Giving teens 30 extra minutes to start their school day leads to more alertness in class, better moods, less tardiness, and even healthier breakfasts, a small study found.
“The results were stunning. There’s no other word to use,” said Patricia Moss, academic dean at the Rhode Island boarding school where the study was done. “We didn’t think we’d get that much bang for the buck.”
The results appear in July’s Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine. The results mirror those at a few schools that have delayed starting times more than half an hour.
Researchers say there’s a reason why even 30 minutes can make a big difference. Teens tend to be in their deepest sleep around dawn — when they typically need to arise for school. Interrupting that sleep can leave them groggy, especially since they also tend to have trouble falling asleep before 11 p.m.
I suppose we’ll keep fighting biology for a couple more decades, trashing “shitty teachers” and “lazy kids,” before this study is replicated a couple hundred more times and someone somewhere in a policy position clues in.
Brien Jackson
I remember arguing this with my high school principal my senior year, pointing out that no job involving skilled labor starts at 7:30 AM, because for the most part you’d expect people to be dragging at that point, so why would you expect teenagers, whose bodies need more sleep anyway, to try to learn whatever you had first period that early?
Third Eye Open
This is what I am blaming my C+ GPA in Highschool, on…yeah, that’s the ticket.
Cat Lady
And the little kids, who are up and at ’em at dawn but start school at 8:30, are falling asleep on the buses on the way home. Hey school superintendents – kids aren’t needed in the fields anymore!
demimondian
We’ll keep talking about this forever, for a very simple reason: money.
(1) School districts can’t afford to run the larger fleets of busses that a later start for secondary schools would entail.
(2) Most parents can’t afford to stay late enough to get high-schoolers off to school later. (And if you think that getting a high-schooler out the door is easier than getting an elementary schooler is…you’re not the parent of both. We are, and it’s far easier to get the fourth grader on his way than it is to get the tenth grader on *his* way. And since the tenth-grader does almost all of his classes at home, we rarely have to get him out the door before 8:30am.)
(3) Most students can’t start after-school jobs any later in the day. There are restrictions about how late they can work on school nights — as there should be — and that means they have to start early enough in the day to earn the money they. (Oh, you didn’t realize that children still provide significant components of their families’ income? Yeah, no — they do. Still.)
Delia
@demimondian:
I now remember having this argument before. The clincher was extra-curricular activities, which all require the presence of teachers/coaches, all start soon after school lets out, and go until 5:00 or 6:00.
kdaug
@Cat Lady: Ding. I brought this up in a thread a week or so ago… how many of our current laws/customs are based on a reality that no longer exists? On schools, I brought up the obvious example of the summer break (to work the fields and harvest).
We need a sunset provision on all laws. Re-evaluate each in 10 years, and if you can, pass it again. If you can’t, it’s probably not working anymore.
Yeah, right. Not going to happen. Because we don’t just have a critical-thinking deficit in this country, but also an introspection deficit. So much we do is in direct contradiction to our self-interest as a nation.
(ETA: …due to outdated “traditional” ways of doing things that made sense when they were formed, but no longer have any apparent benefit in today’s world.
Davis X. Machina
Coaches. The one, true, over-riding and irremovable obstacle is couaches. You can’t start practices till the school day is over. and games are won and lost in practice, before the season even starts.
malraux
@kdaug: As cool as summer vacation is, there’s no point in it for educational purposes. I could see some point in month long breaks at some point. But getting out for the summer just means that kids in the worst homelife will inevitably fall behind those who get to go to summer camp activities.
Spencer
What’s going on here is much more evil than what you all think.
Hint: The public policy is informed by this science. it’s just the people making the rules want to keep people stupid. Depriving kids of needed sleep is one easy, cheap way of doing that.
jwb
The basic problem is the bus schedule. In order to get everyone home by somewhere around 5 pm, school districts either have to buy a lot more buses and hire more drivers or someone has to start school at 7:30 am. Here, they start the elementary kids at 7:30, so they are the ones falling asleep at school.
