But a pair of researchers studying the state\u2019s first-in-the-nation statewide cellphone ban also tracked a 25% spike in suspension rates in the first year, with the biggest impacts on Black students. At schools with high levels of pre-ban cellphone use, the rate of in-school suspensions for Black students rose by 30%, while rates for white and Hispanic students remained steady.<\/p>\n
In the second year of the ban, disciplinary rates returned to pre-ban levels. Those findings are similar to those of a national study on cellphone bans published last week.<\/p>\n
Related<\/a><\/p>\n Five Things to Know About Largest Cell Phone Ban Study<\/p>\n Researchers David Figlio and Umut \u00d6zek also found \u201csignificant reductions\u201d in the number of unexcused absences in both the first and second years after the ban, especially among middle and high school students. That drop in absences could also help explain, in part, the better test scores, they said.<\/p>\n The Florida ban, adopted in May 2023, made cellphones off-limits to students during instructional time, but allowed local districts to impose additional restrictions according to their needs.<\/p>\n Figlio, an economist at the University of Rochester, noted that Florida is an unusual place to study the topic, since it was one of the first states \u201cto really get back to normal in schooling\u201d after the shock of the COVID pandemic and widespread school closures.<\/p>\n \u201cSchooling was business as usual in the 2020-2021 academic year in Florida,\u201d he said in an interview. \u201cIt was not business-as-usual in almost any other part of the country.\u201d That could have delayed potential academic improvements around cellphone bans in other states, he theorized.<\/p>\n David Figlio<\/p>\n Figlio said the discipline data is concerning, since phone-related suspensions were, at least at first, \u201cdisproportionately borne by male students and especially by Black students.\u201d<\/p>\n While it\u2019s possible that Black students were simply violating the rules more often, it\u2019s also possible that the rules \u201cwere being more heavily enforced\u201d for these students. \u201cWhenever I see any evidence of disproportionality in terms of any policy, that\u2019s always a cause for concern for me. And so that\u2019s what I\u2019ll call the dark lining in what I think is a silver cloud.\u201d<\/p>\n When Figlio and \u00d6zek\u2019s findings appeared last fall as a working paper<\/a> in the journal of the National Bureau of Economic Research, they were the first to look at a universal school cellphone ban policy. A newer paper, also published by the bureau, studied nationwide data on cellphone bans compiled by Yondr, a California startup that makes lockable pouches for schools, businesses and entertainment venues.<\/p>\n That paper, released May 4<\/a> by a team led by the Stanford researcher Hunt Allcott<\/a> and Duke University\u2019s E. Jason Baron<\/a>, found that school cellphone bans don\u2019t typically bring improved academic achievement or better behavior, as many advocates have hoped.<\/p>\n Figlio suggested that the broader look at cellphone restrictions could have been subject to a kind of \u201cpost-COVID transition period\u201d that showed slower academic improvement.<\/p>\n In their study, Allcott, Baron and colleagues called the Yondr restrictions \u201cparticularly stringent and physically binding,\u201d suggesting that they provide a way to measure cellphone restrictions more accurately than \u201cno-see\u201d policies that simply ask students to keep phones powered off and hidden. They also said the national scope of their study \u201cprovides substantial statistical power\u201d to examine the policy across different schools.<\/p>\n In an interview, Stanford economist Thomas Dee<\/a>, one of the researchers working with Alcott and Baron, said no-see policies are inconsistently and unevenly enforced. \u201cWe wanted to leverage the data from Yondr because it gives us much more confidence that in-school use of phones is actually being restricted,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n The new paper by Figlio and \u00d6zek, appearing Tuesday in the journal Education Next<\/a>, updates data on cellphone restrictions nationwide to include policies newly in effect this spring.<\/p>\n It looks at an unnamed Florida district which is one of the nation\u2019s largest \u2014 the list of the 10 largest U.S. district includes five in Florida<\/a> \u2014 where local leaders imposed a \u201cbell-to-bell\u201d ban that prohibits using phones, earbuds and smartwatches throughout the entire school day, including noninstructional time.<\/p>\n The new rules went into effect at the start of the 2023\u201324 school year. After Labor Day, if a student violated the rules, their device was confiscated and returned at the end of the day, with the option for suspension.<\/p>\n Related<\/a><\/p>\n \u2018Commons\u2019 Founders Say Phone-Free Schools Rob Kids of Agency<\/p>\n The district carried out the state ban as a \u201cno-see\u201d or \u201coff-and-away\u201d policy, Figlio said, so the expectation was that students had their phones off and out of sight. A few schools used the lockable pouches, he said \u2014 schools in all five of the state\u2019s biggest districts had Yondr accounts \u2014\u00a0but pouches were \u201cnot the dominant form of enforcement.\u201d<\/p>\n Figlio sees the two studies as complementary, comprising \u201ctwo different ways you can really study this topic credibly,\u201d especially as some places implement \u201cno-see\u201d policies and others rely on pouches. He noted that both studies, in effect, find \u201czero-to-small positive test score improvements\u201d initially, but more positive results after that.<\/p>\n A 2024 Pew Research study<\/a> found that about one in three teachers consider students distracted by cellphones \u201ca major problem.\u201d Among high school teachers, that figure rises sharply, to 72%. More recently, Pew researchers in July 2025 found that<\/a> 74% of U.S. adults say they would support banning cellphones during class for middle and high school students, up from 68% late 2024.<\/p>\n Figlio said a future version of the Florida study will also track evidence that student reports of classroom climate, school climate and teacher-student interactions improve under cellphone bans. After a short negative period, students also report improved well-being.<\/p>\n \u201cWhenever we introduce new policies and they really take off like wildfire, I think a lot of people are hoping that they\u2019re going to find that this is \u2018The Solution,\u2019\u201d Figlio said.<\/p>\n In the end, what both studies find is that cellphone bans \u201care not a panacea,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n \u201cThe biggest thing that these cellphone bans did was dramatically reduce student use of cellphones in the school,\u201d Figlio said. \u201cFor people who think that\u2019s a good thing for any number of reasons, that\u2019s a good thing \u2014 that\u2019s a sign that cellphone bans worked. For people who were expecting this to lead to a major turnaround in the \u2018achievement recession,\u2019 where achievement had been dipping even before COVID and continued to dip following COVID, I think they\u2019re going to be disappointed.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The first study probing what happens when an entire state bans cellphones in schools finds that they do…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":267621,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[76645,115062,28,30,29],"class_list":["post-267620","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-florida","tag-black-students","tag-david-figlio","tag-florida","tag-florida-headlines","tag-florida-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/267620","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=267620"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/267620\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/267621"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=267620"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=267620"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=267620"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"David](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/9b9f84cb33281653d8303133a2b4bac9.jpeg\"\/)
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