Articles

Letting Teens Sleep a Smart Move

Editorial
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
June 8, 2005

If teenagers designed high schools, classes wouldn't begin until 10 a.m. Increasingly, research shows that teens have science on their side.

The latest study to recommend later high school schedules appears in this month's journal Pediatrics. Northwestern University researchers found that teens are sleep-deprived during the school week, in part because they're biologically wired to stay up late but required to get up early.

During the school year, teens averaged seven hours of sleep a night, compared to 8.7 during the summer. Ideally, teens should get nine hours of sleep a night. The study examined the impact of this weekly sleep loss on student performance and found that students posted lower scores on reaction tests in the morning than in the afternoon. The study suggests that schools hold critical testing in the afternoon rather than in the morning, when teens are at their lowest ebb.

The Northwestern study reinforces earlier findings. For example, a University of Minnesota study of delayed starting times at some Minneapolis schools concluded that the students ended up getting more sleep and missing fewer classes. Other studies have linked later classes with higher academic performance.

Most parents of teens can vouch for how hard it is to get them into bed at night and out of bed in the morning. The research suggests that there's not much parents can do to force their teens to go to sleep earlier; the adolescent biological clock is simply set for late bedtimes.

The research has yet to affect high school starting times in Georgia, where many high school students report to their first class at 7:30 a.m. That means getting up at 5:30 in the morning for rural and suburban teens who commute a long way.

In designing schools, the needs of adults have always trumped those of children. The long summer breaks — where children lose valuable ground in math and reading — originally accommodated family farms and now accommodate family vacations. Earlier starting times at high schools grew out of an effort to save money by staggering school starting times so one set of buses could pick up all the children within a school system.

American high schools are in crisis. Most of the solutions under consideration, including smaller schools and dramatically lower class sizes, will cost a great deal of money. Pushing back the start of the high school day is that rare fix that's both easy and inexpensive.

Copyright 2005 The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. For more information, visit www.ajc.com.

Fair Use Notice

This site contains copyrighted material the use of which has not always been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. We are making such material available in our efforts to advance understanding of environmental, political, human rights, economic, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues, etc. We believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.

For more information, visit: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use', you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.