How to Evaluate Phone Policies in Schools
The Toolkit for Assessing Phones in Schools Release, Part 2
Note: If you’re an educator, school administrator, or a policymaker interested in phone-free school policies, this post is for you! If you’re a parent or other stakeholder who is interested in helping your school implement and/or measure a new phone policy, we invite you to share this post and the Toolkit for Assessing Phones in Schools website with your school’s leaders.
Over the past few years, momentum to restrict smartphone use in schools has grown rapidly. Notably, 40 U.S. states and around one quarter of countries in the world have now adopted or proposed policies aimed at reducing phone use during the school day. With growing public and institutional interest in phone policies, schools, school districts, and governments need an easy, research-validated way to assess their effectiveness and impact.
That’s why, last fall, we launched the Toolkit for Assessing Phones in Schools (TAPS), a free, ready-to-use, research-informed toolkit that allows stakeholders to measure the effects of a new or modified school phone policy. The TAPS includes four core surveys for students, teachers, administrators, and parents that are available in two user-friendly formats (Google Forms and printable PDF files), accompanying methodologies, and a detailed User Guide. The TAPS empowers you, as an educator, administrator, or school leader, to assess how your school’s phone policy affects your students directly.
And now, we added some new resources to the TAPS that make it even easier to measure changes in your school’s phone policy, including:
A new manual scoring guide that walks you step-by-step through how to analyze the responses for each survey based on question type, as well as how to create easy-to-understand visuals of the data.
An add-to-cart survey design experience that allows you to choose “a la carte” from our library of measures, for researchers who want to customize their own surveys.
Coming Soon: A new Data Dashboard, an automated scoring app that does the analysis work for you, immediately transforming Google Form results into graphs, averages, and other useful statistics. (Sign up on our website to get updates on the Dashboard release.)
We’re also offering an exciting opportunity for schools or legislators to partner with the Stanford Social Media Lab on your survey implementation and measurement. If you choose to partner with the Stanford Lab, the team will help you design your policy study, implement your pre- and post-policy surveys via the Qualtrics platform, and conduct a comprehensive statistical analysis. If you’re interested in partnering, please fill out our contact form.
Even if you don’t partner directly with the Stanford Lab, you can share your findings with us after implementing the TAPS. In either case, you will be contributing to a large body of research on the efficacy of phone policies.
Together, these TAPS enhancements are designed to lower barriers to evaluation and produce consistent, policy-relevant evidence on what happens when schools go phone-free. As more and more schools adopt the TAPS, we will be able to draw stronger, evidence-backed conclusions about phone policies, ultimately helping leaders and educators make decisions that prioritize student well-being, attention, and learning.
You can learn more about the new features below, jump right into the TAPS website, or fill out our contact form if you’re interested in partnering with us!
Our latest release of the TAPS introduces new tools designed to support two primary use cases.
The first: states, research organizations, and large districts seeking to conduct rigorous, multi-school evaluations — with the option of collaborating with the Stanford Social Media Lab. These efforts typically involve tracking outcomes across many schools and, in some cases, over multiple years.
The second: individual schools that want to better understand the efficacy of their phone policies internally, without launching a full-scale research study.
Deep Dive on the New TAPS Features
1. Qualtrics-Ready Surveys
Best for: Organizations interested in partnering with the Stanford Social Media lab to design and execute robust studies, evaluate phone policies across multiple schools, and conduct advanced statistical analyses will benefit from these expanded components of the TAPS.
The Student, Teacher, Administrator, and Parent surveys are now available in Qualtrics format. Qualtrics is a secure, widely used survey platform that supports advanced data collection, branching logic, and statistical analysis. The Qualtrics versions are better suited for large-scale studies and longitudinal data collection (versus the more basic Google Forms versions).
Image 1. Online and mobile versions of the Teacher Survey using the Qualtrics interface
2. Expanded Research Collaboration Opportunities
Best for: Organizations interested in partnering with the Stanford Social Media lab to design and execute robust studies, evaluate phone policies across multiple schools, and conduct advanced statistical analyses will benefit from these expanded components of the TAPS.
Organizations that partner with the Stanford Social Media Lab can design more comprehensive evaluation strategies, including longitudinal tracking, careful measurement of confounding variables, and tailored survey configurations. Additionally, researchers interested in executing their own study can request access to the Qualtrics survey. These collaborations make it possible to move beyond descriptive reporting toward stronger causal inference about the effects of school phone policies.
If your school district or organization is interested in collaborating with the Stanford Lab, please fill out our contact form on the TAPS website and indicate “Research Collaboration” in the “Subject” field.
3. Clear Scoring and Interpretation Guidance
Best for: Individual schools, school leaders, and school districts that want to conduct their own analysis.
