PAUL PETERSON, HOST:
This is the Education Exchange with Paul Peterson. I am the director of the Program on Education Policy and Governance at Harvard University. Thank you much for joining us. Many states and school districts are banning cell phones, at least during the school day on the school grounds. They’re saying that this interferes with classroom study and isolates students from one another, and they need to be put aside. Now, the study of cell phone usage is not really a field that has been thoroughly examined, partly because it’s such a recent phenomenon. But we do have a recent study by David Figlio and Umut Özek entitled, “Can Banning Cell Phones Save Student Learning?” Education Next has just released it on its Education Next website. I’m pleased to have David Figlio with me on the Education Exchange today. David, thanks for joining us again on the Education Exchange.
DAVID FIGLIO: Paul, it’s always a pleasure to be here.
PETERSON: Well, David, you and your colleague have just done a very careful study of what happens when a school district withdraws cell phones from classrooms. So, before we get into the details exactly how you did this study, can you tell our listeners what you found?
FIGLIO: Sure. So this is the first study of a state or district level cell phone ban in the United States. It was from Florida, which is the first state in the country that had a statewide ban. And we’re doing work in one large school district in Florida. We found the following. First of all, we found that a cell phone ban dramatically reduces student cell phone use. You’d think that’s obvious, but on the other hand, maybe it’s not. We all know of stories of students finding ways around these.
PETERSON: In my classroom, a ban on cell phones is very effective. Now, it’s true that once in a while we catch somebody, but we are not nice to them when we catch them.
FIGLIO: At the same time, it was not a foregone conclusion, but we find strong evidence that the ban did reduce student cell phone use, which in and of itself is an outcome. We also found that the cell phone ban improved measures of student engagement. So students were less likely to have unexcused absences in follow-up work that we are about to release. We show that student reports of school climate improved, and student reports of student-teacher interaction quality improved. We find that in the medium run, that is the second year of the cell phone ban, we started seeing improvements in student test scores, English Language Arts and Mathematics test scores. The test score improvements are modest, but present and statistically significant. And we also find evidence, at least in the first year of the cell phone ban, of an increase in discipline. So more students are being suspended at…entirely due to rule violations. And we find that the effects of the cell phone ban on suspensions is really concentrated in two groups, male students and Black students. So that’s our paper in a nutshell.
PETERSON: Well, does that increase in absenteeism and suspension rates…does that continue into the second year or is that just a first-year phenomenon?
FIGLIO: So let’s make sure we have it right. There’s a decrease in absenteeism, and an increase in suspension rates. The decrease in absenteeism happens immediately and persists. The increase in suspensions we observe in the first year, but by year two, things are returning to pre-ban levels. We are interpreting that as a transition period. I don’t know about you, Paul, but I’m 55 years old and I have a hard time giving up my phone; now imagine 14-year-olds. And it seems relatively likely that we’d see an increase in rule violations when you now have this rule in place that students could easily violate.
PETERSON: Well, you know, students will always test adults when they come up with rules. So when they come up with new rules, the first thing students want to do or children want to do is to say, well, is this a real rule or is this just a phony rule; let’s see what happens. So maybe that’s what happened that first year.
FIGLIO: I think that’s certainly likely. We can’t get in what’s in students’ minds, but I had three emerging adults myself, now full-fledged adults as my children, and I’ve interacted with thousands and thousands of undergraduates, and that seems consistent.
PETERSON: Well, how did you do this study? How do we know that these findings are not just something that you gingered up here? How did you gather your data and so forth?
