When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing(22)
Although we can’t always determine when we start, we can exert some influence on beginnings—and considerable influence on the consequences of less than ideal ones. The recipe is straightforward. In most endeavors, we should be awake to the power of beginnings and aim to make a strong start. If that fails, we can try to make a fresh start. And if the beginning is beyond our control, we can enlist others to attempt a group start. These are the three principles of successful beginnings: Start right. Start again. Start together.
STARTING RIGHT
In high school, I studied French for four years. I don’t remember much of what I learned, but one aspect of French class that I do recall might explain some of my deficiencies. Mademoiselle Inglis’s class met first period—around 7:55 a.m., I think. She would usually warm us up by posing the question that French teachers—from the European language academies of the seventeenth century to my own central Ohio public school in the 1980s—have always asked their students: Comment allez-vous? “How are you?”
In Mlle. Inglis’s class, every answer from every student on every morning was the same: Je suis fatigué. “I’m tired.” Richard was fatigué. Lori was fatiguée. I myself was frequently très fatigué. To a French-speaking visitor, my twenty-six classmates and I probably sounded as if we were suffering from a bizarre form of group narcolepsy. Quelle horreur! Tout le monde est fatigué!
But the real explanation is less exotic. We were all just teenagers trying to use our brains before eight o’clock in the morning.
As I explained in chapter 1, young people begin undergoing the most profound change in chronobiology of their lifetimes around puberty. They fall asleep later in the evening and, left to their own biological imperatives, wake up later in the morning—a period of peak owliness that stretches into their early twenties.
Yet most secondary schools around the world force these extreme owls into schedules designed for chirpy seven-year-old larks. The result is that teenage students sacrifice sleep and suffer the consequences. “Adolescents who get less sleep than they need are at higher risk for depression, suicide, substance abuse and car crashes,” according to the journal Pediatrics. “Evidence also links short sleep duration with obesity and a weakened immune system.”2 While younger students score higher on standardized tests scheduled in the morning, teenagers do better later in the day. Early start times correlate strongly with worse grades and lower test scores, especially in math and language.3 Indeed, a study from McGill University and the Douglas Mental Health University Institute, both in Montreal, found that the amount and quality of sleep explained a sizable portion of the difference in student performance in—guess what?—French classes.4
The evidence of harm is so massive that in 2014 the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) issued a policy statement calling for middle schools and high schools to begin no earlier than 8:30 a.m.5 A few years later, the CDC added its voice, concluding that “delaying school start times has the potential for the greatest population impact” in boosting teenage learning and well-being.
Many school districts—from Dobbs Ferry, New York, to Houston, Texas, to Melbourne, Australia—have heeded the evidence and shown impressive results. For example, one study examined three years of data on 9,000 students from eight high schools in Minnesota, Colorado, and Wyoming that had changed their schedules to begin school after 8:35 a.m. At these schools, attendance rose and tardiness declined. Students earned higher grades “in core subject areas of math, English, science and social studies” and improved their performance on state and national standardized tests. At one school, the number of car crashes for teen drivers fell by 70 percent after it pushed its start time from 7:35 a.m. to 8:55 a.m.6
Another study of 30,000 students across seven states found that two years after implementing a later start time high school graduation rates increased by more than 11 percent.7 One review of the start-time literature concludes that later start times correspond to “improved attendance, less tardiness . . . and better grades.”8 Equally important, students fare better not just in the classroom but also in many other domains of their lives. Considerable research finds that delaying school starting times improves motivation, boosts emotional well-being, reduces depression, and lessens impulsivity.9
The benefits aren’t just for high school students; they extend to college students as well. At the United States Air Force Academy, delaying the school day’s start time by fifty minutes improved academic performance; the later that first period began, the higher the students’ grades.10 In fact, a study of university students in both the United States and the United Kingdom, published in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, concludes that the optimal time for most college classes is after 11 a.m.11
Even the price is right. When an economist studied the Wake County, North Carolina, school system, he found that “a 1 hour delay in start time increases standardized test scores on both math and reading tests by three percentile points,” with the strongest effects on the weakest students.12 But being an economist, he also calculated the cost-benefit ratio of changing the schedule and concluded that later start times delivered more bang for the educational buck than almost any other initiative available to policy makers, a view echoed by a Brookings Institution analysis.13
Yet the pleas of the nation’s pediatricians and its top public-health officials, as well as the experiences of schools that have challenged the status quo, have been largely ignored. Today, fewer than one in five U.S. middle schools and high schools follow the AAP’s recommendation to begin school after 8:30 a.m. The average start time for American adolescents remains 8:03 a.m., which means huge numbers of schools start in the 7 a.m. hour.14