Why School Should Start Later in the Morning

For the first time, the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is urging education policymakers to start middle- and high-school classes later in the morning. The idea is to improve the odds of adolescents getting sufficient sleep so they can thrive both physically and academically.

The CDC’s recommendations come a year after the American Academy of Pediatrics urged schools to adjust start times so more kids would get the recommended 8.5 to 9.5 hours of nightly rest. Both the CDC and the pediatricians’ group cited significant risks that come with lack of sleep, including higher rates of obesity and depression and motor-vehicle accidents among teens as well as an overall lower quality of life.

“Getting enough sleep is important for students’ health, safety, and academic performance,” Anne Wheaton, the lead author and epidemiologist in the CDC’s Division of Population Health, said in a statement. “Early school start times, however, are preventing many adolescents from getting the sleep they need.”

“Everybody learns better when they’re awake.”

In more than 40 states, at least 75 percent of public schools start earlier than 8:30 a.m., according to the CDC’s report. And while later start times won’t replace other important interventions—like parents making sure their children get enough rest—schools clearly play an important role in students’ daily schedules, the report concluded.

While the federal recommendation is making headlines, the data on the potential risks of chronically tired adolescents isn’t new information. Indeed, the research has been accumulating steadily for years, including some recent large-scale studies.

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As the Minneapolis Star-Tribune reported in April, the University of Minnesota’s Center for Applied Research and Educational Improvement “finally put to rest the long-standing question of whether later start times correlate to increased academic performance for high-school students”:

Here’s what the research shows: Adolescents’ “internal clocks”—the circadian rhythms that control a human’s responses to stimuli and determine sleep patterns—operate differently than those of other age groups. It’s typically more difficult for adolescents to fall asleep earlier in the evening than it is for other age demographics. And while teenagers are going to bed later, their school start times are often becoming earlier as they advance through middle and high school.

In a landmark study  in 1998 of adolescent sleeping habits, the Brown University researcher Mary Carskadon followed 10th-graders who were making the switch to a 7:20 a.m. start time, about an hour earlier than their schedule as ninth-graders. Despite the new schedule, the students went to bed at about the same time as they did the year before: 10:40 p.m. on average.

The students bordered on “pathologically sleepy.”

Carskadon’s team found that students showed up for morning classes seriously sleep-deprived and that the 7:20 a.m. start time required them to be awake during hours that ran contrary to their internal clocks. Fewer than half of the 10th-graders averaged even seven hours of sleep each night, which is already below the recommended amount. Indeed, Carskadon’s team concluded the students bordered on “pathologically sleepy.”

So, if the science is so strong, what’s getting in the way of changing the policy?

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Carskadon, a professor of psychiatry and human behavior, notes that passionate arguments abound on both sides of the debate—just about all of which she’s heard over the years. In some districts, the start times are largely dictated by local transportation companies, with school boards and superintendents contending they lack the funds or authority to change things. Meanwhile, parents are often reluctant to have teens start later, whether because they rely on having older children at home in the afternoons to take care of younger siblings or because they’re concerned that it will interfere with extracurricular opportunities. Indeed, there’s always a vocal chorus warning that later start times will hurt high-school sports.

But none of those worries override the reality that, as Carskadon put it, “everybody learns better when they’re awake.”

Implementing later start times can be feasible without causing major disruptions, as many school districts have demonstrated, Carskadon said. But it requires that all stakeholders commit to what’s often a time-consuming process of finding creative solutions, which, she added, isn’t always easy.

The medical writer and mother of three Terra Ziporyn Snider, who’s emerged as a national advocate for later start times, also cited widespread challenges hindering schools from making the switch. Getting school systems to change takes more than just presenting scientific evidence, said Snider, the co-founder and executive director of the nonprofit advocacy group Start School Later. The organization deploys volunteers to communities that are considering later school start times to bolster grassroots efforts.

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“Social norms are at the root of this problem—most people don’t take [adolescent sleep deprivation] seriously and don’t see it as a public-health issue,” Snider said. “That kind of thinking has to change.”

“The real obstacles are failure of imagination.”

One of the problems facing advocates of later school start times is that the people sympathetic to their cause seldom have the authority to reset the academic clock, Snider said. Parents typically only care about the issue when it affects their own families’ schedules, she said. That means roughly every four years the key players are replaced, and the grassroots efforts have to start from scratch.

“You start talking about changing start times, and people immediately jump to [all kinds of conclusions]. Teens will miss out on sports. Little kids will go to school in the dark and get run over by a car. What will happen to my child care?” Snider said. “A lot of these fears and speculations turn out to be red herrings. The real obstacles are failure of imagination.”

Snider is hopeful that the policy pressures are reaching a tipping point, though, with the help of major voices like the CDC weighing in.

“It’s becoming increasingly embarrassing to say, ‘If we start school later, what happens to my kid’s three-hour soccer practice?’” Snider said. “We have to convince school systems this has to happen for the health of kids. It’s not a negotiable school budget item—it’s an absolute requirement.”

This post appears courtesy of the Education Writers Association.

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This article was originally published on The Atlantic.