Should later school start times be an ed reform priority?

Howdy, friends. I hope your summer is going well and that your World Cup withdrawal isn’t hitting you too hard. Meanwhile, here’s your annual reminder that in parts of the South, the back-to-school season starts in less than two weeks!

Speaking of “school starting too early,” today we’re going to tackle a different type of school start time—the concern that high schools (and middle schools) start too early in the day for teenagers to get enough sleep. We also hear from Michelle Rhee on why Janeese Lewis George shouldn’t dismantle D.C.’s IMPACT system, Robert Pondiscio on why Alpha School should change its tone, Charlie Barone on why his former boss teamed up with Lindsey Graham, and other great takes from Emily Oster, Rick Hess, Sara Mead, Lydia Rainey, Robin Lake, John McWhorter, and Kelsey Piper.

My two teenaged boys are like their dear old dad in that they don’t like to stay out late, and in fact enjoy being in bed by a reasonable hour. But they aren’t complete weirdos; like other teens, they need plenty of sleep and are taking advantage of the lazy days of summer by staying in bed an hour or two longer than during the school year. I imagine other parents can relate.

Which raises the perennial question: Why do we make teenagers wake up so early for school? And relatedly, should we reformers try to do something to change that?

I can imagine that when Checker Finn reads this newsletter, he will harrumph about “mollycoddling our children” and such, and how in his time, they started school at 3:00 in the morning. But perhaps some cold, hard evidence will change his mind, and those of other skeptics out there.

Consider this take from Emily Oster, no slouch herself when it comes to high standards—for research studies and otherwise:

The main determinant of when kids get up is what time school starts. And for middle and high school students in particular, there is a lot of evidence that a later school start time increases academic performance. One large study of this issue used data from a county in which there was some (arguably) random variation in when eighth graders started school in the morning. The authors found that sleep duration, academic performance, and academic effort measures were lower for kids who started before 7:45 a.m. versus those who started after. Later school start times also seem to have other positive impacts on adolescent students, including on mental health, physical health, and rates of car accidents.

And that was before a study was released in May, focused on a California school-start-time policy. Emily explains:

Senate Bill 328 restricted public middle schools from starting before 8:00 a.m. and high schools from starting before 8:30 a.m., beginning with the 2022–23 school year. The authors found this change increased sleep, had some modest improvements in mental health, and increased student test scores by about 0.1 standard deviations, with larger gains among low-income students. This isn’t a game-changing number, but it’s also not trivial—it’s equivalent to about a third of a year of typical middle-school learning.

Emily acknowledges that it’s also important when kids go to bed—a challenge outside the purview of policymakers, but definitely within the control of parents. Turning off the screens and saying no to a million activities would both help. And she also understands that pushing back school start times isn’t without its challenges, requiring:

…adjustments by parents and teachers, as well as changes to bus schedules. The obstacles to reworking school schedules can be significant: Parents may need to leave for work before buses come, necessitating tiered start times where elementary schools start earlier, since younger kids tend to wake earlier and also need more parental supervision. School systems may need to introduce some increased early care and after-care for students. Sports practice schedules would have to adapt to a later school day. It’s not that these are trivial issues, but these are changes worth investing in because more sleep improves so many things—health, well-being, academic performance—for our kids.

I agree with Emily—it’s worth the hassle to make these changes. Yet this is hardly a reform that’s swept the country, at least at the state level. As far as I can tell, California’s is the only policy like this on the books; Florida was heading in this direction until a backlash caused the Sunshine State to back off. Plenty of districts have moved high school start times back, but why haven’t more states acted?

Perhaps it’s time for another push, with ed reformers joining the fight. Consider:

• If the Senate passes the House’s permanent daylight saving time bill, it’s going to be even darker in the morning during much of the school year, making teenagers feel even more tired than they do already.

• If the problem is that it’s hard to cram in all of students’ required courses and make time for sports and other extracurricular activities, there are potential solutions. Schools could offer online courses in the evenings that students could take from home, or states could streamline course requirements. Perhaps we could give up on teaching foreign languages, for example, given how bad we are at it, and given the rise of AI translation. Wouldn’t that be worth an extra hour of sleep?

What do you think? Should later start times become an ed reform priority? And is this an appropriate policy for state mandates? Share your thoughts by responding to this newsletter, emailing me at SCHOOLED@fordhaminstitute.org, or leaving a comment.

