“Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.”
Benjamin Franklin, one of America’s founding fathers who had a reputation of being an “early-riser,” strongly believed in the notion that the healthiest, wisest people were ones who woke up early.
Although Franklin was a very wise man in his lifetime, his quote most certainly does not apply to teenage students today, especially concerning sleep cycles.
When I was a teenager, waking up to an alarm clock in the early morning on a school day was always a constant struggle for me.
Even worse were those all-night study sessions, keeping yourself awake because you had a stressful test to take at 8 a.m. Taking the bus at 6:50 a.m. to school, attending classes while suffering from chronic drowsiness, could easily summarize my discomforting high school experience.
You could even extend this notion to college freshmen frantically adjusting to college life, such a strain that an Adderall fix becomes a dangerously normal routine for some students to keep themselves awake. When I found out my old high school changed its schedule to start at 8:15 a.m., I was disappointed that they only made this change long after I graduated.
Starting school later should become a universal trend. An extra 45 minutes in the morning is a godsend when it comes to staying awake for lectures all day and performing well on tests. Thus, all public high schools in the United States should adjust their schedules to accommodate students’ sleep cycles. If the costs and benefits are considered, our nation’s policymakers should consider making this change mandatory for high schools, primarily to ensure optimum student performance on standardized assessments.
While sleep is important for people of all ages, it is most critical for adolescent health: teenagers in grades 9-12 require at least 9 and one half hours of sleep to ensure proper mental development. Critics may argue that it is the parent’s responsibility to ensure that teenagers sleep early because they cause their own sleep difficulties (like staying up too late from playing video games). However, teenagers stay up later because the hormone responsible for inducing sleep — melatonin — releases later in the night, affecting a teenager’s circadian rhythm by delaying signs of sleepiness. Simply put, teenagers are biologically programmed to stay up late.
A study published by the American Academy of Pediatrics in February 2015 found that only 43% of 15-year olds get over 7 hours of sleep on a daily basis today, compared to 73% in the 1990s. The organization declared this problem to be a public health crisis, pointing the finger at K-12 school schedules as the culprit because they begin too early, as this insufficient sleep amongst adolescents affects the health and academic achievement of high school students. It says much about our public education system when pediatricians say schools are the reason teenagers have sleeping problems. Thus, the politicians who run our public K-12 education system must answer their wake-up calls to make needed school schedule adjustments. If schools start past 8:15 a.m., teenagers may be rested enough so as not to suffer the effects of sleep deprivation (which is correlated to lower test scores).
Since the study noted that teens are going to sleep past 11 p.m. because their body forces them to do so, tying school schedules to student sleep cycles will not only yield benefits to students, but also to high schools.
There are specific benefits that schools can measure: a University of Minnesota study found that when school starts after 8 a.m., test scores in math, reading, history and science improve across the board, regardless of the economic status of a student. Attendance increases while tardiness decreases.
A Wyoming high school found that crashes from teen drivers decreased significantly when it changed its schedule to start at 8:55 a.m.
Interestingly, since students stay in school later in the day, drug abuse and juvenile crime decreases. A United Kingdom school changed its starting time to 10 a.m. and found that test scores improved overall, with disadvantaged students showing the most improvement.
Most importantly, the University of Minnesota studied 9,000 high school students in three states, finding that 66% of them got more than 8 hours of sleep when schools started at 8:55 a.m.
Only 34% of students got 8 hours when schools started at 7:30 a.m. Clearly, sleep deprivation is directly linked to academic performance.
Administrators should salivate at these findings, as it means giving high school students more time to get to sleep will improve the chances of increasing student achievement. However, there are challenges to implementing this policy reform.
The challenges of changing school start and end times are logistical. The change mostly burdens parents when school bus transportation is sparse.
This change would significantly impact bus schedules, as any change in the bus routines can be very costly to schools when picking up and dropping off students. Additionally, bus schedules would become much more complex when only high school schedules are changed to start later in the day when elementary and middle school schedules do not, which may prevent students of all grades from riding together.
There are also other questions to consider when implementing a schedule change, especially if a poor high school implements this change: what if a student needs to take care of a younger sibling while the parent(s) is/are working, unable to afford daycare?
What about students holding afternoon jobs? How would extracurricular activities work, since these activities cannot be expected to last past dinnertime?
This reform would significantly affect parents who drop and pick up students before work and later in the day. Despite these logistical issues (which have been addressed by some schools in different ways), the benefits of improving student performance outweigh the challenges of implementation in the long-term.
If high schools expect their students to excel on standardized tests, they must ensure students are well-rested by changing when school starts its day.
With more schools changing their starting times to accommodate teenage sleep cycles, it’s time to wake up, America… later, that is..
