Unfortunately, the school systems still rely on one parent at home. It is not just drop off and pick up times: school activities, parent-teacher conferences, etc. For example, in the SF Unified District, school tours for parents of kids entering kindergarten, middle school and high school are during the school hours, mostly in the morning. It is all built around the expectation of a parent at home or a job structure that allows parents to have time off and not be penalized for it. Neither of those are necessarily representative of a family's current reality.
My high school started at 7am. I also took the bus; which picked up around 6:15am; so I usually woke up around 5:45am during the week. I would often nod off during my first or second period; and routinely took 2-3 hour naps when I got home from school; which screwed up my ability to fall asleep early at night or get much homework done. I sometimes wonder what my academics would have been like if I was actually awake during those first two periods.
I've always been confused by TV shows showing kids leaving for school and it's bright outside with the whole family awake. Growing up, it was dark when we got up for school and just barely sun up (depending on the season still dark) by the time we left to get on the bus.
I had similar experiences. I and many other students would sleep in our winter coats on the morning bus ride, and it was hard to focus until about 10AM.
I strongly suspect that school hours are based around parents work hours, even if that is not what they say.
As someone who lives in a country where schools all uniformly started at 9:00 am (i'm probably wrong on that, but lets just go with it), what's the social-background/theoretical reason for starting the school day at 7:00am?
From the outside that just seems absolutely bonkers?
My solution is I would come home at around 3-4pm (after hanging out with friends for an hour) and then sleep for about 8 hours. I'd wake up around midnight and have a good ~5 hours to myself. With my parents asleep I'd cook for myself and do my homework and watch tv. When I had zero period having a rotated sleep schedule only helped. It was like living alone. I preferred the responsibility and the sleep schedule. There is nothing quite like that 3-4am calm in the morning.
I had a similar experience. I went to a magnet school, so it actually started one hour later than other schools (8am instead of 7am). However, since I rode the school bus, I still needed to be up early enough to catch the bus at 6am. The bus would first stop at the local school to drop kids off before driving to my school. I'd get home around 4pm, so all in all I was at school or going to and from school for 10 hours.
But the 10 hours wasn't my biggest complaint -- it was how little time we had to eat lunch. Lunch period was only 30 minutes, and the line to get food was 15-20 minutes long. So I only had like ~10 minutes to eat my lunch once I got it and use the remaining ~5 to be back in class in my seat or be tardy. We weren't allowed to eat in class or we'd get into trouble and get written up, so that ~10 minutes to eat once you actually account for all the logistics was it.
I don't think people realize how important it is for kids to get their nutrition when they're in school for so long trying to learn. Nutrition has a direct impact to learning. I think lunch period should have been longer. It felt like an afterthought in the schedule.
Grew up in Ohio in the 80's same deal from 6th through 11th grade. Hour long bus ride, class started at 7am. Nice thing was we were the first off the bus on the way home, so we were home by ~3pm and got to sleep for a couple hours before parents came home.
Another benefit of delaying start is fewer kids driving in the dark in winter and more time for morning fog to burn off on those marginal days that weren't bad enough in town for a delay.
I don’t get how this is supposed to work with sports and other activities. In high school I had water polo/swimming practice mornings at 6:15. Is that now illegal?
School children are sleeping on average 1 hour less than theirs peers did 50 years ago. This has been driven by earlier and earlier school start times. Sleep deprivation in school age children has been linked to lower test scores, lower knowledge retention, higher rates of "trouble making".
Really happy to see these laws getting put in place!
Now can we pay attention to all of the research saying that homework creates stress but doesn't work, and have schools stop assigning so much?
More precisely, the research shows that homework done right helps, done wrong hurts, and the result is that more homework increases the correlation between parent's socioeconomic status and student performance. But on average is approximately net neutral for learning.
But there is one very strong correlation. More homework means more conflict in the home...
FWIW my 5-year-old started kindergarten this year, and not only is he given about two hours of homework a week (expected to be spread out over a few days), but he is expected to do it without parental help/supervision, beyond getting him started/explaining the assignment (because he can't read).
If you've ever been around a 5-year-old boy, you know how ridiculous this is.
My 5th grader has never had homework. Each year the new teacher says the same thing: homework has been conclusively proven to not only provide no benefit, and actually to increase negative outcomes. Each teacher says she stopped assigning homework about 5 to 15 years ago, and the result has been categorically positive.