Bootlegger
John, you know better, it will take a campaign manager who can spin it into a winning message before we see it change.
Quaker in a Basement
OK, but my teen years are far, far in the past. How come I’m so groggy in the morning?
scarshapedstar
Yep. But then the summer camp lobby would be mighty pissed.
This country’s educational system will not be fixed anytime soon because, when you get right down to it, it’s just not a priority. There are too many groups involved that are looking out for their own interests instead of their students’; and the right-wingers are happy to see public education crumble and die for ideological and religious reasons; and our corporate overlords would rather keep the permanent underclass in the dark.
Of course, this means that our country will inevitably fail to keep itself running and descend into Idiocracy, but… well, there is no but. The end.
Also, why is there this assumption that you can’t just shorten the frickin’ school day? I feel like there were 6 periods when I was in grade school. Shorten them all by 5 minutes. Bam! Sooner or later, people have to admit that this would be an improvement.
jwb
@Spencer: Personally, I think TV is sufficient to keep people stupid.
Bootlegger
@Third Eye Open: +1, that has to be the case for me, couldn’t have been the fact that I never studied because it was too easy and I could C’s for without trying…and sleeping through class.
kdaug
@malraux: That’s precisely it. When we were a more agrarian society (circa 1850), it made sense – one schoolhouse, parents didn’t really want the kids off the farm, but allowed for it as long as they were there to work the fields during growing and harvest (and milked the cows before they set off for the schoolhouse.)
But the rationale is no longer there, and we’re getting our asses kicked (educationally) by a whole bunch of countries who school their children year-round.
Why cut a third of our school year off, due to a centuries-old “tradition”?
Bootlegger
@malraux: Divide the year into quarters with an similar length break in each quarter. Two weeks over the December holidays, two in spring, two in summer, two in fall, easy.
demimondian
@kdaug: Actually, we aren’t.
Year-round schooling is rare everywhere — and the State of Iowa, which *does* provide its students with generous vacation time, has public schools which are the envy of the world.
Bootlegger
@jwb: TV alone doesn’t make people stoopid. My family is full of college grads with high IQs who watch a lot of TV. My kids watch all kinds of cool stuff on the National Geographic Channel and other educational programming.
Lolis
The high schools in Austin start later than elementary schools. I think they start at 8:30 AM.
clyons11
It’s not the leftover from agricultural days – there have been city schools for quite some time now, after all. Buses are a major factor (this has taken almost as hard a hit as custodians/maintenance), but extracurriculars (athletics, band/choir, etc) simply cannot begin at 4 pm.
Hell, most of my students have already reached middle-management status in terms of hours-per-week (32.5 hours of school + 10-to-15 hours of extracurriculars + jobs).
I know it’s tres gauche to believe high school years should feature plenty of time to be with friends (and family!) that might literally last a lifetime, but this is simply not a value unless you’re a DFH.
kdaug
@demimondian: Cite?
kdaug
@clyons11: Which came first, pop. 200-300 townships with a single teacher and a whole bunch of farms, with no obvious advantage to literacy, or the cities? And then the city schools?
Bootlegger
@clyons11: I heard a story on NPR where school officials were making the bus argument. Frankly I’d pay the extra taxes just to keep my elementary school kids off the bus with the “teenagers in the back” who are teaching my 7 and 9 year olds all manner of interesting words.
Adam Collyer
I wrote an “article” about this in our middle school paper when I was in 6th grade. I was 11 years old.
That was in 1995.
Counting on a couple of decades to fix this is still too short, I think.
The Raven
John, John, where did you get the idea that the main purpose of public schools is to to educate? They would be much differently organized, if that was their main job.
