But if the results in Texas are similar to those seen elsewhere, school leaders here can expect to see benefits beyond an improved school climate, new research suggests.
“I think you can expect to see improved learning environments, probably a little bit better test scores, a little bit a little bit better attendance rates and engagement,” said David Figlio, an economics professor at the University of Rochester who recently published a study on the impact of school cellphone restrictions elsewhere.
TEXAS LAW BANS CELLPHONE USE DURING SCHOOL DAY
Texas’ new statewide school cellphone ban took effect at the beginning of the school year. The law requires districts to enact policies barring students from having their phones out anytime during the school day, including at lunch and during passing periods between classes. Some districts have adopted policies requiring students to leave their phones in a locked pouch in the school office at the beginning of the school day. Others allow students to keep their phones with them, but require them to keep them in a pocket or backpack during school hours.
Matt Smith, superintendent of the Arlington Independent School District, said the policy has made a noticeable difference on campuses. Teachers say they spend less time dealing with distractions, he said. And where students previously spent their lunch period buried in their phones, they now spend it talking with each other. One principal in the district recently bought a handful of games for the school cafeteria and walked in one day to find a group of students playing on a life-size checker board, Smith said.
Arlington ISD’s phone policy allows students to keep their devices with them, but requires them to be out of sight for the entire school day. District officials worked with principals over the summer to hammer out the details of the policy, Smith said. A few weeks before the first day of school, the district’s communications office began pushing information about the new rules out to students and parents.
District officials intentionally rolled out a relatively restrictive version of the policy for the first year, Smith said. The idea was to give students as much clarity as possible about what’s allowed and what isn’t, he said. Still, he said, before the ban, teachers had found ways to use students’ phones as teaching tools, not just as a source of distractions. District officials may revisit the policy in the next few months to figure out what leeway they have under the state law to allow students to use their phones in some limited cases, he said.
For example, students in school newspaper and yearbook classes routinely used their phones to take photos of campus events and activities, he said. And students in English classes often used online tools like Grammarly to check grammar and punctuation before submitting assignments. It’s possible that district leaders could create exceptions to the cellphone ban for those kinds of uses, he said.
Although he said the ban has been a positive change for the district overall, Smith said he thinks there need to be opportunities to teach young people what appropriate use of technology looks like. The policy keeps students from using their phones through the school day, but nearly all students turn their phones on the minute they walk out of school, he said. Whether the responsibility falls on schools or on parents, it’s critical that students be taught how to use electronic tools responsibly, he said — both the tools that exist today and ones that haven’t been invented yet.
“This is an evolving new game that none of us know what it’s going to look like moving forward, and we have to build that skill for them,” he said.
ACADEMIC, ATTENDANCE GAINS FOLLOW SCHOOL CELLPHONE BANS
New research suggests that school cellphone policies can lead to academic gains — but not necessarily right away. In a working paper released last month, researchers at the University of Rochester and the RAND Corporation looked at data from an unidentified urban school district in Florida, where statewide school cellphone restrictions have been in place since 2023.
Researchers found that the district had an uptick in in-school suspensions in the first year after the cellphone restrictions were enacted. In the second year of the policy, the number of suspensions returned to near normal, but researchers saw modest but meaningful improvements in both state test scores and attendance.
“Neither of these two is earth-shattering, but both are solid,” said Figlio, the University of Rochester professor and the paper’s lead author.
Figlio said it’s difficult to pinpoint the exact reason for the uptick in in-school suspensions. It’s possible that there were widespread violations of the policy as students took a while to adjust to the new rules, he said. It’s also possible that teachers were enforcing the rule more harshly during the first year, then backed off in the second year, he said. He noted that the uptick in suspensions was most pronounced among Black students, which mirrors a broader trend in which Black students are disciplined disproportionately.
Although Figlio’s study is the first piece of research to look at how cellphone bans can affect academic metrics like state test scores, he said there’s a growing body of evidence that they can improve school climate overall. Besides being a source of distractions, phones can provide an avenue for bullying and harassment, especially in middle and high school, he said. So if school districts remove phones from the equation, it can mean that schools are a calmer, more stable place to be. A calmer classroom environment could mean some students miss fewer days, because they want to be at school, he said.
More than half of states now have some form of school cellphone ban enshrined in law, and about two-thirds of school principals reported in a recent RAND survey that their schools have an all-day cellphone ban in place.
Figlio said the states and districts that have adopted those policies have done so without much evidence to support their effectiveness. Most seem to have implemented cellphone bans based on the rationale that they represented a common-sense solution to a serious problem, he said. Although he cautioned against drawing overly broad conclusions based on a single study, Figlio said there’s growing evidence that those districts made the right move.
“I’ve been in this business for 30-plus years at this juncture, and so often I’ve found in the past that common sense doesn’t really seem to pan out in terms of what actually happens in the real world,” he said. “Here’s one case in which common sense seems to be backed up by the data.”
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