Yes, the cellphone bans are working But screens in the classroom are still a problem

Earlier this month, the Trump administration’s Office of the Surgeon General and Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers union, separately called for limits on screen-time in schools. The United States Department of Health and Human Services suggested the use of physical text-books and pen-and-paper assignments “whenever possible,” and recommended the exclusion of screens in schools, except in computer labs. Weingarten called for a no-screens policy prior to the third grade, and a ban on “social companion” AI in class (i.e., the kind that could replace teachers) prior to age 16. Such expanded limits are an essential phase two of the already existing cellphone bans, which, despite a small but persistent population of doubters, appear to be working.  

I tested the success of this movement on a recent Thursday morning, when in a wanton breach of Los Angeles school-drop-off protocol, I emerged from my car to witness our school’s year-old cellphone ban in action. I’d been motivated because I live not far from Van Nuys High School, where a February New York Times article dismissed the use of lockable Yondr pouches, meant to keep kids away from their phones during learning hours, as “an inadequate Band-Aid”; students, apparently, quickly broke through Yondr’s magnetic locks and kept using their devices. 

The report confirmed some of the parental anecdotes I’d heard about kids getting around phone bans: from dishonoring honor systems, to turning in fake or unworking “burner” phones, to sneaking in newfangled gizmos like Meta’s Ray-Ban glasses. Since my kid attends a similar-sized school in the same district as Van Nuys, the Times’ Yondr takedown made me wonder if my child, too, was trapped in a screen-littered hellscape, doomscrolling with impunity. 

Could the doubters have real reason for concern? Is it too late to reverse the takeover of classrooms by technology?  

In today’s tribal America, it’s remarkable that we’ve achieved almost bipartisan unanimity on the movement to ban phones from schools, which was jumpstarted back in 2024, when Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, a Democrat, and then-Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, a Republican, both signed restrictive bans just weeks apart. Fast-forward to 2026, and according to Ballotpedia, 41 US states have taken formal action to limit in-school phone use by K-12 students — and nearly half have embraced “bell-to-bell” bans prohibiting phone use for the entire school day. So far this year, six more states have enacted or expanded bell-to-bell policies, and restrictive bills are pending in several more. Ninety-eight percent of American students now face some level of school phone restrictions, with more than half facing “bell-to-bell” all-day bans, according to a 2026 Brookings Institution survey. Weingarten also embraced the bans in her recent remarks.

Objections to the premise mostly seem myopic or self-serving. Among the few remaining die-hard opponents, some take a performative empathy tack, insisting that screen-deprived students’ academic achievement will suffer due to poor morale. They cite a Texas teenager’s August 2025 petition against the Lone Star State’s phone ban, which has garnered over 150,000 online signatures; or Pew Research from 2026 indicating that 73% of teens oppose full-day bell-to-bell phone bans. Others insist that school phone bans are pointless because they make kids “want them more,” resulting in bigger screen-time binges at home. And safetyists, of course, still demand 24/7 electronic umbilical cords — citing school shootings to justify their helicopter parenting. (Because military history is clear: nothing repels bullets so effectively as panicked phone calls from Mommy.)

Setting these objections aside, most rational people at this point understand that children aren’t learning if they’re scrolling or clicking on their phones. But there’s a difference between parents and schools saying they want something, and being actually willing — or able — to make it happen. 

What I witnessed at my kid’s diverse public school of 1,500 students in North Hollywood was a picture of efficiency, not chaos. At each campus entrance, aides in neon vests monitor as students pass through Yondr processing stations; the kids slip their device(s) into the thick neoprene pouches, then lock them with table-mounted magnets before being granted admission. (The process is reversed after the last bell.)

As coincidence would have it, my kid forgot his Yondr bag on the morning I accompanied him to the gate. He’s among the last in his cohort to not have a phone, but he does have a cellular Apple watch, which must also get Yondr’ed, per the phone-ban policy. So when he told a bearded young aide named Brian that he’d forgotten his pouch, Brian simply stowed the device in a ziplock bag and issued a ticket for end-of-day retrieval.

Brian has worked that gate daily since the ban went into effect early last year, putting him on the front line of the screen battle. He told me he’s seen plenty of creative efforts by kids to thwart it — from forged parental notes saying the phone is broken or lost to the “burner”-phone gambit (the child locks up the burner, and keeps their real phone accessible). Brian admits that there are flaws in the system: “a lot of kids say they don’t have a phone, and I’m not going to be able to check every kid,” he says, but his overall take was positive. “It really does make a difference. We don’t really see kids with their phones out anymore.” 

A key to implementation, he says, is rules that successfully keep most kids in line for fear of upsetting parents. First, the school has a strict phone confiscation policy: if a child gets caught with their phone out, a parent has to come pick it up in the main office. Second, there are monetary consequences; a damaged pouch results in a $40 fine for the parents. This puts real teeth in the policy for dealing with apathetic grownups who can’t be bothered to enforce the ban — compelling their compliance via unpleasant jolts of inconvenience and fines. 

