This is an area where hacker news shows its weakness. We have:<p>1. A chart showing a very low increase (1-2 percent)<p>2. Nothing to control scores rising in every school in America in the last school year (due to reduction of COVID effects).<p>3. Scores not moving immediately after the ban, but only after the start of a new school year, which means a new cohort of students muddying the data.<p>Yet the data fits people's biases here (regardless whether it's right or wrong), so the celebrate it and add anecdotes and explanations why it's true.
There's no study that's good enough for HN.<p>I don't think I've ever seen a science or research article posted here that didn't immediately get picked apart for this or that in the comment section. The methodology is flawed. The data is flawed. The conclusions cannot be drawn. There are confounding variables not accounted for. The sources are questionable. It's become a trope at this point. Either our commenters' standards are way too high, or all of science reporting is deeply flawed.
Maybe most studies actually are junk.
No study is perfect – research is and has always been expensive, and playing devil's advocate while seeing the arc of promising research is one of the fundamental skills of reading and doing research.
Why not both? :)
To be fair, all those details are in the paper. And a 1-2 percent increase does not seem low to me for such a measure.
Ok here is the crucial part of the paper:<p>It's a difference in differences design, using individual-level test scores and de-seasonalized data (p. 13). Their wording is:<p>> Y_igst is the outcome of interest for student i in grade g in school s in time period t, HighAct_s is an indicator for high pre-ban smartphone activity schools, D_t is a series of time period dummies (t = 0 indicates the first period after the ban took effect), δ_s is school fixed effects, and θ_g is grade fixed effects. In this setting, β_t are the parameters of interest, reflecting the difference in the outcome of interest between treatment and comparison schools for each period, with the period before the ban serving as the omitted category, holding grade level constant.<p>To me some modeling choices seem a bit heavy-handed, but I'm not an economist and could not do better.
Yea, it's strange that the line didn't move quickly. I would give grace for a couple weeks to a few months, but next year? The timing feels really disconnected.
I'd go further and say its a global weakness and unbelievably destructive. The bulk of current discourse today is:<p>1. Read a headline/tweet/instagram.<p>2. Decide whether or not it fits in your worldview.<p>3. Move forward with the confidence that you are better informed than everyone else who agrees/disagrees with it.<p>You see it everywhere on all sides of all beliefs.<p>It didn't use to be like this. We used to read articles, we used to read common news sources, we use to not have media overrun with bad actors who know exactly what to say to get the most engagement and solidify people in their own world views.<p>It's all over HN and I could have hoped there'd be more willingness to say "let me consider the contents and the source before deciding if I accept it". That attitude is just lost and I don't think it will be regained and I think it's the reason we are all in a death spiral.
Back in the late 90s, when I first entered the video game industry to work (when it was quite scruffy, countercultural, and populated by some pretty odd people), one of the first things I encountered was a new co-worker who, next to his giant tower of used Mountain Dew cans, had a black and white TV in his cubicle. This struck me as very odd at that moment in time - as I understood things, obviously the point of work was supposed to be that it was a place where you worked, not a place where you watched TV. (Now, granted, everyone else was playing the recently released Diablo on their work PCs during lunch in network mode, and we were a game studio after all, so my reaction wasn't totally coherent). Still, no one else had a TV, and that guy was young and single with no work-life balance, he was a recent transplant, and it still seemed unusual at the time.<p>Fast forward 28 years later, and now everyone has an amazing TV in their pocket at all times when they commute, sit in their work space, go out for coffee or lunch, or go sit down in the bathroom, all with a near infinite collection of video via youtube, netflix, and even massive amounts of porn. How little did I know. And that's to say nothing of texting and twitter and reddit and instant messaging and discord and ...<p>Several years ago, I was working on a college campus, and there were giant corporate-flavored murals beside some of the city blocks students walked, full of happy multicultural clip art people and exciting innovative technological innovation, and adorned with the message, "Imagine a borderless world!" Clearly that message was meant to be rhetorical, not a call to reflection, critique, or reevaluation. There did not seem to be the suggestion that one might imagine the borderless world and then, having done so, decide it was a problem to be corrected.<p>I wonder a lot, these days, if we're not deep into a Chesterton's Fence situation, where we have to rediscover the hard way the older wisdom about having separate spheres with separate hard constraints and boundaries on behaviors, communities, and communication pathways to facilitate all sorts of important activities that simply don't happen otherwise - something like borders and boundaries as a crucial social technology, specifically about directing attention productively. Phones and tablets are, in their own Turing complete way, portals to a borderless world that pierces the older intentional classroom boundaries.