FIGLIO: Sure. So, thanks for asking. The first thing you’re probably wondering, or listeners are probably wondering is if this is a universal cell phone ban, which is the case in Florida, how did the authors manage to come up with causal inference? And the answer to this is we were looking at schools for which the cell phone band likely had more bite or less bite. Let me tell you what that means. We collected information from Advan (location-based analytics software), which is a very high frequency, high quality measure of cell phone use that you can link to the building level. And we looked at which school buildings in this school district had high levels of cell phone use before the ban took place and others that had relatively low levels of cell phone use before the ban took place. Our expectation would be the schools that for whatever reason, including we suspect pre-existing cell phone policies for example, and we have some evidence to support that a school that already had low cell phone use before, there’s not very much scope for improvement in terms of student cell phone use, if improvement means less cell phone use. A school that had a lot of cell phone use before the ban had a lot more scope. We find that the places, the schools, where there was the most scope for improvement because of high cell phone use before the ban, were the places where all the results I was telling you were taking place. One thing I’ll mention, because you might wonder, how do we differentiate between student cell phone use, which was banned, and adult cell phone use, which was not banned? And the answer is these Advan data we see on a daily basis. So, what we did was we looked at the time period between 10 and 2 during the day on days when kids were present in the school and compare that to days in which only adults were present, that is teacher workdays. And what we found, we were able to tease out the difference by looking at a typical teacher’s workday versus a typical school day. And that’s how we were able to get our measure of student cell phone use.
PETERSON: All right. Well, very good. So, you know, who supports cell phones? I guess this is something that comes out of state legislatures. So, the politicians must be fairly popular out there. But is there a way of identifying the drivers of who’s supporting this?
FIGLIO: Who’s supporting cell phone bans?
PETERSON: Yeah.
FIGLIO: I think that there are a number of different drivers, one is that there have been increasing numbers of reports and concerns about the fact that we are in what people like your colleague Tom Kane and Doug Staiger and Sean Reardon (co-authors mentioned by name by Figlio of recently released Education Scorecard) are referring to as an achievement recession that’s been taking place ever since the middle of last decade. Which corresponds, of course, to an era of ubiquitous cell phones and social media for kids. I think a large number of people have been looking at those trends and saying, boy, it sure seems like we need to do something to turn around that decline in student achievement, which predated the Covid pandemic. Teachers and principals, and other educators, have been complaining about student distraction in classrooms. And a major source of the distraction are these highly attractive devices that everybody is carrying.
PETERSON: So, the teachers are happy to ban these. They don’t…you’re not getting any opposition from the teachers’ union or from teachers on the ground.
FIGLIO: I think teachers…I think educators, really are very interested in banning the phones. I think parents are of mixed minds. So, parents, of course, want to see their kids happy and thriving and learning and growing. And of course, many parents are very concerned about the distraction in schools, about potential negative consequences of social media, 24-7 social media use, et cetera. And those parents tend to be favoring cell phone bands. And then on the other hand, a lot of parents have gotten very used to wanting to be in constant contact with their kids. And so some parents are not as excited about cell phone bans for that reason, because they feel like, how am I going to be able to be in touch with my kid if I need to, or if they need me, or something of that nature. I think that when I’ve heard the biggest opposition to cell phone bans have often been parents, although parents also tend to be strong supporters of cell phone bans.
PETERSON: Well, of course, there’s different points of view within families. You know, there’s another study that’s been released not too long ago. David, I know you’ve heard about it, and they, I think, don’t find the same benefits of the cell phone ban that you’re finding. Could you tell us a little bit about what are the differences between your study and the alternative study that’s out there?
FIGLIO: Sure. So, you’re referring to the study by Hunt Allcott and colleagues, which is a national study that recently came out. Our first study was released in October, and the Allcott et al. study was released at the end of April. Let me first tell you about what the Hunt Alcott et al. study does.
PETERSON: And they do cite you. I noticed that they did cite you. So that’s a good thing.
FIGLIO: Absolutely. And as we continue to do work, the feeling is mutual, I see these two studies as actually much more complementary than in conflict. And I’ll tell you why. So our study, again, was of a single large school district, albeit a school district that’s the size of some small states in the United States.
PETERSON: Can you tell us which school district it is?
FIGLIO: I can only tell you it’s one of the five biggest school districts in the state of Florida, which means one of the 10 biggest school districts in the United States. It could be Miami-Dade, Broward, Palm Beach, Hillsborough, or Orange, but I can’t tell you which of those five. But it’s one of those five. And so we study one large school district. Theirs is a national study, which is based on a rollout of lockable pouches, specifically Yondr pouches. We have…
PETERSON: Oh, Yondr Pouches. What’s this word, Yondr?
FIGLIO: It’s just a brand name.
