15 Days of Haidt (#1): Phones In Schools

Yesterday I wrote:

My admiration for Jonathan Haidt is 10 out of 10.

In this blog series, I want to explore 2 questions.

Question A: How is Haidt’s Agenda going over the past year? Is there progress?

Question B: What is the Individual Parent to do once the cat is out of the bag?

Day 1:

Haidt’s Agenda: Schools That Are Phone Free; Increase Adventurous Play at School; Reduce EdTech in Classroom

As usual, I bit off more than I could chew for Day 1.

Let’s chop this down: just phone free schools.

Off we go!

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1. Mike wonders: Is Jonathan Haidt winning the battle against smartphones used 8am to 3pm, during school hours?

The Free Press December 2024:

How Jonathan Haidt Won the Fight Against Smartphones in Schools

Okay then.

It’s been only one semester since the ban has taken effect, but Roberts says the school’s failure rate has fallen by 30 percent, meaning a full third of students who would have likely flunked a class are now on track to pass. Just as important, he says, is a sound he’s lately been hearing in the school cafeteria, which overlooks the Pacific Ocean. It’s a sound he says he’d almost forgotten. “I heard laughter,” he said. “And I mean laughter. And there wasn’t a single phone in sight.”

2. So are schools - and states - banning cellphones?

Education Week Tracker: "19 states ban or restrict phones.”

Plus lots of individual schools or school districts in the other 31 states.

But the phrase “restrict” is doing the heavy lifting here.

Actually 3 states ban. FL Louisiana SC.

What exactly are these laws?

Haidt published Deb Schmil’s piece: How to and How not to mandate phone bans. Thoughtful throughout.

3. What's the scope of the “8am to 3pm problem” ?

JAMA Pediatrics put this out in early Feb.

We found that adolescents spent an average of 1.5 hours (95% CI, 1.31-1.73) on smartphones during the 6.5 hours of school, accounting for approximately 27% of average 24-hour phone use of 5.59 hours daily.

In this sample, 25% of adolescents spent more than 2 hours on their phone during school. By number of users, the top 5 most used apps or categories (excluding internet browsers) were messaging, Instagram, video streaming, audio, and email.

To me? Real problem.

I don’t know if anyone has good data on “True Screen Use” versus just “Smartphone Use.”

That is, when kids circumvent the ban with their Smartwatch, or their school-issued laptop…how is that counted?

4. What’s the timeline on these bans? Per National Center on Education Statistics:

• In 2009, 91% of schools prohibited cell phone use.

• In 2015, that number dropped to 66%.

• In 2021, it rose again to 76%.

So some evidence the pendulum had swung by 2021. But it seems like Haidt is accelerating/tightening the trend.

5. When schools put these policies in place, do the smartphone minutes actually go down?

That is:

Lots of schools have dressed codes that are (ahem) ignored.

Lots of teachers assign homework that is….never done.

We have really good randomized control trial data on certain edtech - teachers assign kids to “Do Khan Academy” - and then they….don’t.

So just to claim a “policy” or ban - doesn’t automatically mean it works.

Here I need to find better data and then update this post!

I think yes. In my kids high school, the phones go into pouches during class, and more or less stay there. Ish.

With that said, certainly kids are dodging the bans sometimes. Edweek surveyed educators to find out how. But the article doesn’t cover the frequency of end runs.

6. If the minutes go down, are kids somehow better off?

I really like the writer Matt Yglesias. Here’s his take.

Smartphones in schools are bad

7. Empirically, are kids better off? A tale of 2 research studies.

a. Norway study says it helps.

Banning smartphones significantly decreases the health care take-up for psychological symptoms and diseases among girls. Post-ban bullying among both genders decreases. Additionally, girls’ GPA improves, and their likelihood of attending an academic high school track increases. These effects are larger for girls from low socio-economic backgrounds.

b. Lancet study of 30 schools in Britain says school bans don’t help. Authors said they’d compare 10 permissive school to 20 restrictive schools.

We recruited 1227 participants (age 12–15) across 30 schools.

Adolescents attending schools with restrictive, compared to permissive policies had lower phone (adjusted mean difference −0.67 h, 95% CI −0.92 to −0.43, p = 0.00024) and social media time (adjusted mean difference −0.54 h, 95% CI −0.74 to −0.36, p = 0.00018) during school time, but there was no evidence for differences when comparing usage time on weekdays or weekends.

