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.
Researchers at US universities including Stanford and Duke looked at nearly 1,800 US schools where students’ phones were kept in locked pouches and found little or no differences in outcomes compared with similar schools without strict bans.
The report concluded that among schools instituting a ban: “For academic achievement, average effects on test scores are consistently close to zero.”
The results will come as a disappointment to teaching unions and campaigners in England who backed the government’s recent move to restrict the use of mobile phones in schools. A ban is likely to come into force next year.
Who would have thought!¿
anyone not in Meta’s pocket
Keep in mind the paper is a white paper (not peer reviewed) and it is sponsored by the Bezos Family Foundation and Walton Family. Personally taking it with a grain of salt and waiting for some experts to weigh in who are not economists (like most of the authors are) since I don’t feel like combing through this 100 page document.
it gets even stupider than that:
We acknowledge funding from Arnold Ventures
who is this John Arnold guy anyway…let’s see…and…oh
since February 2024, is a member of the board of directors of Meta.
oh, and fun fact, it’s not even a real fucking charity:
The Laura and John Arnold Foundation was initially created as a philanthropic organization, but was restructured as a limited liability company and renamed Arnold Ventures in January 2019. The organization’s LLC structure is intended to allow it to operate with more flexibility.
so he’s on the board of directors for Meta, which among other things owns Instagram…and he has a side business that pretends to be a charity even though it’s not, and it funds publication of a “study” saying no, teenagers having cell phones 24/7 is totally fine actually.
the tobacco industry used to pay people to wear white lab coats and say cigarettes didn’t cause cancer. it’s tempting to think of ourselves as more savvy than they were, and look back in hindsight and say “how could people have fallen for such obvious bullshit?”
well…
This paper is of the same caliber as all of those cigarettes are safe papers from the 70s. Funded propganada with a PR firm plying it to a willing news source.
As an aside, is the Guardian becoming a shit rag? Lately (last year or two) I’ve noticed a huge dip in their quality.
As an aside, is the Guardian becoming a shit rag? Lately (last year or two) I’ve noticed a huge dip in their quality.
what I’ve heard previously is that the Guardian’s UK edition sucks, and that the US edition is somewhat better, but at this point I’m comfortable lumping them together.
the article that flipped the “assume everything they publish is bullshit” switch for me was Number of AI chatbots ignoring human instructions increasing, study says from a few months ago.
it’s written with the tone you’d expect from “serious” journalism:
AI chatbots and agents disregarded direct instructions, evaded safeguards and deceived humans and other AI, according to research funded by the UK government-funded AI Security Institute (AISI). The study, shared with the Guardian, identified nearly 700 real-world cases of AI scheming and charted a five-fold rise in misbehaviour between October and March, with some AI models destroying emails and other files without permission.
but if you read carefully…it’s tweets. it’s just fucking tweets. they released a “study” that is a graph of “tweets over time” and claimed that it says something about the prevalence of AI “going rogue”.
and in particular, they take the one story about the Meta executive who allowed an AI “agent” to delete all their emails, notice that there’s a bunch of tweets discussing it, and conflate that with an increased occurrence of it happening.
it’s the equivalent of saying that there were 10,000 moon landings in 1969 because you looked back at newspaper archives and found 10,000 “man lands on moon” headlines. just complete fucking amateur hour data analysis, and for the Guardian to publish it uncritically is shameful.
That is an excellent breakdown. I’m glad I’m not the only one noticing these posts. Poor data analysis being published or claims taken at face value.
I interacted with the Guardian editorial team once in the UK. I had a dataset on academic censoring and we were focusing on sharing the qualitative responses. All seemed on the up and up but we never moved forward for a variety of reasons with the story. Editors and the journalist were great. Tough questions, good insight, etc. Seemed like a good outlet. But that was earlier 2025 and in less than a year, I read that trash we are discussing.
Wow that casts a healthy dose of doubt on the entire study. Thank you for pointing it all out so thoroughly!