PETERSON: Oh, okay. A certain company by the name of Yondr makes cell phone pouches that you stick the phones into when you are not using them.
FIGLIO: That’s right. So theirs is a national study and ours is local. We use, we are using individual level student data, which has the various…all the benefits of individual level data in terms of being able to follow the same kids, do the student level heterogeneity, and they’re using much coarser aggregate level school level data. And so there are— Our study is focused on looking at the relative intensity or bite of a universal policy. Theirs is the rollout of a tool that could serve as a ban at a school level. So, there are very different research designs. However…
PETERSON: It’s just possible that your intervention is a more substantial one, the one you’re studying. It’s a more substantial one than the one that is being studied by the other team.
FIGLIO: It’s certainly possible. I mean, ours has the bite of being a statewide policy with strong consequences. But that said, even with all of those differences, I actually find that our study and their study, despite the way it’s come out in the press, are much more similar than different in our outcomes. So let me tell you the similarities, and I’ll tell you the slight difference. Similarity one, we find, as I mentioned, strong evidence of reduction in student cell phone use after the Florida ban came into place. They can’t study student cell phone use, of course, at a national level, but they can study overall cell phone use, which includes students and adults, and they find substantial reductions in overall cell phone use in the schools after the Yondr pouches were implemented. So that’s one similarity. A second similarity that we find is evidence of increased student engagement. And as I mentioned before, they find, after a brief negative period, they find improvements in student reported measures of subjective well-being. So, I view that as another similarity where students seem more engaged and report higher well-being across the two studies. We find short-term increases in discipline and suspension rates. They also find short-term increases in suspension rates, just like we find those increases are not long-standing, long-sustained, same with them. So, then there’s the one, now they don’t find reductions in unexcused absences, but they can’t measure that with the national data. The only thing they can do is get to rates of chronic absenteeism, and they don’t find evidence of improvements in chronic absenteeism. But on the other hand, you can chalk that up to just differences in measurement. So, the one place where it seems like there might be a difference is that we find modest positive improvements in test scores. They find on average zero changes in test scores, except actually for their most recent round of Yondr Pouch. The most recent Yondr Pouch implementers…actually they were finding increases in test scores, also modest. So, I look at this and I see, okay, almost everything lines up except we are somewhat more bullish on test scores than they are. That seems like much more similar than different as far as I’m concerned.
PETERSON: Yes, that does explain and clarify the way in which these studies can be complementary rather than the opposite. Now, where do you see the biggest effects? Is it in the high schools or is it in the elementary schools? My guess is it’s going to be in the high schools but tell our listeners.
FIGLIO: Yeah, we find much bigger effects in middle and high school. And that’s because there’s much more student cell phone use in middle and high schools than there are in elementary schools. We did find very similar effects across racial, in terms of test scores and student engagement, we found very similar effects across racial and ethnic groups, across socioeconomic groups, across high achievers and low achievers. Everybody seemed to have their changes in kind of the same approximate direction. The only real standouts were that the rate of disciplinary action, suspensions due to rule violations seem to be concentrated with male students and Black students disproportionately.
PETERSON: Well, how many states have these cell phone bans? Is this spreading?
FIGLIO: Absolutely. So as of January, which was the last time I counted, there were 30 states that had statewide cell phone bans. So, this is getting to more popular than not. I wish I could tell you, Paul, that I looked at the percentage of students in the United States. If that’s more or less than half, it all depends. But I know some of the biggest states have them now, like New York and Florida, for example. So I’m … Texas also now. So I expect that it’s well over half of students.
PETERSON: Well, thank you, David, for elaborating on your study. It’s great to have a chance to talk with you about a subject that is not very controversial across the political parties that everybody thinks we need to do something about regaining students’ engagement with their schoolwork. So thanks for joining me.
FIGLIO: Thanks for having me, Paul. Always a pleasure.
PETERSON: I’ve been speaking with David Figlio. He’s a professor of economics at the University of Rochester, and he’s a co-author of a recently released study that looks at the effects of cell phones on student learning. You can find the study summarized and made very clear for the lay reader on the Education Next website. I am Paul Peterson. This is the Education Exchange. Please join me every Monday at noon when our weekly podcast is released at noon Eastern time.
