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Ccigarette, Backpack, Short skirts, guns and books. Now you can add a new item to your school banned list – smartphones.
From California to Texas to Maine, state legislatures and individual school districts Reduce screen time in the classroomoften enforcing blanket “item-by-item” bans on personal devices. The aim of these bans is to reduce distractions in the classroom and improve children’s learning outcomes while reducing their total screen time and thus their exposure to digital dangers.
What’s more, the push is bipartisan — almost shocking in the second Trump era. Throughout 2025, red and blue state governors have joined the crusade with equal zeal, and on Capitol Hill, Virginia Democrat Tim Kaine and Arkansas Republican Tom Cotton Move to grant Provide additional funding to schools that pilot such bans.
“Phone bans in schools are very popular with parents and educators,” said Vaishnavi J, a veteran in the field of online child safety. consultant The former head of youth policy at Instagram parent company Meta said independent.
“They met with initial resistance from students themselves, but soon after the restrictions came into effect, many children and teenagers reported feeling more focused, [being] More at the moment. “
Vaishnavi J said this is similar to Massive bipartisan support for new law banning texting while drivingand the massive push to get computers into schools in the 1990s and 2000s.
Crucially, Vaishnavi J argued, these bans do not require complex technical solutions to enforce: schools already know how to confiscate and police physical items. This makes them “a very attractive proposition” for any politician who wants to “show they’ve made some progress” on child safety.
In fact, 69% of Americans now support banning cell phones in K-12 classrooms, According to a Fox News December pollboth Republicans and Democrats are mostly in favor (although support varies widely).
Conservative commentator Carol Markovich said: “I think these bans are just a good start. We should be working to a large extent to make schools completely screen-free.” in interview laura trump on her fox and friends In stock last week. “Kids just don’t have the attention span anymore.”
More and more shocking evidence
Much of the credit for this wave can be attributed to psychologists and prolific centrist experts Jonathan Haidt leads the way with his 2024 bestseller anxious generation. His work has been promoted by Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders and New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy, both of whom have several children.
“Everyone is a parent, everyone has children…everyone sees this,” Haidt Tell Politico September.
Haidt’s book brings together a body of research that suggests smartphones and social media are behind widespread increases in mental health diagnoses, self-harm and suicide among under-18s since 2010.
Some academics and researchers have disputed these claims, arguing that Haidt’s evidence is insufficient to blame technology alone and accusing him of peddling simple answers to a range of complex problems.
Thomas Robinson, a professor at Stanford University who has been studying the effects of screen time on children, said Since the early 1990sthere is indeed a lack of academic evidence. “The large number of null and weak results makes it very difficult to draw conclusions about impact in one way or another,” he said independent.
However, he believes that this is largely due to limitations of the study’s methods – particularly the difficulty in measuring what children actually do on their smartphones, rather than just what they tell researchers.
exist a recent study Robinson and other researchers aimed to address these issues, but have not yet been peer-reviewed, by measuring the actual activity of 163 teenage users through a background monitoring app. While the specifics vary from person to person, they are used heavily during school hours and very little of it is actually related to their schoolwork.
“Overall, for younger children, many types of evidence tended to be harmful. For adolescents, the evidence for harm also outweighed the evidence for benefit,” Robinson said.
Robinson’s Discovery Mirror Another recent study Research led by Dr. Jason Nagata, associate professor of pediatrics at the University of California, San Francisco, found that teens spend more than an hour on their phones during the school day, mostly on social media, video or gaming apps.
Nagata’s research also found Using social media before age 13 was associated with worse performance on reading, memory and vocabulary tests two years later. “[These] The findings are consistent with recent school phone bans and efforts to promote age-appropriate screen habits,” he told independent.
Robinson said the real push for these bans, anyway, is that parents and teachers feel like they’re seeing blatant problems unfolding before their eyes, with anxious and distracted teenagers always staring into their portable magic mirrors.
“I’m living in real life right now,” said Sarah Huckabee Sanders. Politico.
How does the ban work?
The specific approaches vary widely from school to school. Many schools have enacted rules prohibiting students from taking out their mobile phones in class, and some have tried to divide campuses into smartphone “green zones” and “red zones.”
