Do Phone Bans Help Students Perform Better in School?

Millions of children who head back to school this fall will find their phones are now gadgets non grata. Chancellor of New York City public schools David Banks has said that he is considering a ban on classroom phone access that would affect 1.1 million students, though the ban will not be in place at the start of the school year.

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Better academic performance is one factor supporting the bans. But another—mental health—has also captured the attention of policymakers and the public. Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at New York University’s Stern School of Business, has posited that social media (which young people primarily access on phones) is causing a teenage mental health crisis. His bestselling book The Anxious Generation, published earlier this year, cites numerous studies to make that case—although a statistician’s analysis in Reason notes that a majority of 476 studies reviewed were published before 2010, when smartphones were far less ubiquitous, and that few focus on extensive social media use. Haidt says that “there’s a lot of direct evidence of causation” between smartphone use and harms to adolescent mental health. And he points to a blog post he wrote in response to critical reviews.

Read the whole story (subscription may be required): Scientific American