& then there’s sleep deprivation in medical school and residency, which I am convinced has a permanent and unhealthy effect on hominid brains.
eemom
sports killed a later HS start time here in my neck of Unreal Virginia this past year. And it wasn’t just the coaches — there was some issue about fields and who gets to use them at what times. It was pretty amazing how efficiently the leagues mobilized against it — maybe some K Street lobbyists amongst the parents.
jwb
@Bootlegger: I think TV is sufficient to make people stupid (i.e., nothing more is needed), and that TV remains the most powerful medium for shaping culture we have (though the intertubes are rapidly approaching it). But I don’t think that all people who watch TV are stupid or that all TV is stupid.
kdaug
@clyons11: As re: this
Shove that strawman in your brainport, skinjob. You think kids don’t socialize at school? At work? At “extracurriculars”?
Yet you trot this out as why they need a third of a year off, every year?
Bootlegger
@The Raven:
No shit. I inquired about my son skipping 4th grade because he was bored, bored, bored waiting for the teacher to make sure no child was left behind. They insisted that they were worried he wouldn’t adapt well to the “social aspects” of hanging out with kids 3-15 months older than him. I finally had to put my foot down and say “your job is to educate him, not teach him the social graces.” As a sociologist I understand that socialization is a latent function of the educational institution, but they were giving it equal weight to their academic function. Putting my foot down worked, which was good because the next place I was gonna put it would have got me arrested.
Mike
Also, a half hour less time to fuck around and, um, fuck, in the afternoon. But then where would those stimulative abstinence program bucks go?
Bootlegger
@jwb: Agreed. Just qualifying your comment. I would also add that stupid people who watch stupid TV magnifies the effect. And there is a lot of stoopid on TV.
Bostondreams
@kdaug:
Not quite true. Many parents sent children as young as two years old to school, simply to get them out of the way. In many cases, they were locked in closets or chained to benches. Check out Kaestle’s Pillars of the Republic for a definitive history of schooling in the 19th century, particularly at the dawn of the common school era.
Keith G
You are are silly people. Get a grip.
To solve this problem all you need to to is give a high stakes test and hold teachers accountable.
It’s their fault anyway.
Bootlegger
@kdaug: Easy ‘daug, I think you are reading clyon wrong and you two actually agree.
Bootlegger
@Keith G:
Yeah, burn ’em at the stake.
(we are still snarking aren’t we?)
Roger Moore
@clyons11:
Then they should schedule the extracurricular activities before school, so only the students participating in them are forced to get up that early. It’s dumb to design the schedule for the convenience of optional stuff that only a subset of students participate in at the expense of good scheduling for the mandatory stuff everyone has to do.
Cap'n Billy
Would love to follow up on this topic, but can’t get the AP link to work in either Firefox or Safari. I’m on a local school board and we kick this around all the time.
Bostondreams
@Davis X. Machina:
As a social studies teacher at the high school level, I get so frustrated with the association between my department and coaches. We almost always get the coaches in our department. This upcoming year will be the worst. I was specifically told that the only reason they are replacing the person in our department who is leaving is because they needed a place for the defensive line coach. It was that, or no fourth teacher.
kdaug
@Bootlegger: I had exactly that experience – I skipped first grade altogether, and was always at least a year younger than my classmates.
In truth, I think it did add a streak of irascible misanthrope to my general outlook, but YMMV.
jwb
@Roger Moore: Everyone who’s not a DFH knows very well that the whole point of school lies in the extracurriculum, especially football, so it’s only responsible that the schedule should reflect that fact.
Fern
@clyons11: I have an issue with this much homework on top of a full day of school. Plus a lot of the homework that gets assigned is poorly designed has limited learning value.
demimondian
@Roger Moore: You think that they don’t?
Don’t tell me, let me guess. You don’t have kids in school, do you?
JGabriel
John Cole:
Or, more likely, we’ll keep trashing the teachers & kids for centuries longer, because the study doesn’t tell us anything we haven’t already known for millenia: teenagers have trouble getting up early and going to bed early.
Hell, we’d known that the planets revolve around the sun for almost half a millenia before the Catholic Church finally got around to apologizing to Galileo. Conservatives & Fundamentalists are far more stubborn and crazy than Catholics.
So don’t expect a couple hundred repetitions of the study to change anything. Rather than letting kids get up later, C&F’s will just demand more homework to keep the kids up late and busy at night, because suffering builds character and breaks their rebellious spirits!
