Banning cellphones was supposed to improve many of the problems ailing American education, including distraction, bullying, declining test scores and absenteeism.
The idea attracted rare, bipartisan support, and over the past three years, two-thirds of states passed laws restricting cellphones in schools.
But the bans have achieved only some of the goals that educators and parents hoped for, at least so far, according to a new study, the largest of its kind, which will be published Monday by the National Bureau of Economic Research.
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.
Still, teachers have been thrilled with the change, reporting fewer distractions from personal cellphone use. Over time, students in schools with strict bans reported a greater sense of personal well-being.
The paper, from researchers at Stanford, Duke, the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Michigan, relied on data from Yondr, a company that makes cellphone pouches that lock with a special magnetic device. Students are required to place their cellphones into individual pouches when they arrive at school. Students hold onto their pouches, but cannot unlock them until the last bell rings.
Researchers compared schools that use Yondr with demographically similar schools without pouches. Those control-group schools also typically limited cellphone use, but less strictly. They sometimes allowed students to use phones between classes, or to keep them as long as they stayed hidden from view. Cellphone use declined at those schools, too, but not by nearly as much as the ones that used Yondr, according to GPS data and teacher surveys...
Full story by Dana Goldstein in the New York Times
