Scores last week on the latest National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP test, often called “the Nation’s Report Card,” showed that just 22% of seniors were “proficient” or above in math, down from 24% in 2019. And just 35% were proficient in reading, down from 37% in 2019. Higher percentages in 2024 also scored in NAEP’s “below basic” level in both subjects.

That has prompted a chorus of protests from experts who believe that, among other problems, digital devices and social media are dragging down U.S. teens. 

Harvard scholar Martin West, who co-leads the National Assessment Governing Board, which oversees NAEP, said in an the day the scores appeared that emerging evidence of widening achievement gaps in other developed countries suggests that we should be looking at “factors that transcend national boundaries.”

The rise of smartphones — and particularly the advent of social media use among young people — seems a likely culprit, he said.

“The timing fits,” West wrote. “Phones distract students from math homework just as much as they do from reading.” And surveys show that disadvantaged students spend the most time on their devices, “while motivated students of all backgrounds may be able to use them to enhance their learning.” He noted that disadvantaged students saw the biggest score drops.

While there’s no definitive causal link between smartphones and learning, West said, the circumstantial evidence is “sufficiently strong” to justify experimenting with all-day “bell-to-bell” phone bans in schools, as well as continued efforts to “rein in students’ near-constant use of other digital devices while in class.”

A 2024 found that about one in three teachers consider students distracted by cell phones “a major problem.” Among high school teachers, that figure rises sharply, to 72%. More recently, Pew researchers 74% of U.S. adults say they would support banning cellphones during class for middle and high school students, up from 68% last fall. 

Much of that momentum grows from years of efforts by the psychologist Jonathan Haidt, who has pushed for schools to . Haidt, author of the mega-bestseller , says there’s growing evidence of an “international epidemic” of mental illness that started around 2012, caused in part by social media and teens’ uptake of smartphones in the early 2010s. 

“Many parents now see the addiction and distraction these devices cause in their children; most of us have heard harrowing stories of self-harming behavior and suicide attempts among our friends’ children,” Haidt wrote in 2023, weeks after the U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy warning that social media use in particular can carry “a profound risk of harm to the mental health and well-being of children and adolescents.”

Murthy said there wasn’t enough evidence to determine if social media use “is sufficiently safe” for young people, especially during adolescence, “a particularly vulnerable period of brain development.” While the evidence suggests that social media could put kids’ mental health and well-being at risk, he admitted that more research is needed to fully understand its impact.

To San Diego State University professor and psychologist Jean Twenge, the new NAEP scores “are yet another indication that academic performance is suffering and we need to do something.”

The academic declines predate the COVID pandemic, she said, reaching back to the early 2010s, just as smartphones became popular — Apple introduced the iPhone in 2007. “So yes, teens having access to their phones during the school day could certainly be one of the causes of the declines in test scores,” she said in an email.

Twenge, author of the new book , said bell-to-bell phone bans “are one obvious and usually low-cost solution.” That idea, she said, “has only started to catch on in the last year, so we don’t yet know what impact it’s having.” She noted that it’s not even clear how many schools have adopted them, but theorized that they’ll make a difference.

“When the phone is available, it’s just too tempting for students to look at it,” she said. “When rules are only classroom-by-classroom, many teachers allow students to use their phones after they’ve completed their work. What teenager wouldn’t rush through their work to get on their phone? It’s setting them up to fail.”

‘The research is not strong, but public opinion is’

Research on the topic and related issues is beginning to emerge, but doubts about its utility leave a few researchers skeptical.

Writing in Education Next last week, University of Virginia cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham noted that more screen time is with poor attention regulation, for instance. Most studies, he said, support the hypothesis that children’s screen time is associated with poorer attentional control, but the size of the observed relationship, on average, is small.

He warned that educators should keep in mind the context of kids’ digital device use, such as the notion that more screen time could coincide with particular styles of parenting that could also affect kids’ abilities. “Parents may allow their child more access to screens in an effort to improve their child’s mood or behavior,” he wrote. “Or screen activities may keep the child occupied so parents have time for their own pursuits.”

And of course wealthy families may have easier access to pastimes that aren’t screen-based. “In each case,” Willingham said, “it may be elements of the context that have the critical effect on attention, not digital activities per se.”

In one 2024 study, University of Delaware researchers from 1,459 middle schoolers, ages 11 to 15, finding that their academic achievement decreased as their self-reported use of Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and X increased. Controlling for age, gender, race and ethnicity, they found that participants’ grades dropped as the frequency of their social media use across all four platforms rose.

By contrast, a by Chinese researchers found that medical students who used social media platforms like WeChat to discuss their work did better and were more engaged in discussions. 

Marilyn Campbell, a professor in the school of Early Childhood and Inclusive Education at Australia’s , cautioned that current peer-reviewed research hasn’t found an airtight causal connection between mobile phone use and students’ academic performance, their mental health or even the likelihood of being cyberbullied. 