(It’s shocking how many C&F’s seem to think that “suffer the children” is Jesus’s way of saying “spare the rod and spoil the child” instead of its actual meaning of “don’t hinder them – show them forbearance, tolerance, and love”. Assholes.)
.
kdaug
@Bootlegger: In retrospect, I believe you’re right. And Clyons11 – my apologies, I was reading your screen name as “Cylons” – hence my “skinjob” reference. Sometimes my geek shows through.
Allison W.
Uhm, what of the parents and their work schedule?
Bootlegger
@kdaug:
That describes my kid precisely. He “gets” the lesson on Monday then is expected to sit quietly while it’s repeated four more times for an hour each time. He entertains himself by trying to outsmart the teacher, and I’m sure you understand how well that goes down.
jon
One of the biggest problems for single parents in their employment is the school schedules. Instead of having schools that have a schedule similar to and overlapping a normal workday, we have schools with an early drop off on Wednesdays (at least we do in Arizona, and it has something to do with teacher training and other NCLB nonsense) and all sorts of other things that seem to be a promotion of this idiotic daycare industry that serves needs that would be easily fulfilled by the public schools. Instead of a long school day with time before and after to conduct extracurricular events and having such things be part of the school schedule, it’s been decided that it’s better to have a school day end before workdays do, pay for people to move the children from school to someplace else, and pay more for the warehousing of said children for an hour or three before their parent can pick them up. It’s wildly inefficient, completely absurd, and absolutely indefensible. It’s almost as if the school schedules were devised by the same idiots who thought of our public and private health insurance companies. If there’s any business that could easily be replaced by governmental expansion (and for the better,) it would be the daycare industry.
Yeah, give children some time before school begins to settle in and wake up. And give them some optional time after school ends to do other things, whether they are getting tutoring, marching in the band, making art, playing sports, or just hanging out. But whatever is done, just make it so we don’t pretend that every child has a stay-at-home parent or lives within walking distance of their school.
As for the school year, there’s little reason to stick to an agrarian calendar. But there’s also little reason to turn children’s lives into nonstop school. This may seem contradictory based on my desire to help parents work, but I’m in favor of schools being available all the time but not being needed all the time. I’m for the schools being there all the time, but the students being there as much as they need to be.
Whatever needs to change will involve money, make the teachers have a harder time staying accredited, and go against tradition. But if the tradition sucks, it’s worth changing. This tradition sucks.
Bootlegger
@Fern: You mean worksheet 34-1.4 which looks exactly like the standardized test questions is a waste of time? I’m just speechless.
Turbulence
@Quaker in a Basement: There’s a fairly reasonable theory that claims that many people in the western world have a fracked up sleep schedule because of electronic lighting at night. Here’s the deal. Human sleep/wake cycles are regulated by the hormone melatonin. Melatonin is produced by the pineal gland; its production is regulated by exposure to light. But not just any light: it turns out the pineal gland is only sensitive to a fairly narrow part of the spectrum: basically, blue light. Now, after sunset, we’re bathed in white light from CFL bulbs and computer monitors. That white light includes lots of blue light which convinces the pineal gland that it is still daylight outside. Which screws up your sleep schedule.
How to fix it? Me and Mrs. Turbulence are experimenting with a couple of things. First, we’ve got some yellow/orange-ish coated CFLs for use in our apartment after sunset. They are basically standard white CFLs that filter out the blue light that the pineal gland is sensitive to. We also installed programs on our computers that track sunrise/sunset times and cut down on the blue light after sunset. Finally, we just got a sunrise alarm clock.
Bootlegger
@kdaug: Have you seen the new ad: “And the geek shall inherit the earth”? I need to find that as a bumper sticker.
Bootlegger
@jon: +1 on the school/work schedule lack of synergy, totally insane.
Fern
@Bootlegger: I know. Daring opinion, is it not.
Quaker in a Basement
@Turbulence: Zow! I was only about half serious, but that’s freakin’ awesome! Thanks, Turb’!
