Every now and then I bump into a reminder of how deeply America is afflicted with QED: Quarterly Earnings Disease. It’s a disorder that forces every newsworthy event or morsel of information into the frame of obsessive capitalism. Tsunami hits Southeast Asia. How will this affect Monday’s market opening?

The 24-hour churn of CNBC has bred a generation of CEOs whose vision extends only as far the next three months. Their every decision must move the line up and to the right lest they face the wrath of Jim Cramer and a performance review from the board. Long-term investment is for losers. If firewood offers more profit than apples, out come the axes and down goes the orchard.

American QED acts as a force bent on inverting the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois confederacy) seventh generation principle, which asks us to consider how a decision we make today will affect our descendants seven generations hence.

I thought about all of that this week as I tracked the buzz surrounding a new study on school phone bans published by the National Bureau of Economic Research.

As The New York Times reported: “Schools that adopted strict bans—requiring students to keep their devices in locked pouches throughout the school day—saw a meaningful decline in student cellphone use. But test scores have not increased in those places on average.”

Over the next few days I heard the study spoken of with a touch of the sad trombone: Good idea, too bad it didn’t produce the desired result.

That conclusion was nonsense. Nevertheless, it spread so quickly that Emily Oster, a Brown University economics professor and the founder of ParentData, felt compelled to pen an op-ed headlined Banning Phones in Schools Is Still a Good Idea. As if desperately trying to stop a rush to the exits.

It was a teeth-gnasher of a situation. No sooner had we given bell-to-bell a try than it was being written off by data that had no relation to the policy’s intent. I felt like I was reading a story headlined Study Finds New Fire Department Equipment Makes No Dent in Crime Rate.

Over the past three years, two-thirds of states have instituted student phone restrictions or outright bans in public schools. If you want to know more about this branch of the Big Tech resistance, check out the Phone-Free Schools State Report Card. It’ll give you an overview of the bell-to-bell movement, so called because the idea is to remove social media, texting, and addictive algorithms from a student’s life from the first morning bell to the afternoon dismissal bell.

There are a lot of good reasons to institute bell-to-bell—which I support—including:

Bell-to-bell policies were never sold as a quick way to boost test scores. Academic score improvements may come about as a long-term result. Or not. That’s not the point.

Bell-to-bell policies are being embraced because we’re raising a generation of kids and young adults who don’t know how to read a full book. Who have to be taught, by college professors, how to start in-person conversations and make chit-chat. Who’ve become addicted to the dopamine hit they get from their digital devices.

That’s to say nothing of the increasing isolation from the real world that’s led to widespread psychological damage, as documented in Jonathan Haidt’s bestseller The Anxious Generation.

There’s a common quality shared by all these digital-kid problems: They don’t lend themselves to simple cause-and-effect remedies that can be measured in short-term test results. Putting the phone away is a strong start. The end result—healthier kids with robust, resilient social skills and a rich inner life—may take many years to develop. And even then we may not have a simple test to register the results as data points.

Not everything in life is reducible to a dataset. There are things worth doing that don’t contribute to better test scores or short-term profit margins.

In fact, the New York Times reporter who initially set off the firestorm with her story on the study’s “mixed results,” acknowledged as much. If you read past the headline, the subhead, the lede, the supporting quotes, all the way to the bottom of the story, you’ll find a school district official in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, offering firsthand testimony.

Brice Beck, deputy superintendent, said his district was thrilled with the early results of the bell-to-bell policy, “which had become a potent tool for attracting and retaining skilled teachers eager to work in more focused classrooms.”

“Even more exciting, he said, was the change adults had observed in teenagers’ social lives—something that cannot be measured in test scores.”

“‘At lunch you will see all these kids, they’re talking to one another,’ Dr. Beck said. ‘It’s a lot louder, but the good kind of loud.’”