The older wisdom was that you worked on the farm with your husband and children for your entire life, breastfeeding while you peeled the potatoes, putting down your spindle to comfort a crying child. Millers lived in the mill; even blacksmiths lived at their smithies. Except for rituals, separate spheres with separate hard constraints was a novelty of the Satanic mills where the Victorian proletariat toiled.
They still had clear boundaries. They slept in the sleeping place and at the sleeping time, they worked at the working place and at the working time. See, they didn't have smartphones to fiddle with in bed.
<a href="https://www.ou.org/holidays/the_thirty_nine_categories_of_sabbath_work_prohibited_by_law/" rel="nofollow">https://www.ou.org/holidays/the_thirty_nine_categories_of_sa...</a> outlines those "clear boundaries" in detail from a pre-medieval or early medieval perspective.
> they didn't have smartphones to fiddle with in bed<p>This is solvable for people who want to. We have a dedicated charging station in our house for all electronic devices. Before bed, all of those devices get put there. Including me and my wife's phones.
I had an early experience with a Palm III and a cell modem strapped to it. It was <i>intoxicating</i>. I still find the pull of the phone to be very strong sometimes. It's an ongoing battle to maintain a healthy relationship with it. Such a useful tool, but also a massive time suck if you let it.
I am also older and I see that my kids don't have certain things that I perceived as disadvantages at the time but may have helped develop useful habits. These things include quiet and boredom, which helped with focus; lack of ready answers or information, which may have helped imagination or generative reasoning.<p>I think we can recreate these things if and when we need to, but that recreation may be for the elites. I heard an interview with a professor who said he had to reintroduce Socratic exams to get around chat bots and the fact that kids now have very poor handwriting. At an elite school you can do that.
<i>Your Phone Isn't a Drug. It's a Portal to the Otherworld.</i> <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46115659">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46115659</a>
I'm not particularly old yet, in my mid-thirties, but I reacted like someone much older when I learned kids are allowed to carry around their phones all day at school.<p>Back in my day (when we walked to school uphill both ways), we weren't allowed to carry around basic flip phones. They had to be in our locker and only used before or after school.<p>When and why did it become acceptable for much more distracting and stimulating devices to be allowed in class?
We weren't allowed to have any of <i>several</i> different individual devices the functions of which are present in a smartphone. Banning that stuff was more-or-less uncontroversial. Obviously kids in an ordinary classroom shouldn't have instant cameras, and video recorders, and audio recorders, and Walkmen, and radios, and game boys, and TVs, and flashlights, and...<p>Now we have devices that are all of those things in one and parents will fight you if you try to keep kids from having or using them. Go figure.<p>What's baffling is why so many more people started thinking all those devices were OK when they're combined into one device. Like, not much of this is novel, we <i>could</i> have had devices that did most of the relevant things a smartphone does, in class. But we didn't because <i>of fucking course</i> they weren't permitted.
When parents themselves also became addicted and decided it was easier to give their kids phones than to parent them.
I think it is precisely because they are more distracting. When the most addictive thing in phones was the snake game, kids did not bother to insist in using their phones all the time. Now, when you try to tell a pupil to put the phone away, it often results in a huge arguments, so eventually teachers gave up.
Never. There has never been a time when it was OK to use a phone in class. What happened is A) Some kids do take their phone out and play with them and either get caught or not B) Something happens and kids record it aka school fight videos. C) giant moral panic that has very little basis in reality.
It became "acceptable" because the teachers and admin were already on their phones constantly. I went to grade school from 2005-2017, when iPhones came around the adults got them years before kids did, I had numerous teachers that would sit on their phones half the class.
Since when is a study needed to confirm that enabling a dopamine addiction, especially in developing minds, is a bad idea? Isn't our own direct experience as adults/parents struggling with said addictions enough?
Having grown up in the "no cellphones allowed at school" age, and now having a kid, I'm super glad that my local school district is finally banning phones.<p>There's always going to be exceptions but speaking for myself there's no way I'd be able to resist the allure of a cellphone in class.
Two years after the imposition of a student cell phone ban, student test scores in a large urban school district were significantly higher than before, David N. Figlio and Umut Özek find in The Impact of Cell Phone Bans in Schools on Student Outcomes: Evidence from Florida (NBER Working Paper 34388).<p>Paper: <a href="https://www.nber.org/papers/w34388" rel="nofollow">https://www.nber.org/papers/w34388</a>
You have to admit that it's quite clever how they approximate phone use:<p>> Our identification strategy relies upon our ability to calculate school-specific measures of smartphone activity that we can attribute to students, rather than adults in the building. To do so, we use detailed smartphone activity data from Advan between January 2023 and December 2024 that we link to LUSD schools using point-of-interest coordinates.13 In particular, we focus on the average number of unique smartphone visits (pings) between 9am and 1pm on school days (a common time frame that elementary, middle, and high schools in LUSD are all in session during school days) in the last two months of the 2022-23 school year (right before the ban took effect) and the first two months of the 2023-24 and 2024-25 school years.14 To disentangle student activity from the smartphone activity of teachers/staff, we subtract the average number of unique smartphone visits between 9am and 1pm on teacher workdays (in the same school year) from the same average on regular school days.
