I’ve written before about the ongoing argument that cell phones are making teenagers, especially teen girls, miserable. In case you missed all of that, the brief version is that there’s pretty solid evidence that teens are experiencing a mental health crisis. The CDC released new research back in February which supports this conclusion but there is an ongoing argument over the cause. Academic and author Jonathan Haidt has been one of the leading voices arguing that phones (and social media) are likely responsible. The timeline of the crisis seems to support the idea. Here’s what Michelle Goldberg said about it in March:

As I looked closer at the data, I saw that the inflection point for liberal adolescent depression wasn’t 2016, but around 2012. That was the year of the devastating Sandy Hook mass shooting, but it was not otherwise a time of liberal political despair. Barack Obama was re-elected in 2012. In 2013, the Supreme Court extended gay marriage rights. It was hard to draw a direct link between that period’s political events and teenage depression, which in 2012 started an increase that has continued, unabated, until today…

Technology, not politics, was what changed…around 2012. That was the year that Facebook bought Instagram and the word “selfie” entered the popular lexicon.

There are a lot more interesting aspects to this mental health crisis, such as the fact that liberal teens seem to be much worse off than conservative teens (which is what the data shows). There are some interesting possible reasons for that which you can read about here if you’re interested. The idea that the left fosters a “culture of fragility” won’t come as a shock to many of you.

But in addition to making kids depressed and unhappy, there’s a separate but related argument that their phones are also making them dumber. That’s the case being made today by an author at the Atlantic.

The Program for International Student Assessment, conducted by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development in almost 80 countries every three years, tests 15-year-olds in math, reading, and science. It is the world’s most famous measure of student ability. Most years, when the test makes contact with American news media, it provides instant ammunition for critics of America’s school system, who point to PISA scores and ask something like “Why are we getting crushed by Finland in reading?” or “Why are we getting smoked by Korea in math?”…

The deeper, most interesting story is that test scores have been falling for years—even before the pandemic. Across the OECD, science scores peaked in 2009, and reading scores peaked in 2012. Since then, developed countries have as a whole performed “increasingly poorly” on average. “No single country showed an increasingly positive trend in any subject,” PISA reported, and “many countries showed increasingly poor performance in at least one subject.” Even in famously high-performing countries, such as Finland, Sweden, and South Korea, PISA grades in one or several subjects have been declining for a while.

And if you dive deep into the report, it cites the distraction caused by cell phones as one of the major problems that schools face.

PISA 2022 data show that, on average across OECD countries and in around a third of all education systems, the disciplinary climate improved between 2012 and 2022 (Table II.B1.3.12). However, apart from “traditional” disciplinary problems, around 30% of students, on average across OECD countries, reported that, in most or every mathematics lesson, they get distracted using digital devices (Figure II.3.4 and Table II.B1.3.9). Equally important, around 25% of students indicated that, in most or every lesson, they become distracted by other students who are using digital devices, that the teacher has to wait a long time for students to quiet down, that students cannot work well and that students do not start working for a long time after the lesson begins.

On average across OECD countries, students who reported that they become distracted in every or most mathematics lessons scored 15 points lower in mathematics than students who reported that this never or almost never happens, after accounting for students’ and schools’ socio-economic profile (Table II.B1.3.13). A similar pattern was observed in over 80% of education systems with available data. In all countries/economies students who perceive the climate in their mathematics lessons to be less disruptive reported feeling less anxious towards mathematics (Table II.B1.3.16).

Relying on students’ cell phones at school increases the risk that students use their phones in class for non-educational activities or get distracted by notifications. Students appear to be less distracted when they switch off notifications from social networks and apps on their digital devices during class, when they do not have their digital devices open in class to take notes or search for information, and when they do not feel pressured to be on line and answer messages while in class (Table II.B1.5.44).

In short, cell phones are not compatible with math class. Math requires a lot of sustained focus and everything about a cell phone is designed to interrupt and create distractions. The PISA report notes that distractions would decline if cell phones were banned. And that’s the point the Atlantic piece eventually gets around to as well.

The way I see it, for the past decade, the internet-connected world has been running a global experiment on our minds—and, in particular, on the minds of young people. Teens are easily distracted and exquisitely sensitive to peer judgment. Results from a decade of observational research have now repeatedly shown a negative relationship between device use and life satisfaction, happiness, school attention, information retention, in-class note-taking, task-switching, and student achievement. These cognitive and emotional costs are highest for those with the most “device dependence.”

Ban phones in school and a lot of these problems go away. This is a conclusion which Jonathan Haidt reached back in June.

According to the National Center for Education Statistics, as of 2020, “cellphone bans were in place in 77% of U.S. schools.” But this high number seems to refer to a very low bar: It includes any school that tells students they should not use their phone while in class––unless the use is related to class. That’s not really a ban; it’s more of an unenforceable wish. Such a policy guarantees struggle between teachers and students, and it means that there are always kids looking at phones hidden in their laps or books, especially in the classes where the teacher has grown exhausted by the never-ending game of phone policing. As long as some kids are posting and texting during the school day, that raises the pressure on everyone else to check their phones during the school day. Nobody wants to be the last person to know the thing that everyone else is texting about.

Other countries are ahead of the U.S. on phone policy. France banned the use of mobile phones on school grounds through grade nine in 2018 (though the law allows students to keep their phone in their bag or pocket, so students still use their phone stealthily). In New South Wales, Australia, the use of mobile phones has been banned in elementary schools and will soon be banned in high schools, although schools can decide how to implement the bans.

Some schools in the U.S. have now taken similarly uncompromising stances on phones. For example, the author Mark Oppenheimer wrote earlier this year in The Atlantic about St. Andrew’s, a small boarding school in Delaware that allows students to use their phones only when in their dorm rooms, not when anywhere else on campus—a move that some students initially resisted but now has widespread student support.

More American schools—arguably all schools—should make themselves into genuinely phone-free zones.

Students would hate it but adults have to decide how much that should that matter if it’s a choice between tolerating the phones and the constant distraction they create or leaning math.