The USA Public School System notoriously doesn’t care about science or education in general. They’ve been isolated groups of independent small governments held to no national standard since their inception. They usually just prepare kids to blend in with their local community: manerisms, speech patterns, bare minimum math and reading skills.
Luckily, my state understood this and our school hours were like 8-8:30am to 3pm. Still kinda early, but way less of a kick in the teeth as states that make their kids come in at 7am and out at 2pm.
What if (hear me out) the high school kids can go to bed earlier if they’re sleep deprived? Waking up at a certain time is really only half the equation. The school isn’t making you stay up and get up early.
Going to bed earlier isn’t an effective solution for many kids. Around 1 in 6 adolescents find it difficult to fall asleep before 11:00 PM.
In adolescence, up to 16% of teenagers experience a sleep phase delay. Due to this circadian shift , their melatonin levels don’t begin to rise until later in the evening. As a result, they naturally feel more alert at night, making it harder for them to fall asleep before 11:00 p.m.
Well considering that public schools (at least in the US) are glorified daycares in place so both parents can go work, the obvious solution is to globally push back the concept of “morning” to mean ‘a few hours after the sun rises’.
Scientists: humans have evolved to go to sleep later in the evening and wake up later in the morning during their teenage years. It’s hard to fall asleep earlier and even if they do the quality of their sleep will be less.
Morons commenting on this post: just go to sleep earlier
The tragic truth when I’ve worked at schools that start that early is that it was done so that the kids could work/take care of siblings. Even then many kids would leave school early because they would be asked to come into work. It sucked, I had kids that would sleep through my classes because they had worked extremely late.
Most of the shitty things Public schools do are because we have no money, are trying to feed/clothes/protect kids who have literally no one else. The school I worked at had 100% free breakfast and lunch, because the population was so transient/not in the country legally that it wasn’t realistic to expect them to fill out the forms to get free lunch.
The system is such a brutal grind that is also designed to extract as much as possible from optimistic, well meaning folks. There is no money, so most good things come from teachers spending their own money, staying well after contract hours, etc, etc. The burnout rate is insane, my school has already had multiple people leave mid year (and this has happened every where I’ve worked). Alcoholism is rampant among teachers. The stress caused me to develop epilepsy - and I’m not the only person I know this has happened to.
Republicans have been running a war on education for years now, and this is the result. We are forced to do things that we know are bad and ineffective (like the shitty hours, or allowing physically violent students to stay in classroom because we aren’t allowed to suspend them, or teaching to the test) because we have no resources and are expected to be the entire social safety net.
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