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Smartphones have become ubiquitous. This has led to regular news stories blaming them for everything – birthrates, literacy, anxiety. Bad school behavior and poor test score performance is also blamed on smartphone use. Naturally, this a testable theory, and a large study by Allcott1, Baron, Dee, Duckworth, Gentzkow and Jacob (2026) (“ABDDGJ”) looked at what happened when phone use in school was restricted.
Reducing Phone Usage
Over 4000 schools in the US implemented a policy where smartphones needed to be put into Yondr pouches at the beginning of the day. These pouches are magnetically locked and prevent the use of the smartphone:
ABDGGJ compared schools that used the smartphone pouches with otherwise similar schools, and observed them for 3 years. So what do they find?
Impact of Smartphones on School Outcomes
Nothing. The authors found no difference in test scores, attendance, disciplinary actions or online bullying.
To be a bit more precise – there were relatively minor differences in outcomes:
Students subjective well-being falls in the first year but turns positive in year 3;
Disciplinary actions rise in the first year of smartphone pouch adoption but revert to pre-pouch adoption levels by year 3;
High school students saw a slight improvement in test scores – a 0.9 percentile score increase;
Middle school students saw a slight reduction in test scores;
To give additional context, a 0.9 percentile increase in test score is approximately one fifth of the gains students get when paired with a better teacher.
Potential Explanations
ABDGGJ posit a few explanations of the puzzling results. If the problem with smartphones is that they distract students, then by removing smartphones, students may resort to other distractions such as talking in class. So test scores are unlikely to change if students don’t substitute phone use with in class learning, but rather, with other distractions.
Some of the other findings have intuitive explanations:
The rise in disciplinary actions initially may be driven by the fact that there may have been resistance to the smartphone pouch policy;
Improved subjective well-being has been shown to occur with decreased social media usage in prior studies;
The reason middle school students may have seen a test score decline, while high school students saw a test score increase could be because younger children have less impulse control, resulting in more disruptive behavior compared to older children.
Broader Research
Similar results have been found by other studies. Figlio and Ozek (2025) looked at the impact of smartphone restrictions in schools in Florida. Using phone signal tracking data, Figlio and Ozek were able to differentiate schools by smartphone usage prior to the ban, with the expectation being that high smartphone-use schools would see bigger improvements in test scores.
Overall, Figlio and Ozek found that the smartphone ban improved test scores by about 0.6 to 1.4 percentile, in line with the findings of ABDDGJ. Beland and Murphy (2016) conducted a study on UK students during the time period of 2000-2013 and found that there was a positive impact, similar in size to ABDDGJ. At the same time, some studies showed truly zero impact of phone bans; Kessel, Hardardottir and Tyrefors (2020) found that imposing a ban in Sweden did not change test scores.
Banning Smartphones Will Not Do Much
It appears that banning smartphones in school, at best, will only minimally improve test scores. Smartphones feel like an easy scapegoat for all educational ills, but research has failed to show that they are the cause.
However, if smartphones are an issue, the problem might be that they’re already too ubiquitous. Students use phones outside of school and the majority of any adverse impacts may be occurring in these settings, making school bans ineffective.
For example, a paper by Barwick, Chen, and Li (2025) looked at how phone app usage can be ‘contagious’. In a college setting, if Person A has a roommate that uses phone apps more than the average user (average phone app use is 92h a month with a standard deviation of 108 hours), Person A then uses phone apps more themselves. The authors also found that starting wages upon graduation drop by 2.3% if one uses apps one standard deviation more than average (i.e. 200 hours a month).
This study suggests the ubiquity of smartphone use might be the issue. Moreover, we also have research that shows that social media has adverse impacts on a person’s well-being (covered by us here). Therefore, the fact that smartphones are omnipresent may be the issue and simple school bans are unlikely to have an impact. Since smartphones will not disappear, some new approach may need to be developed to better deal with smartphone use.
One such idea could be based on the approach used by some schools, which have implemented training and courses on the healthy use of smartphones and social media. The Florida schools in the Figlio and Ozek study had such classes. Currently, school-based smartphone/social media instruction is minimal – only around 10% to 20% of students in the US had a standalone course offered. Perhaps a more structured class would result in a better relationship with smartphones/social media. After all, physical education and health classes are often year round courses, so a dedicated course on smartphones which is, ultimately, a mental health class may be warranted.
Let me know your thoughts/comments on smartphone use in school in the comment section!
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Fun fact - Hunt Allcott was one of my professors during my PhD!