David Figlio

That lasted a year.

By year two, it was gone.

But in that first year, we saw the discipline.

It varies from place to place.

A lot depends on what are the punishments that are associated with these bans.

I know that there are some places, not the county school district that I was studying, that had zero tolerance policies where the first violation of a cell phone ban is an automatic suspension.

The place that...

Umut Ozek and I carried out our study was somewhere in the middle.

They had a cooling off period at the beginning of the academic year, a month in which they said, the phones are banned, but there will be no consequences.

And then after that, they started to say, okay, the first couple of offenses, we're just going to remind you, after that, there were going to be escalating sanctions.

They wanted to have suspensions be in school versus out of school.

But I will say one thing that Florida did at the beginning that now they've changed is at the beginning, Florida allowed kids to have their phones on their person, right?

Including smartwatches.

And now as of this year, Florida requires kids to have the phones fully locked away.

If I can jump in, I think that this is one of the things that's probably behind the fact that we're finding this improvement in attendance that's occurring as a direct consequence of the cell phone bans.

Both the narrative evidence that Kathy is describing, as well as now some of the early quantitative evidence, is suggesting that schools are just more pleasant places to be.

People tend to be less interested in skipping school if school is a more pleasant place to be.

So that's the flip side of some of these growing pains, I could say.

I mean, ditto to what Kathy just said.

I can speak as a parent.