You are misinformed about research on homework. Even when you control for socioeconomic status homework has a large positive impact. [This is a nice review of many papers](http://www.ascd.org/publications/educational-leadership/mar0...). The only place where homework is questionable is for very young children, like in kindergarten.
Our district has a new policy this year for primary school: no project work at home (This was historically a HUGE time sync), and no at-home writing assignments. Typically, this means homework is whatever math the kids didn't finish in math class. It has been a HUGE benefit vis-a-vis family time and overall stress. Our oldest, now in 5th grade, had a similar experience to another commenter in grades K-4, where he had multiple hours/wk of work, plus writing assignments and periodic projects. So hard on everybody, with extremely limited ROI.
I have 4 children and I actively help them with/cheat on their homework. They are assigned too damn much of it. They are all getting good grades and I don't think it is impacting them academically.
All this commotion around what time to begin soul-crushing conformity factory amuses me grimly. Studies show children are slightly less psychologically crippled for life if you let them sleep in for an hour before putting them in the electric Skinner Box. Terrific.
Charter schools and home schooling are viable alternatives, and if done well they have decent results as far as college admissions and career opportunities go.
I didn't even realize schools started before 8... I believe that's when my high school started. Thinking back to the useless slug that I was in the mornings as a teenager, I can't imagine this will do anything but help learning.
If only there had been a law saying college classes couldn't start before 11am (or 2pm on Fridays) when I was there...
This is a great move by California. My family engaged with school district officials a few times on why we started school so early, when there is so much research showing it is harmful for teenager. The answer we got was... buses and sports. And little kids.
Basically, the district needed to make sure that elementary school kids weren't walking to school or waiting for buses in the dark, so they had to start around 9a at the earliest. Since they needed to share the buses, they couldn't start all grade levels at the same time.
The reason why they went 725a, 750a, and 9a instead of something like 8a, 9a, 930a is that if you started Jr high or High school at 930a, they wouldn't start after school activities till 4p and would go after dark in the winter.
This always seemed an insane argument to me, but was said multiple times. My home district looks to still use the same bell schedule too.
As a non-American I find this interesting, that school start times would be decided based on availability of buses.
Here in Australia, most schools don't own their own buses (I see a few expensive private schools do). Buses are provided by private bus companies and/or by a government-owned bus company (depending on who provides regular non-school bus services in the area). The bus fare is either paid by the student's parents, or else by the government, depending on factors like how long it would take the student to walk, how old the student is, whether they have a disability, etc. The government subsidises buses for all school students equally, irrespective of whether they attend private schools or government-run schools. I don't know how exactly schools decide their start times, but I doubt bus availability would have much to do with it. Bus availability is something for bus companies to worry about, not schools.
I don’t know what to say..I grew up in India. My mom would wake me up at 4.30, make me a hot beverage and go back to sleep. I would study in the early hours because she believed that early morning is the best time for the mind to absorb and retain what I study.
Go for a brisk walk at 6.00 and leave for school by 7.15-7.30. School was from 8.30-3.30. 8.00-8.30 was morning assembly which was mandatory.
Extra curricular activities like music or dance or outdoor sports till sunset(6.00). My grandmother won’t let me in before 6.00 because she thought that outdoor play was important and in the sun. Freshen up and homework till 8.00. Dinner and then TV time. Reading and to bed by 9.00-9.30.
In high school, less play and more classes. But these tutoring classes were outside. And I would leave by 5.00 to catch the bus to get to them. I was old enough to travel by myself. I loved school. I loved my teachers.
My math tutor from 1989..we keep in touch and she is now teaching me Indian classical music by whatsapp video chat thrice a week. I call her once a year and this year I told her I am joining a neighborhood music group. She made me sing. Entirely disapproved my technique and we started classes immediately.
If my teachers asked me ‘jump’, I would. My school years were the best years of my life. I don’t think I would have had this experience had I grown up in CA in this time and age..and gone to public schools here. Case in point: The public school teachers in my Bay Area city recruit parents and students to strike in their support during their union wage negotiations. It’s a travesty.
I think children should wake up earlier. It’s delightful to wake up before dawn and have a goal. The rest of the day at school becomes easy peasy.