A month ago, D.C. reform advocate Maya Martin Cadogan wrote in to encourage SCHOOLED readers not to freak out about the Democratic mayoral primary victory of democratic socialist Janeese Lewis George. “I think, much like in NYC, everything will be OK,” Maya said at the time, while acknowledging that D.C. Public Schools’ teacher-evaluation-and-merit-pay system (IMPACT) might be at risk.

Michelle Rhee and her team created that system when Rhee was DCPS chancellor almost twenty years ago, and she recently appeared on Paul Peterson’s podcast to defend it. Like Maya, she’s hopeful that Lewis George won’t actually dismantle IMPACT, but offers a robust case for the system all the same:

When the new mayor takes office, my hope would be that that person really looks first at the results. Like what has been accomplished in D.C. public schools over the last 20 years, going from the lowest performing school district in the country to leading the nation in gains…

And then the second thing that I would hope is that they would really get a broader perspective from teachers about what is working and not working as opposed to just kind of listening to this very narrow voice of the teachers union. Because one of the things that I think people find very interesting is the fact that when [local union president] George [Parker] and I were negotiating this groundbreaking contract at the time in 2009, we got a lot of pushback from the national unions who didn’t want it to go to a vote, right? Because they were saying the teachers are not going to like this. We can’t take it to a vote. We can’t take it to a vote. Interestingly enough, when we actually did take it to a vote, it passed 80 percent to 20 percent…

And what it showed us was that the vast majority of people were not the ones that were arguing against this.

And the widespread support is related to its tremendous results:

It’s not just the student achievement, which is obviously the most important thing, but the other thing that has increased significantly over time has been teacher retention, and teacher retention of the highest, most highly effective teachers in D.C. looks significantly better than it does in other urban districts.

Here’s hoping that Lewis George is listening!

The same thing goes for MacKenzie Price and Joe Liemandt, the founders of Alpha School, and the objects of a (viral) open letter from Robert Pondiscio—I hope they are listening too. Robert explains that Alpha School’s claims, “if true”:

…would represent arguably the most important educational breakthroughs of my lifetime: students mastering academics in just two hours a day, learning more than twice as fast as expected, and achieving at levels comparable to or exceeding America’s most elite schools.

I want badly for this to be true, so let me be clear: this is not a “put up or shut up” challenge. Quite the opposite. I’m rooting—hard—for you to be right. American education desperately needs genuine breakthroughs. If you’ve discovered a fundamentally better way to educate children, I want researchers to validate it, educators to emulate it, and policymakers to encourage more of it. I want you to be wildly successful, even rich. But rooting for you is precisely why I’m writing: we can’t just take your word for it.

Furthermore, Robert writes:

My concern isn’t about Alpha’s ambition, it’s your rhetoric. It’s not that Alpha criticizes traditional schools. I’ve made a career of doing that myself. Too often you speak as though generations of educators simply failed to notice obvious solutions. That’s not only implausible, but it’s also strategically unwise…

Similarly, you often speak as though the academic part of schooling is something to be optimized, compressed, or dispatched as efficiently as possible so students can get on with the more meaningful parts of their day. That strikes me as a serious misunderstanding of what many educators—and many families—value about school. Literature, history, mathematics, science, music, art, and the disciplined pursuit of knowledge are not mere hurdles to clear before children arrive at the rewarding part of their education. For many, they are the rewarding part. They are among the richest expressions of human civilization. We don’t study them simply because they’re useful. We study them because they matter and are worth knowing.

As I see it, Robert is asking Alpha School to acknowledge the tradeoffs inherent in any model, as well as understand the history of American education, in which nothing is newly true under the sun. Perhaps nobody before has combined (AI-infused) cram school with student-led passion projects, but the Sudbury Valley School, for example, has been around since 1968, letting kids “explore the world freely at their own pace and in their own unique ways.” This sort of “unschooling” has a long history. Maybe entrepreneurs feel the need to hype their inventions as revolutionary game changers, but I for one am grateful for the Roberts of the world who can put their claims into perspective.

I’m also feeling grateful for Charlie Barone and his reminder of the positive power of bipartisanship. That’s the theme of his remembrance of Senator Lindsey Graham, who teamed up with Charlie’s former boss George Miller on a student loan forgiveness program for teachers serving in high-need schools—a program the unions refused to support.