I had seen the LLC thing and raised my eyebrows at the projects listed on their wiki, but didn’t see the META board thing, good catch. Everything is both awful and exactly as expected.
wow. I was just gonna say doubt based on my experience substitute teaching.
The Fox Family Institute for Poultry Studies determines that hen house doors should be left open
Interesting that Guardian didn’t see fit to mention it was a white paper unless I missed something.
Just on the epistemological tip, how is it being a white paper more relevant than having Bezos, Waltons, and more (of the same) sponsors?
Typically when a news article mentions a “study” it’s a peer reviewed research article. If it’s a white paper or a working paper that is typically pointed out. Leaving that detail out is notable and probably a purposeful decision by my reckoning.
Generally they don’t mention conflicts of interest even if they’re listed so that bit isn’t especially atypical here to me.
Okay. Again, from the standpoint of how to get at what’s knowable - my complaint here with The Guardian is that they aren’t pointing out the things they should be, at all, and that the white paper nature (from such “sources”) merits exactly nothing. No further draft on any such topic from such sources could ever be credible.
Your “typical / atypical” is you getting to my point for me, or maybe we just agree.
I think we agree! I was the original commenter in this comment thread and posted the screenshot of the sponsorship issue
Maybe we do, and I appreciate you pointing out what you did! I’ll be the first to acknowledge I never would have known those things had you not posted them (and I’m sure that’s true for tons of folks who saw your comment, so truly, thanks).
But to me even “taking this with a grain of salt”, though, that’s just way more credulity than documents coming out of those orgs will ever merit. So I don’t know, your comment struck me as really strange, you point out the bombshell facts you did, to me those utterly destroy any assumption of good faith investigation/analysis, and then you go essentially “so I’ll take it with a grain of salt and wait for other experts to weigh in”. But…why?
Apologies if you’re simply using neutral language as a way to reach more readers. But the damning epistemological facts about the document make it ineligible for taking seriously. To make an analogy it’s like you said “we can see this bread is half-baked (white paper), and it actually comes from a mold factory (Bezos, Waltons), not a bread factory. So I’ll have a little, not a lot, and then see what other bread experts say about it too”. Which would be a crazy course of action, given the preceding description.
Again, sincere apologies if I’m mischaracterizing your POV, that’s how it reads to me though.
It also found a rise in suspensions and a dip in students’ feelings of wellbeing in the first year after a ban as schools adapted to the change. “Over time, however, disciplinary impacts fade and wellbeing rebounds, becoming positive in subsequent years,” the report said.
So it sounds like the winning play is to not give them phones in the first place. Then you skip straight to positive impacts without going through the negative ones first.
Thanks for posting this. It’s good to know that the propaganda still flows
When did schools start allowing phones?
When the excuse “but what if my mom needs to call me” started working.
Mom can call the school. It worked for 70 years.
I distinctly remember my elementary school not being able to call my parents because their area code wasn’t the local area code but okay.
Phones should be allowed in schools, just take them before class starts and hand them back after.
Why does the school have to be the middle-man? Just ban phones during actual classes and let them use it during free periods.
In practice that doesn’t work, for the same reasons education hasn’t been either. Too few teachers to students, plus the things (phones) are greasily addictive. And we’re talking about the youths, lol, dumb-kid brain, most exemplified by teenagers of course. The phase of life that specifically combines “rules are actually just stupid, did you ever notice that?” with “so anyway (I forgot what we were talking about [or any other thing])”.
It’s really just placing an extremely addictive thing in the pocket of anyone prone to addiction. Kiddos are very naturally weak to resisting those “reward now, consequences later” qualities that drive addiction in the first place. And just like any drug that sells, phones have been engineered (legally, lauded in many ways for doing so) to be super-duper addictive.
“Why don’t the children simply smoke the crack pipe in the hallways, between classes, forbidden to do so in class? Why must the school be the middle-man?”
Shallow take homie.
