In a recent Fordham Institute survey, 76 percent of high school students and recent graduates reported at least one form of daily unsanctioned tech use during the school day. Half reported daily social media use, while 49 percent reported messaging friends during school hours. These numbers reflect student use both of school-issued devices and of personal phones. States aim to address some of these distractions with cellphone bans.
As of July 2026, more than 30 states restricted student phones during school hours. Such bans can take various forms, from restrictions limited to class time to policies that ban phones throughout the entire day. Some require students to lock their phones in secured pouches or a central office, while others rely on teacher discretion. Despite the rapid growth of phone-ban policies, there is limited research examining whether the bans improve student achievement and well-being.
In a research review of seven studies of natural experiments across six countries, NYU’s Emma Park, Carmen H.J. Lim, Zach Rausch, and Jonathan Haidt aim to assess the effects of these policies. Haidt is a leading proponent of phone bans and heads NYU’s Tech and Society Lab, which has spent years collecting evidence on “away for the day” policies. Among the studies, three[1] evaluate full-day bans only, while three[2] analyze both full-day and classroom bans but report the findings separately by ban type. The seventh[3] study pools several types of phone bans in Sweden, examining ninth-grade outcomes from 1997–2017.
The findings are nuanced. All studies measuring phone use found that students used phones less in class after the bans were implemented. Three found positive effects on student test scores, while three showed no overall effect and one did not measure test scores. Preliminary findings in two of the studies suggest that phone bans may reduce bullying over time, while the studies that measured student well-being found no significant overall effect. Notably, in two of the studies, discipline incidents increased in the first year of a ban, though most of that increase faded out by the second year. Overall, the studies found mostly beneficial or neutral effects from phone bans.
The seemingly modest impact of cellphone bans described in the NYU research review may be related to varied and shifting implementation. A recent Brookings survey of teenagers by Dan Silver, Amie Rapaport, and Morgan Polikoff examined how phone bans hold up over the course of the year. In surveys near the start and end of the school year (October 2025 and May 2026), Brookings asked teens about their schools’ phone policies and whether they used their phones during core classes, with nearly all of the respondents attending schools with some form of phone ban. Overall, the percentage of teens reporting in-class phone use rose from 28 percent to 42 percent between the start and the end of the school year, with larger increases in places where phone ban policies were less strict. Consistent with this finding, 44 percent of teens said their teachers became less strict about phone use as the year progressed.
By May, most respondents reported that phone bans had no overall impact on their well-being or relationships with teachers, which the Brookings authors interpret as consistent with teens finding the phone bans less disruptive than they had feared. Still, the share of teens who said phone bans improved their learning environments rose from 28 percent to 35 percent.
While teen perceptions are far from causal evidence, the Brookings survey is consistent with Fordham’s finding that phone policies are rarely enforced. The NYU research review suggests that benefits rise when phone use declines substantially, but the policies don’t always hold, as a larger share of teens report using phones in class by the end of the year.
Enforcement matters. If leaders wish to ban phones from classrooms, they need to design policies that don’t rely solely on teacher enforcement. Future research should also track phone use along with school-issued devices, as students still find ways to access distractions without their phones. The early evidence suggests that phone bans can help students, but open questions remain about the best way for schools to carry out these policies. Taking phones out of the classroom may be the place to start.
SOURCES: Emma Park, Carmen H.J. Lim, Zach Rausch, and Jonathan Haidt, “Are school phone restriction policies working? A review of the natural experiments and advice to researchers on expanding the outcomes measured,” NYU Stern School of Business working paper (September 2026); and Dan Silver, Amie Rapaport, and Morgan Polikoff, “A year later, what teens tell us about school cellphone bans,” Brookings Institution (September 2026).
