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https://www.techdirt.com/2026/06/02/school-phone-bans-great-politics-mediocre-education-policy/>
"Before the current wave of laws banning mobile phones in schools, we had
published a piece from some researchers who had looked at how similar bans had
worked in Australia, with the conclusion that… they didn’t. At best, the
research showed the evidence on school phone bans to be “weak and
inconclusive.” Those authors suggested that rather than doing outright bans,
politicians should leave the issue to the schools themselves to determine
what’s best.
So it should come as little surprise that two years later, after many similar
bans have gone into effect in the US that… the studies are showing up as (you
guessed it) weak and inconclusive. The new study from the National Bureau of
Economic Research (NBER) has some people shaking their heads because it can
find no evidence of better student performance in schools.
Schools that adopted strict bans — requiring students to keep their devices
in locked pouches throughout the school day — saw a meaningful decline in
student cellphone use. But test scores have not increased in those places on
average. And at first, banning phones led to higher suspension rates.
That’s not to say there should be a free for all in schools. But, once again,
it would be nice if politicians, the media, and other commentators could
finally (for once) recognize that blanket bans of technology are almost never
the answer. The relationship between students and technology is complex and
nuanced and doesn’t have a single effect in a single direction. Instead, it’s
highly context and individual dependent.
A reasonable, nuanced approach is (1) better equipping teachers with tools to
be flexible, (2) better educating students on the tradeoffs of technology use,
and (3) improving the overall education environment with an actual recognition
that context matters.
Obviously, if kids are just sitting in class all day staring at their phones
instead of paying attention to the teacher, that’s a problem. But there are
ways to deal with that specific scenario that don’t require a full ban. For
some schools a full ban could absolutely make sense, and for others it
doesn’t."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
