— Cara Delevingne to Heidi Klum, whose Met Gala look was slightly terrifying. We’re asking the same thing.
Education
Are Cellphone Bans Working?
What's going on: School cellphone bans are popular with parents and lawmakers (not to mention teachers) — but do they actually help students? A new study from the National Bureau of Economic Research lands on a very unsatisfying answer: yes… and no. Researchers looked at more than 40,000 schools from 2019 to 2026 with varying levels of restrictions. Stricter bans, like locking phones in Yondr pouches, reduced phone use by about 30%. But students pushed back, well-being dipped, and suspensions rose. Still, the upsides eventually became clear as teachers saw more engagement and less distraction. The big headline, though: Test scores barely budged. On average, the impact was “close to zero,” despite earlier, smaller studies that suggested otherwise.
What it means: Phones are a problem, but they’re not the problem. Attendance, test scores, bullying — none of it hinges on devices alone. That hasn’t stopped at least 32 states from passing some form of school cellphone restriction. The results are mixed and even nuanced at times. In one rural school, students use phones as stand-ins for lab tech. And banning phones doesn’t eliminate the internet or computers from their daily lives — it just reroutes them (hello, Google Chat or passing notes like us OGs). What bans do change: how kids interact in person. Teachers say cafeterias are louder now, in a good way. For a generation raised online, that might be the most meaningful shift of all.
