Schools across the country have cracked down on students’ cellphone access during the school day.
But how well are cellphone restrictions working over time? Researchers from the University of Southern California sought to answer this question from the perspective of the group arguably most affected: teenagers.
They found that enforcement of school cellphone restrictions weakened over the first year of their implementation while student attitudes toward the policy tended to move from negative to neutral.
How students view these policies and their effectiveness is important, said Dan Silver, a research scientist at USC’s Center for Applied Research and Education. Although teens don’t love cellphone bans, they appear to have grown to accept them.
“Teens’ perceptions matter in terms of being able to get a policy like this off the ground in the first place,” Silver said. “If you’re going to create a policy restricting [cellphones], there’s going to be some headbutting, [but] if you’re a school leader or a teacher who’s implementing this policy, there is light at the end of the tunnel.”
The other major takeaway, Silver said, is that bell-to-bell cellphone bans appear to be more effective than less strict policies that, for example, ban phone use only during class periods.
Enforcement of cellphone restrictions wanes over time, but remains stronger in schools with bell-to-bell policies
Thirty-nine states and the District of Columbia in recent years have started to require schools to restrict student cellphone use, with 29 states and the nation’s capital requiring bell-to-bell bans, according to an Education Week analysis.
The researchers surveyed a nationally representative sample of teens from public and private schools in October 2025 and again in May 2026 about their schools’ cellphone policies. The researchers also gave a parallel set of surveys to adults who live with a teen.
The surveys showed that cellphone restrictions initially led to fewer students using their devices in school. But use crept up over the course of the school year—although that varied based on the type of cellphone policy.
Overall, 28% of teens reported that they had ever used a cellphone in class at the beginning of last school year, compared with 42% by the end of the year. The adults in teens’ households, however, mostly didn’t pick up on that change, with only 13% reporting that the enforcement of cellphone restrictions weakened over the year.
Forty-four percent of teens said their teachers grew lenient in their enforcement of the policy over time.
There are other factors that might have come into play that the survey didn’t dig into but nevertheless are logical hypotheses, the USC researchers said in an article for the Brookings Institution. Students may have found ways to evade the restrictions, such as tricking teachers with burner phones, or more started simply breaking the rules if they saw that consequences weren’t that bad or not evenly enforced, they said.
Waning enforcement among teachers is not surprising, Silver said.
“It’s much easier to be really intentional about enforcing this policy when it’s new, when it’s the beginning of the year,” he said.
“As a teacher, your whole goal is to establish good classroom routines so that you can work efficiently through the year. So, it is natural to ease up some. But importantly, we don’t find that cellphone use is rampant even by the end of the year.”
Cellphone use rises throughout the year, but not uniformly
The type of cellphone policy matters.
Bell-to-bell bans on student cellphone use appear to be more effective, with fewer teens reporting using cellphones in core classes at the beginning of the year and fewer slipping into the habit by the end of the year. The increase in student cellphone use at schools with less-strict policies was nearly double that in schools with stricter policies.
Twenty-five percent of teens in schools with bell-to-bell bans said they used their cellphones in class at the beginning of the year, growing to 35% by the end of the year, or a 10-percentage-point increase. Meanwhile, 32% of teens in schools that didn’t have a bell-to-bell ban reported using cellphones in core classes at the beginning of the year, compared with 50% at the end of the year, or an 18-percentage-point increase.
“Although we don’t know for sure, probably the reason for that has to do with it just being easier to enforce a bright line,” Silver said, versus a situation in which students can use their phones during lunch and passing periods and teachers must continually tell students to put their phones away.
Bell-to-bell policies that require students to lock their phones up in pouches or their lockers when they arrive at school also put more of the onus of enforcement on administrators, he said.
Teens’ negative opinions on cellphone bans softened over time
While teens aren’t necessarily embracing cellphone restrictions, their views on how the policies are affecting their happiness, stress, and academics shifted somewhat from negative to neutral over the course of the last school year.
The proportion of teens who said that cellphone restrictions worsened their relationships with teachers—a potential side effect of these policies that worried educators as well—shrank by eight percentage points over the school year.
Meanwhile, the proportion of teens who said the restrictions had no impact on their relationships with teachers grew by seven percentage points, and the proportion who said the policies improved their relationships grew by just one percentage point.
Could it be that teens grew to see cellphone restrictions as not having much of an impact because their schools weren’t enforcing them? The short answer: not likely. That’s because teens reported the same changes in attitudes toward cellphone policies even in schools where policy enforcement remained consistent over the year, Silver said.
Finally, did cellphone restrictions in schools push teens to use their devices more outside of school? Again, the survey data doesn’t point to this as a significant side effect of the policies.
Three out of 10 teens said school restrictions pushed them to use their cellphones more outside of school. But about 6 in 10 teens said school policies had no effect on their use outside of school, and around 1 in 10 said their schools’ policies actually pushed them to use their phone less in their free time.
Parents of teens reported mostly similar patterns, with most reporting no change, some reporting an increase in use, and a few reporting a decrease in use.
