Class time, not nap time

By Jonathan Zimmerman

The Cherry Hill Board of Education and its teachers recently agreed on a new contract that extends the school day by 30 minutes. Over the course of a 180-day school year, that comes out to about 14 more days of class.

But it probably won't make much of a difference, at least not for high school students. That's because the board tacked the additional time onto the beginning of the day, forcing high school kids to show up for school at 7:30 a.m. instead of 8.

They won't be awake. Sure, they'll trudge into class and go through the motions. But as a growing body of research reveals, adolescents' bodies - and minds - don't really rouse that early.

Consider a recent study of Chicago high school students. It found that they got lower grades in their first-period courses than in the rest. Standardized tests also showed that they scored worse in subjects taught at the start of the day.

At the Air Force Academy, meanwhile, first-year cadets who began class before 8 a.m. performed substantially worse in all of their courses, not just the earliest ones.

Finally, a study of middle-school kids in Wake County, N.C., found that students who started school an hour later did much better on end-of-the-year reading and math tests. And poor kids benefited most, showing twice as much improvement as their wealthier peers.

Nocturnal creatures

Here you might object that many jobs require adults to rise early, so students need to learn to do the same. But they're kids, not adults, and their sleep-wake cycles are completely different.

Adolescents are wired to stay up late, which explains why your teenager is often the last member of the family to turn out the lights. Their bodies also want to wake up later, which is why they're groggy on weekday mornings - and why they often sleep past noon when the weekend rolls around.

So why do we make them go to school so early? One reason is to save money on transportation: By staggering start times for different age groups, school districts can get by with fewer buses and drivers.

But many districts are already scaling back their transportation services and requiring more kids to get to school on their own. And even if a later start time increases busing costs, it would be worth it.

According to Colby College economist Finley Edwards, the author of the North Carolina study, letting all the kids in Wake County start school at 9:15 a.m. would cost another $150 per student each year. That's not chump change, but it's a small price to pay for dramatic improvements in reading and math proficiency.

Sports supremacy

Yet the biggest barrier to later start times has nothing to do with academics. Rather, it's about sports. If we begin school later, the argument goes, we'll have to end later, and that would leave less daylight for athletic practices and games.

Never mind that half of American kids don't play a sport at school, or that many sports are played indoors. The real objection here is that there will be less time for athletics, period.

But why would that be such a bad thing? Every year brings a new report that American students are falling behind those in countries like South Korea and Singapore, where they wouldn't think of sacrificing academic rigor for a few extra minutes of sports.

A hundred years ago, American high school students ran their own sports teams. But as schools swelled with immigrants in the early 20th century, districts hired full-time coaches and referees to teach discipline, virtue, and character to the allegedly unpolished masses in their midst.

But how much virtue is there in sending all our kids to school before they're awake enough to learn, just so some of them can play more sports? What does that say about our character as citizens, taxpayers, and parents?

In 2007, University of Pennsylvania sleep researcher Richard Schwab noticed that his daughter, a student at Harriton High School in Lower Merion, seemed sleep-deprived. So father and daughter conducted a survey and found that only 16 percent of the school's students thought they got enough sleep. And 90 percent felt their academic performance would improve if school started later.

They were right about that. But Harriton still starts at 7:30 a.m. - academics be darned. So does Lower Merion, the other high school in the district. I know, because my daughter goes there. And she's tired.