Wednesday, April 29th, in New York State’s capital, Albany, Governor Kathy Hochul and the leaders of the New York State Assembly and the New York State Senate announced an agreement on a whopping $254 billion state budget—a budget that still requires approval by the New York State Legislature.
Buried in that quarter-trillion-dollar deal was something unusual: a bell-to-bell ban on the use of cellphones in public schools.
The New York Times immediately picked up the story of the school cellphone ban and ran with it. The Times pointed out that the budget measure would ban cellphones not just during classes, but during lunch and while a student was in the corridors or stair wells of the school.
The new directive requires the superintendents of 700 school districts including New York City to create their own plans to lock student use of cellphones out of their schools. Those plans will be imposed on a total of nearly 2.5 million students.
The new ban, said the Times, is thorough. It applies all the way from kindergarten to 12th grade.
In addition, the Times pointed out that, “Today, about 90 percent of U.S. teenagers own a smartphone,” a startling number. The Times also reported that even among eight year olds, one in three already have a smartphone in their pockets.
Then the Times pulled in the strange fact that, “policymakers are searching for solutions to soaring rates of depression, anxiety and self-harm among adolescents.” And that, “The U.S. surgeon general in the Biden administration warned last year that the addictive nature of social media could be part of the crisis, especially for young girls.”
That heaps a big load of expectations on a cellphone ban in schools. Are these expectations realistic?
The new ban would make New York State the 13th state to enact a ban on cellphones in schools. And bans of this kind have even sprung up in Europe. Some of those bans have been in operation for as many as 36 years. That’s enough time to study the bans’ consequences and to see whether or not they work.
In fact, to date at least twenty scientific studies on school cellphone bans have been done. They’ve been done everywhere from Norway and England to France and Australia. Not to mention the United States.
So here’s the question: have school cellphone bans been worth it?
The answer is simple. Yes. These bans have had a positive impact. The vast majority of studies find that banning cellphones in schools leads to better performance on tests, higher grade point averages, better focus and attention in class, and improved performance for low achievers.
But there’s a glitch. Most of these studies indicate that banning cellphones in schools does not help with mental health problems like depression and anxiety. However one study of a whopping 240,000 students in Norway disagrees. It finds that banning cellphones decreases bullying, decreases sadness, lowers nervousness, and reduces sleep problems among girls. Yes, just girls. And, yes, banning cellphones ups the girls’ grades.
So is banning phones in schools a wise idea? Scientific studies say the answer is yes.
References:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/29/nyregion/nyc-schools-cellphone-ban.html
https://apnews.com/article/school-cellphone-ban-new-york-budget-d75065bb0f62783f11da363174792f96
Abrahamsson, Sara. Smartphone Bans, Student Outcomes and Mental Health. NHH Dept. of Economics Discussion Paper No. 01, February 22, 2024. https://ssrn.com/abstract=4735240
Beland & Murphy (2016): “Communication: Technology, Distraction & Student Performance,” https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cep:cepdps:dp1350
Kuznekoff, Jeffrey H., and Scott Titsworth. 2013. “The Impact of Mobile Phone Usage on Student Learning.” Communication Education 62 (3): 233–252.https://doi.org/10.1080/03634523.2013.767917
Hancock, Kirsten, Leon Straker, Rebecca L. Fulton, and Stephen Houghton. 2020. “Screen Time and Mental Health in School-Aged Children and Adolescents: A Systematic Review.” BMJ Open 10 (Screen time): e035620. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjopen-2019-035620
Johansen, Ditte Marie, Lars Østergaard, and Charlotte Skau Pawlowski. 2021. “A Ban on Smartphone Usage during Recess Increased Children’s Physical Activity: A Danish School Intervention Study.” BMC Public Health 21 (1): 1-9. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7920279
Kates, Jennifer. 2024. A Look at State Efforts to Ban Cellphones in Schools and Implications for Youth Mental Health. KFF. https://www.kff.org/mental-health/issue-brief/a-look-at-state-efforts-to-ban-cellphones-in-schools-and-implications-for-youth-mental-health/
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/B9780128006813000025
https://www.ctinsider.com/news/article/ct-cellphone-policy-schools-benefits-20020570.php
https://www.govtech.com/education/uconn-study-examines-benefits-of-school-phone-bans
https://www.chalkbeat.org/chicago/2025/02/19/illinois-pritzker-propose-to-ban-cellphones/
https://cla.auburn.edu/news/articles/social-work-research-on-cell-phone-bans/
School cellphone bans spread across states, though enforcement could be tricky • Stateline
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