No Phones, Boys Get Smarter. Yeah
December 11, 2025
Another dinobaby post. No AI unless it is an image. This dinobaby is not Grandma Moses, just Grandpa Arnold.
I am busy with a new white paper, but one of my team called this short item to my attention. Despite my dislike of interruptions, “School Cell Phone Bans and Student Achievement” sparked my putting down one thing and addressing this research study. No, I don’t know the sample size, and I did not investigate it. No, I don’t know what methods were used to parse the information and spit out the graphic, and I did not invest time to poke around.
Young females having lunch with their mobile phones in hand cannot believe the school’s football star now gets higher test scores. Thanks, Midjourney. Good enough.
The main point of the research report, in my opinion, is to provide proof positive that mobile phones in classrooms interfere with student learning. Now, I don’t know about you, but my reaction is, “You did not know that?” I taught for a mercifully short time before I dropped out of my Ph.D. program and took a job at Halliburton’s nuclear unit. (Dick Cheney worked at Halliburton. Remember him?)
The write up from NBER.org states:
Two years after the imposition of a student cell phone ban, student test scores in a large urban school district were significantly higher than before.
But here’s the statement that caught my attention:
Test score improvements were also concentrated among male students (up 1.4 percentiles, on average) and among middle and high school students (up 1.3 percentiles, on average).
But what about the females? Why did this group not show “boy level” improvement? I don’t know much about young people in middle and high school. However, based on observation of young people at the Blaze discount pizza restaurant, females who seem to me to be in middle school and high school do three things simultaneously:
- Chatter excitedly with their friends
- Eat pizza
- Interact with their phones or watch what’s on the screen while doing [1] and [2].
I think more research is needed. I know from some previous research that females outperform males academically up to a certain age. How does mobile phone usage impact this data, assuming those data which I dimly recall are or were accurate? Do mobile devices hold males back until the mobiles are removed and then, like magic, do these individuals manifest higher academic performance?
Maybe the data in the NBER report are accurate, but the idea that males — often prone to playing games, fooling around, and napping in class — benefit more from a mobile ban than females is interesting. The problem is I am not sure that the statement lines up with my experience.
But I am a dinobaby, just one that is not easily distracted unless an interesting actual factual research reports catches my attention.
Stephen E Arnold, December 11, 2025
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