Were your teenage years exhausting? School plans can be the reason

If you went to high school in the US, you might remember early-morning extracurricular activities, dozing through the first algebra lesson, or dreary late-night study sessions (as opposed to other wide-awake “study sessions” we told our parents) . to have). As an adult, you might be wondering if there’s a better time to be exploring Shakespeare than at 8am, or expanding on a Taylor series, right after you’ve collapsed in your chair, half asleep from your sunrise bus ride.

As it turns out, early school enrollment dates for US high schools are based on shaky science, as journalist and parent Lisa Lewis points out in her new book: The sleepless teenager. She explains why US high schools tend to start early, the science behind why that’s bad for kids, and how late school starts can benefit not just teenagers, but, well, everyone. Perhaps most importantly, it provides an introduction to advocating for change in your community.

The wheels of the bus turn round and round

Our early start times are a bit of a historical coincidence. Schools in the first half of the 20th century tended to be small and locally based – most students could walk. Lewis points out that in 1950 there were 60,000 one-room schoolhouses across the country. By 1960, that number had dwindled to around 20,000.

According to Lewis, this trend accelerated when US authorities feared that education – particularly in science and mathematics – was lagging behind that of their nemesis, the Soviet Union. She describes how a 1959 report by James Bryant Conant, a chemist and retired president of Harvard University, recommended that high schools do so complete class sizes of at least 100 – far from small local schoolhouses. The school consolidation that had already begun accelerated. Neighborhood schools continued to be closed. And the yellow school bus was on its way to its current iconic status.

To minimize the costs associated with bus travel, Lewis describes how many districts staggered school start times so they could use the same buses to transport elementary, middle, and high school students. At the time, the consensus in society was that teenagers needed less sleep than teenagers, so high schools got the earliest places.

And science says…

In the 1950s and 1960s, scientists still had to deal with teenage sleep. But that began to change in the 1970s, beginning with the Stanford Summer Sleep Camp experiment led by then-graduate student Mary Carskadon, now a professor of psychiatry and human behavior at Brown University. Lewis guides readers through highlights of the multi-year study in which scientists tracked sleep patterns and metrics ranging from monitoring brain waves to cognitive testing in the same children over 10 years from 1976 to 1985.

Surprising results emerged from this first look at teenage sleep. For example, adolescents require the same or even more sleep than younger children. On average, all children in the study, regardless of age, slept 9.25 hours a night. Subsequent studies have shown that the ideal amount of sleep for teenagers is between 8 and 10 hours per night. However, Lewis reports that as of 2019, only 22 percent of high school students reported getting at least eight hours of sleep on a regular basis, according to the CDC.

Another key finding from the Stanford Summer Sleep Camp experiment was that older children had bursts of energy later in the day. Subsequent studies showed that the brains of children entering puberty delay the release of melatonin — the hormone that makes us sleepy. In teenagers, melatonin rises later at night and falls later in the morning, shifting their circadian rhythms. High schoolers’ tendency to stay up late and sleep through the morning isn’t necessarily due to laziness or defiance—it’s biological.

Yet here we are, decades later, with average school start times in 2017 starting at 8 a.m., and 40 percent of schools start even earlier. This is a dramatic change from a century ago, when high schools in the eastern US started at 9 a.m., Lewis notes.

Why haven’t schools responded to this influx of new information? Well some schools have. Lewis runs several examples throughout the book, showing schools that have made numerous positive impacts even in the age of smartphones and social media.

Lewis describes a study published in 2018 in which students slept 34 minutes longer each school night when their Seattle district moved the start time to 8:45 a.m. That might not seem like much, but many students and families gave equally positive feedback to the teachers, with one describing the morning atmosphere as “upbeat” – an adjective many of us might find unfathomable for the first lesson.