*Yawn!*

I am a morning person. My whole family are morning people: my birth family, that is. (On Liberal Mountain, where the children refuse to sleep until very late, morning is my "me" time.) I've generally up before 6 no matter what time I go to bed, and nothing surprises me more than the increasingly rare times when I spend the night in the same place as one of my blood family members and discover that they're the same way, particularly my beloved elder brother.

The reason he surprises me so much is that my memories are filled with various colorful examples of my mother's heroic efforts to get him out of bed for school. Music, lights, calling every few minutes, screaming (eventually), once dumping an entire glass of water on him in the bed (though that may have been a deputized sibling, now that I think about it)--getting Phil up for school was a constant, colorful struggle.

My own teen, who eagerly starts her last week of school today, is actually pretty good about getting up in the morning--I rarely have to wake her actively. But on her own, on non-school days, she routinely sleeps until 1 or 2 pm. And as a teacher, I know that as much as I like earlier classes, students do tend to be somewhat, shall we say, logy in them, and absenteeism is higher.

As it turns out, this is not a moral problem at all, but a biological one.

Research shows that teenagers’ body clocks are set to a schedule that is different from that of younger children or adults. This prevents adolescents from dropping off until around 11 p.m., when they produce the sleep-inducing hormone melatonin, and waking up much before 8 a.m. when their bodies stop producing melatonin. The result is that the first class of the morning is often a waste, with as many as 28 percent of students falling asleep, according to a National Sleep Foundation poll. Some are so sleepy they don’t even show up, contributing to failure and dropout rates.

The answer? Let them sleep in a bit.

In 2002, high schools in Jessamine County in Kentucky pushed back the first bell to 8:40 a.m., from 7:30 a.m. Attendance immediately went up, as did scores on standardized tests, which have continued to rise each year. Districts in Virginia and Connecticut have achieved similar success. In Minneapolis and Edina, Minn., which instituted high school start times of 8:40 a.m. and 8:30 a.m. respectively in 1997, students’ grades rose slightly and lateness, behavioral problems and dropout rates decreased.

Later is also safer. When high schools in Fayette County in Kentucky delayed their start times to 8:30 a.m., the number of teenagers involved in car crashes dropped, even as they rose in the state.

There are a ton of logistical problems with this, of course. Here, the district HS starts at 7:45, then the buses go out for a second pass and get all the elementary and middle-schoolers in for their 9am start time. Kalish suggests here that rather than making things logistically more complex, we could just flip the elementary and high school schedules. Of course, that creates increased need for after-school child care: If the little kids are done by 2:30, they can't just be dumped at home the way teens can.

I like the suggestion of a longer schoolday, myself.

Massachusetts has opened more than a dozen “expanded learning time” schools, which add about three hours to the school day. Students spend additional time on subjects like math and English, but also enjoy plentiful art, music, physical education and recess — all of which are being slashed at many schools.

Also, why not make sure there’s built-in time for doing homework? That way, children could get their work done at school where professionals can help them, freeing them to spend time with their families when they do get home.

Now, homework is Kalish's "issue," so it's not too surprising to see her swipe at it here, but she has a point: one of the things about the alternative school I noted in my last post is that there was very little outside work. Almost all projects were completed during class time. And you know what? I didn't miss those fights at all. (Because it took students from multiple districts, the alternative school started later, too, which might also have had an effect.)

I'm not wholly convinced she's right, but it's a compelling argument.