To support practical decision-making, TAPS now includes a manual scoring guide that helps schools interpret results without advanced statistical training. In addition, we have developed an automated Data Dashboard that will make this process even easier (coming out soon).
The manual scoring guide provides clear instructions for individuals who want to conduct the data analysis themselves.
The TAPS Data Dashboard (coming soon) is a tool that automatically generates statistics, plots, and a compilation of feedback from respondent data. To use it, simply download a CSV file of data collected through the TAPS Google Forms surveys and upload the data to the Dashboard. The Dashboard can support both an analysis of data from a single timepoint and a longitudinal analysis of data from two timepoints (e.g., before and after a new phone policy was implemented).
These guides are designed to answer common, applied questions: Are students reporting fewer distractions? Do teachers perceive changes in classroom management? Are there differences across grade levels?
4. Customizable Shopping Cart Survey Builder
Best for: Individual schools, school districts, states, and research organizations who want to fully customize their phone policy surveys.
The Custom Shopping Cart survey option gives researchers the flexibility to individualize the TAPS surveys to their own interests, and work with schools to develop a relevant and sound study of their phone policies. Within the Measures Library, users can explore over 80 validated measures covering a large diversity of school outcomes, some of which are included in the six core TAPS surveys and some which are not. Then users can bookmark the measures most relevant to their goals and automatically generate a PDF file of all selected measures and questions. This document can then be used to adapt the existing TAPS surveys or create a new survey altogether.
Cautions and Caveats
While TAPS is a valuable tool for assessing and tracking changes in school environments, it is not designed to definitively establish causality with high confidence. Like most observational tools, the TAPS cannot fully control for all confounding variables without a randomized control trial.
That said, the TAPS makes it easy for individual schools to track changes within their school, and for larger entities such multi-school districts or states, as well as research teams, to conduct studies in which they can compare the change scores, over time, between schools that changed their phone policy and schools that did not. Such studies can offer meaningful evidence to help schools decide whether to continue, adjust, or discontinue a policy based on observed outcomes and stakeholder feedback.
For guidance on interpreting results and understanding the limits of causal claims, see the TAPS: User Guide.
Try It Out
We care about phones in schools because we care about the education of our students. We developed these additions and features in direct response to your feedback after our initial launch of the TAPS. If you’re introducing a new phone policy in your school, district, or state — or if you want to evaluate an already established policy — the TAPS will make it easy for you to measure the effects of the changes. Take a look!
If you’re interested in collaborating with the Stanford Lab, please fill out our contact form.
 | A guest post by
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 | A guest post by
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 | A guest post by
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Really, thank y'all so much for your work on this.
This article is primarily about the TAPS framework — a toolkit for evaluating the effects of phone policies in schools. Before addressing TAPS directly, though, I think it’s necessary to step back and look at this problem from a wider angle. My concern is that much of the current debate — including well-intentioned efforts around evaluation — is taking place downstream of deeper cultural and developmental failures that remain largely unexamined.
In previous comments on *After Babel*, I’ve argued that social media and AI systems are being misidentified as the root cause of harm. These technologies are better understood as *symptoms* of a deeper, long-running developmental and cultural failure. Over decades, we have stripped children of ordinary agency, freedom of movement, intergenerational connection, and relational depth through fear-based parenting, over-supervision, and moral panic. When children’s real-world emotional and relational needs go unmet, they do not simply seek stimulation — they seek **substitutes for connection, presence, and belonging**. Mediated systems step into that vacuum, offering the *illusion* of relationship while extracting attention and shaping behaviour. We then pathologise the outcomes and regulate the platforms, rather than confronting the social conditions that made those systems so compelling in the first place. Regulation that focuses on platforms without repairing those conditions treats symptoms while entrenching causes.
Links to those previous comments:
* Australia’s new social media regulations put childhood first -
https://www.afterbabel.com/p/australias-new-social-media-regulations/comment/188316861
* Don’t give your child an AI companion -
https://www.afterbabel.com/p/dont-give-your-child-an-ai-companion/comment/180827274
Let me return to the current topic with a related but distinct nuance: **autonomy**.
I agree that smart devices and younger people don’t mix well — the empirical harms are real and documented. But the **knee-jerk response** (bans, restrictions, enforcement policies) misunderstands both *why* teens gravitate toward screens and *what actually influences their wellbeing*.
When I spoke to my teenage daughters about phone bans, they immediately pointed out the obvious outcome: kids don’t become safer — they become sneakier: secondary phones, hidden accounts, feigned illness, disengagement from school, and workarounds for age-verification systems. In doing so, we are actively training young people in how to evade surveillance and control architectures. That is a genuine risk: sustained exposure to adversarial systems teaches adversarial thinking, and over time this becomes a pipeline for producing individuals highly skilled in operating below detection — the very skill set associated with black-ops security, intelligence, and cyber-evasion work — rather than fostering trust, judgment, and civic responsibility, **driving the world further into disrepair rather than restoring social cohesion**.
