articles? Right to the top.
I get baited into reading these posts and comments every day - why can't I stop? Probably for the same reason these posts and comments get up votes.
The answer is, of course, liberal hyperindividualism. By that I don't mean "liberal institutions" or respect for the individual person especially in the face of collectivism, but an ideology of antisocial atomization of the self that thrusts the self into subjective godhood. Paradoxically, this makes people more susceptible to control in practice.
Now, ideological and political programs don't fully realize the consequences of their premises instantly. It can take years, decades, centuries for all the nasty errors to manifest and become so conspicuous that they cannot be ignored. The Enlightenment program in our case. And so, in this hyperindividualism, the social order - its layers, its concentric circles, its various rights and demands on the individual that precede the consent of the individual - is all reduced progressively to not only the consensual, but also the transactional. Social bonds and structures evaporate or become fluid and contingent merely on the transactional; commitment and duty are a prison. Consent as the highest and only moral law leads us to relativism, because if all that is needed is consent to make an act moral and good, then naturally what is morally good will vary from person to person, and even minute to minute for a given person. On top of that, consent can be attained through manipulation and power, and so now individuals joust for power to manufacture consent in order to bless their exploitation of others.
The self cannot be limited in any way according to this program, and any residual limits are the lingering chains of some ancient past.
Perhaps most amusing is how so-called "countercultural" movements are anything but. These are typically just advancing the ideological program, not rejecting it. Contradictions between such movements and the status quo often come in the form of a tension between residual cultural features of an earlier age and the greater faithfulness to the trajectory of the program among the countercultural. Typically, conflicts are over power, not belief. And sometimes, the internal contradictions of the program lead to diverging programs that come into conflict.
But man, social media and the internet age have really exploited it to an unhealthy and unproductive point.
I remember going to college for the first time in 2000, and having an absolute blast meeting the people I was by circumstance forced to be around. Went back in 2004 and it was completely different, everyone was on their phone, maintaining their personal bubble in what should have been an age of exploration. That made me rather sad.
Today it's even worse, but at the risk of being an old man yelling at clouds, I won't drone on. I mostly wish my own children could experience the upbringing I had, as I find this one rather dystopian and depressing.
I mean "liberal" in the philosophical sense, not the ill-defined, often pejorative partisan sense (in a philosophical sense, both major US political parties are liberal parties; we live in a liberal political order). One can support liberal institutions while rejecting the ideology along with its false anthropology, presupposed metaphysics and thus ethics.
The basic failure of liberalism lies in its definition of "freedom" which boils down to the ability to do whatever you choose, an absence of any restraint or constraint. Compare this with the classical definition of freedom as the ability to do what is objectively good. True freedom only exists in being able to exercise your nature as a human being. That's what flourishing means. The heart of such freedom is virtue and thus morality. The ability to do drugs or watch porn or sleep around or whatever is contrary to the good of the person doing those things. They do not make a person free. Immoral acts imprison and cripple the person committing them in the very act of committing them.
> individualism was at one time a boon for the nation/economy
I'm not talking about economic freedom. Economic freedom is always subject to various constraints. Some (good) regulation is necessary to protect the common good on which we all depend.
I'm talking about an anthropology that conceives of human beings in a way that denies or misrepresents their social nature and denies their obligations and duties toward others, and misunderstands freedom.
> People move out of their family homes early, start their own family, chart their own path.
I'm also not talking about having the liberty to make all sorts of life choices. What would the alternative be? And people today aren't moving out of the house. They're living with mom and dad into their 30s, maybe longer. Yet liberalism marches on.
And that's perhaps part of the lesson. If we draw out the conclusions of liberal premises and cross them with human nature and the human condition, we find that liberalism's inner contradictions cause it to implode on itself, producing what might appear to be paradoxical results. After all, shouldn't liberalism have given us a freer, better world? This is the part where its defenders will blame external factors, which raises all sorts of new questions about how that is possible.