Too few teachers to students, closer to the actual problem.
but all smartphones have parental controls which is never talked about, but we keep blaming violent media and addictive technology while offering terrible solutions like ID verification and yondr pouches. https://www.overyondr.com/phone-free-schools This whole thing is a scam on our society with a private company getting taxpayer’s money while not actually solving the problem.
these solutions do not teach self-regulation, does not fix algorithmic feeds, does not address home use, does not solve violent or addictive content exposure
Kids not having phones at school (or not having access to them or similar) does address huge problems with phones at schools.
I’m not advocating anything like ID verification and have no idea what the pouches are about.
Self regulation is great and the only true solution. But roughly no kid can self regulate under current conditions, as we see. They need an environment conducive to learning those crucial skills.
And I hate the retreat to “well the parents should do more!” which is just an unsympathetic blamey way to say “what we have is as good as it gets I guess” because if it’s largely the parents needing to do more, that’s what we have. The status quo. Not a great recommendation.
If parents doing more was a viable strategy would we need to regulate use of car seats? Would we have seatbelts at all if some flavor of “people making important but annoying decisions correctly all the time” was a good way to achieve healthy societal outcomes?
“Kids probably shouldn’t have cell phones in schools” does not seem controversial, given the evidence, the specific nature of school and kids and those devices, and the blatant obvious evidence we see everywhere we look.
ok, US 😐👍
This should have been obvious. Why would you only be able to bully someone digitally in the time you’re in the school building? I was in high school when cell phones were first coming out, so I remember school before and during phones, and kids always could and would ignore class if they wanted to. This feels like an attempt to divert blame from school systems not being reactive to generational learning differences and needs. There are reasons to ban phones in schools, but if you think that doing so is going to prevent bullying or ignoring class, methinks you don’t remember pre-phone school.
I’m sorry but this comment, as well as the posted article is misguided. I am a classroom teacher and I can say without hesitation that it is 100% impossible to teach someone when they have a phone in their hand. It is extremely challenging when the phone is in their pocket. It is manageable but not ideal when it is in their bag.
Your brain is capable of doing one thing at a time and if that thing is scrolling feeds, then it is not learning.
If you’d like to develop an informed opinion on the matter, I highly recommend The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt. His book comes with a website with a regularly updated collection of research and data on the matter. The data is staggering; there is absolutely no question that smartphones do not belong in a classroom, full stop. They generally don’t belong in a child or adolescent’s hand either, but schools cannot do anything about that. To think otherwise simply indicates that you have not been in a classroom later than 2011.
Here is a link to that data: https://www.anxiousgeneration.com/research/collaborative-review-docs
My partner is a teacher, as well.
it is 100% impossible to teach someone when they have a phone in their hand
Yes, but this is a symptom of structural problems with our school system. Looking at phones didn’t make kids hate school. Hating school made kids want to look at their phones.
Schools have been shifting from places of learning, which requires exploration, to places of compliance and regurgitation. And it’s not just about the shift towards obedience-based, rote memorization in service of standardized testing (or how schools care about attendance only for funding reasons), we’ve even shifted the literal architectural design philosophy behind how we construct school buildings to be more prison-like.
The pandemic lockdown was horrible for kids, but the rush to reopen schools wasn’t about the negative impact it was having on their social development, it was about serving business interests who wanted their parent-employees back at work. They wanted the childrens’ holding cells reopened.
When we actually start shifting schools back towards environments of learning, at a structural level, I will have sympathy for the mission of education over sympathy for the disinterested
inmatesstudents.“schools have a bunch of structural problems that should be fixed” - yes, agreed 1000%
“schools have a bunch of structural problems that should be fixed, and therefore schools shouldn’t ban phones until the structural problems are fixed” - nope. that’s a complete non-sequitur.
“fix structural problems with schools” is a gigantic undertaking. it’s absolutely worth doing, but it’s the kind of thing that will take many many years, and effort across many many different fronts. it’s not like Congress can pass the Fix Structural Problems In Schools Act of 2026 this summer and then starting this September schools are now fixed.
