by Patrick Appel
It’s better for them (NYT):
New evidence suggests that later high school starts have widespread benefits. Researchers at the University of Minnesota, funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, studied eight high schools in three states before and after they moved to later start times in recent years. In results released Wednesday they found that the later a school’s start time, the better off the students were on many measures, including mental health, car crash rates, attendance and, in some schools, grades and standardized test scores.
Suderman uses this research to lobby for school choice:
Sure, it’s nice to see that some school districts are taking note of the evidence in favor of later start times for high schools. But it would be even nicer to imagine a world in which the evidence didn’t take 20 years to filter into school systems’ decision-making processes, in which small bands of school-board bureaucrats weren’t making one-size-fits-all decisions for thousands of students, and in which teenagers and their families had a variety of meaningful options available—options that might include, among other things, variable start times, and perhaps even school days that weren’t constructed on the traditional seven-hours-starting-in-the-morning schedule at all. In other words, it would be nice if there were choice and competition in public education, and if innovations and adjustments like later start times weren’t news.
The Dish 