Science doesn’t know the best way for St. Louis schools to restrict smartphones

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Given how much education affects life outcomes, and that the great majority of U.S. schools (and many in St. Louis) see student smartphones as distracting enough to restrict in some way, you may assume teams of researchers have run experiments on the various restriction policies—lockable pouches vs. phone lockers vs. keep-it-in-your-backpack rules—and found the best ones. At least I assumed this. I was wrong.

My first stop on this journey was the work of Jonathan Haidt, the New York University professor whose bestselling book, The Anxious Generation, makes a bold claim: that smartphones and social media have triggered “an epidemic of mental illness” among adolescents. It came out in April and got copious press coverage. Long before this, St. Louis educators had been clamping down on phones, but Haidt’s book galvanized some people locally. A parents’ group sprung up in Clayton and persuaded that district to revisit its policies; dozens of schools and districts, meanwhile, have co-signed a letter urging parents to limit their kids’ use of smartphones and social media apps “as long as possible into adolescence.” The letter’s first sentence mentions Haidt’s book.  

Haidt’s argument about a mental-illness epidemic has its critics, to whom he has responded—here’s a summary of the debate. But let’s bypass questions of youth anxiety, loneliness, and depression to focus instead on classroom learning. There’s a body of research to suggest that students’ recreational use of smartphones in class lowers their retention and test scores. You can sift through a compilation of such studies in a collaborative review document that Haidt has set up online, but to me it’s an intuitive finding: Being distracted in class means you’re less engaged with the material, and your scores reflect that.

So Haidt advocates that K–12 schools go phone-free. But how?

Picking policies

Writing last year in The Atlantic, Haidt argued that the only two interventions he knew of that would accomplish phone-free-dom were lockable pouches, such as those made by Yondr, and all-day phone lockers. 

Yet the most common approaches, he wrote, seemed to be (a) phones are allowed only for classroom purposes; (b) phones are never allowed in class but may be kept in a pocket or backpack; and (c) phones are checked into the classroom’s caddy or storage unit during each period. Haidt suspected (a) and (b) were “nearly useless” because if students have a device within reach, many won’t have the impulse control to resist checking. As for the classroom caddy system, Haidt wrote that it might be “a little better for learning” but would lead to the moments in between classes being “dominated by kids looking down silently at their phones.”

All that may be true. Still, I wondered: Are Haidt’s preferences here supported by science? The answer matters because his two favored policies are more expensive than the others. His collaborative review document lists the options but doesn’t link to research about them. You can see on his website that he’s been busy with his book tour, so I emailed his lead researcher, Zach Rausch, and haven’t heard back (though if he responds, I’ll update the online version of this story). I also emailed the nonprofit Phone-Free Schools Movement, which has created an administrator’s toolkit, to ask whether there was anything better than anecdotal evidence to support one policy over another. “Unfortunately, at this time we do not know of any more robust studies,” they replied. “We are working with a researcher here in the US to hopefully have said data by the end of this school year.” I also emailed Daniel Buck, who has written on this issue as a fellow at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a right-of-center think tank. “The difficulty is that strict, universal bans are new,” Buck wrote, “and so researchers haven’t had sufficient time to compare and contrast different approaches.”

So evidently there’s no scientific consensus on how best to tackle this problem. In the meantime, local districts and schools are forging ahead in a trial-and-error phase, as the St. Louis Post-Dispatch recently reported. For now, I’ll leave you with a brief sketch of the Ladue School District’s experience, which at least gives a feel for the diversity of variables that educators must consider.

Ladues and LaDon’ts

In the pre-COVID era, Ladue Horton Watkins High School tried Yondr pouches in 10 of its 85 classrooms, Principal Brad Griffith told me. The teachers who elected to use them loved them, Griffith recalled, but that choice created an inconsistency on campus, which stirred some resentment among students. 

After the pandemic, school leadership sought to establish consistency. Ladue is fortunate in that it likely could’ve covered the cost of school-wide pouches, Griffith said; they reportedly run about $25–$30 per student, and Ladue has about 1,300 students. Yet the administration foresaw logistical challenges in unlocking them each day and were wary of that process eating into instructional time.

So for three years, Ladue has used the classroom caddies, which keep the phones out of reach for each class period. True, Griffith said, teachers do have to deal with the occasional “dummy phone” that misleads a teacher into thinking a student’s phone is put away while, in reality, the one she actually uses is still on her person. “No system is ever going to be perfect when you’re working with teenagers,” Griffith said. “They will always find a way around your system.”

But on the whole, he said, the caddies are working as intended—and with fewer hiccups than expected. The administration had feared having to deal with parents who were unsupportive for having lost a direct line of communication in an emergency; with teachers who enforced the policy unevenly; with students who fought the policy, some as habitual offenders. “And we just didn’t,” Griffith said. “As a matter of fact, the feedback has been exceedingly positive.” Including, he added, from the teachers.

Keep in mind, too, the problem that Ladue was trying to solve: classroom distraction. Students can still use their phones in the passing periods and at lunch. Many do, Griffith said, “but it’s not zombieland.” He also argues that about 90 percent of the students are going to college, so it wouldn’t be ideal for them to go from total prohibition to “complete freedom.” After all, there’s a big difference, he points out, between an 18-year-old and a sixth grader. (Haidt recommends no smartphones before high school and no social media before age 16. In a future edition, I may write more about the middle school perspective.) 

Has Ladue’s policy affected academic performance? Griffith said he has nothing quantifiable but will be watching and learning from how other districts approach things. There’s conflicting evidence in scientific literature about whether the “mere presence” of a smartphone—say, within a student’s reach or field of vision but unusable—hampers learning. If it doesn’t, and usability is all that matters, then maybe the caddies are just as effective as pouches or lockers. Or maybe correcting for any distraction will achieve only a modest bump in test scores. Or maybe a smartphone policy that benefits one kind of student won’t benefit another. 

Uncertainties abound. Everyone is experimenting. I hope the kids are still learning algebra.