I’ve explained in a previous post why teenagers cannot get healthy sleep if they have to get to 7 or 8 a.m. classes, often at considerable cost to their health and well-being. I’ve also explained that plenty of schools now, and in the past, started classes later. So why do most schools still start so early? And why do people act like civilization will end if school starts a bit later?
Sleep scientists ask these questions all the time. So do health professionals, and even education policy researchers. To them, starting school later is low-hanging fruit. “Research” shows that we are doing active harm to adolescents by requiring them to be in class at times their brains and bodies should be sleeping. “Research” also shows that schools can make this change feasibly and affordably, and that, when they do, benefits to health, safety, and school performance far exceed any cost or inconvenience of change. So what are we waiting for?
Decades in the “start school later” trenches have convinced me that resistance has nothing to do with “research.” It has to do with politics.
Sane, Human School Hours: What’s Not to Like?
Since the early 1990s sleep experts, health professionals, and local community activists have advocated for later secondary school start times to give students a chance to get more and better-timed sleep—as well as a myriad of health, safety, learning, performance, economic, and social justice benefits. Typically, though, school districts considering change have faced contentious community pushback, much of it concerning logistics and transportation. This pushback comes from numerous stakeholders both inside and outside the school community, including students, parents, teachers, administrators, school board members, school staff, bus drivers, athletic coaches, small business owners, childcare providers, and parks and recreation officials.
I understand this pushback: Community life revolves around public school schedules, and the prospect of changing school schedules naturally evokes speculations about how the change might undermine elaborate and often precarious childcare, commuting, sports, and other afterschool arrangements. People fret about potential costs of rerouting buses, too, or the prospect of making “little kids” wait for buses in the dark (speciously put forward as the “only” way to start older kids later).
Even those with little direct relationship to public schools worry, including private schools that want to coordinate release times with the public schools so that all children can attend similarly timed afterschool activities, or childcare providers, commuters, organizations that use school fields or facilities, or local businesses employing students.
Community life revolves around public school schedules, and changing these schedules could potentially undermine elaborate and often precarious childcare, commuting, sports, and other afterschool arrangements.
It doesn’t matter that schools schedules vary considerably from place to place and year to year and even as kids grow from kindergarten to middle school to high school. It doesn’t matter that community life necessarily and inevitably adjusts when schools change schedules—which they often do, for all kinds of reasons. It doesn’t matter that many districts that have delayed bell times later consistently find that many negative consequences are exaggerated, temporary, and/or resolvable, including many initial cost estimates, or that most fears and speculations about logistics and costs have consistently turned out to be red herrings. (See the Myths and Misconceptions page of Start School Later’s website if you want to know more.)
What matters, I’m convinced, is that people are suspicious of change. And, people being people, they tend to overestimate the cost of change while underestimating the cost of inaction.
That is why, regardless of validity, the endless succession of “perceived obstacles” presented to school leaders are politically powerful. They create what education analyst Kyla Wahlstrom has called the “prickly politics” of delaying start times, to which, school officials, whose jobs depend on the goodwill of their communities, are particular vulnerable.
This vulnerability (which in some cases resulted in superintendents losing their jobs) may help explain why even though some of the earliest sectors to join sleep researchers, pediatricians, and other health professionals in pushing to delay school start times were school officials, today superintendents rarely lead the charge without support from the larger school community.
A Clash of Priorities
Contributing to the problem—but often overlooked—is the way school hours (and the sleep that comes with it) are treated as just one of many negotiable school budget items. Many people affected by school start-time decisions have priorities, interests, and responsibilities unrelated to sleep health, or, in some cases, even to student safety, mental health, or school performance. That makes it exceedingly difficult—passion and research notwithstanding—to convince school districts to delay bell times without concerted and often lengthy efforts to build political will both within and beyond the school community.
I’ve seen this happen repeatedly in communities all over the country. If the public doesn’t really understand why they are being asked to change their lives, why sleep matters, or what school start times have to do with sleep or children’s well-being, they come at school leaders with pitchforks when anyone suggests changing schedules.
Many people affected by school start-time decisions have priorities, interests, and responsibilities unrelated to sleep health, or, in some cases, even to student safety, mental health, or school performance.