There is no evidence that restrictive school policies are associated with overall phone and social media use or better mental wellbeing in adolescents. The findings do not provide evidence to support the use of school policies that prohibit phone use during the school day in their current form, and indicate that these policies require further development.

Mike note: This does help me answer Question 5 above - here the bans did decrease actual minutes of use.

c. Jonathan Haidt and team says Lancet study is wrong.

They found 5 flaws. For example:

Problem #1: The Permissive Schools Were Not Very Permissive; Most of the Restrictive Schools Were Not Phone-Free

8. Sean on Norway study:

My friend and colleague Sean G is the best reader of educational research in the world. No seriously - Nobel laureate tried to hire him to do nothing but read published papers and opine.

What does Sean you think of Norway study? He wrote:

2010-2018, so I wondered a bit about applicability to now-ish, but there was heavy smartphone penetration, so seems reasonable.

The 0.22 on math test for girls seemed somewhat implausibly large, but the data doesn't seem super tortured, and the trend is there?

Wobbly on some details (weak response rate to the survey, unusual way of extracting mental health data), and I'd bet on smaller effects in real life than what she's presenting - both on mental health and on school.

But overall I directionally "buy" the narrative.

9. Sean on Lancet study: do you buy the study or the Haidt critique?

Put your answer in the comments! :)

10. What’s Mike's natural instinct on top down policies in schools?

Picture young Mike, age 20, senior at Duke. Unruly hair. Inconceivable to me that I’d one day have a teen who occasionally walks up behind me and traces my bald spot, then leaves without comment.

Between camping out to attend basketball games, I’m taking a public policy class with economist Phil Cook. Love that dude. It’s about the economics of vice.

My project: I study DARE. It’s a curriculum in schools to decrease drug use. But it increased drug use!!!

Back to the present. Daniel Buck of Fordham Institute was thinking the same thing. Dan writes recently:

Just because something is bad doesn’t necessarily justify a strict prohibition. History is riddled with examples wherein prohibitions backfired (the temperance movement) or created unsustainable negative externalities (the war on drugs). Similarly, some school-level campaigns such as the D.A.R.E. program have only increased the rate of the behavior they tried to combat.

So what is Dan's take on these phone bans in schools?

In the case of phone bans, however, this latest study is just one more entry to an expanding literature on the benefits of such policies. It’s worth noting that the p-values in this study are small—signifying a uncertainty in its conclusions—but as I’ve written about here before, several earlier analyses showed that limiting phone usage during class increases performance on both standardized test scores and end-of-course exams. As for non-academic benefits, researchers have found that, without phones, students exercise far more at recess, burning off energy, fostering physical health, and promoting later attention in class. In short, phone bans work.

From a personal perspective, I’ve seen the benefits. For a number of years, I volunteered at a summer camp that confiscated phones on day one. Students grudgingly handed them over, complaining that they’d “lose their streaks” (it has something to do with Snapchat). But in short order they were voicing appreciation for the time they could spend sitting in circles chatting with friends, without all eyes staring down. Few had experienced the simple pleasure of getting lost in thought because boredom had always prompted them to grab their phone. By week’s end, every single student—every single one—expressed some hesitation to check their phones when we handed them back. They’d learned to love being phone free.

Something of a pessimist as I am, I find this turnaround on phones a heartening trend.

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11. Mike TLDR

I’d bet $1 each that

- School restrictions will continue to climb (85% confidence) during 2025 and 2026

- During School Teen SmartPhone Minutes will fall from 90/day to… 75/day? (40% confidence)

- Future RCTs would/will find nothing approaching a 0.22 sd gain in learning per Norway (95% confidence)

- No gains on state math and ELA standardized tests from those 20 less-distracted minutes per day (50% confidence) - those scores are very hard to move

- Legit increases in girl mental health per Norway, contra Lancet? Yes.

- Legit increases in teacher job satisfaction? Yes. Although mixed because kids sedated by their phones ARE quiet - hmm.

Overall, this seems like a necessary-but-insufficient component of the Larger Effort needed to slash the 5, 6, 7 hours a day of teen smartphone way down. This is good work by Haidt et al.

The 8am to 3pm battle has been joined.

The bigger problem is 3pm to 3am….