Just a quick piece from Miller-McCune highlighting one of the many stupidities of contemporary education: high school start times. Basically, high schools have, over the last two decades, started earlier and earlier, so that millions of teenagers across America now start their school day at 7 AM. Conversely, every study ever done on the subject demonstrates that grades, attendance, and focus all increase amongst students if the day starts at 8 or, heaven forbid, 8:30 AM.
As this article demonstrates, there are some reasons to start the day earlier, but they are all pretty flimsy when stacked against the blunt fact that kids do better with a later start time. Seriously, it’s a minor point in the larger game of education reform, but even if such a minor point has proven to be so difficult to reverse, what kind of promise does larger reform hold? I guess states or districts mandating later start times isn’t as sexy as investing in charter schools, but it would also affect a whole lot more students with almost zero added cost — and shouldn’t that be what everybody wants?
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