What my daughters articulated most clearly — reflecting a wider pattern I’ve observed — wasn’t screens themselves, but the **destruction of autonomy**. Blanket bans communicate that young people are not to be trusted as thinking agents, only managed as risks. That’s not a quirk of adolescence; it’s a developmental reality. Children are autonomous beings from early childhood — certainly well before adolescence — a point strongly supported across behavioural and developmental psychology. Exploration, choice, resistance, and negotiation are not flaws to be eliminated; they are how judgment develops. When adults systematically override autonomy through surveillance and restriction, rebellion is not a failure of character — it is a predictable response to disrespect.
The irony is that we then take this rebellion as evidence that children *cannot* be trusted, and respond by tightening control further. We mistake evasion for incapacity, and compliance for wellbeing.
This is not a call to unleash children into unsupervised chaos — I am not suggesting we let four-year-olds roam the streets on their trikes and hope for the best. The alternative is not neglect; it is a shift from **control** to **guided autonomy**. True guidance doesn’t pre-decide every choice; it frames options, teaches reasoning, and allows young people to experience the consequences of choices within a supportive relational context. It means gradually expanding freedom as capacity develops, not replacing trust with surveillance. Had we normalised this from early childhood — offering meaningful choices, honouring developing agency, and helping children reflect on outcomes — we would not now be trying to “fix” adolescence through bans, enforcement, and technical controls.
This brings me back to the TAPS framework discussed in the article. As presented, TAPS is not itself an enforcement system or a technical control stack; it is an evaluation toolkit designed to measure the effects of whatever phone policies schools choose to adopt, using surveys and structured feedback from students, teachers, parents, and administrators. The intent is to support evidence-based decision-making rather than to prescribe a single policy approach.
My concern, however, is more fundamental. Even when framed as evaluation rather than enforcement, TAPS still implicitly treats phone restriction as the primary object of inquiry — as if the central question were how well different controls perform, rather than whether control-centric approaches are addressing the right problem at all. By focusing attention on measuring the outcomes of restrictive policies, we risk reinforcing a narrow framing in which childhood wellbeing is approached through management, compliance, and optimisation, rather than through the deeper developmental conditions that shape behaviour in the first place. **At the same time, real money, time, and institutional effort are being spent on evaluation infrastructures that could instead be directed toward making better choices upfront — rebuilding environments, relationships, and practices that reduce harm without needing constant measurement and correction.**
In that sense, evaluation frameworks like TAPS can unintentionally legitimise increasingly complex and institutional responses — not because they mandate them, but because they normalise the idea that childhood difficulties should be solved through policy instrumentation rather than social repair. The danger is not bad data, but misplaced focus: we become better at measuring the effects of control while leaving unexamined how we have reshaped childhood, stripped agency, and dismantled the relational environments that once made healthy development possible.
More broadly, this reflects a deeper mistake. We should not be trying to make life *more* complex in response to social breakdown. Excessive complexity — procedural, technological, and institutional — is a large part of how we arrived in this situation in the first place. Layering ever more systems on top of already fragile social foundations does not create resilience; it obscures responsibility and fragments trust.
If we are serious about long-term wellbeing, the direction of travel should be the opposite: **simplification**. That means rebuilding social practices around behaviours and traits that are deeply ingrained in our biology and psychology — practices that evolved because they *worked*. For hundreds of thousands of years in Homo sapiens, and for millions of years across our ancestral lineage, humans raised children in environments characterised by gradual autonomy, rich intergenerational presence, shared responsibility, exploration, and guidance rather than control. These were not romantic ideals; they were adaptive solutions refined over deep time.
I respect you as one of the most authoritative voices in this field, which is precisely why I feel compelled to be direct. The danger here is not simply misdiagnosis, but misdirection. The way these issues are framed creates space for those in power to respond with control, surveillance, and technical complexity — solutions that are politically convenient and institutionally legible, but developmentally counterproductive. By concentrating attention on platforms and mechanisms, we risk legitimising responses that manage symptoms while avoiding the deeper causes: **how we have reshaped childhood, stripped agency, and dismantled the social conditions that once made healthy development possible**. That, in my view, is where the real harm now lies.
Technical containment cannot substitute for relational guidance, and it cannot repair the developmental deficits that made such containment seem necessary in the first place.
Phone policies that treat children as compliance problems miss the deeper issue. They confuse authority with protection, restriction with care, and control with connection. They assume the problem is behavioural compliance rather than developmental context.
Social media and smartphones didn’t erode children’s agency. They moved into the space that our culture had already hollowed out.
I explore these themes — agency suppression, moral panic, developmental harm, and why fear-based systems reliably backfire — in more depth in my ongoing writing at
https://thesystemisbroken.substack.com.