But these policies are difficult to enforce and easy to defy—as anyone who’s ever caused trouble behind a teacher’s back can attest.
That’s why many schools are choosing to partner with a company called Yondr, which says its lockable phone storage bags are currently used by more than 2.5 million students. Students put their phones in a bag when they arrive at school and carry them with them throughout the day, only to be able to unlock them later using a special magnetic tool.
Yondr CEO Graham Dugoni founded the company in 2014. “Our whole view is that it doesn’t take anything away from students, but it gives something back to them,” said Yondr CEO Graham Dugoni, who founded the company in 2014. told cbs news.
Other schools use lower-tech solutions: individual cubicles, student lockers, or even just a plain, locked wooden box in each classroom. Some let older students keep their phones, but need them Install app blocking software.
According to data from the Fordham InstituteConservative education think tanks said a ban would be more effective if teachers were also forced to give up their devices.
Phone bans are not always popular with students. “I think it hurts me because when I need to contact my parents or ask for any help, I’m chased by people who think this policy is a good thing,” junior Mito Flores Tell that to Oregon broadcaster KOIN 6.
“While I see positives in this policy, I think it undermines student autonomy.”
Others have more positive feelings, like the 16-year-old girl in New York tell about educational utopia: “I got more done today than I have in the past two weeks. I don’t have to worry about my phone.”
But many teachers implementing the new policy say the difference is like night and day.
“The hallways are buzzing again,” New York City history teacher Sari Beth Rosenberg wrote. “More students are coming to my desk to chat — about history and their grades, of course, but also about their weekends, their lives.” in an op-ed Praise for the city’s smartphone ban.
“Students didn’t even complain about not having their phones all day. Instead, it felt like oxygen was being pumped back into the building. We didn’t realize until now how mundane things had become.”
Are these bans really effective?
Two researchers expressed cautious optimism about the impact of these bans.
“We don’t know for sure yet, but the early reports and testimonial evidence I’ve seen so far, including from teachers, parents and students themselves, point to the overall benefit of limiting or completely excluding smartphones from classrooms,” Robinson said.
“I hope Congress and state legislatures will take action to properly regulate digital media companies and their practices. If they do so, the burden will not fall on the shoulders of schools, teachers, parents and the children themselves. In this case, I support restrictions on smartphone use in schools.”
Nagata similarly said the bans “can reduce distractions during instruction” and “help protect attention to learning and face-to-face interactions.”
However, he warned: “We still need more evidence on whether restrictions or bans are actually effective, especially in practice. Adolescents are often very tech-savvy and can find ways around restrictions, so the key question is not just whether bans are helpful, but how they are implemented and enforced.”
indeed, Australia – Recent ban on social media for under-16s — The kids have found creative ways Bypassing restrictions, such as commandeering a parent’s old device. Australian officials said this was natural and did not undermine the overall ban, commenting: “We don’t expect perfection.”
Some parents also oppose school smartphone banEspecially since they want to stay connected to their children if anything terrible happens during the school day.
Still, momentum for such bans in the U.S. now seems unstoppable, and tech companies are not lobbying heavily against them. Vaishnavi J, founder of child safety consultancy Vys, said companies are alarmed by calls to ban children from smartphones or social media altogether, especially since smartphones have huge benefits for children (such as giving them a more private space to connect with peers and explore their identities).
In contrast, school bans are easier to swallow. “The industry recognizes that this is not a decision in which they should have a say,” Vaishnavi J said. “This is about how school districts, governments and society structure their offline environments.”
However, Vaishnavi J also pointed out that these policies left a glaring loophole that could cause potential harm through the laptops and tablets provided by schools for students to do homework.
Vaishnavi J said these devices often have very heavy-handed restrictions and supervision methods that fail to take into account unsafe content that children may encounter through permitted video and social media platforms, discussions with AI chatbots or conversations with classmates. This is especially true in cash-strapped school districts that don’t have the ability to manage computer clusters in detail.
“There is a complete ban on mobile phone use for 10 hours a day, but school-issued devices can still be vectors for abuse, harassment, manipulation, addiction, dependence and despair,” said Vaishnavi J. “I think there is a question, how do we solve this problem?”