Bootlegger
@Fern: I was completely floored the first time I went to an open house and met the “testing supervisor”. First of all, I was the only parent who bothered to see her. But the disturbing part was when she handed me the prior year’s standardized tests. I was leafing through them and told her she handed me the wrong stack, these were homework pages. No, she said, those are the tests, the homework is designed to look like the tests.
What is the point of “accountability” and “assessment” if this is how it’s done? (yes, that is a rhetorical question, but consider it an opening for more fun)
Josie
I worked for 30 years in the field of education, both as a teacher and a librarian. Given the contrast between the things that we know about the way children learn best and the way that schools are organized, it is hard to believe that the powers that be are interested in educating children to a high degree. There are probably some schools doing a good job, but they are few and far between. Many other priorities take precedence, such as politics, sports, parents’ schedules, administrators’ convenience and availability of money and resources. Until we take education as seriously as some other countries, we will continue to fall behind. I’m glad my kids are grown and done with the system. If I had school age children today, I would be tempted to home school.
scottinnj
We raised this in our school district (which has a 7:20 AM start time) however the response that we got back was that in state rankings of schools the total hours/week were a factor. so having more hours in and of itself meant we had a better rank (all else equal) and if we wanted to push the day later this might mean 15 minutes less/day. This would mean our school ranking would fall and there go property values thank you very much next question.
kdaug
@Bootlegger: Argh, that’s the worst. The sheer boredom of K-12 (well, -1) is what I remember most.
On the flipside, there are drawbacks to jumping a grade. One is size – I’m not a particularly big guy anyway, and in a school district where football is king (Plano, TX), being a year smaller than your peers can be an issue.
But to escape the boredom was worth it.
Litlebritdifrnt
@demimondian:
Yeah but the question is
a) why do you need to get the kids out of the door so early, so you can go to work?
b) why do the kids have to come back from school so late, so you can work?
c) why do you have to work?
http://americathegrimtruth.wordpress.com/
Two working parents who do it by choice is one thing, two working parents who do it out of necessity is another.
justcorbly
School should start at 10 am and run to 4pm. However, this would play havoc with parental schedules.
Litlebritdifrnt
Oh and how many people do not actually know that teachers do not get paid for those “two months of vacation” which everyone likes to tout as teachers being lazy. Teachers in the US are paid ten months a year. How many of you would sign up to be employed in a job that basically makes you “unemployed” for two months of the year.
Faisal
Football coaches should be lobbying their principals to have school start later so their students had enough sleep, since getting adequate sleep causes football players to play better. The last time this story went around, one of the articles had an interview with a coach who’d lost the battle to shift the schedule later and then was surprised to suddenly find his team beating everyone in sight.
Anyway, what Turbulence said. People who spend too much of their evenings in front of a monitor should check out f.lux.
jon
@Litlebritdifrnt: It is a seasonal job of some sort, with long hours and ridiculous expectations. And those two months are for teachers to be lazy in classrooms of their own, trying to put in the hours to be
trainedcertified in the new codewords for the new metrics regarding the new standards under which they’ll do the same job they always did but using Extra Special New Government-Approved Measurable Methodology that must be changed on an annual basis to ensure that neither the testers nor the tested know just what the hell it is they’re supposed to be doing, since that would spoil the fun. And in the absence of adult supervision…“And all the while, Graham slept on, dreaming of a world where he can do just what he wanted to.”
Amanda in the South Bay
Am I the only person who is at her best in the morning? Seriously, I guess I’m one of those odd folks whose mental powers are at their greatest in the morning. Even in high school I had no problem with getting up early
karmakin
Remember one thing folks. Not all people work 9 to 5 or close to that. Stupid class privilege.
SiubhanDuinne
@Bostondreams #39: Old joke, every high school history teacher in the country has the same name.
Oh yeah, what’s that?
Coach.
Faisal
@Amanda in the South Bay: we’re all at our best in the morning. Some people just define morning differently than others.
