David Figlio

How do I know they're thriving if I can't hear from them every hour?

Sure.

So a lot of people think, oh my gosh, these phones are absolutely wrecking school.

So what my co-author, Umar Ozek at the Rand Corporation and I decided to do was do the first...

causal study of what happens to kids' academic outcomes when you take away the phones.

Florida was among the very first in the country to introduce one of these cell phone bans.

And what we did was we looked at one large anonymous school district in Florida, one of the biggest in the country.

We were interested in seeing what happened to test scores, what happened to attendance, and what happened to discipline when the cell phones were banned from the beginning of the school day to the end of the school day, no exceptions.

Here's what we found.

We found evidence that the cell phone ban led to modestly improved test scores.

especially in year two after we got past some of the hiccups at the beginning.

We found that the cell phone ban led to improved attendance.

We don't know exactly the reason behind that, but we think it is due to improved school environment, better engagement.

But, and there's always a but, we found in the short run, in the first year, the cell phone ban led to increased discipline.

And the discipline concentrated disproportionately with black students.

And here, we don't know the answer to that offhand.

We don't know.

It could be the case that black students were differentially violating the cell phone ban.

It could be the black students were differentially being targeted by discipline.

But we do know that black students in this school district in Florida were getting disciplined more as a direct consequence of this ban.