Going to bed late and getting up early is the life of the average American teenager. And dragging them out of bed each school day is the scourge of the average American teenager’s parent.
But it turns out this rinse-lather-repeat approach to teenage sleep habits might be costing the economy a not-so-insignificant amount of money, reports Christopher Ingraham for the Washington Post.
Mr. Ingraham writes:
The United States would realize roughly $9 billion a year in economic gains by instituting a simple, nationwide policy change: starting public school classes no earlier than 8:30 a.m.
That's according to an exhaustive new study by the Rand Corporation, the first of its kind to model the nationwide costs and benefits of later school start times.
According to the article, teens are simply not built for the morning routine currently being thrust upon them.
In recent years researchers have identified early school start times as a significant public health problem. Adolescents' brains are wired to go to sleep late and wake up late, making it difficult for them to get a good night's sleep before a 7:30 a.m. first period class. Sleep deprivation in teens has been linked to everything from poor health to bad academic performance to criminal activity.
“The evidence strongly suggests that a too-early start to the school day is a critical contributor to chronic sleep deprivation among American adolescents,” the American Academy of Pediatrics wrote in 2014. “The AAP urges middle and high schools to aim for start times that allow students to receive 8.5 to 9.5 hours of sleep a night. In most cases, this will mean a school start time of 8:30 a.m. or later.”
And while the transition to later middle and high school start times would cost money, the investment would pay off in the long run.
Ditching that system to get everyone to school at the same time would require more buses and drivers, costing a school district roughly $150 per student, according to a 2011 Brookings Institution analysis. Beyond that, the Rand researchers note that schools would need to invest in lighting and other infrastructure to support after-school activities happening at later hours.
But these costs are dwarfed by the economic benefits of starting school later. States implementing later school times would see a positive return on their investment in just two years, according to the Rand report. The net nationwide benefit from increased academic performance and lower car crash rates would reach $9.3 billion a year, equivalent to the annual revenue of Major League Baseball.
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