Earlier this month, Emily Oster published a New York Times op-ed arguing that school phone bans haven’t done much for academics but that schools should keep them anyway. I wrote an annotated edition of that piece — I think she misreads several of the studies she cites. But the debate, on both sides, rarely considers what bans cost the students who depend on their phones to learn.
At least 37 states and the District of Columbia now require school districts to ban or restrict student cellphone use. None of the studies behind those policies has asked what happens to students who need their phones for medical monitoring, communication, or other accommodations.
For some students, the phone is the accommodation. It runs the receiver and alert system for a continuous glucose monitor worn by a student with Type 1 diabetes. It runs the speech-generating app a nonspeaking autistic student uses to communicate. It runs the real-time captioning tool for a deaf student. 2024 federal guidance recognizes that a student’s own phone can be required assistive technology under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, and the U.S. Department of Education has directed schools not to discipline a child for using their own device as an agreed-upon accommodation.
Many phone-ban policies carve out exceptions for these students. But the carve-outs create a problem of their own. Using an exemption often makes a student’s accommodation visible to classmates, teachers, or security staff. A federal Title II guidance document, jointly issued by the Departments of Justice and Education, is unambiguous: auxiliary aids must be provided in a way that does not “unnecessarily disclose the nature and extent of an individual’s disability.” Many exemption procedures do precisely the opposite.
LAist’s reporting on the Los Angeles cellphone ban described students with disabilities who stopped using accommodations after the policy took effect. One had an accommodation in her individualized education plan that let her use her phone during school. After the ban, she stopped using the accommodation. It remained in her plan, but using it meant making it visible to others. Disability advocates call this a chilling effect. Researchers studying users of augmentative and alternative communication have documented stigma as a barrier to use.
The strongest case for school phone bans rests on a small set of recent studies. The new lockable-pouch study found mixed effects on test scores and a 16 percent year-one increase in suspensions, with effects that fade over time. A Florida study found test-score gains alongside a 12 percent first-year increase in suspension rates overall, and roughly a 30 percent increase in in-school suspensions among Black students.
But neither study asks whether disabled students lost access to assistive technology, whether accommodations were honored in practice, or whether students were disciplined for disability-related device use. Neither asks whether students stopped using approved supports because doing so revealed their disabilities.
The same gap appears in the broader research literature. The largest 2026 meta-analysis of digital media and child health, published in JAMA Pediatrics and synthesizing 153 studies from 18,933 articles screened, explicitly excluded any sample “recruited due to a medical condition or use of medication.” That is the first exclusion criterion listed in its published methods.
Schools can act on this now. First, a student should not be suspended for using a device that an IEP, 504 plan, or health-care plan requires. Second, exemption procedures should not force students to publicly identify themselves as disabled. A pre-arranged, private understanding with a teacher works; a hall pass that announces the accommodation does not. Third, school districts should track and report exemption denials, confiscations, and discipline by disability status, the way many now track them by race.
Until someone asks who lost access, phone bans are evidence-based for the students who were studied, and an experiment for the rest.
This is the kind of data-driven justice work I do in my book Unlocking Justice, now available from Princeton University Press.