Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photo: Getty Images
Starting at the beginning of the 2025–26 school year, New York public and charter schools will be implementing plans for “bell-to-bell” smartphone bans, which prohibit the “unsanctioned use of smartphones and other internet-enabled personal devices on school grounds in K-12 schools for the entire school day.” If you’re a New York student and the plan’s various small exceptions don’t apply to you, your phone will be going in the bag (or the box, or the cubby, or the office).
New York is far from the first state to implement smartphone restrictions in schools, but it’s the largest to go so far, and its ban marks a tipping point: Whatever you think of the broad, bipartisan, passionate, but also sort of disorganized and confused campaign to ban smartphones from classrooms, it’s winning. More than half of American states have something on the books, while more than a dozen have policies that resemble outright bans, many of which will go into effect next year. France, Italy, the Netherlands, and Brazil all have national bans of some sort, and countless other countries are close behind.
It’s an outcome years in the making. As the phone-ban campaign has gained momentum, though, it’s started to outpace its considerable public support. While “68 percent of U.S. adults say they support a ban on middle and high school students using cellphones during class,” according to Pew research from last year, total bans, like New York’s, are supported by just 36 percent of parents. (Educators tend to be more supportive: 90 percent of NEA members support bans during instructional time, while 83 percent support bans during the entire school day.)
Part of the move toward full-day bans comes down to enforceability. In-class bans leave teachers to police dozens of small boundaries throughout the day, and Yondr-pouch-based half-measures tend to fall apart as students figure out how to thwart them and teachers grow tired of policing them. But post-pandemic radicalization is also a factor — not among students, but among parents. For a lot of parents, particularly those who’ve read or encountered the movement associated with Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation, the campaign to get phones out of schools is part of a larger battle with maximally high stakes. This is evident if you’ve tuned into any local conversations around the topic, which often veer — understandably! — into anxiety about kids’ relationship with technology, teen depression, and COVID-era learning loss.
Keeping kids from messing around while their teachers are trying to teach is a no-brainer, and the sort of thing for which there’s plenty of public support. In recent years, though, the conversation has shifted away from educators’ concerns about in-class distraction toward something more comprehensively dire. Governor Hochul’s announcement, for example, mentions “promoting student success in the digital age” but leads with “protecting youth mental health.” (Last year, she was talking about the prospective ban in terms of the “dark forces of the social-media world.”) Parents are worried about their kids’ relationship with phones in general, and “bell-to-bell” school policies are something they — and politicians — feel like they can do about it.
The pedagogical benefits of paying attention in class instead of scrolling through TikTok are obvious enough. In the time since phone bans have gained traction, though, studies on their broader effects have been unintuitively mixed. A study published in The Lancet in February, which compared students ages 12 to 15 in 30 schools with a mixture of more and less permissive phone policies, found no discernible mental-health benefits:
There is no evidence that restrictive school policies are associated with overall phone and social media use or better mental wellbeing in adolescents. The findings do not provide evidence to support the use of school policies that prohibit phone use during the school day in their current form, and indicate that these policies require further development.
This doesn’t conflict with research linking heavy smartphone use with poor mental-health outcomes or with similarly strong evidence suggesting that screen-based technology use in classrooms, even when ostensibly educational, can be distracting. Instead, it hints that the campaign for phone-ban legislation, driven by parental anxiety about smartphones and the internet in general, has started to extend beyond evidence and into wishful thinking; in other words, the new and encompassing relationships among kids, their phones, and one another aren’t things that can be navigated with mere school policy. With the various caveats in Hochul’s plan — for caregivers and parents, people with jobs, and students who have particular needs addressed by apps, to name a few — the risks to students of a slight policy overreach are low and the benefits of clearer guidelines for being able to tell kids to put away their devices are potentially significant. Parents looking for relief from their overwhelming anxiety about their kids’ overwhelming anxiety, however, might be disappointed.