“you can’t do that small change until the all the larger problems are fixed” ends up being essentially a thought-terminating cliche.
You’re misunderstanding my position.
Right now, schools are not learning institutions that are trying but struggling to enrich kids. They’re a penal institution, punishing kids for being non-productive members of society, funneling many of them directly into military or prison, and actively making their lives worse than if they were sitting at home or hanging out with friends outside.
Every kid thinks that when they’re in school, but in most places they’re not correct; here they often are.
I think you can draw a pretty direct and causal line from the prison-ification of schools and increasing school shootings, NCLB being the instigating national change, but Republican anti-education policies in general being heavy contributors (and Red states are far worse than Blue states in this).
Bear in mind this is not some “school is bad” stance: there are actually a lot of schools numerically which are wonderful places of learning. Expensive private schools and high-income-neighborhood-servicing public schools don’t allow that kind of disruptive policing and aren’t looking for every opportunity to punish children as a show of dominance and teaching forced-submission. But numerically high does not equate to high percentage, and they’re a minuscule percent of the overall count of schools in America (115,000+).
So this is not a “don’t fix small problem until we fix big problem” issue. This is a “don’t pretend that these are students and not prisoners, and take away one of the few remaining joys most of them have”.
Taking away phones isn’t fixing a small problem, it’s making the bigger problem worse.
I mostly agree with what you are saying, but when was this golden age where school was about pure learning, exploration, and inquiry, and wasn’t an institutional machine? At least here in Canada, schools have never been more about inquiry than ever before… to the point where much of the value of traditional teaching styles is lost. IMO.
I don’t think phones make kids hate school, and I don’t think kids use phones because they hate school. Phones have seeped into our lives and into our children’s lives and it has prevented them from using their brains the way they are naturally made to work.
Last year most provinces in Canada banned phones from schools. But it didn’t work because students bring them anyways and parents still text their kids 24/7 so they are fine sending their kids to school with them. Teachers don’t stand at doors patting kids down. The problem is not, IMO, at the school system level, it is cultural. We are destroying the brains of a generation and sitting back and watching the train wreck in slow motion.
I have taught in Quebec schools this year, the first full year that cell phones were banned. I have not seen a single student using a phone. The teachers at my schools have also been unanimous in saying that there has been a significant improvement in the student attention, as well as communication and activity between students.
I didn’t realize you’re in Canada, and I fully admit I know nothing about Canadian schools or the education system there.
In the US, we have military recruiters in schools, armed officers patrolling halls, metal detectors and backpack checks (for the schools that don’t require transparent backpacks), and random locker searches. And this was all from before Trump.
Edit: oh, I forgot my (least) favorite new rule: no talking in the hallway between classes, though it seems like the UK leaned into that more heavily than the US has.
It’s a cage for kids, not a place to learn, and it is significantly different than when I was very young. 9/11 happened when I was in middle school, and even in the subsequent 6 years until I graduated high school, it had gone downhill fast.
“Hating school made kids want to look at their phones.” thats just 100% false. Hating work is not why adults look at their phones nor is it hating public transit or hating driving. 100% phones are a distraction in their own right outside of all exterior effects.
Hating work is not why adults look at their phones
When I like what I’m doing I don’t get the urge to look at my phone.
maybe but as I replied to another then its that people hate life because they are on them all the time. Smartphones or some apps are addictive.
Hating work is not why adults look at their phones nor is it hating [commuting]
Um, ya sure about that?
Yes, phones are distracting, but distraction is entirely about competing levels of interest, and phones are more interesting than most people’s work or commute, and certainly than modern classrooms.
im 100% sure because people are doing it no matter what they are otherwise doing it. So its either they are on their phones because they hate life or smartphones or at least certain apps on them are addictive. its plain to see they are addictive although I will grant that life sucks especially now. Still. the phones be an addiction.
Addiction usually forms around something that is used for escaping one’s problems. True here as well.
And yes, most people are unhappy in life, right now especially.