Bostondreams
@SiubhanDuinne:
Ha. When I went through Proteach after getting my BA in history, I was told to say I would be willing to coach if I wanted a job in my field. At my interview for my current (and so far only) teaching position, I was told I would be coaching golf and JV baseball. As long as the principal knew my only experience with golf involved driving a cart while drinking beer and swinging madly at a little ball, I said I would do it. I would not have gotten hired otherwise.
Florida is adding end of course exams in the social studies soon; I look forward to them only because it might start getting more quality teachers in this field.
Of COURSE there are some great teachers who are coaches; I know a few. But, ugh, we have had some bad ones at my school.
BruceFromOhio
Hit this in my kids public district as well, and have seen most of the same stuff in the comments: bus schedules, after school employment, extracurricular activities, staffing. There are, apparently, a million excuses why things are the way they are now.
And all seem to be completely irrespective of normal human sleep patterns. I’ve made a deal with the teen and soon-to-be-teen: sleep well when you *can* sleep, and we’ll try to balance it as best we can. Weekends, holidays and summer break can go along ways if used well, and there’s a limit to how much shit we’ll put up with during the school week.
Still, I would happily kick in a little extra in my school taxes and property taxes if it meant buses at the right time (esp. winter) and additional staff for extracurriculars.
Spencer
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=acLW1vFO-2Q
george carlin explains what I was saying earlier.
Sly
There are countless academic studies on the ineffectiveness of how we structure primary and secondary education, from funding to tracking to nutrition to everything else. The smaller problem is that there is always some overriding interest that prevents any substantive change from being implemented, which is sometimes addressed in our public discourse. The regressive nature of many property tax codes, parents with children in upper tracks, the extent to which we subsidize shitty food so that its cheaper than good food, etc. I envision all sorts of pressures against giving students an extra 30 minutes before the start of classes, from every agent in the process (parents, teachers, coaches, administrators, community, etc) and I haven’t even been in the profession that long.
The larger problem, and the one that isn’t addressed, is that this country hasn’t committed itself to the notion that everyone equally deserves a high-quality education to the extent that these overriding interests can be swept aside.
As for summer vacations, there’s conflicting evidence for their efficacy but I don’t know of any school system with a full year-long schedule that doesn’t offer anywhere from six weeks to three months off, cumulatively. Some countries space that time differently, not granting it all at once (Japan, I think, has three-term academic years and spaces its breaks evenly throughout, but with a slightly longer summer break), and there have been some surveys that show that such an approach is more effective than lump-sum vacation time. Less burnout, etc. The notion that summer vacations are a hold-over from agrarian practices is largely a myth, however.
Nick
@demimondian: Personally, I don’t think high school students should have jobs…period. Until college, they should be 100% into their school work.
Nick
@Sly: As a kid, as much as I liked summer vacation, because I hated school, I always found myself overwhelmed when I went back in September. I think I would’ve done better in school if we didn’t have three months off.
Sly
@Nick:
Statistically, much of that overwhelming sensation occurs when a student moves to from primary school to middle school or middle school to high school, and that has more to do with the culture shock of changing social environments than anything else. It happens a lot less when a student moves from third grade to fourth grade, or from tenth grade to eleventh grade, even though the academic shifts in those transitions are often more strenuous for them (language skills from 3-4, math skills from 10-11).
In terms of assessments (and without getting into the debate on the merits of standardized tests) full school transitions are also where students tend to perform at their worst. Teachers and administrators don’t help them adjust to the new social environment, and in all honesty this isn’t really their “fault.” They usually don’t have the training to do this, and rarely does anyone ever tell them that they need it or offers to help them get it. A lot of states do a really shitty job of training their teachers and principals, but continue to expect them to move mountains anyway.
This isn’t to say that providing breaks from school at more regular intervals would be a bad idea. I actually think it would be a good idea. But its a question of priorities, I think, and that would be something not at the top of my list. Of course, given the political dynamics of public education, none of these problems will likely ever be resolved across the board.
D-Chance.