“The research is not strong, but public opinion is,” she said. “Public opinion is driving this, or else why would politicians get involved?”  

Australia has had a near-total cell phone ban in public schools since 2023, and lawmakers have sung its praises: In South Australia, where the ban didn’t take effect until 2024, showed a 63% decline in “critical incidents involving social media” in the first six months, with behavioral issues down 54% and violent incidents down 10%. But Campbell has noted that there’s little reliable research on academics, mental health and the like.

Banning phones in school makes a kind of logical sense to many people, she said, because there’s a lot of circumstantial evidence supporting it. But she said it’s often a false connection. Campbell compared it to watching summer ice cream sales rise and concluding that it’s ice cream that makes sunglasses fly off the shelves. 

In a of 22 research studies from 12 countries, Campbell and several colleagues found “little to no conclusive evidence” that broad mobile phone bans in schools produce better academics or mental health, or that they reduce cyberbullying. 

Conversely, she said, it’s not entirely clear if banning cell phones in school could have unintended harmful consequences, such as parents finding it more difficult to get kids to do homework or to put away their phones at home “because they’ve got to catch up on all their social media that they haven’t been able to during the break times,” Campbell said.

She also said it’s possible that students in schools with phone bans are staying up later with their phones and missing sleep, which would also have a negative effect on academics.

Campbell also said broad bans leave young people with less practice self-regulating their device use. “Kids leave our schools when they’re 18,” she said. “They’re adults, they’re going to university, and they have had no training [or] practical experience of saying, ‘I really want to look at my phone, but I know it’s rude or it’s the wrong thing to do, and I’m going to control myself and not do this.’ They’ve had none of that experience when they go to work, when they go to further education.”

And in a few cases, she said, bans on devices can hurt poor kids. She recalled a school in Australia with a lot of kids from low-income families whose principal said many students have phones, but few can afford data plans. The principal, she said, encouraged kids to bring their phones to school so they could take advantage of the school’s Wi Fi. 

“He said, ‘If I can get them to school, I can keep them safe. They’re not wandering around the malls and getting in trouble. I can feed them, and hopefully they might learn something.’”

Tom Kane, an economist and education professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, said the next year or so will be key as scholars push to study U.S. school cell phone bans already in place for evidence that they’ve made a difference. “That’s central to this question of what’s been driving the loss in achievement,” he said.

While such bans can’t address all of the conditions making achievement suffer, he said, they can eliminate distractions during the school day. He just hopes the findings see the light of day sooner rather than later, with a scientific consensus emerging over the next year or two.

“We can’t wait a decade to figure out what was the effect of these cell phone bans,” he said. 

Harvard’s West, who also serves on the Massachusetts Board of Elementary and Secondary Education, said policymakers also need to consider higher, clearer standards for students and ways to hold schools accountable for ensuring kids meet state standards — he noted that, for all the derision No Child Left Behind generated, “it produced results” such as steadily rising levels of achievement, driven by large gains for the nation’s lowest-performers — the opposite of what we’re seeing now.

West’s two sons have phones, and he admitted that he takes comfort “in being able to reach my boys as needed.” But he also appreciates experts’ calls to put phones away. “Coupled with greater accountability around student achievement, it may be the single most important thing we can do to help our kids learn,” he wrote.

While the evidence for phone bans improving academics might take years, one teacher said he’s seeing results already, in a matter of weeks. 

Blake Harvard, an AP high school psychology teacher in Madison, Ala., a suburb of Huntsville, said Alabama’s , enacted in May, is already having an effect since school began in early August. “I’m getting more from my students than I did” last year, he said. “Now, of course, that’s anecdotal, but I sincerely think discussions are better. I’m getting more student participation from [students] in the past who may have been trying to sneak a cell phone.”

Harvard, the author of a recent book on the psychology of student attention, said he and his colleagues initially worried that students wouldn’t put up with a ban. “But they’ve been fine about it, honestly,” he said. “Very quickly, everyone was just like, ‘Well, O.K., this is the way it is.’”

Harvard makes sure he talks to classes each fall about the brain science behind attention, such as how multitasking is a myth. “You can’t consciously pay attention to two things at once,” he said. 

Looking at one’s social media notifications while driving is dangerous. Likewise, he said, “If you’re looking at all your notifications in class, that’s getting your attention. So the lesson itself can’t get your attention.”

Just a few weeks into the semester, Harvard said his students have already figured out that while the law says they can’t have a phone “on their person” during the school day, they can keep it stowed in a backpack on the floor — the school doesn’t have lockers. As he was walking among desks the other day, he noticed a phone visible in a student’s open backpack. He joked that he might have to write her up, to which she replied, “It’s not ‘on my person.’” 

Harvard thought to himself, “Well, if students didn’t know what ‘on my person’ meant before this, in legal parlance, they know what it means now. They figured it out quickly.”

Disclosures: The Future of High School Network and The 74 both receive financial support from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, XQ and the Walton Family Foundation.