School cell phone bans and student achievement

Shifts in School Norms and Enforcement

• Many commenters are surprised phones are allowed in class at all, contrasting this with past bans on pagers, Walkmans, game devices, and even graphing-calculator games.
• Several describe a post‑COVID collapse in discipline: teachers avoid confiscating phones due to constant conflicts with students and parents, or because admins won’t back them without district policy.
• Where bans work, they’re often implemented centrally (e.g., Yondr locking pouches, “phone hotels” in the office), not left to individual teachers.

Parents, Safety, and Convenience

• A recurring theme is parental pressure: parents want constant access for coordination and school-shooting fears, and some text or even call kids during class.
• Others argue this is largely about parental addiction and convenience; schools worked fine when all contact went through the office.

Attention, Addiction, and Boundaries

• Many see smartphones as engineered attention traps, likened to drugs, alcohol, or cigarettes; kids cannot realistically “outsmart” trillion‑dollar engagement machines.
• Others stress the importance of learning self‑regulation: total bans may delay, not solve, the problem, and some students say figuring it out themselves was valuable.
• Broader reflections highlight the loss of boredom, quiet, and “separate spheres” (home/school/work) and call for re‑introducing friction and boundaries.

Interpreting the Study’s Results

• The reported gains are small: roughly 1–3 percentile points after two years, larger for boys and secondary students. Some call this trivial; others note that even modest shifts are meaningful at population scale.
• Skeptics question causality: overlapping effects from pandemic recovery, new Florida testing formats, changing attendance, cohort changes, and the rise of AI tools could all influence scores.
• The paper’s difference‑in‑differences design and clever use of smartphone “ping” data to approximate student phone use are praised, but many still see too many confounders and want comparisons to districts without bans.

Technology in Education and Adaptation

• Some insist schools must prepare students to live productively with phones, not just remove them, and criticize bans as a crutch for inflexible systems.
• Others counter that learning demands focus and that existing school tech (iPads, laptops) already provides ample digital access without adding TikTok and Snapchat to the classroom.