We side-watched a ton of stuff together as a team - it was great for morale - and we actually shipped stuff, too. Of course the TV eventually became a console for the build server, but it was always available to anyone to put something on in the background, if they wanted to. Definitely a nice way to get a team to be a bit more coherent - as long as whats being played isn't too crazy.
I put my phone in a drawer. Everything's in silent mode. I have a fully disconnected, distraction-free iPad for reading and writing. Work only happens on the computer. There are no emails on the phone.
Yet, I can't fully disconnect. Every device, every account, every app mixes work stuff and personal life stuff. And software is so sticky! I can't just check one thing without my attention getting stuck on a notification badge, an email, a feed or some other thing that I should not pay attention to right now.
How do you people handle it?
My phone's SIM no longer has any credit on it. I actively cannot browse mindlessly in a lot of places. Doesn't work perfectly, half of public transport around here has free WiFi, as do some shops, but it helps.
I have three laptops. One with the games on (Steam, Windows and nothing much else, no passwords installed except Steam… oh and Discord but I don't actually log in because the content was never interesting enough to get addicted to in the first place); one as a work machine (mac with Xcode, claude etc. installed); and one as a down-time machine (also a mac, but only co-incidentally).
Facebook itself isn't installed anywhere, though the Messenger app is for family I otherwise can't reach; various time-hungry sites (including FB, X, here*, reddit, several news sites) are blocked as best as I can block them (harder than it should be: on iPhones the "time limit" tool doesn't allow "zero" and reflexes to tap "ignore limit" are too quick to form, on desktop it's increasing ignoring my hosts file).
YouTube has so many ads, it's no longer possible for me to habit-form with it. Well, that and the home suggestions are consistently 90% bad, and the remaining 10% includes items in my watch-later playlist that I don't get around to watching.
* see my comment history for how well that attempt at self-control is actually working.
One reason might be some kind of physical/psychological addiction (either to apps themselves or the act of looking at your phone). One reason might be that what you're doing is more boring than what you normally do on your phone.
Here's my script: https://gist.github.com/matthewaveryusa/8257de0083abdecc612c...
[0]HN, Reddit, and Tumblr are the exceptions for me. I have notifications off and those platforms tend to invite more nuanced discussions and be less distracting over all
I'll let you decide which ones you think are doing better.
Obviously the place without headphones do way better.
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?
There is always the peer pressure excuse but thats not good enough. At the end who buys and setups and keeps paying for that phone?
Or maybe it was always this way and I simply had a better environment?
So then the teachers just stop caring: doing something about the phone distraction will only cause them grief. If the kids don't learn, whatever, not their problem, really, as long as the same thing is happening in every other classroom, which it is.
A school-wide policy, or, even better, a district-wide policy gives the teachers and school administrators cover: they can make sympathetic noises when the parents complain, but tell the parents there's nothing they can do, because the policy comes from above their pay grade.
A friend's kid got in a small amount of trouble for something along these lines. He was "present at but not involved in" a fight at school, where some of the other kids were shooting it on their phones.
Then one of the teachers came round the corner to break it up and take the guilty parties off to the headmaster's office.
My mate's son, kind of similar thinker to his dad, clever guy, bit of a windup merchant, sprung into action.
"OKAY, CUT! Right, you and you - " pointing at the antagonists " - reset please, everyone else places right now please, " and rounds on the teacher "... and you can be here but you have to be out of my shot."
There's no way to prove they weren't trying to make a film. There was a note home from the school that basically said "We know he's at it, we just can't prove he's at it, but we do know that he's not going to do that again, right?"
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.
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.
Give me a company phone or you don't get this rule. I'm not using my phone for work if I can't have it out during work.
I use it 99% for work related things during work, though, with the 1% being happy birthday texts or something similar
We're so used to being able to get in touch with our family members at all times that it feels really unnerving when your kid isn't immediately accessible.
And the parents who complain think that their kids aren't the ones who are addicted to their phones.
