Announcing Educating the Exhausted

After decades in the "trenches," Amy Wolfson and I are thrilled to share our new book on the messy, complicated, and wide-ranging battle to align school schedules with the science of sleep.

For years—decades, really—I’ve been baffled by a deceptively simple question: If we’ve known for so long that early school bells undermine sleep, health, safety, and learning, why have most schools been unable to change?

That question has followed me from my kids’ 7:17 a.m. high‑school start time to my work with the nonprofit I co-founded (Start School Later), and into countless conversations with researchers, health care providers, educators, policymakers, and exhausted families who all seemed to be living different versions of the same puzzle. Eventually, it became clear that this wasn’t just a sleep story. It wasn’t even just a school story. It was a story about translating science, institutional inertia, grassroots advocacy, and the strange ways we decide what counts as “normal.”

Today, I finally get to share where that long pursuit led:

My new book, Educating the Exhausted, co‑authored with sleep researcher Amy Wolfson, is now available for preorder. Official publication date is July 14, 2026.

Typing that still feels a bit surreal.

A Bigger Story Than We’d Imagined

When Amy and I began writing, we thought we were documenting a very specific public‑health movement. What we ended up uncovering was a window into how evidence influences—or fails to influence—policy decisions, and how ordinary people (often women working outside traditional power structures) can often be just as if not more important than “science” and evidence in changing the world.

Case in point: while the research on adolescent sleep and school start times is about as clear as any education policy or public health research gets, the reality is that over 80% of U.S. middle and high schools still begin at times that make healthy sleep nearly impossible. And this is true despite decades of serious efforts by school leaders and advocates alike to do what to them seemed like a no-brainer.

We also discovered that the “start school later” story, something that may seem simple on the surface, is far more intricate than most people realize. It touches everything from adolescent biology to transportation logistics and social history, from cultural beliefs about sleep to deep-seated and often insidious psychological and economic forces. What might appear to be a slam-dunk case for change if you considered the research (or even commonsense) turned out to be much more complicated, and more difficult to resolve.

Finding a Path Forward

For all the complexity and frustration, we also discovered plenty of reasons for hope. While the gap between what we know and what we do remains enormous, it’s finally beginning to narrow. Communities in 46 different U.S. states that have shifted to healthier hours. California passed a landmark school start time law. Students and parents are joining forces with sleep researchers, health professionals, and education leaders. The conversation is changing.

This book tells the inside story of how that change took root—and what still needs to happen next. More specifically, it provides:

• The human story behind decades of adolescent sleep research

• A look at how evidence gets translated (or mangled) on its way to policy

• A chronicle of the Start School Later movement from the inside

• A reminder that small questions often reveal the bigger, broader truths

• And, I hope, a sense of momentum—because change is happening, even when it feels (and genuinely is) slow

Getting this book launched is part of keeping that conversation going, and ultimately to accelerating this momentum.

A Special Thanks

Oh, one more thing: for my Substack subscribers who have read this far, I am happy to provide a friends and family discount of 30%, good for book orders through July 31, 2026. Just let me know if you’re interested.

This is my small way of thanking you for following along and for your interest, without which the book would never exist. Your engagement with the issue, your questions, your stories have all shaped how I think and write about this work. And, more importantly, they are absolutely critical to changing the way our society thinks about sleep, school hours, and science, which, ultimately, is the way we make progress.

More soon.