A massive national study on the impacts of taking away student phones during school hours reveals a great deal about the benefits and drawbacks of student connectivity.

The study was published as a working paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research. Researchers from Stanford University led a multi-disciplinary team from Stanford, the University of Pennsylvania, Duke University, and the University of Michigan. The study was cleverly designed and carried out over a three-year period, a duration that proved critical to understanding the impacts.

First, the researchers partnered with Yondr, the company that makes lockable pouches that render smartphones unusable until the magnetic lock is deactivated. The lockable pouches are used by many schools. Students place their smartphones and other devices into the pouches at the beginning of the day, and school staff unlock the pouches at the end of the day.

Yondr shares a trove of data about the pouches with researchers, who are able to eliminate a lot of guesswork about how long the phones are sequestered and whether locks are broken during the day. Researchers note:

[T]he pouches substantially reduce students’ ability to use phones during the school day and lower the enforcement burden on teachers and administrators.

Yondr enabled the researchers to track more than 43,000 middle school and high school students spread across the country. The data is then augmented with the following information:

• Student attendance records
• Standardized test score results
• Student behavior disciplinary reports
• Student evaluations of smartphone bans
• Teacher evaluations of smartphone bans
• Administration evaluations of smartphone bans

What the researchers found, surprisingly, is that smartphone restrictions had no measurable impact on school attendance, classroom attentiveness, standardized test scores, or perceived level of online bullying. One of the only definitive results of the research is that the Yondr pouches did, in fact, take smartphone usage during school hours to nearly zero.

The researchers found the phone bans to be disruptive in the first year of implementation, leading to an increase in disciplinary incidents and a reduction in student-measured well-being. If the study had only been a year long, it would have missed the well-being rebound in years two and three. In the second and third years, disciplinary actions declined compared with students who did not have the phone bans, and student-reported well-being more than recovered from the first year’s decline.

Investigative journalist Gerald Posner explains the reasons for poor outcomes in the first year of school smartphone bans:

Kids consider them essential for managing anxiety, developing their public identity, and a continuous peer-monitoring system. Removing them abruptly changes the texture of the school day.

One of the more disappointing results is that banning smartphones at school seemed to have no impact on bullying. The bans did not reduce disciplinary reports, and they did not improve student-reported feelings about being bullied. Posner speculates that students substituted laptops and other devices to get around bans, and, of course, they had access to their phones before and after school.

The impact of using Yondr pouches on teacher satisfaction is stunning. Teacher satisfaction with the school’s smartphone policy went from 26% before Yondr to 75% after. Teachers love that they don’t have to remind students to put away their phones, and they aren’t responsible for collecting phones at the beginning of the class and returning them to students at the end of class.

This leads to the interesting finding that improving teacher satisfaction did not result in improved outcomes for students. One would expect that happier teachers would lead to more successful students, but this study does not demonstrate that outcome.

Written by Steve O’Keefe. First published May 15, 2026.

Sources:

“The Effects of School Phone Bans: National Evidence from Lockable Pouches,” NBER Working Paper No. 35132, April 2026.

“The Biggest Study Yet on School Phone Bans Just Dropped — And the Findings Are More Complicated Than Either Side Expected,” Just the Facts with Gerald Posner, May 6, 2026.

“School cell phone bans deliver benefits — but not right away,” Stanford Report, May 4, 2026.

“Lockable phone pouches in schools improve student well-being over time, not test scores or bullying,” Institute for Social Research, May 4, 2026.

Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, used under Creative Commons license.