Studies show children don't perform as well in the early morning which is why this change was made. I don't want to de-value your experiences because they sound fantastic. However. Anecdota is not a substitute for science. I suggest skimming the summary by the Centers for Disease Control [1] which references numerous studies in support of schools starting later than 830am. You are of course welcome to wake your children up at any time, should you disagree with the CDC's findings, or you know, if they're morning people.
Children can still wake up early. They're just not forced to PERFORM well early.
You have to understand that not everyone does well in the morning. It's completely unfair to expect everyone to get up and be functioning at the same level in the early morning. That's going to advantage some, and disadvantage others. That's what this is about.
Nothing stops the early bird from getting up early and doing all the things you ascribe to.
> " one-quarter will need to wait an additional 31 to 60 minutes to get going."
So one quarter of Californian schools were starting between 7 and 7:30? I'm surprised there haven't been revolts in the streets about that. That's completely ridiculous.
Apparently this is to accommodate parents who need to leave for work at ridiculously early hours, but if you want to accommodate parents, why only those, and not the parents who prefer to get out of bed a bit later?
My wife and I have arranged it so that she works early (she often leaves at 7:15 when the rest of the family is barely out of bed) and is home in time to pick the kids up from day care, while I take the kids to school at 8:30 and am usually home a bit too late to pick them up (though I work fairly nearby and can still pick them up if I have to).
But if this isn't an option for whatever reason, why not take your kids to pre-school care? Leave early, drop the kids off at pre-school care, go to work, and when school starts, pre-school care ensures the kids get there on time.
Weird thing is the assumption there is a single one-time-fits-all solution. Give some flexibility to kids and families on start time. Optional period 1 paired with optional period 8(or 7 or 9).
I am going to ask this again, as I never receive a satisfactory answer when this subject comes up.
Isn't time all relative? Its just a number, which we adjust by an hour twice a year. It takes us a couple of days to get used to it. Can't people just be more disciplined and go to bed an hour earlier if they need an hours extra sleep? That's effectively what we do in spring when the clocks change.
I came to this conclusion travelling from Chile to Peru, going pretty much directly north. One country had daylight saving for summer the other didn't and on top of that there was an hour difference for time zone - so in total two hours difference. As I say, it took a couple of days to get used to it.
Can anyone give me a decent rebuttal to this argument?
Physiologically there's no difficulty in pushing your circadian around. Heck, various studies have shown that in isolation people's clocks will drift by an hour or more a week.
Culturally though, there is a preferred cycle, and it's some weighted average of the cycle of all the people you interact with. Moving from Chile to Peru and shifting your cycle 2hrs _to match the Peruvian clock_ isn't so bad, but if you shifted 2hrs the other way you'd find it a lot more painful. This is the problem with shifting school hours: not the hours themselves, but how they interact with everyone else's hours.
Finally, there is a privileged circadian, and it's the Sun's. Free, global lighting is just too good to pass up on.
No, not all time is relative and the presence of light has profound impacts on our biological circadian rhythm. Even DST has shown negative health impacts. [1]
I think this doesn't go far enough, there should be a ban on starting before 10 am. During high school I recall frequently falling asleep around 3-4 am and having the alarm go off at 6:30.
Ultimately the buck for public education in US states stops at the state, therefore, this amounts to an administrative change. They set the curricula, is it a stretch to say they should also decide when that curriculum is administered?
Here, in Brazil, when my classes was in the morning, it started 7:00AM. To be at class on time, i was off the bed at 6:00AM, took a breakfast and walked 20 minutes to the school.
It was rough.
They had 2 classes shifts, a 7-11:30AM and another 1-5:30AM, depending of your grade and the school, it could be on the morning or the evening shift.
Edit: I forgot to mention that i live in a city with 80k habitants, a small-medium city.
At the biggest cities here, like São Paulo, the kids usually have to wake even early to take the bus.
I wonder how the policy discussions looked when considering the impact on poor parents who have to be at work. Maybe the thinking was that the start time of 7:30-8AM was already too late to save these folks, so 8:30AM would not make them much worse off? Or maybe there are fewer people in these circumstances than I fear?
This law is only for grades 7-12, so most affected kids can get themselves to school, or don't need direct supervision between when parents leave for work and when the bus arrives.
Poor kids and parents are almost always penalised: Remove one and another comes up. These same folks are simply being penalised at a different time of day - morning instead of afternoon. This is solved in a number of ways - the most basic being providing before-school programs for the (especially!) the younger children. This can include things like breakfast too.
