A working paper released Monday by scholars at four universities found that locking up students’ phones had a long-term positive effect on their self-reported wellness.
But the improvement in their test scores, relative to similar schools that kept more lax phone policies, was negligible. The study is the largest and broadest of its kind, and looked at more than 40,500 schools between 2019 and 2026.
The new data comes as lawmakers continue to debate the costs and benefits of a statewide school phone policy. Pennsylvania currently has none, leaving the matter up to local school entities.
In his budget address earlier this year, Gov. Josh Shapiro endorsed a “bell-to-bell” ban, meaning students would not permitted to access their phones from the start of school until afternoon dismissal. The state Senate passed such a bill shortly thereafter.
Last week, the House Education Committee took up both the Senate bill and a House bill on the same subject, amending both to have identical language.
This newest version of the proposal, similar to prior ones, would require that every public school district and private school operator adopt a policy to “prohibit the use of a mobile device during the school day while on school property.”
The school must also “establish the manner in which a student’s possession of a mobile device is to be restricted,” and implement the policy by the 2027-28 academic year. The bill also provides relatively broad exceptions for students with medical conditions, special education plans, and those who receive special dispensation from the school principal.
“I think everybody knows I have been skeptical of doing a mandate from the state level that is going to impact all of our 500 school districts that, as we know, are extremely varied,” Education Committee chairman Rep. Peter Schweyer, D-Lehigh County, said last week.
In the committee’s prior discussions, “there wasn’t a traditional party-line breakdown on where people’s thoughts were on a statewide mobile device policy. There was no traditional breakdown of regional differences,” Schweyer continued, and the current iteration of the bill is “my attempt to thread that needle and make sure all concerns are heard.”
The prevailing concern among committee members was that the exceptions would go too far, and that many parents would push to get their child a carve-out until the policy becomes divisive.
“You’re really going to create an environment where you have the haves and the have-nots,” said Rep. Bryan Cutler, R-Lancaster County, the ranking Republican on the Education Committee.
The new study took schools that adopted a popular type of lockable phone pouch, and compared them to demographically-similar control schools which allowed students to keep their phones during the school day.
Using GPS-based activity tracking, researchers found that having students surrender their phones reduced the number of pings on school property during the day by roughly 30 percent, and teachers reported a roughly 80 percent decline in students’ phone use — indicating that having students surrender their phones was effective and hard to evade.
Researchers also found an adaptation effect when it came to students’ self-reported well-being: a decline in the first year after a phone ban, followed by an increase in the second year and a net positive in students’ mental wellness thereafter. The impact, researchers noted, was of larger magnitude than a prior study finding a similar effect from de-activating Facebook.
The study found little impact on reported bullying or student attendance, with phone bans correlating to a 16 percent increase in suspensions in the first year that subsequently dissipated.
However, the influence on test scores in the first three years post-ban was “close to zero,” researchers found, with a small positive effect for high school math achievement and a small negative effect for middle schools.
Several explanations are possible, with researchers telling the New York Times that the test score conundrum should not necessarily dissuade schools from restricting phones. Students may be replacing the distraction of their phone with similar distractions on a laptop or other classroom device, researchers said. Reduced learning disruption from phone use may be offset by increased disruption from teachers having to police students who violate the ban.
Some prior studies, particularly those done internationally, have shown a stronger connection between phone bans and improved academic performance. Others have found that banning phones during the school day has a limited effect on students’ overall phone use, and that better test scores are also dependent on limiting screen time more broadly.
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