That's why these bans needed to happen at the state or school district level - expecting individual teachers to have to spend their time arguing with parents and kids over cell phones was just not realistic.
Some (like, one or two per hundred students or so) may occasionally call their kid when they know they’re in class. Not because there’s a family emergency or something (and c’mon, you can still call the office for that) but just to shoot the shit. Talk about a WTF.
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.
One, there's the very real pressure from parents to be able to contact their kids when they need to. In the US, regular school shootings have made this a complicated issue to navigate.
Also, it requires much more consistency from school staff than most people realize. If it's top down and not supported by just about everyone, then many teachers and staff find themselves in endless battles. It takes more consistency and clarity of vision, and consistent enforcement than many schools are capable of.
Last, the devices students carry with them are often more capable and reliable than school based technology. So when students need to look something up, it's easy for them to just pull out their device.
Super-addictive devices in a society that's prioritizing many of the wrong things is a hard thing to manage. How many of you would give up your tech salaries to make $40-60k to take on these issues?
If there is a school shooting, what is texting their kid going to do?
For instance would you put your phone in a locker for the time you're on the clock for work ? Some professions require that, it's not an unreasonable proposition in itself. But how many actually can/would do it ?
Some people see it as a guilt thing and just assume they're succumbing to some tentation. Another way to look at it is the generic message being just wrong, we're doing fine _enough_ as we do now, and pushing moral principals nobody actually cares about on kids isn't as smart as people want to make it.
We put extra rules in place for kids because their brains aren't fully developed and they very often incorrectly assess whether or not the consequences of an action are worth it.
(And yes, adults are bad at that assessment sometimes, too, but we as a society have decided that at some point we need to take off the training wheels.)
To put it in perspective, some people will still live their all life in an institution dictating their life rhythm, potentially setting how they dress and where they live, what they eat. That's how working in a factory line and getting a place in a company dormitory will be like. We basically modeled school according to that model, not by first looking at kids and thinking long and hard at their biological needs and how to best match their needs. School uniforms looking like adult cosplay version is in line with this as well.
> Adults in the workplace are expected to get their work done, meet deadlines, act professionally, etc.
We expect kids to get their work down, pass the scheduled tests, act according to the ~company~school rules.
I'd argue generic schools have always tried to just mold kids into what society wants as adults, and only a few places genuinely focus on sheer education. But even under the "mold the kids" premise, expecting kids to deal with smartphones, digital communication and SNS all at once at 18 is just a recipe for disaster. Understanding how to do what they're expected to, while having access and properly using all of those is probably the most basic life skill they absolutely need in this day and age.
Those parents don't realize it's going to get their kid shot when the kid is hiding and the gunman hears the ding or buzz of the notification.
But... this means that a student is significantly more likely to get injured or killed riding in car with their friends, but somehow that was allowed before phones. The school shootings excuse is not a reason to let kids have phones in schools.
So much of the way we treat education is based on vibes rather than reality.
That sentence really stood out to me. When (and where) I grew up this wasn't even a possibility one would consider. It reminds me how irrelevant my frame of reference is when trying to think about how to address difficulties facing schools, educators and pupils today.
A lot of parents are addicted to texting back and forth with their kids all day. I imagine many of the kids hate it.
(The thing that annoyed teachers was when we played games on our graphing calculators, which they of course couldn't ban, since the school required them in the first place!)
Block Dude! I also spent quite a bit of time writing functions and tools on my TI-84+, probably the closest thing I'll have to "growing up writing BASIC" since I missed that bus.
I think the biggest barrier to a phone ban being more widely adopted is parents. My wife works in the front office of a middle school and parents lose their minds if a kid gets their phone taken away. "But but but what if I NEED to get ahold of my kid during the day?". Umm... You ask the school to get your kid? I dunno seems pretty straightforward.
Then again I'm in an affluent area where moms against liberty (as I call them) are prevalent so maybe it's just the people here?