There will always be people for whom a school start time of X is inconvenient, will there not be? And, while middle- and upper-class people might be more likely to have the standard 9-to-5, there are still plenty that don't (nurses & doctors, for example).
School K-12 started at 8:30am where / when I grew up. I assumed that was just the universal time school started everywhere.
I have a feeling we're in for quite a shock when my daughter starts school in a couple years. Our current routine has her waking up sometime between 7:30 and 9.
As the parent of a high school freshman boy, I've observed that his demand for sleep seems to have recently gone up, but so has his school work load. He's regularly up until 11pm doing homework as it is, and waking up tired at 7am the following day. If they simply shift his school start and end times 30 minutes later, I don't see much net benefit for him.
I found the statistics in Dr. Matthew Walker's Why We Sleep [1] pretty compelling.
Starting an hour layer improves SAT scores:
One of the first
test cases happened in the township of Edina, Minnesota. Here, school start times for teenagers
were shifted from 7:25 a.m. to 8:30 a.m. More striking than the forty-three minutes of extra sleep
that these teens reported getting was the change in academic performance, indexed using a
standardized measure called the Scholastic Assessment Test, or SAT.
In the year before this time change, the average verbal SAT scores of the top-performing
students was a very respectable 605. The following year, after switching to an 8:30 a.m. start time,
that score rose to an average 761 for the same top-tier bracket of students. Math SAT scores also
improved, increasing from an average of 683 in the year prior to the time change, to 739 in the
year after. Add this all up, and you see that investing in delaying school start times—allowing
students more sleep and better alignment with their unchangeable biological rhythms—returned
a net SAT profit of 212 points. That improvement will change which tier of university those
teenagers go to, potentially altering their subsequent life trajectories as a consequence.
(This is one example, that has been replicated many times, he covers more in the book.)
It saves even saves lives:
Yet something even more profound has happened in this ongoing story of later school start
times—something that researchers did not anticipate: the life expectancy of students increased. The leading cause of death among teenagers is road traffic accidents, and in this regard, even
the slightest dose of insufficient sleep can have marked consequences, as we have discussed.
When the Mahtomedi School District of Minnesota pushed their school start time from 7:30 to
8:00 a.m., there was a 60 percent reduction in traffic accidents in drivers sixteen to eighteen years
of age. Teton County in Wyoming enacted an even more dramatic change in school start time,
shifting from a 7:35 a.m. bell to a far more biologically reasonable one of 8:55 a.m. The result was
astonishing—a 70 percent reduction in traffic accidents in sixteen- to eighteen-year-old drivers.
To place that in context, the advent of anti-lock brake technology (ABS)—which prevents the
wheels of a car from seizing up under hard braking, allowing the driver to still maneuver the
vehicle—reduced accident rates by around 20 to 25 percent. It was deemed a revolution. Here is a
simple biological factor—sufficient sleep—that will drop accident rates by more than double that
amount in our teens.
There's more reasons, like improving attendance and decreasing drug/alcohol use, but these are the ones that stuck out to me. There was another statistic that I can't immediately find a quotation for that was pretty mind-blowing for me, which was that in university, the difference in performance in controls and students who started class an hour later was equivalent to the difference between controls and students who had a professor a standard deviation above the average. They even showed that this was dose dependent (an extra hour later had more effect). I think it's pretty incredible, considering the skill gap between an average professor and a great one, that simply taking a class at a 10am instead of 8am can increase learning so much.
The benefits are sleep, as the article says. I would guess this outweighs the risk that a few students use the opportunity to stay up longer. (although pre 8am seems excessively early to me - we started around 8:50)
> I'm particularly concerned that this will incentivize students to just stay up later, negating many benefits of increased sleep.
This is missing the point. Teenagers staying up late is often interpreted as laziness or disobedience, when there is increasing evidence that it's a symptom of an (ab)normal circadian rhythm.
- Does this only impact "regular" classes, or does it also impact optionally-early schedules (a.k.a. "0 Period", as the middle and high schools called it where I grew up)?
- Has there been any consideration on the impact from students having less time to do homework every night if school starts (and therefore ends) later?
My mother works for a school district in California. There was an open hearing around moving the starting school time from 8:00 am to 7:00 am. There's been countless research showing that this is generally bad for children to wake up this early (I'm sorry for not linking a reference).
