Mike Males, Principal Investigator, YouthFacts.org| October 2025<\/strong><\/p>\n We get it. Politicians and school principals, teachers, and media reporters are flooding news reports with wild enthusiasm about bans on cellphones in schools.<\/p>\n 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 \u201cScared Straight!\u201d 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\u2026 it all brings quotable joy.<\/p>\n But do any of these easy, one-size-fits-all panaceas that make certain authorities feel so good have any provable benefits?\u00a0Researchers consistently say: NO<\/a>. No improvements in mental health, attendance, drug use, academic achievement, crime, violence, dropout, disciplinary cases, or any other important index.<\/p>\n \u201cWe know that teachers and administrators are making wild claims of remarkable success for cellphone bans that aren\u2019t supported by public records requests for data\u00a0from their own schools<\/em>,\u201d Stetson University psychology professor\u00a0Christopher Ferguson said<\/a>.<\/p>\n The present study headlined by\u00a0The Economist<\/em>\u00a0as a \u201cringing endorsement<\/a>\u201d of banning student cellphones in schools was a perverse interpretation of a trivial result,\u00a0Ferguson\u2019s analysis showed<\/a>. The study of schools in India, an unreviewed \u201cpreprint version<\/a>,\u201d reported only one positive finding: the cellphone ban accompanied a negligible improvement in grades \u2013 a claim that carries its own lesson.<\/p>\n In studies with large samples and multiple variables, some irrelevant factors will inevitably prove \u201cstatistically significant\u201d \u2013 that is, they meet the bare-minimum standard of 95% probability of not being random noise. Thus, we might hastily conclude from \u201cstatistically significant\u201d findings from\u00a0Centers for Disease Control surveys<\/a>\u00a0that eating vegetables and drinking milk makes students depressed.<\/p>\n 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 \u201csignificant,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n That is how the bogus claim that social media causes student depression got started. The most plausible explanation for researchers\u2019 significant-but-tiny-effect finding<\/a>\u00a0is that students who are abused by parents tend both to be more depressed and to use social media more. Popular researchers and authorities just\u00a0leave out the abuse part<\/a>\u00a0and clarion that social media causes depression.<\/p>\n In the case of cellphone bans and school grades, testing for effect size yields a resounding \u201cnothing.\u201d Ferguson points out that the study\u2019s negligible effect value (d=0.086) is so close to zero it amounts to random \u201cnoise.\u201d \u201cAn effect so unreliably tiny should never have been interpreted as supporting cellphone bans,\u201d Ferguson said. (For\u00a0reference<\/a>, a d-value has to reach 0.200 before it is considered even barely \u201csmall\u201d and 0.500 to be moderately of interest.) The near-zero d-value of 0.086 actually confirms that \u201cthis study is better evidence against cellphone bans than for them,\u201d Ferguson concluded.<\/p>\n