These challenges will continue so long as we keep weighing safe, healthy school hours against teacher compensation, transportation, instructional materials, and the like. These decisions are often made by school board members and administrators whose positions, whether elected or appointed, depend on the opinion of sectors within the school community (e.g., teacher unions, sports boosters, advocates for special education services and disparities reduction), as well as the elected officials and the voting public.
School boards and superintendents are tasked with matters such as balancing the school budget; improving grades, test scores, graduation, and attendance rates; attracting and retaining teachers; and addressing opportunity gaps. They may be held responsible for certain aspects of student health and safety, particularly those required of them by specific federal, state, or local regulations (e.g., removing asbestos, requiring vaccinations, or having cafeterias inspected for cleanliness), but protecting student sleep, improving public road safety, or considering long-term impact of school policy on the state economy—all issues associated with later school start times—fall outside their official responsibilities.
I “get” this pressure having lived with three different school board members over the years. What would you do, after all, as a school superindent or underpaid/unpaid school board member whose position depended on pleasing the public? What I’ve seen is that most people in these positions, even those who say that, ideally, school should start later, ultimately respond by insisting that there is only one way to start school later, or to offer options involving astronomical costs and enormous sacrifices. The community obviously opts for the status quo, and the issue goes away—at least for a while.
Outside the USA, the politics may differ. In some places school hours rest less on public opinion and more on the leveraging the political or personal interests of a national leader or their appointed education minister. In Rwanda, for example, the Ministry of Education changed school opening time to 8:30 a.m. across the board on the grounds that such hours were better for children. Little if any effort was made to involve teachers, parents, students, staff, much less with sectors outside the school community, which expedited change.
However, such decisions are just as easily reversed if a new leader has different interests and priorities. Thus, in 2007 Hugo Chavez turned Venezuela's clocks back 30 minutes so that children could wake up for school in daylight, a decision reversed by his successor Nicolas Maduro in 2016, “to ensure more daylight in the evening when energy consumption peaks.” Without buy-in, effective implementation, and accountability, moreover, unilateral decisions may go unheeded. Kenyan Education Minister Ezekiel Machogu decreed that day-primary and high schools run between 8 a.m. and 3:45 p.m. so that students could sleep for nine hours, but it appears to have had no effect on at least some local schools.
Sleep as a Public Matter
Back in the USA, though, the problem of public priorities remains. Many stakeholders—among them parents, teachers, and coaches—cannot be assumed to share the view of sleep and health professionals that early hours or even sleep deprivation do substantial or lasting harm. They may primarily view changes in school hours as something that will impact family, work, extracurricular, and childcare arrangements; taxes; or supply of inexpensive afterschool labor. Even those concerned about adolescent sleep may reject the idea that school start times are involved, attributing any problems to laziness, rebelliousness, poor parenting, and electronics instead.
When the decision to change a school schedule means losing a job or an elected position, science or even kids’ well-being, mean little.
Some of these views stem from pervasive deep-set assumptions and beliefs about sleep and about adolescents, including ingrained cultural attitudes regarding sleep as private, personal matter subject to individual/family control. Also at work is the still common idea that sleep is for the weak and unmotivated, a sign of laziness, disinterest, or vulnerability, and the enemy of fun and productivity, and the idea that sleep deprivation is a rite of passage that builds character, or a means to prepare for “real life.” Just like the proponents of delaying start times, however, the people holding these views share a desire to have safe, happy, healthy, successful youth; they just believe these goals can be achieved through means other than later school start times.
Our society fails to recognize sleep as a basic human need and the connection between sleep and school hours as a matter of public health. As a result, we continue to leave decisions about sleep in the hands of local school officials who are tasked with, and judged by, competing priorities. For the vantage point of these officials, it makes sense to treat school hours as negotiable budget items rather than non-negotiable public goods like clean air and water. They often have little choice. After all, when the decision to change a school schedule means losing a job or an elected position, science or even kids’ well-being, mean little. As Upton Sinclair famously remarked, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
So how do we make healthy school start times a priority for the people who make school policy? That is, of course, what Start School Later and other later start time advocates are trying to do. I’ll share more going forward.