At the hearing, there are some words that go something like "Children come first" printed on some wall in a large font. My mother made her case that starting so early isn't a good idea, and is bad for children and they may as well remove those words. The reason for the change is that teachers generally live pretty close to the school they teach at. They also have a car. So, for them they can wake up at 6:30 and make it on time. Whereas kids, especially poor kids, might live further and may be taking a bus where the bus pick up times could be as early as 6:00 am so the kids are waking up even earlier just to make it. An early starting time, generally, benefited the teachers as they can wake up later and they get out of class around 2:00 pm. The after-school programs then rake in cash by keeping kids longer since most parents don't get off work until 5:00 pm.
tl;dr the early starting times were to make teachers happy. Good on California to put students over teachers. Now, if only we can raise teacher's salaries.
[+] [-] meristem|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] socalnate1|6 years ago|reply
(This was in the 90's)
[+] [-] non-entity|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unqueued|6 years ago|reply
I strongly suspect that school hours are based around parents work hours, even if that is not what they say.
[+] [-] ACow_Adonis|6 years ago|reply
From the outside that just seems absolutely bonkers?
[+] [-] proverbialbunny|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mygo|6 years ago|reply
But the 10 hours wasn't my biggest complaint -- it was how little time we had to eat lunch. Lunch period was only 30 minutes, and the line to get food was 15-20 minutes long. So I only had like ~10 minutes to eat my lunch once I got it and use the remaining ~5 to be back in class in my seat or be tardy. We weren't allowed to eat in class or we'd get into trouble and get written up, so that ~10 minutes to eat once you actually account for all the logistics was it.
I don't think people realize how important it is for kids to get their nutrition when they're in school for so long trying to learn. Nutrition has a direct impact to learning. I think lunch period should have been longer. It felt like an afterthought in the schedule.
[+] [-] jcims|6 years ago|reply
Another benefit of delaying start is fewer kids driving in the dark in winter and more time for morning fog to burn off on those marginal days that weren't bad enough in town for a delay.
[+] [-] jumpingmice|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chaosbutters|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dsalzman|6 years ago|reply
Really happy to see these laws getting put in place!
[+] [-] btilly|6 years ago|reply
Now can we pay attention to all of the research saying that homework creates stress but doesn't work, and have schools stop assigning so much?
More precisely, the research shows that homework done right helps, done wrong hurts, and the result is that more homework increases the correlation between parent's socioeconomic status and student performance. But on average is approximately net neutral for learning.
But there is one very strong correlation. More homework means more conflict in the home...
[+] [-] duderific|6 years ago|reply
If you've ever been around a 5-year-old boy, you know how ridiculous this is.
[+] [-] tylerl|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] light_hue_1|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eitally|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gregpilling|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] carapace|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] polynomial|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drak0n1c|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] awillen|6 years ago|reply
If only there had been a law saying college classes couldn't start before 11am (or 2pm on Fridays) when I was there...
[+] [-] topkai22|6 years ago|reply
Basically, the district needed to make sure that elementary school kids weren't walking to school or waiting for buses in the dark, so they had to start around 9a at the earliest. Since they needed to share the buses, they couldn't start all grade levels at the same time.
The reason why they went 725a, 750a, and 9a instead of something like 8a, 9a, 930a is that if you started Jr high or High school at 930a, they wouldn't start after school activities till 4p and would go after dark in the winter.
This always seemed an insane argument to me, but was said multiple times. My home district looks to still use the same bell schedule too.
[+] [-] skissane|6 years ago|reply
Here in Australia, most schools don't own their own buses (I see a few expensive private schools do). Buses are provided by private bus companies and/or by a government-owned bus company (depending on who provides regular non-school bus services in the area). The bus fare is either paid by the student's parents, or else by the government, depending on factors like how long it would take the student to walk, how old the student is, whether they have a disability, etc. The government subsidises buses for all school students equally, irrespective of whether they attend private schools or government-run schools. I don't know how exactly schools decide their start times, but I doubt bus availability would have much to do with it. Bus availability is something for bus companies to worry about, not schools.
[+] [-] jelliclesfarm|6 years ago|reply
Go for a brisk walk at 6.00 and leave for school by 7.15-7.30. School was from 8.30-3.30. 8.00-8.30 was morning assembly which was mandatory.