I wonder if there's a hidden confounding selection bias here, i.e. "ability of the school to ban phones". This is probably easier in less chaotic schools where the students listen to the teachers, say.
In our local schools, they <i>don't</i> make *teachers* responsible for enforcing the bans. Students have to keep their phones in a Yondr pouch. If they're caught with their phone it will be confiscated (and require a parent to pick it up), and the <i>administration</i> will give also give additional consequences such as being banned from extracurriculars or school activities like Prom.<p>My student tells me that in practice many students don't keep their phone in the pouch, but they are very careful about how and when they use them. Many teachers have a "don't ask, don't tell" policy - if I don't see you using the phone, and it's not disruptive, then they don't care.
If the teachers and schools cannot implement a phone ban because the students won't listen to them, it might be time to reassess what their purpose is.
Some very important context that the researchers don't mention: during the same period that they are claiming test scores improved because of phone bans, Florida changed the way they administer standardised tests. Starting in 2024, they switched from doing one end-of-year assessment and started administering more frequent tests throughout the year in order to better gauge a student's progress and provide a tighter feedback loop. (source: <a href="https://www.educationadvanced.com/blog/florida-standardized-tests" rel="nofollow">https://www.educationadvanced.com/blog/florida-standardized-...</a>)<p>It's much more likely that simply changing the way they administer these tests had a more significant impact on test scores than phone bans.
It's beyond obvious that they should be paying attention to the classroom and not their screen. Future generations will equate our screentime addictions to smoking and drinking. Just putting it down doesn't work. It needs to be out of reach and in certain locations, taken away from us entirely for the betterment of humanity.
The increase in scores is really small. It’s 1.1 percentage points.<p>My interpretation is, the pandemic is a root cause of lower test scores for many reasons, one reason is that kids started using cell phones way more during the pandemic, and that new stuff on the phone (TikTok, let’s be real) causes lower test scores. Reducing usage during school is addressing a real problem, but it’s one of many real problems, and some are way bigger.
I think you're correct, but another piece of this is that students (especially in HS, but probably also in MS) have realized they can accomplish most assigned tasks in a fraction of the time using online resources (whether copies of old tests, agentic AI, or other sites), so they lean on their phone for this. A big piece of the missing equation here is the fact that home PC/laptop use has also been consistently decreasing, in favor of phones & tablets, causing phones themselves to be even more indispensable for youth.<p>I read a position paper last week suggesting the solution to this is to take a zero tolerance policy in the classroom and move all course testing back to pencil & paper / bluebooks. I would support that (as a parent of two current high schoolers).
I think there is a typo in the paper, that was carried over to the article. These two sentences appear to contradict one another as written:<p>> Interestingly, we observe significantly improved student test scores in the second year of the ban (about 2-3 percentiles higher than the year before the ban) when suspensions revert to pre-ban levels.<p>> Overall, we show that student test scores improved by 0.6 percentiles, with the ban increasing spring test scores 1.1 percentiles in the second year relative to the spring test right before the ban took effect.<p>Instead, I think the 1.1 percentile gain should be about the <i>first</i> year, and a 2-3 percentile gain by the second year. That is consistent with the graph.<p>But yes, a fairly small gain. I agree that much of the gain could be recovering from losses during the pandemic. Also the FAST is a new test that started in the 2022-2023 school year, so some of this could also be due to students and teachers adjusting to the new test and improving over time.
When you're dealing with large populations (here, the study include 230,065 students--a very large number), even small shifts due to some treatment can be significant. It is very hard to generate top-down policy interventions that shift the mean of a population in significant ways: if this treatment effect (banning phones) is real, 1.1 points represents a very big policy win that can easily be applied elsewhere. The devil is in the details, however: they exclude some recent data based on the pandemic, but baseline off of 2022-2023, which was still in the throes of the pandemic. The data they show looks to have around a 0.5-1 sigma variation in percentile from 2022-2024, so the shift from the baseline of around 1 to 4 definitely looks significant, but it will be interesting to see if sticks over time.