Millions of children who head back to school this fall will find their phones are now gadgets non grata. Chancellor of New York City public schools David Banks has said that he is considering a ban on classroom phone access that would affect 1.1 million students, though the ban will not be in place at the start of the school year. In June his counterparts in Los Angeles approved a similar crackdown, affecting more than 400,000 students and starting in January 2025. More than a dozen states have now enacted school phone restrictions in the U.S. And the U.K. issued new guidelines for schools on phone bans this past February.
One consequence of such bans is a boom in low-tech devices that keep kids off their phones. These include the Yondr pouch: a small fabric bag sealed with a lock that requires a powerful magnet to open, an arrangement similar to that of antitheft tags that retailers affix to clothing. At the start of the school day students slip their phone into the pouch. They can then keep it in their own backpack or locker but will be unable to cycle through social media or other apps when they’re meant to be studying. At the end of the day, they open the pouch by swiping it at one of several magnetic devices positioned near school exits.
Millions of students across thousands of schools in 27 countries have used these pouches, according to Yondr, the California-based company that makes them. In the past five years 329 U.S. organizations, mostly schools, have contracted to buy more than $8 million worth of Yondr products, according to data from GovSpend, a government procurement intelligence provider. (GovSpend only tracks agreements made directly with the company and notes this amount does not include any potential third-party resellers or brokers.) Other schools use similar containers, such as the Phone Away Box, from different makers.
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The restrictions that prompted these purchases are popular with parents and educators. A survey of likely voters in New York State conducted by Siena College between late July and early August found that 60 percent favor a school phone ban, with support equally split across the political spectrum. Whether such rules achieve their intended ultimate goals—improving educational attainment and throttling bullying and issues around well-being—is still being debated by scientists, as are potential unintended consequences.
Yondr declined Scientific American’s request for an interview, citing time constraints. In its response, Yondr pointed to company press materials that said that 83 percent of the schools using its pouches have reported improved student engagement. The company boasts similar, if smaller, improvements in behavior and academic performance. Anecdotally, some schools claim they’ve also seen a downtick in bullying since using Yondr because students aren’t sniping at one another on social media as much.
Student Performance
Anything that limits access to phones is a positive, says Louis-Philippe Beland, an associate professor of economics at Carleton University in Ontario and co-author of one of the first papers on the academic impact of smartphone access. “We found that banning mobile phones in schools increases student performance, especially for low-achieving students. There was no negative impact on high-achieving students,” Beland adds.
Further research has supported those initial findings, Beland believes. “If you put all this evidence together, I think there’s a strong case that mobile phones cause distraction,” he says. “If you do something about it, you can increase academic performance.”
Available data in the scientific literature back this view: phone bans do help students do better in class, albeit with some caveats. A small number of reports and studies have tried to understand the bans’ impact on educational performance. In 2023 a UNESCO report found that phones are disruptive in class and that banning such technology in schools “can be legitimate if [it] does not improve learning or if it worsens student well-being.” Beland’s study, which looked at U.K. school data, suggested a phone ban was equivalent to pupils spending an extra hour a day in class—although an attempt in 2020 to partly replicate the same study design by Swedish academics found that banning phones had no impact on student performance whatsoever. “More evidence is always better,” Beland says.
Globally, in 2022, one in three students reported that they were distracted by phones in every or almost every lesson, according to a report released in 2023 by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development’s Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), which benchmarks educational performance worldwide. Yet academics at King’s College London who looked into the data further suggested the opposite was actually true: in an assessment posted at the British Educational Research Association’s blog in February, they found that the more a country cracked down on phone use in schools, the lower its benchmark PISA score was, although the researchers weren’t sure why this would be the case.
Sonia Livingstone, a professor of social psychology at the London School of Economics and Political Science and a leading child media researcher, will soon publish a meta-analysis of phone-ban studies to date. It’s “plausible that there is probably going to be mounting research that if kids are not distracted in class, they will concentrate and learn better,” she says. “I don’t think that’s going to be controversial.”
In a non-peer-reviewed report for her institution, Livingstone found that the children she spoke to were in favor of gizmos like the Yondr pouches—but were also keen to carve out exceptions. “It could be the child with diabetes who needs the reminder to take their pills or the child who’s caring for someone at home and needs to feel they could be reached in an emergency,” Livingstone says. Yondr, for its part, offers nonlocking pouches for children who need their phones to monitor blood sugar or for other medically important reasons.
Mental Health
Better academic performance is one factor supporting the bans. But another—mental health—has also captured the attention of policymakers and the public. Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at New York University’s Stern School of Business, has posited that social media (which young people primarily access on phones) is causing a teenage mental health crisis. His bestselling book The Anxious Generation, published earlier this year, cites numerous studies to make that case—although a statistician’s analysis in Reason notes that a majority of 476 studies reviewed were published before 2010, when smartphones were far less ubiquitous, and that few focus on extensive social media use. Haidt says that “there’s a lot of direct evidence of causation” between smartphone use and harms to adolescent mental health. And he points to a blog post he wrote in response to critical reviews.
Nor are all psychologists convinced phone bans are an unalloyed good. Pete Etchells, a professor of psychology and science communication at Bath Spa University in England and author of Unlocked: The Real Science of Screen Time, says that “parents, schools and policymakers are being scared by some really unhelpful rhetoric in the media.” He worries that part of the phone bans’ appeal is that such actions are seen as “immediate solutions because it feels like we’re in an emergency and need to do something quickly.” In the absence of hard data, he says, we ought to wait and take stock.
A more middle-of-the-road approach is also advocated by Michael Rich, an associate professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School, who has been studying the issue with the Alberta Teachers’ Association (ATA) since 2011. As a result of his work with the ATA, he stands somewhere between the pro and anti sides of the argument. “The way we approached it, ultimately, is not about blocking smartphones and their use but about looking at the educational task at hand,” Rich says. He envisages using phone-locking devices for most of the school day and taking phones out only at select times—at which point children will be educated about how to use them in a way that will reinforce a positive relationship with their devices. “We don't just toss kids into wood shop with all the power tools and say ‘Have at it,’” Rich says. “We teach them how to use them responsibly and carefully—and use them in productive ways.” It’s a pragmatic approach, he reckons. “Smartphones are, at least at the moment, for the foreseeable future, a reality of all of our existence,” he says. “Why not overtly teach them how to use these?”
Etchells agrees that hiding phones may remove some opportunities for kids to learn about the safe, responsible use of technology, and he fears the future effects of this approach won’t be recognized for years. Blanket phone bans can’t teach young people “how to effectively navigate their online environment and, critically, be able to talk about it if or when things go wrong,” he says. “Locking them away literally teaches that they are things that should be hidden, not discussed. This does not nurture healthy habits and relationships with technology.”