Extra curricular activities like music or dance or outdoor sports till sunset(6.00). My grandmother won’t let me in before 6.00 because she thought that outdoor play was important and in the sun. Freshen up and homework till 8.00. Dinner and then TV time. Reading and to bed by 9.00-9.30.
In high school, less play and more classes. But these tutoring classes were outside. And I would leave by 5.00 to catch the bus to get to them. I was old enough to travel by myself. I loved school. I loved my teachers.
My math tutor from 1989..we keep in touch and she is now teaching me Indian classical music by whatsapp video chat thrice a week. I call her once a year and this year I told her I am joining a neighborhood music group. She made me sing. Entirely disapproved my technique and we started classes immediately.
If my teachers asked me ‘jump’, I would. My school years were the best years of my life. I don’t think I would have had this experience had I grown up in CA in this time and age..and gone to public schools here. Case in point: The public school teachers in my Bay Area city recruit parents and students to strike in their support during their union wage negotiations. It’s a travesty.
I think children should wake up earlier. It’s delightful to wake up before dawn and have a goal. The rest of the day at school becomes easy peasy.
[+] [-] arcticbull|6 years ago|reply
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/features/school-start-times/index.html
[+] [-] rubicon33|6 years ago|reply
You have to understand that not everyone does well in the morning. It's completely unfair to expect everyone to get up and be functioning at the same level in the early morning. That's going to advantage some, and disadvantage others. That's what this is about.
Nothing stops the early bird from getting up early and doing all the things you ascribe to.
[+] [-] mcv|6 years ago|reply
So one quarter of Californian schools were starting between 7 and 7:30? I'm surprised there haven't been revolts in the streets about that. That's completely ridiculous.
Apparently this is to accommodate parents who need to leave for work at ridiculously early hours, but if you want to accommodate parents, why only those, and not the parents who prefer to get out of bed a bit later?
My wife and I have arranged it so that she works early (she often leaves at 7:15 when the rest of the family is barely out of bed) and is home in time to pick the kids up from day care, while I take the kids to school at 8:30 and am usually home a bit too late to pick them up (though I work fairly nearby and can still pick them up if I have to).
But if this isn't an option for whatever reason, why not take your kids to pre-school care? Leave early, drop the kids off at pre-school care, go to work, and when school starts, pre-school care ensures the kids get there on time.
[+] [-] WillPostForFood|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] collyw|6 years ago|reply
Isn't time all relative? Its just a number, which we adjust by an hour twice a year. It takes us a couple of days to get used to it. Can't people just be more disciplined and go to bed an hour earlier if they need an hours extra sleep? That's effectively what we do in spring when the clocks change.
I came to this conclusion travelling from Chile to Peru, going pretty much directly north. One country had daylight saving for summer the other didn't and on top of that there was an hour difference for time zone - so in total two hours difference. As I say, it took a couple of days to get used to it.
Can anyone give me a decent rebuttal to this argument?
[+] [-] andyljones|6 years ago|reply
Culturally though, there is a preferred cycle, and it's some weighted average of the cycle of all the people you interact with. Moving from Chile to Peru and shifting your cycle 2hrs _to match the Peruvian clock_ isn't so bad, but if you shifted 2hrs the other way you'd find it a lot more painful. This is the problem with shifting school hours: not the hours themselves, but how they interact with everyone else's hours.
Finally, there is a privileged circadian, and it's the Sun's. Free, global lighting is just too good to pass up on.
[+] [-] x3n0ph3n3|6 years ago|reply
1. https://www.businessinsider.com/daylight-saving-time-is-dead...
[+] [-] chadlavi|6 years ago|reply
You ever met kids?
[+] [-] haywirez|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] malchow|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] arcticbull|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] trezemanero|6 years ago|reply
They had 2 classes shifts, a 7-11:30AM and another 1-5:30AM, depending of your grade and the school, it could be on the morning or the evening shift.
Edit: I forgot to mention that i live in a city with 80k habitants, a small-medium city. At the biggest cities here, like São Paulo, the kids usually have to wake even early to take the bus.
[+] [-] ijpoijpoihpiuoh|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] secabeen|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Broken_Hippo|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dlivingston|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] crooked-v|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] war1025|6 years ago|reply
I have a feeling we're in for quite a shock when my daughter starts school in a couple years. Our current routine has her waking up sometime between 7:30 and 9.