Around the corner at the school’s more heavily trafficked north gate, three more aides in yellow vests stood behind folding tables at a larger Yondr station just inside the chain-link fence. One of them, an amiable young woman named Tori readily admitted the Yondr pouches aren’t perfect. “There’s good and bad things about everything,” she said, “but this has been pretty good.” Tori went on to describe a sea change in how kids at my son’s school interact post-ban. “We’re seeing a lot less internet drama, cyberbullying — the problems that the phones were causing have gone down like 90%.” After pausing to help a girl whose Yondr pouch’s clasp had bent, Tori added, “the fights have also gone down because kids aren’t recording them and doing it for clout.”

That’s no small difference. At this very same school just two years ago, it had become routine for student social-media beefs, hatched on personal phones during class, to explode into physical violence between periods. Scores of kids would surround the melee to record with their phones and post the footage in a mad dash for likes and followers. As a parent, I’d seen (and saved) one such video myself; it looked like a prison riot. That scene has not been repeated even once since the phone ban took effect last February. 

But it’s the change in the mundane, everyday rhythms of school that are most obvious. Last year on the same campus, pre-ban, I witnessed a lunch period that was eerily quiet and antisocial, with sedentary kids glued to their phones, wordlessly shoveling food into their mouths. A few weeks ago, however, I saw a school that was genuinely transformed. During lunch on a sunny California afternoon, kids gathered at tables in animated clusters, chatting, telling jokes, and playing with their food. On the fields adjacent to the cafeteria pavilion, young teens chased each other, tossed balls, did cartwheels, and trash-talked. A quirky boy wandering solo with a grimy orange traffic cone atop his head approached me and asked with a smile, “Do you like my hat, sir?” Yes, the scene was still marred by scattered Chromebooks, but overall, it felt like passing through a time portal to pre-iPhone America.  

My conclusion was that lockable pouches and other restrictions aren’t perfect, and kids can be counted on to stress-test and break rules. But they seem to be largely achieving the desired effect — especially when principals implement them bravely, with consequences that put parents on the hook, too. 

Rachel Alonzo, a parent in Jacksonville, Fla., notes that while her two sons already had “pretty healthy relationships” with screens, she approves of the strict school phone bans enacted in their county three years ago — despite having had to collect phones at the school office on the three occasions her boys got caught using them in class. “They enforce it. They mean business,” she said of her sons’ schools, adding, “but rules are rules, you know. They exist for a reason. I’m in full support of that.”

Alonzo and others like her who support the bans are in luck, because at this point, it looks like they are here to stay. The 2026 Brookings study found that more than 90% of adults and nearly 80% of teens now support restrictions, and other recent surveys from both Pew and Rand show large year-over-year increases in public support for school phone bans. More important, the bans are actually making an impact, with schools themselves reporting improved student well-being, higher attendance rates, and fewer fights. Perhaps most interesting, many schools with phone bans are now reporting huge surges in library–book checkouts — because apparently, in the absence of screens, kids can still find paper stimulating. 

Unfortunately, even while the evidence of behavioral benefits piles up, there has been no accompanying bump in academic achievement. American scores remain dismal relative to other developed nations. Indeed, in the largest study to date, hot off the presses from the National Bureau of Economic Research, a survey of 40,000 schools shows big increases in overall student well-being by year two of phone bans but also indicates “close to zero” impact on test scores. 

Wielding this data, the usual suspects will argue that phone bans are but a pointless moral panic. But standardized testing is a crude measurement tool, even when done well, and there is a much more obvious reason that culture and morale have improved even as academic achievement hasn’t: there are still too many screens. 

The NBER study confirms what many parents and teachers already know: phones in schools are only half the problem — and the lesser half at that. When phones are banned, students’ gazes merely shift to “digital distractions that are not blocked, such as accessing video or social-media sites on laptops.” In other words, the core obstacle to learning isn’t whether a device is a phone or an iPad or a Chromebook, or even who owns the device — it’s the screens and internet themselves, which remain deeply entrenched. 

By evicting “private” screens from schools, the phone bans have succeeded in restoring the healthy, human-centric atmosphere of cafeterias, hallways and playgrounds. But back in the classrooms, state-issued screens wrapped in a false cloak of educational legitimacy remain atop every desk, in the form of Chromebooks and iPads running (unproven, ineffective) ed-tech platforms, such as the widely loathed i-Ready.  

So yes, the school phone bans are popular — and they’re working — but they’re not a magic cure. If screens are a cancer on American education, you might say phone bans were the first round of chemo that halted the tumor’s growth. But for any true rebound in achievement, we’ll need radical resection surgery on the Chromebooks and iPads, followed by a blast of radiation targeting endless online standardized tests. Then, and only then, can we expect to see the malignancy of imploding youth cognition put into long-term remission.

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