no measurable impact on grades in the US from locking phones in pouches, with measurable decrease in cell activity: https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w35132/w351...

school phone bans in brazil appear to increase test scores by 0.06 SD (although the identification strategy is a bit sketchy): https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w35233/w352...

I was thinking the same thing, the outcome they're measuring is unrelated to the reason for the instituted change.

Study: Schoolwide phone bans show no significant impact on road death toll.

> I wouldn't have expected any impact on mental health resulting

AFAIK declining mental health was the main driver of the bans - put forward by its proponents like Jonathan Haidt, author of "The Anxious Generation."

I actually read it as "They're no more unhappy without than with them" . Kinda occam's razor of if they're not unhappier without their phone, then there's no harm taking it from them.

> Analyses using a more stringent definition of school phone bans (ie, requiring phones to be stored away and not carried on the student’s person) also yielded findings consistent with the main results

Classroom behaviour is what it’s all about. Schools have turned into an absolute barnyard. A kid checked out of class and watching TikTok should be marked absent. Teachers blame parents but we are not the adults in that particular room.

> Improve grades, improve classroom behavior, maybe. What about those?

Isn't that partly the goal with the ban? Fewer distractions.

Alternate take: people are so afraid to be themselves that it has become easy to ideologically divide us.

Even if phones are the root issue a ban during school hours can't be expected to do much if the kids spend all their hours outside of class on the phone.

We do most of our communicating via phones on platforms that encourage flip, nuance-free takes, are hotbeds of disinformation, and so on. Nothing about the environments we exist in foster positive, meaningful communication that collectively benefits us. Everything we used is designed to divide.

Our inability to collectively get along ramped up exponentially as smartphones took off. Phones, and the platforms within that people have become dependent upon, are the root.

Edit: Instead of getting to know people at a deep level, understanding what shapes their core views and how they view the world, and constructively communicating with them to shape their worldview over time for the better, we prefer to yell and scream at each other in 140 characters for the sake of upvotes.

Real change and progress takes time and effort, but for some reason we're collectively deluded into thinking that it'll happen via upvotes in 45 seconds and without ever having looked one another in the eye.

Another thought: maybe society as you describe it isn't all that different today than at many other points in history. It's called the human condition.

The problem is social media, and the culture around it, and how it's manipulated from individuals and companies with no ethics, to foreign states.

We're literally allowing people with bad intentions have a direct contact with children. It's insane.

Not to mention that I learned that nowadays lying for some benefit on social media is completely normalized.

Lying used to be off-putting in western society, and would be a clear red line.

> But nobody has been able to prove this in any studies, even in ones outside of the school environment.

What do you mean? Here's one published last year:

> This study does not provide evidence to support the use of school policies that prohibit phone use during the school day in their current form, given that no differences were observed in mental, physical, and academic outcomes for adolescents attending schools that permit, versus restrict phone use. However, the negative associations found between increasing time spent on phones/social media and worsened mental health and wellbeing do provide evidence on the need to address phone and social media use in adolescents, and school policies should be developed as part a more holistic approach. [...]

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanepe/article/PIIS2666-7...

This happens a lot in social sciences; more than once I've gotten my intuition "disproven" by a study only for that study itself to later be proven wrong.

However this study in particular is pretty bad, see the comment elsewhere about the screentime not spent not going down (possibly cause of extant classroom bans)

What seems blatantly obvious does not always represent the underlying reality. This can also be taken as a chance to discover better solutions to a given problem than banning phones.

The narrative says that phone use was already banned during classroom instruction in many of the schools that later instituted school-wide bans. The impact on students would've been minimal because realistically the only time they would've been able to use phones beforehand was passing between classes or at lunch/recess.

Though this is still relevant to policy-makers who are thinking of instituting district-wide bans. It's sorta like all the heat around critical race theory: banning something that doesn't actually happen much in schools.

> chasing after pleasure

Pleasure is cheap, even addictive. Fulfillment and meaningful work are extremely difficult to come by. Everything is monetized, every interaction, every experience... money makes experiences transactional, they lose their meaing.

To have a fulfilling live people needs to participate in society, have opportunities, education, basic needs covered... and that is our failure. A kid can get 24/7 entertainment while lacking food or good education.

I’m not sure there’s any real convenience and comfort to it for school kids through the day. For coordination of pickups etc yes, but the rest is just dopamine chasing.

> There is no evidence. Mostly because Well being cannot be really quantified

Isn't there a baseline saying well being is declined?

> bans were associated with slightly worse mental health

I expect if you took away adults phones for a few hours every day their would experience increased anxiety

The Amish aren’t wrong, they just feel left out of all the fuck-shit we’re doing.

That’s the most concise way I can put that.

> From all the evidence I’ve seen, the disastrous effect of social media is everywhere but in the data.

This study doesn't say anything about the effects of social media on students.

It finds that phone bans in schools are not associated with measurable improvements in mental health. This is not the same as saying that social media and phone use aren't harmful, it only means that phone bans in school don't independently improve mental health outcomes.

A similar study from a couple of years ago [1] reached the same conclusion, however they had more data which exposed the hidden correlation (emphasis mine):

> Implications of all the available evidence

> This study does not provide evidence to support the use of school policies that prohibit phone use during the school day in their current form, given that no differences were observed in mental, physical, and academic outcomes for adolescents attending schools that permit, versus restrict phone use. However, the negative associations found between increasing time spent on phones/social media and worsened mental health and wellbeing do provide evidence on the need to address phone and social media use in adolescents, and school policies should be developed as part a more holistic approach. Preventative efforts should also consider how other behaviours that influence mental health and wellbeing are influenced by increased phone/media use, such as sleep, physical activity, attainment, classroom behaviour and problematic use.

[1] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lanepe/article/PIIS2666-7...

It's amazing what you manage to not find when you try really hard to not find it.

Reminds me of a scene from the movie "Thank you for smoking" where Big Tobacco's lead scientist has managed to find no link between smoking and cancer for 30 years. It's a miracle!

Goodnight.....

> they did not control for medication or supplements

The only way this would matter would be if phones were banned and then also those other interventions were withheld in order to perfectly counterbalance the expected effect of the phone ban. Do you have some evidence that Iceland suddenly decided to reduce these interventions between 2018 and 2023?

This point isn’t even mentioned in the limitations section of the study, so why are you making it? There are more significant potential limitations to this study that they did describe, including the fact that “we also lacked objective measures of in-school smartphone use and therefore could not determine whether bans reduced actual phone use”. (Though that doesn’t exactly matter either, since if the bans aren’t actually stopping phone use, then they are still ineffective, just in a different way.)

> Alternate interpretation: when it's dark for half the year your mental health isn't dominated by phone access.

This is a nonsensical interpretation that seems to me to betray a lack of understanding of statistics. The planet doesn’t experience any more or less sunlight in the winter between 2016 and 2023, so has no bearing on whether or not there would be a detectable effect from an intervention.

You're inventing a plausible-but-probably-irrelevant cause when a more likely cause is mentioned in the study: students were not using their phones a lot in school before the ban.