I’m sure you’ve seen the headlines: over the past several years, states and districts across the country have increasingly adopted restrictive cell phone policies for students during school hours.
For many, enforcement comes in the form of lockable phone pouches. The most common are from a company called Yondr.
Yondr pouches got their start at concerts and comedy shows for performers who wanted a phone-free experience. But the company quickly realized an even better use case: schools.
From a social science perspective, the adoption of Yondr pouches sets up an interesting experiment: If you make phones harder to reach, do students get happier, calmer, and more focused? Or do they simply get annoyed? And what’s the impact on behavior, attention, attendance, and academics?
These questions are not just relevant to school policy, but can also help us figure out what happens when a device that’s become part of the furniture of our lives is suddenly a bit more difficult to access.
Does less phone time make our lives better?
A new paper and new answers
A new paper has provided some early answers to this question.
The researchers — which include some of my friends and colleagues — studied the effects of these pouches in roughly 5,000 American schools. They had a whole bunch of data, and a clever design to distinguish correlation from causation.
Because different schools adopted the pouches at different points in time, the researchers are able to compare the changes in adopting schools to changes in similar schools that hadn’t yet (or never) adopted them.
This is what economists call a natural experiment. It’s not perfect (nothing in social science is), but it’s a serious attempt to get close to the logic of a randomized control trial.
The data used includes records from Yondr about which schools adopted the pouches and when, surveys of students and teachers, and school-level statistics on discipline, attendance, and standardized test scores. The researchers even used anonymized phone location data to track phone activity on school grounds during school hours.
What the researchers actually measured
The question “do phone bans work?” is actually several different questions squashed into one. So it’s important to establish the specific outcomes these researchers were measuring.
First, they asked: did phone use itself fall? This sounds obvious, but the world is full of policies that look great on paper and are never actually enforced.
Next, they looked at well-being: did students feel better or worse after the introduction of Yondr pouches? For this, they analyzed surveys asking students about their feelings of happiness, excitement, and safety, as well as sadness, worry, and frustration.
Then, the researchers looked at the social environment — primarily counting disciplinary incidents and perceptions of online bullying.
And finally, they turned to more traditional metrics: attention, attendance, and standardized test scores (in math and reading).
The order they approached these questions matters. A lot of education research tends to jump straight to grades, but the other measures are important in their own right. These authors take the human component very seriously.
On to the findings
First up: the pouches reduced in-school phone use — a lot.
Teachers reported student phone use fell from 61% prior to the phone ban to 13% after adoption. The anonymous phone location data also shows a substantial drop in phone activity on adopting campuses during school hours.
This means the intervention is real and it bites.
But if the problem’s distraction, taking away one cause of disruption does not guarantee attention. So the more interesting questions come next.
Well-being drops first, then improves
To me, this might be the most important result of the bunch.
In the first year after schools adopted Yondr pouches, self-reported well-being actually falls. But — over time — this measure rebounds. By the second year after adoption, students report feeling better than they did before the policy was introduced.
This suggests that the short run hit is more transition pain than permanent damage. Students adapt, and get used to the new normal.
How the social environment does — and does not — change
When it comes to discipline, things also get worse before getting better.
During the first year of adoption, schools using Yondr saw an increase in disciplinary incidents. Much of this can likely be explained by the friction of a new rule being enforced. If you draw a new line, more people will get caught crossing it.
Nevertheless, this measure returns to normal over time.
As for online bullying, the paper finds little evidence of a meaningful improvement. That’s a useful reality check – a lot of online bullying happens outside school hours, and is unlikely to be affected by locking phones up from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m.
Attention, attendance, and academics
Here, the results are more sobering.
The authors find little evidence of a clear gain in classroom attention and no meaningful improvement in attendance or chronic absenteeism. They also find the average effect on test scores to be close to zero.
That doesn’t mean the policy failed, but the big, across-the-board academic payoff did not show up in the way many people expected.
Now, there’s an important caveat when it comes to test scores. When the researchers split students by age, an interesting pattern emerges.
For math, high school students saw modest positive effects, while middle school students saw small negative effects.
It could be that older students have a more genuine problem with phones, and thus the upside is bigger. Or perhaps younger students are more likely to substitute one form of disruption for another.
The researchers are careful not to over-claim here, but there’s a practical, common-sense lesson: different ages might need different rules. What works for a 17-year-old may not work the same way for a 12-year-old.
What this tells us about our own lives
So what does this all mean? And what should we do with it?
Here’s my take:
First, making phones harder to reach does change behavior — a bit of friction makes a real difference.
Second, if you add that friction, you should also expect some initial turbulence, discomfort, and conflict. But that tends to fade as people adapt.
Third, big benefits aren’t automatic. Gains in well-being appear to be real, but we also have to care about what replaces the phone.
If you want less phone time for your kid — or yourself — you need to think like an economist, and consider substitution effects. Less scrolling isn’t the same thing as more studying. Less Instagram doesn’t necessarily equate to more sleep. And deleting one bad habit doesn’t automatically install a good one.
What it does, is give us a chance.
So my advice — as an economist — is to be just as intentional about what you’re adding as about what you’re taking away.
That’s how you think clearly about schools. And it’s not a bad way to think about your own life either.