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?
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.
For the middle, it really depends on the material covered. if it's cumulative, then results might not change as much. if it's "learn and forget", then it might be testing the wrong incentives.
The thing I find interesting is that when most people talk about standardised tests, they are talking about assessments that benchmark how much trivial knowledge about a given subject one has, and this has been the standard for most of the history of the American education system. I would argue that this is a flawed way to measure a student's literacy–in any subject for that matter.
I would actually frame "learn and forget" as "learn and adapt" because I would much rather a student forget a piece of trivial knowledge, but still have the ability to figure it out on their own with the right resources than a student who can tell you the colour Benjamin Franklin wore on his 15th birthday, but couldn't explain the effects of imperialism on societies.
For much of history, we have incentivised rote memorisation of trivial knowledge and accidentally de-valued critical thinking and problem solving skills. Do you remember the backlash that schools got from _parents_ when schools started implementing Common Core in an attempt to get students to think more abstractly? While I scoff at them, I genuinely don't blame parents for coming to the conclusion that we should just do math "the way we used to do it", but I can't help but point out that this is leading to the exact decline in general literacy that we have seen in public schools over the years. Now when you start comparing the educational attainment of students in public schools vs. private schools this becomes a who other conversation that cell phones can't even begin to explain.
Or maybe the last test of the semester covers the entire semester's material, while the earlier tests only cover new material since the previous test.
We can't say for sure without this information.
> correlation does not imply causation
correlation CAN imply causation. You missed a word making what you said completely wrong.
We then turn to our causal analysis comparing schools with different degrees of apparent pre-ban student cellphone use, after vs. before Florida’s cellphone ban. We show that the ban increased disciplinary incidents and suspensions significantly in the first year, immediately after the district started referring students for disciplinary action for cellphone use infractions. In particular, our difference-in-differences estimates suggest that the ban increased suspension rates by 12 percent (relative to the comparison group mean) and in-school suspension rates by roughly 20 percent in the first year.
I swear sometimes people only exist to look for flaws in studies they didn't read.
Just from anecdata of my own kids, enforcement is nearly impossible. Phones are banned citywide as of this year but it sounds like they are still being used pretty openly.
> 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.
There are schools where the administrators are too busy dealing with violence to have time for much else.
Parent comment described them as "chaotic." I'm not even sure I'd describe them as "schools." But to more clearly answer your question: I think it's fair to question what their actual purpose is (and it doesn't seem to be education), but I don't think it was anyone's explicit intention to make them that way.
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.
This generally takes it out of the hands of individual classroom teachers.
> When comparing high-effect and low-effect schools, the researchers note significant reductions in unexcused absences during the two years following the cell phone ban. They posit that increased attendance could explain as much as half of the test score improvements noted in their primary analysis.
Seems to me like there wasn't a huge improvement, and the improvement seen could easily be attributed to other things, no?
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.
I'm not sure how they generated the error bars but that, to me, would suggest the relevant error could be +/- 1 percentage point. Meaning the delta could be at little as two percentage points.
My intuition says cellphone bans would have a positive impact, but I don't think I'd call this data conclusive. I'd want to see more data from earlier and later.
Also, if these are the same students, then test scores might be reflecting increased maturity. If it's different students of the same age, it could be a shift in some extra-educational factors affecting the younger generation.
Too many unknowns and not enough signal.
I find it completely unremarkable that test scores went up post-COVID and feel it's very hard to tell what is causing what.
When I was in high school, we didn't have smartphones, but we had game boys, flip phones, and graphing calculators that could play games.
If we were ever caught playing with any of these things we got in trouble. That seemed sufficient at the time, but is that not the case anymore?
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.
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).
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.
> 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.
Schools aren't exactly much better equipped to make sure parents don't both need to work 50 hours to survive, nor bring housing prices down. They can barely pay their teachers to begin with.