[+] [-] epmaybe|6 years ago|reply
I'm particularly concerned that this will incentivize students to just stay up later, negating many benefits of increased sleep.
[+] [-] mLuby|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ryanhuff|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] moozilla|6 years ago|reply
Starting an hour layer improves SAT scores:
One of the first test cases happened in the township of Edina, Minnesota. Here, school start times for teenagers were shifted from 7:25 a.m. to 8:30 a.m. More striking than the forty-three minutes of extra sleep that these teens reported getting was the change in academic performance, indexed using a standardized measure called the Scholastic Assessment Test, or SAT.
In the year before this time change, the average verbal SAT scores of the top-performing students was a very respectable 605. The following year, after switching to an 8:30 a.m. start time, that score rose to an average 761 for the same top-tier bracket of students. Math SAT scores also improved, increasing from an average of 683 in the year prior to the time change, to 739 in the year after. Add this all up, and you see that investing in delaying school start times—allowing students more sleep and better alignment with their unchangeable biological rhythms—returned a net SAT profit of 212 points. That improvement will change which tier of university those teenagers go to, potentially altering their subsequent life trajectories as a consequence.
(This is one example, that has been replicated many times, he covers more in the book.)
It saves even saves lives:
Yet something even more profound has happened in this ongoing story of later school start times—something that researchers did not anticipate: the life expectancy of students increased. The leading cause of death among teenagers is road traffic accidents, and in this regard, even the slightest dose of insufficient sleep can have marked consequences, as we have discussed. When the Mahtomedi School District of Minnesota pushed their school start time from 7:30 to 8:00 a.m., there was a 60 percent reduction in traffic accidents in drivers sixteen to eighteen years of age. Teton County in Wyoming enacted an even more dramatic change in school start time, shifting from a 7:35 a.m. bell to a far more biologically reasonable one of 8:55 a.m. The result was astonishing—a 70 percent reduction in traffic accidents in sixteen- to eighteen-year-old drivers.
To place that in context, the advent of anti-lock brake technology (ABS)—which prevents the wheels of a car from seizing up under hard braking, allowing the driver to still maneuver the vehicle—reduced accident rates by around 20 to 25 percent. It was deemed a revolution. Here is a simple biological factor—sufficient sleep—that will drop accident rates by more than double that amount in our teens.
There's more reasons, like improving attendance and decreasing drug/alcohol use, but these are the ones that stuck out to me. There was another statistic that I can't immediately find a quotation for that was pretty mind-blowing for me, which was that in university, the difference in performance in controls and students who started class an hour later was equivalent to the difference between controls and students who had a professor a standard deviation above the average. They even showed that this was dose dependent (an extra hour later had more effect). I think it's pretty incredible, considering the skill gap between an average professor and a great one, that simply taking a class at a 10am instead of 8am can increase learning so much.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Why-We-Sleep-Unlocking-Dreams/dp/1501...
[+] [-] joshvm|6 years ago|reply
> I'm particularly concerned that this will incentivize students to just stay up later, negating many benefits of increased sleep.
This is missing the point. Teenagers staying up late is often interpreted as laziness or disobedience, when there is increasing evidence that it's a symptom of an (ab)normal circadian rhythm.
[+] [-] yellowapple|6 years ago|reply
- Does this only impact "regular" classes, or does it also impact optionally-early schedules (a.k.a. "0 Period", as the middle and high schools called it where I grew up)?
- Has there been any consideration on the impact from students having less time to do homework every night if school starts (and therefore ends) later?
[+] [-] avischiffmann|6 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dillon|6 years ago|reply
At the hearing, there are some words that go something like "Children come first" printed on some wall in a large font. My mother made her case that starting so early isn't a good idea, and is bad for children and they may as well remove those words. The reason for the change is that teachers generally live pretty close to the school they teach at. They also have a car. So, for them they can wake up at 6:30 and make it on time. Whereas kids, especially poor kids, might live further and may be taking a bus where the bus pick up times could be as early as 6:00 am so the kids are waking up even earlier just to make it. An early starting time, generally, benefited the teachers as they can wake up later and they get out of class around 2:00 pm. The after-school programs then rake in cash by keeping kids longer since most parents don't get off work until 5:00 pm.
tl;dr the early starting times were to make teachers happy. Good on California to put students over teachers. Now, if only we can raise teacher's salaries.