Researchers found a statistically significant relationship between owning a personal cellphone and lower reading comprehension scores. Any of those could drive both phone ownership and reading scores without the phone doing anything. It provides evidence that school phone bans, on their own, are unlikely to move elementary reading scores. The confirmed finding is that phone ownership, not phone presence at school and not the age of acquisition, tracked with lower reading comprehension in this sample. Third and sixth graders who owned a cellphone had statistically significantly lower reading comprehension scores than classmates who did not own one.