“There are some encouraging results in the midst of these mixed findings. They are driving down phone usage, and as schools have longer experiences with phone bans, we’re seeing a shift towards more positive outcomes.”
The post literally contradicts itself.
This study has no thoughts on parents just not giving their kids smartphones to start with.
- “tobaco is good for vitality”
- “sugar is good for health”
- “fat in food is what makes you fat”
We have heard those “sponsored” messages before…
Strict bans on mobile phones in schools have “close to zero” impact on student learning and show no evidence of improvements in attendance or online bullying, a study has found.
Well now, that’s something entirely different. I never assumed that banning phones were going to be having effect on attendance or bullying. I wouldn’t think either of those or even in the top five of anyone’s reasoning for Banning phones in school.
Also I don’t know if any band has been an effect long enough to really get accurate data.
Hopefully it would have an effect on your mispelling.
<apologies, the grammar and spelling nazi came out>
I don’t buy it
If your school experience looked like mine, then you had about 25 teachers in K through 5th grade, maybe another 25 in middle school, and about another 40 in high school.
Just under 100 teachers. I remember maybe a dozen that were ok and at best 3 I’d be willing to talk to if I saw them in the wild these days.
Personally I think public schools don’t attract high quality talent and we’re getting what we’re paying for with near-poverty salaries.
A poorly educated public is one of the major underpinnings of a fascist dictator state. It’s why school funding has been on the decline for decades - capitalist alpha-type one-percenters have been pulling the politicians’ reigns (particularly the willing Republicans, but over time the Democrats have been bought, too) & playing the long game, and it’s now reached fruition.
Cool… so how do we fix this?
Guillotine
I can’t comprehend how banning phones in schools could not improve things.
Part of the problem here in the Netherlands is that kids just use their laptops at school to access the same social media and chat apps.
They block it on the school WiFi, but kids either just tether their phones, hidden in backpacks or use VPNs, etc.
That being said, as the parent of a teenager, I still strongly support the ban.
The general conception is that it does improve focus in the class by taking away distractions. However, it doesn’t always improve end results as many kids double down on smartphone use after school. Nevertheless it’s a step in the right direction
one of the report’s authors, said it would be wrong for policymakers to see the results as a reason to shy away from restrictions.
“One of the concerns I have about this study is that it might encourage people to walk away from phone bans as a compelling reform. And I think that would be a major mistake
The study very specifically says "average effects on test scores are consistently close to zero.”
Little effect on test scores is VERY different to no positive effect and at least one author of the study is still strongly in favour of phone bans.
🤨 just a few days ago - maybe up to two weeks, there was a post somewhere here linking to article that said teachers are noticing positive effects on scores. It might have been Australia, though
From an Guardian article in Oct 2025, roughly 5 years into the first statewide phone ban in Australia:
One year after the ban was implemented, a survey of almost 1,000 public school principals led by the NSW Department of Education’s Centre for Education Statistics and Evaluation found that 95% of principals still supported the ban. Eighty-one per cent said the ban has improved students’ learning, 86% said it has improved socialisation among students and 87% believed students were less distracted in the classroom.
Research from South Australia – released in March this year – revealed 70% of teachers reported increased focus and engagement during learning time and 64% of teachers reported “a lower frequency of critical incidents” at school as a result of device use.
Ruqayah, who graduated from a western Sydney high school in 2024, thinks the bans were an “overreaction”. After going through high school with access to phones, she finished her final year with the phone ban in place and says fellow students were still finding ways to use them in secret. “Teenagers find their phones very important,” she says. “It makes them feel secure and safe, so taking away something that is important to them just causes more stress and more worry which makes situations worse at school and harder for teachers, supervisors [and] support workers to deal with.”
Prof Neil Selwyn from the School of Education, Culture and Society at Monash University. “Some politicians were promising improvements in student learning and mental health. But one of the main drivers of these bans was undoubtedly that they were popular.”
Selwyn says phone bans in Australia were not set up “with the intention of properly testing their effectiveness” and says concrete research in this area is “inconclusive, and … not particularly rigorous”.
He also believes the latest government data from NSW and South Australia is “not particularly insightful”.
“The key question is how these bans play out over time,” he says. “Claiming that these bans are suddenly leading to dramatic improvements makes for a neat political soundbite, but we need a lot more in-depth and sustained investigation of what effects these bans are actually having.
There are positives and negatives to everything - highlighting just one side is the modus operandi for manufacturing consent.
Conversely “both sides”-ing a quantitative study is only useful if you want to make a narrative appear more important than it actually is.
Have these bans really been in place long enough to actually see an impact?
I would imagine you need a cohort to go through the whole span of secondary education with the ban in order to reasonably measure impact.
I’m suspicious of this study and its stakeholders
Phones are already banned during lessons and if students don’t behave they get taken, theoretically at least practically it’s a hassle and a pain in the ass and teachers don’t want to be known as the mean one. Also phones are used in classes for interactive lessons, quizzes and sharing materials, will they return to paper? Which probably means they’ll need to buy more supplies and printers, which I hardly see viable with the current schools funds.
*Don"t trust any studies that the tech bros haven’t sponsored.
The US government is one of the least trustworthy sources of information on such topics these days.
Wholeheartedly agree
Not shocked at the findings, nor at governments deciding that their decisions to take rights away matters more than what the science says. If you let them set that pecedent, don’t cry when the next rights they take are ones you were enjoying.
don’t cry when the next rights they take are ones you were enjoying.
You’re overreacting - kids not using phones during class is not a fundemental human rights issue.
Moreover, the study only says that there is little impact on test scores so far. That’s a very limited conclusion. There’s a lot more to education than test scores. Even one of the authors warns against reading this study as evidence against phone bans.
It’s so wild to hear cell phones for kids being spoken of as “a right” when they didn’t even exist for some of us as kids.
I get that times change, but phones feel more like a privilege than a right. Just like driving. I remember “it’s a privilege, not a right” being hammered in during driving school, as irresponsible driving can mean having your privilege revoked. Having that expectation for phones as well makes sense.
While phones may cause some issues, the blatant disregard of any issues bans cause by administration and lawmakers makes it hard to trust reports of success for me, as in my experience, the removal of phones seems to wall off school from students lives, even during breaks and makes students stressed and feel overworked for no reason but “phone bad”
Everyone’s always over reacting until the next one effects you. The article also said in addition to test scores it had little if any impact on bullying and attendance, not just test scores.