"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. These positive test score effects are larger for male students (an effect of 1.4 percentiles on the spring test in the second year) and for students in middle and high schools (1.3 percentiles)."
https://edpolicyinca.org/publications/california-test-scores...
Ban advertising to children & youth and the device itself will be harmless
TVs? Newspapers? Magazines?
Well those are on-way, with limited feedbacks. What's the better alternative except phones?
You had TV, newspapers and magazines - and perhaps more importantly, public libraries. The current generation doesn't, not if you take away their phones.
My high school did offer a computer science class in the 90s, and students who took it got to use the school's computer lab. If your school didn't have something like that, that's a shame, but that doesn't suggest that you should have been able to ignore the presented curriculum and do whatever you wanted.
edit: I forgot the Standard ML book, also from some thrift store. All circa late-80s, early-90s. I still have them all.
That's why they're being banned all over. Citizens and governments finally got savvy to how bad these devices can really be, especially in the hands of the inexperienced.
Imagine if history had gone differently. Maybe history still can go differently. A portable computer in the hands of every child. One that actually works for them, not against them.
Are there people already working on this?
(I do know about eg. F-Droid, which is an improvement due to strict curation)
edit: Think of eg 'A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer' : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diamond_Age
Anyone know how to interpret that chart?
Not something particularly worth worrying about.
Work from ... Texas?
Restricted to adults over 21 years of age.
Which won't work. The model isn't an exact match.
I'd rather see hard content filters in certain contexts than a complete ban.
No social media sites, games, or messaging would remove most of the problem.
But the ultimate driver of addiction is ad-tech, and all of these measures would cause a significant hit to the ad industries.
So in practice it's easier simply to ban phones.
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.
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.
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), δ_s is school fixed effects, and θ_g is grade fixed effects. In this setting, β_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.
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.
To me this was the most informative comment in the thread because it offers some effect size comparison.
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.
One study can find any effect it's looking for.
A study shouldn't move consensus. A study finding an effect is a signal that more studies should be done.
Once they are done, and people who know their stuff pour through them and reach some consensus is the sort of bar that needs to be crossed for a reasonable non-expert to 'follow the science'.
And sometimes those experts get it wrong, and accepting that degree of uncertainty is part of it.
It's that common phenomenon where people think they can use general logic (which they generally are good at) to draw strong conclusions about something that isn't in their wheelhouse. I'm certainly guilty of it myself, sometimes.
> 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.
I know that it's important to look at data and not rely on our own assumptions and "common sense" about things (as reality can often be surprising).
But.
Based on how kids seem to actually use their phones in class (that is, not all that much for educational things related to the coursework at hand), and based on what we know (conclusive study after conclusive study) about how by-design addictive social media and smartphone games are, it's honestly hard to take seriously the idea that smartphone use in class hasn't hurt education and test scores.
Priors matter!
But also, complete inability of schools to adapt.
Refusing to adapt to the reality that is, students will be living their entire lives with these devices, and that they should be working out ways to ensure student productivity despite their existence, is not the same thing as success.
Teachers are inherently lazy. Its one of their more human qualities. But really they need to adapt, or fail and be replaced.
There was a kid in my class in highschool. We had a school that permitted laptops, one of the first near us, but situationally. Teachers could exclude, or instruct the student to not use the laptop for periods during class. However policy was that students were allowed to use the laptop any time they could use a workbook. This kid was the only one who both had access to a laptop and was willing to risk damaging it by bringing it to school.
Math class with this kid was:
1. He plays games on his laptop unless the teacher was looking, in which case he would be solving problems in excel or notepad. Proficient alt tab user.
2. At the end of class, he would copy out all the answers from the back of the textbook to his workbook, and he would hand that in.
English was different. In english the teacher built a relationship with him and engaged him directly. If he was unresponsive he might be forced back to attention somehow, asked a direct question about the text, but that was true of a lot of the students. The entire class was a discussion on book content. When he used the laptop, he was using it to write notes because he was engaged through positive reinforcement. If the teacher caught him playing, the teacher would on those rare occasions, engage him about the game. Often, he had finished his assigned reading\tasks early and simply drifted over. In that case he was left to play because he wasn't disrupting anyone.