@SiubhanDuinne: Psst… substitute “health” for “history” and it works better.
Kirk Spencer
Lots of good points above, but there’s a logistical issue a lot of people are missing.
School size.
A small high school these days is when a class is “only” a couple hundred students. (Yes, I know they’re smaller in some places. Doesn’t change the base fact.) They are this large so we get economies of scale.
We need a principal per school, with associated minimal staff.
There are courses that, at a certain size, barely have students. These include various foreign languages and advanced academics. It’s hard to justify collecting the taxes to pay for an AP instructor for five students (unfortunately).
My daughter’s high school, student population ~1,000, ‘only’ needs a school nurse half the time. The other half is at one of the middle schools. Another nurse covers the other two middle schools, half time at each.
We don’t want to pay the taxes for enough buses or enough buildings or enough teachers or, well, the list goes on.
We live with the results. TANSTAAFL.
Kirk Spencer
re: summer breaks. One issue that’s often not considered is continuing education requirements.
Now, the district tends to require teachers to perform duties beyond just classes during the school year; after school bus loading and sponsors for extracurricular activities (clubs and sports) and so forth. In addition there’s the simple requirement to grade papers and update lesson plans, not to mention various meetings with peers, superiors, and parents. Adding these together, the average work week for a teacher is 50 to 60 hours.
The point of that time is that this leaves little to no time for continuing education. That in turn means a chunk of the “vacation” is spent taking classes.
A year-round school removes this opportunity. The few year-round schedules I’ve seen, however, STILL require heavy work weeks due to extra activity from the teachers.
It’s a point to keep in mind.
slag
@Cap’n Billy: Here you go: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/07/05/starting-school-30-minute_n_635766.html.
trueblood
@demimondian:
I haven’t been in high school in almost a decade, but you’re telling me that your teenager needs help getting out the door to school after 8:30, and you and your significant other are both home at that time, but your teenager also works a job because s/he is crucial to your family’s income…
So you’ve been unable to instill some discipline or sense of responsibility in your teenager, to the point that s/he can’t get up, eat, walk to the bus stop or walk to school or whatever by 8:30, a full hour after many schools have already started, and you still force him/her to work a shitty after school job for the good of the family.
twiffer
@karmakin: no one works 9 – 5 anymore.
meetings start @ 7:30AM, every fucking day of the week. not to mention the leash, er, blackberry, to insure you are always reachable and can work at any given moment.
Catsy
@kdaug:
This has to be, hands-down, one of the stupidest ideas I’ve heard all month. Imagine the difficulty we currently have in passing any kind of meaningful legislation. Now imagine that all new legislation has to share time with the renewed argument over whatever batch of bills were passed ten years prior. Imagine that in addition to the current year’s legislation being election issues, you also have the expected (and predictable years in advance) fight over the legislation that’s up for renewal.
Nothing would ever get done, and what little made it through this mess would have to be re-fought ten years (or at whatever interval you choose) later. As time goes on and more laws are passed, the congressional docket would get so clogged that things would grind to a stand-still.
Don’t mean to pile on here, but I’ve heard this kind of thing floated before, and it needs to be stomped on hard before anyone reading it gets the harebrained notion that it’s actually a good idea. It is one of the most abominably stupid ideas for lawmaking imaginable, and the only people to like it would be the glibertarians and hard-right conservatives who would gleefully watch the status quo become permanent.
gumbo
Our school system in Chapel Hill has switched start times for high schoolers and elementary schoolers so that the young ones who generally do wake up at the crack of dawn are in first. From what I understand, letting the teens sleep later really has made a difference.
Catsy
@Roger Moore:
Right, because scheduling a couple hours of physically exhausting activities first thing in the morning before sending kids off to classes where they already have a hard time staying awake and paying attention to material is a fantastic idea.
kdaug
@Catsy: Uh, the status quo is currently permanent. That’s the whole point.
