The Educational Impacts of School Phone Bans

A rapidly expanding literature documents the detrimental effects of excessive cell phone use, particularly on mental health outcomes and attention. While nearly all studies focus on adult populations, many experts have used them to support phone bans in schools ??" partially in the hope that these might help reverse declining trends in standardized test scores dating from even before the Covid-19 pandemic. This paper provides first-hand evidence that phone restrictions in schools indeed causally boost K??"12 learning outcomes. Leveraging the introduction of a policy that banned non-pedagogical uses of cell phones within schools in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, we contrast schools that already had strict rules on phone use even before the policy (the control group) to all other schools (the treatment group), before and after the ban. We find that, 1.5 year after roll-out, (1) the prevalence of high-usage schools converged across groups; and (2) standardized test scores significantly increased in treatment schools, relative to control: in the former, students learned 0.06 s.d. more ??" enough to fully eliminate the baseline gap in test scores across groups.

Speaker: Gulherme Lichand, Stanford University

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