Phone bans are a crutch for lazy, uninterested educators. Kids need to be prepared to live in a world with these things in their pockets. The correct dopamine reward feedback loops are not going to be built by banning them entirely. And being better at rote learning and regurgitating ancient course material isn't a strong indicator, if it was even an indicator, of better student outcomes.
Kids can prepare to live in a world with these things in their pockets outside of school. Sure, primary school is about learning all sorts of things, not just what the teacher is lecturing about. But it doesn't have to be about everything, and I think it's fair to make the call that the distraction caused by smartphones (especially with all the apps designed to addict users) outweighs any positive teachable moments with them present.
Your anecdote is interesting because it didn't really bring me to the same conclusion. Kids aren't going to be interested in every single subject, but we believe it's important to expose them to a bit of everything regardless. Maybe your classmate just didn't care about math, but enjoyed English and reading, and found that much more engaging. Maybe there was absolutely nothing the math teacher could have done to get that kid to pay attention all the time, even if they were the best teacher in the world.
> he would copy out all the answers from the back of the textbook to his workbook, and he would hand that in.
That's really the big flaw here. If he hadn't been able to do that, his grades would suffer, and someone, whether the teacher or his parents, would have (hopefully!) stepped in to see what was going on, and find a way to curb his game-playing in class. Maybe that would have meant he wasn't allowed to have the laptop out in that particular class until he could demonstrate that he could use it appropriately.
> Teachers are inherently lazy.
I know quite a few teachers, and calling teachers lazy is so mind-blowingly, disrespectfully inaccurate that it's really hard to take your opinions seriously. Sure, in every walk of life you'll find lazy people, but I see no evidence that teachers are on average lazier than people in any other profession. My take on it is that teachers might be on average less lazy than your average human.
It doesnt unless a teacher can meaningfully incorporate and teach to smart phone users.
>Kids can prepare to live in a world with these things in their pockets outside of school.
Kids can meaningfully prepare for their entire lives without school. But school is designed to meaningfully prepare them for their adult lives, so if you inflict a school upon a child you should hope that it would, try somewhat to prepare them for their adult lives which will undoubtedly include smart phones. I remember hearing similar complaints when laptops were being handed out, and now in parts they are mandatory. Adults without basic computer skills were at a heavy disadvantage in the workplace. At least universities are stepping up, and forcing phones into classrooms for MFA.
>I think it's fair to make the call that the distraction caused by smartphones (especially with all the apps designed to addict users) outweighs any positive teachable moments with them present.
If kids are distracted, they aren't being meaningfully engaged. It should be seen as a litmus test for quality educators.
>Maybe your classmate just didn't care about math, but enjoyed English and reading, and found that much more engaging.
That english teacher was a former national AFL coach who was exceedingly good at educating difficult kids. When he retired, he had several wayward kids who graduated based on his impact on their education breaking down in tears. He definitely made an effort. He used a lot of peer to peer communication styles rather than falling back on more authoritative methods.
Writing off some kids as simply disinterested in some subjects is specifically the laziness I was referring to.
>That's really the big flaw here. If he hadn't been able to do that, his grades would suffer, and someone, whether the teacher or his parents, would have (hopefully!) stepped in to see what was going on, and find a way to curb his game-playing in class.
He failed or scraped past most of his math assessments, kid had money and trauma. Winning combo at a private school.
>I know quite a few teachers, and calling teachers lazy is so mind-blowingly, disrespectfully inaccurate that it's really hard to take your opinions seriously. Sure, in every walk of life you'll find lazy people, but I see no evidence that teachers are on average lazier than people in any other profession. My take on it is that teachers might be on average less lazy than your average human.
All you have to do is ask them to adapt, and you will get a massive bucket full of excuses and finger pointing.