As a lifelong late-sleeper who
went to a high school with a brutal 7 a.m. start time, I’m thrilled
to
see The New York Times cover
new research indicating that students at high schools with
later start times performed better on measures such as mental
health, auto accident rates, attendance, and sometime grades and
test scores as well. I napped through first and second period
fairly consistently during my high school days, even in classes
that I liked, and even when my teachers allowed my to tote my
technically off-limits mega-thermos of coffee into the classroom in
hopes that it would keep me awake. Even when I wasn’t passed out on
my desk, I still didn’t learn much. I was basically zombified until
third period or so—shuffling and groaning from class to class, but
not really alive and engaged.
And while supporters of early start times frequently argue that
they’re better for kids who participate in sports and other
extracurricular activities, because they make more room in the
afternoon, for me the opposite was true. I quit competitive
swimming once I reached high school because practices started at
something like 5 a.m., and nighttime band practices kept me out
later during the weekday anyway. Waking up in time to swim would
have been incredibly difficult just by itself. Trying to do it
while staying up for band—and the inevitable home that had to be
finished after practice—would have been impossible.
Sure, some of this was basic teenage laziness, but I’m not the
only teenager to have had trouble with early morning school start
times. Overall, the research is pretty clear that teenagers tend to
have later sleep cycles, and that early class start times impact
performance at school and elsewhere. That’s why places like the
Brookings Institution are recommending later start times, and why
the Times report is built around the story of a successful
student push to get a school board in Missouri to ditch plans to
make an early start time even earlier. As the Times notes,
this is a movement decades in the making; the research has been
pointing in this direction for a while.
But here’s the thing: Later high school start times may be
better on average, but not every teenage student is semi-comatose
until 9 a.m. I knew kids who liked going to bed and getting up
early, and others who managed to earn great grades, play sports,
maintain active social lives, and otherwise perform just fine on
five hours of sleep. And while it wasn’t true for me, the benefits
for many after-school activities are real—especially for teenagers
who work part-time jobs. Indeed, that was one way that my school’s
hellishly early start time actually helped me: Throughout my senior
year, I worked a few days a week at a local grocery store. The
early start time meant school was out before 2 p.m., so I was able
to stop at home, change clothes, and grab a snack before starting
an afternoon shift.
All of which is to say that what works for some students doesn’t
always work for others. The real problem then isn’t early start
times so much as it is the centralized rigidity of the public
school system.
For many kids (and their parents) there’s little or no choice
about what high school to go to, and what time to be there. You go
to the school you’re assigned to, and that’s it. Private options
offer some flexibility, in some cases. But even moderately priced
private schools are expensive. And in many smaller and medium-sized
towns, the competition is weak at best.
Sure, it’s nice to see that some school districts are taking
note of the evidence in favor of later start times for high
schools. But it would be even nicer to imagine a world in which the
evidence didn’t take 20 years to filter into school systems’
decision-making processes, in which small bands of school-board
bureaucrats weren’t making one-size-fits-all decisions for
thousands of students, and in which teenagers and their families
had a variety of meaningful options available—options that might
include, among other things, variable start times, and perhaps even
school days that weren’t constructed on the traditional
seven-hours-starting-in-the-morning schedule at all. In other
words, it would be nice if there were choice and competition in
public education, and if innovations and adjustments like later
start times weren’t news.
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