The Impact of Cellphone Bans in Schools on Student Outcomes: Evidence from Florida

• In Event: No Cells for You: The Impacts of Cellphone Bans on Student Outcomes in the U.S.

Abstract

Many jurisdictions in the United States and around the world have recently implemented policies banning or restricting cellphone use in schools. One-quarter of countries had banned cellphones in schools through a law or policy by 2023, increasing to 31 percent in 2024.In the United States, as of September 2025, 30 states have passed statewide bans or have recommended local districts to enact their own bans or restrictive policies (Prothero, Langreo, and Klein, 2025). A recent nationwide survey reveals that nine in ten school districts report having some form of cellphone policy (Diliberti et al., forthcoming). To date, however, we know of no causal evidence of the effects of national, state, or district-level policies on student outcomes, and no causal evidence even on school-level policies in the United States, with its unique cultural context.

We bring to bear new evidence from Florida’s statewide cellphone ban, implemented in May 2023. Florida is an ideal environment to study this question, because (1) it is the first state in the United States to implement a statewide cellphone policy, allowing us to observe not just short-run transitional effects of the ban but also longer-run steady-state effects; and (2) in Florida we can measure outcomes of interest at a higher frequency than in most other locations – three times per year in the case of test scores and daily in the case of disciplinary incidents. Using detailed administrative records from a large urban county-level school district (LUSD) – one of the ten largest in the United States – and a research design that differentiates schools based on their pre-ban levels of student cellphone use, we find evidence that Florida’s cellphone ban led to meaningful improvements in student test scores in year two of the program, which is also when disciplinary incidents began to decline after an initial surge following the cellphone ban. To identify the effects of cellphone bans in an environment in which all students are subject to the ban, we compare schools where there was a larger pre-ban difference in cellphone use between regular school days and teacher in-service days (high effect schools) and those with a smaller pre-ban difference in cellphone use (low effect schools), based on data from Advan; this design likely understates the positive effects of the ban on students, because both high effect and low effect schools are treated by the ban. We also present evidence that the Advan contrasts between high effect and low effect schools are due to student cellphone usage differentials, rather than other idiosyncratic or community-level features.

Author

• Umut Ozek, RAND Corporation
  Presenting Author