One central lesson here is that institutional interest groups—and, in turn, those they lobby—don’t automatically align with the equity outcomes they claim to champion. The teachers unions’ insistence on spreading loan forgiveness universally rather than targeting it to high-poverty schools and shortage areas revealed a preference for protecting broad membership interests over solving the specific staffing crises adversely affecting disadvantaged students. This is a recurring pattern in education politics: policies framed around equity can be blocked or diluted by the very stakeholders self-positioned to implement them.

A second lesson is a practical one about legislative strategy: when a natural political ally (Democrats, teachers unions) blocks a policy, credible bipartisan coalitions can rescue it, especially on issues that are hard to publicly oppose once framed around helping needy kids and shortage subjects like STEM and special education. Lindsey Graham’s willingness to co-sponsor the proposal purely because he saw it as smart labor-market policy, without needing full ideological alignment with Miller, gave the idea enough momentum that reluctant Democrats found opposing it politically untenable.

Yes and yes. And it’s a message I need to hear myself, as I’ve grown skeptical—even cynical—of the notion that today’s Congress could enact any worthy policies, especially in a bipartisan fashion. Yet the housing reform world (especially the YIMBY crowd) just scored a big win with the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act; perhaps we ed reformers could get some W’s on the board in Washington too if we learned how to work across the aisle again.

Speaking of federal policy, Rick Hess checks in on the latest happenings on the Federal Scholarship Tax Credit*, and particularly two big challenges ahead. The first is whether anyone will contribute to it:

In the 1970s, following Watergate, Congress adopted a provision that allowed taxpayers to direct $1 of their taxes to publicly fund presidential elections. Intended to combat the influence of big donors, this was a 100 percent tax credit; like the FSTC, it added nothing to the taxpayer’s obligation. The IRS stuck it right at the top of the 1040 tax form. Yet in 1977, just 29 percent of taxpayers checked the box. That was down to 19 percent by 1992 and 4 percent in 2020. Why the low take-up? Mostly, confusion about the program, skepticism about its purpose, and uncertainty about what a tax credit means.

Advocates correctly note that FSTC contributions are “free money” for taxpayers, since that money is going to the federal Treasury if they don’t participate. But that doesn’t mean people believe they’ll actually receive the credit, figure out how to make a donation, be willing to deal with the requisite record-keeping, or have the cash flow to float $1,700 until they file their returns.

The second challenge Rick highlights is that a few bad scholarship granting organizations might spoil the initiative’s brand:

I’m reminded of the early years of charter schooling, when a loose approach to authorization led to lousy schools and scandalous hijinks in states like Texas and Ohio. Indeed, it took charter schoolers many years—and a lot of assiduous scrubbing—to overcome the enormous reputational damage.

Preach, Rick, preach! (And yes, it took Fordham and our allies over a decade to clean up the mess in Ohio.)

Rick continues:

If the Democrats have a good fall (which looks likely), it’s easy to envision Democratic hearings next year designed to highlight misconduct, shady practices, or self-dealing. Rest assured that NPR, The New York Times, and the teachers unions would be eager allies in such an enterprise. I’ve been told not to worry about all this because SGOs will be spending contributions they’ve collected via a federal tax credit rather than a federal appropriation. If you think that distinction is going to forestall the critics or stop them from gleefully declaiming Republican hypocrisy on fraud, expect to be sorely disappointed. (Hell, let’s remember that Biden-era tax credits have long been a popular target for Republican fraud-busters.)

The best time to address these challenges is not reactively during the weeks and months after the damning hearings, but proactively now—when there’s still time to anticipate and identify potential bad actors rather than control the damage they’ve wrought.

That’s right—which is another reason I wish the Trump team would give governors a real role in regulating the initiative.

* Which I’ve been calling the Education Freedom Tax Credit recently, since that appears to be what the Trump administration prefers. Then again, the Treasury Department sometimes uses FSTC. Which is it, people?!?

Meanwhile, Sara Mead continues to think creatively about how the FSTC (or is it the EFTC?!?) could be used to promote lefty goals, in this case supporting before-, after-, and summer school programming:

How would a state do this? First, the governor would need to opt the state in to the new FSTC program. Second, the state would need to identify scholarship granting organizations (SGOs) that are particularly focused on scholarships for before, after, and summer care. That doesn’t mean the state would need to create the SGOs themselves—they could partner with national organizations standing up SGOs to distribute FSTC for children enrolled in public schools. Or nonprofit organizations working on before, after, and summer care at the national or state level could create SGOs for this purpose. Third, states could leverage the governor’s platform and use communications campaigns and collaboration with tax preparation professionals to encourage taxpayers who want to claim the credit to direct their contributions to SGOs providing before, after, and summer care.

