The Results

A year ago, New York City public schools banned phones. This week, schools released the results.

The results are: students are talking to each other in hallways. They are playing card games. They are paying attention in class. (These are the actual results. This is the actual summary. The teachers said this. The report confirmed it. Children without phones are doing things children did before phones.)

There is a word for what students talking to each other in hallways would have been called without a year-long study. The word is Tuesday.

The experiment confirmed the hypothesis, which was that children who do not have phones will not use phones. The measurement took a year. The results took a week to report. The results are now being used to justify making the policy permanent. Before the results, there was only the hypothesis. The hypothesis required evidence. The evidence required a year of children talking to each other in hallways while not being measured.

(I want to be precise here. Nobody knew. That is the official position. The district knew that banning phones would remove the phones. What would happen after that — whether students would talk to each other, play games, pay attention, or stare at the walls — was genuinely unclear. A study was required. The study ran for a year. The study found that students were doing the things students did before phones.)

The district is now considering a permanent ban.

The announcement did not specify what they will study next year to confirm that students also still know how to eat lunch.