Psychology professor Chris Ferguson demolishes the media’s latest “ringing endorsement” of school cellphone bans
Mike Males, Principal Investigator, YouthFacts.org| October 2025
We get it. Politicians and school principals, teachers, and media reporters are flooding news reports with wild enthusiasm about bans on cellphones in schools.
Just as their forebears wildly lauded students lined up in school uniforms, middle-schoolers forced to pee in front of drug testers, violent prison convicts screaming and threatening teenagers in “Scared Straight!” scams, youths expelled for bringing aspirin to school or having a water pistol in their car trunk, and now, the students compelled to surrender their cellphones to confiscation… it all brings quotable joy.
But do any of these easy, one-size-fits-all panaceas that make certain authorities feel so good have any provable benefits? Researchers consistently say: NO. No improvements in mental health, attendance, drug use, academic achievement, crime, violence, dropout, disciplinary cases, or any other important index.
“We know that teachers and administrators are making wild claims of remarkable success for cellphone bans that aren’t supported by public records requests for data from their own schools,” Stetson University psychology professor Christopher Ferguson said.
The present study headlined by The Economist as a “ringing endorsement” of banning student cellphones in schools was a perverse interpretation of a trivial result, Ferguson’s analysis showed. The study of schools in India, an unreviewed “preprint version,” reported only one positive finding: the cellphone ban accompanied a negligible improvement in grades – a claim that carries its own lesson.
In studies with large samples and multiple variables, some irrelevant factors will inevitably prove “statistically significant” – that is, they meet the bare-minimum standard of 95% probability of not being random noise. Thus, we might hastily conclude from “statistically significant” findings from Centers for Disease Control surveys that eating vegetables and drinking milk makes students depressed.
Superficial variable significance can result from poor specification, reverse correlation, random interaction with other variables, and other problems. So, conscientious researchers then look at the most important value: effect size. Even if marginally “significant,” does the variable have any real impact on the issue in question? Here, the imposter variables recede. Eating vegetables and drinking milk has no real effect on depression.
That is how the bogus claim that social media causes student depression got started. The most plausible explanation for researchers’ significant-but-tiny-effect finding is that students who are abused by parents tend both to be more depressed and to use social media more. Popular researchers and authorities just leave out the abuse part and clarion that social media causes depression.
In the case of cellphone bans and school grades, testing for effect size yields a resounding “nothing.” Ferguson points out that the study’s negligible effect value (d=0.086) is so close to zero it amounts to random “noise.” “An effect so unreliably tiny should never have been interpreted as supporting cellphone bans,” Ferguson said. (For reference, a d-value has to reach 0.200 before it is considered even barely “small” and 0.500 to be moderately of interest.) The near-zero d-value of 0.086 actually confirms that “this study is better evidence against cellphone bans than for them,” Ferguson concluded.
As with previous panaceas, the research so far is finding that despite the huzzahs, there are no provable benefits from school cellphone bans. “We can now see that journalistic outlets like The Economist are willing to publish careless fluff, so long as it supports the moral panic narrative,” Ferguson said.
As with other useless one-size-fits-all edicts, whether imposed on youths or adults, there is a better, more effective approach: discipline those who are causing disruption, leave those who aren’t causing trouble alone. Weird idea, I know.