Let’s round out today’s roundup with a recent post by Lydia Rainey and Robin Lake on a topic we’ve covered a bunch here at SCHOOLED: how states can best support school districts. Reporting on recent surveys of district leaders, Lydia and Robin suggest that states:

• Provide legal and financial clarity immediately.

• Show districts where they have more flexibility than they realize.

• Cut red tape.

• Help districts face the enrollment reckoning honestly.

• Identify and spread what is working in teacher recruitment and training.

• Create real forums for superintendents to drive policy and collective action.

All good, but really, nothing about high-quality instructional materials? Get with the times, CRPE!

Matt Barnum, “Test scores have plunged, but voters aren’t making schools a top political issue”

Thibaut Delloue, “How the Other Half Chooses: A New Era of Choice for the Charter Movement”

Kathleen Porter-Magee, “Religious liberty in education: Back to the Supreme Court”

Harry Patrinos, “Real Accountability Means Marrying Standards and Markets”

Jessica Poiner, “Cleveland is a national model for closing underenrolled schools”

Mickey Revenaugh, “Why Microschools Are Multiplying”

Mike Schmoker, “The learning recession might be caused by a teaching recession”

Tommy Schultz, “School Choice Succeeds in Arkansas”

Natalie Wexler, “How Schools Can Counter ‘The End of Reading’”

“It has become a summer rite to bemoan how few Black students are admitted to Stuyvesant and other highly competitive public high schools in New York City,” begins John McWhorter, who goes on to call out those who claim the selective admissions test is racist. Among the real culprits, he argues, is the loss of accelerated learning:

Since the 1990s, too many Black students have been deprived of gifted and talented programs, in the wake of an antitracking movement that called for students of all abilities (and races) to be taught together. The gifted and talented programs smoothed the way to schools like Stuyvesant for many Black students in the past.

And thus:

Faced with such small numbers of Black kids getting into Stuyvesant, there is nothing racist in asking: “How can we make Black kids do better on the test?”

Expand, don’t shrink, the number of gifted and talented programs. Expand and strengthen free, city-run test prep and tutoring.

What’s racist is pretending the test is the problem.

Kelsey Piper agrees, explaining how critiquing standardized tests is shooting the messenger instead of tackling the problem of preparedness:

Black kids in America are much less likely to be reading at grade level. They are much less likely to take advanced math classes and less likely to take and pass AP tests. But taking away the AP tests wouldn’t mean they knew the math. And taking away the SAT wouldn’t teach them how to read…

The war against gifted programs has not led to any educational improvements—indeed, it has correlated with a substantial across-the-board slump in test scores that has been most brutal for the students who started out weakest.

School closures are painful, but a recent complaint against Pittsburgh Public Schools alleging discrimination against Black students sounds like 2020-era madness. Naaz Modan reports:

“On average, the lower a school’s utilization rate, the higher the share of Black student enrollment,” the complaint said. “The inverse relationship between utilization rate and Black student enrollment in PPS indicates that basing school closure decisions primarily on utilization rates will disproportionately affect schools serving higher shares of Black students.”

When schools are underutilized because families have voted with their feet—either by moving out of the neighborhood or using school choice to enroll their kids elsewhere—the right answer is to ensure the remaining students get access to better schools when their campuses close. (See Jessica Poiner’s excellent look at how Cleveland should serve as a national model for consolidation.) And as our Fordham colleague Brian Fitzpatrick wrote recently, the mere fact that closures hit some groups harder is not proof of discrimination. In fact, consolidations can help put children into schools better suited to serve them.

Savannah Peters looks at progress across the U.S. Bureau of Indian Education’s 183 schools, where high school graduation rates skyrocketed from about half to 79 percent in the past decade. The usual caveats apply: Soaring graduation rates should make us wonder about schools playing games via lower grading standards and credit recovery, plus this jump is at least partly due to changed data reporting procedures. Still, the article describes how local innovations are paying off in a system that doesn’t always get enough attention.

—

“The Odyssey is not, strictly speaking, a children’s book. I thought my son might enjoy it anyway.” —Chris Moody, The Atlantic

Get some sleep, catch a movie, and see ya next week.

Mike

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