Texas has had a Sunset Commission for over 30 years. Every 12 years (from the date of their creation), state agencies are subject to review by the Sunset Commission. Like the link says, agencies under review are automatically abolished unless Legislation is passed to continue them. Since 1978, 58 state agencies have been abolished and 12 have been consolidated, saving the state ~$784 million between 1982-2009.
And having worked at a state agency while it was undergoing it’s Sunset review (Texas Department of Insurance), let me express how much shared love, joy, and happiness my co-workers felt at having to justify everything they’d done for the last twelve years some outside Legislative commission. Fail the test, ~300 people lose their jobs. Sword of Damocles? Sure. But it tends to focus the mind during the next dozen years to make sure you’re making the right decisions, and can defend them to a panel of laymen (and thus, the people of Texas).
Further, the US Congress frequently passes laws with Sunset Provisions (see: Bush Tax Cuts, parts of the Patriot Act, the now-dead Assault Weapons Ban, et.al). The logic behind self-terminating laws seems obvious to me – temporary problems require temporary solutions, not etched-in-stone-for-all-time Commandments. It’s already done all the time.
lol
@kdaug:
Sunsetting agencies is something entirely different than what was being suggested – sunsetting individual laws.
By several orders of magnitude.
lol
@Catsy:
Exercise actually wakes you up.
Daulnay
@Catsy:
In grade school, a lot of kids are full of energy, and really need the opportunity to burn it off before they start classes. As it stands, they get to school and are forced to try and stay still, listen, and behave while they’re literally wriggling with energy. If they could burn it off before school, there would be many fewer kids on Ritalin.
thalarctos
When I was in high school, the school day started at 8.20 AM, and somehow, the world didn’t end and a bunch of us went on to Yale and Stanford and Amherst and Bowdoin. Of course, this was back in the ignorant 1970s, when smoking wouldn’t get you expelled from school, and the drinking age was 18, when sex was still safe and the phrase “President Reagan” was the punchline to a sick joke.
And get off my lawn!
Dr. Psycho
Re sunsetting legislation, how about if we did it less often than sunsetting agencies? Maybe every 49 years, like the Biblical jubilee?
Older
@kdaug: “The sheer boredom of K-12 (well, -1) is what I remember most.”
I’m surprised more people didn’t mention this. It was an important feature of my education. I spend the better part of most school years trying to be unobtrusive about not paying attention in classes I had already mastered.
And for the less academically adept, what all this boredom means is less retention of the material.
So to summarize, we’re worried about the school day not having enough time to cover all that stuff that is so boring it ill-serves both the bright and the less-bright students.
Are we worrying about the right thing? Maybe we should be focusing all this concern on something else? Like maybe learning how to actually teach the information well? It’s my impression that better techniques are known, although perhaps not in this country.
sparky
John–this study will disappear down the memory hole because it conflicts with the emergent narrative that what we need are more workhouses.
Catsy
@kdaug:
This is self-evidently untrue, unless you are equating all legislation with the status quo. In that horribly mangled misreading of what the “status quo” actually means, yes, all legislation is permanent unless otherwise specified by law.
In truth, however, legislation per se neither preserves nor upsets the status quo–it is the substance of the legislation that does one or the other. What you propose is a mechanism that makes it easier–by orders of magnitude–to do nothing at all than to do something. Conservatives could only dream of a mandatory sunset provision like the one you describe, as it would allow them to kill any laws they don’t like simply by refusing to allow the reauthorization to come to a vote. If you look at the last few years of lockstep obstruction and see any other outcome from this proposal, you are living in a fantasy world.
As someone else pointed out, a mandatory sunset of state agencies is such a different animal from a mandatory sunset of all federal legislation, I can’t even imagine what you’re thinking by comparing them. It’s like comparing my yearly performance review with an IRS audit.
No. Just no. This is an appallingly stupid and short-sighted idea that would be the best friend of conservatives and the worst enemy of anyone seeking progress. The idea of having to re-fight the health care debate alone every ten years or so just to allow HIR to continue to exist should fill anyone with a functioning brain with horror–especially once you consider that it would put the lives and health of millions, once again, at the mercy of a Senate Republican filibuster.