Today, Explained - California Dreamin'

Episode Date: November 6, 2019

A new California law limits how early school can start in the state. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

You ever notice that the standard school day in America is about two hours shorter than the standard work day? That creates a lot of work for parents, a lot of stress. There's an entire industry out there designed to deal with the work and stress of this two-hour gap. Now, some argue that changing school schedules to align better with work schedules would be better for parents and students. And today, California Senator Kamala Harris is introducing a bill that would do just that. A lot of the details are forthcoming, but the big idea is to make kids stay at school a little longer. And that doesn't necessarily mean teachers have to teach more, but maybe the school provides free child care after classes are over. Senator Harris is not the only one thinking big about school schedules. Back in her home state, they've

already made a big change. But to understand the change, you have to understand zero period. I had no idea what zero period was when I moved to California from Canada when I was a teenager, but it immediately became an essential part of my life. Zero period is actually where I made my first friend in the United States. Hello? Zach Hunsaker. Hunsaker, can you hear me i can't hey uh i wanted to ask you a couple questions about high school you got a second cool i don't know if you remember how we met i do yeah i want to say junior year high school junior year of high school i remember i uh i just moved to californ. I didn't have any friends yet.

And you sat, I'm going to say, in front of me in Mr. Rob's zero period algebra two math class. Is that right? That's correct. Yeah, so I remember it. You had a Blink-182 sticker on your folder or something. And I was like, I like Blink-182. Yeah, my girlfriend takes me home when I'm too drunk to try.

You want to be friends? Yeah. That's how it started. That's right. Do you remember what time that class started? 7 a.m. 7 a.m. Yeah, we were brats to be there that early.

Do you remember why we elected to take a math class at 7 in the morning? I just remember I was trying to get out of school at noon. I think that was the only way to do that. Did you hear that future Zachs and Shons might not get to meet at school at seven in the morning anymore? I did not. California just passed the first law that mandates a later school start time for middle and high school students. Katrina Schwartz covers education for KQED in San Francisco. It's a first-of-a-kind law, although some school districts in other parts of the country have done something similar. But this is the first statewide law, and it would go into effect in three years.

So districts basically have three years to figure out how they're going to do this. Is California just coming around to the idea that asking kids to wake up at five, six o'clock is kind of extra? Yeah, I mean, the reason that they passed this law is that there's a lot of research showing that especially teenagers, their circadian rhythms are a little bit different as you go through adolescence. And so really, they need to be sleeping in a little bit later in order to be fully awake. And so this argument is all about achievement and sort of well-being for young people that, you know, being at school at 730 in the morning is just really not optimal for this age group. But on the other side are all the educators and school administrators who are saying, you know, this is going to be a huge

shift for us. It takes a lot of logistics to change the school schedule and it's going to affect a lot of people. So can we just like talk about the law explicitly? What exactly does it dictate? Yeah. So the law says that middle schools have to start at 8 a.m. or later and high schools have to start at 8.30 or later. You can still have zero periods, by the way, so you could still be going to school at 7.30 in the morning, but that's mostly for like electives and things. Boo! Yeah. And then there are a few exemptions for rural schools. Obviously, those are the schools that have the biggest issues with transportation, so they are exempt.

Although this does affect charter schools who, you know, in many other areas of education law have a little bit more leeway. But in this bill, they are affected by this as well. And people pushed back saying this was, I don't know, nanny state, cool nanny state who lets you sleep late. Yeah, there was pushback. A lot of districts pushed back. And like I said, teachers, the school board association, the school administrators, pretty much any adult who was in charge of running schools pushed back against this. And of course, there were some parents, too. I mean, I think parents are kind

of split on this. But I should just tell you that the California State Parent Teacher Association was in favor of this bill. They backed it. So parents are probably all over the place on this, depending on their individual circumstances. But it'll really depend how districts do this. Like, do they get buy-in from the parent community? Do they tell them about the science? Do they tell them why they're doing this and why it's important? And kind of get people on board before they just, like, make a sweeping change

that affects the mornings of, you know, hundreds of thousands of families. And not just people with kids, but people driving to work at the same time as people with kids and school buses. Is having more kids start at the exact same time potentially going to create more traffic, affect municipalities in other ways? I think a huge issue was just the amount of administrative effort it will take to reschedule all the buses. Because already buses are staggered. You know, like one bus might be

used for a school that has an earlier start time and then pick up a whole other set of kids for a different school. And those are like carefully monitored. They're trying to maximize like the use of each bus and each bus driver. So definitely some districts were saying this could cost us millions of dollars to one, figure out how to redo the schedule, you know, all the administrative time and thinking about it. And then potentially having to use more buses, hire more bus drivers. That could all take time. And then the other big thing was just this idea that one size does not fit all. Like what works for one district doesn't work for others.

And people just really feeling like we value local control and education. That's like a core part of education in the United States. That's why we have such different laws in each state. And it's true of local districts as well, that they like implement laws differently and every community looks different. Between how diverse California is as a state and all the conflicting needs of parents

and all the scheduling, it sounds like there could actually be a lot on the line here for California. Well, you know, whenever you're the first in the country to do something, people are watching you. And, you know, California is a big state. And often, especially with education policy, other people follow suit. Although I guess that's true of like many kinds of policy in California. So, you know, other states and districts are aware of the research around this. This has been like in the conversation for a while, the effect of lack of sleep on teens.

I mean, especially because we're seeing some high rates of anxiety and sleeplessness, achievement rates and stuff like that. People are saying, OK, we need to really pay attention to the mental health of our adolescents and not just have these schedules dictated by the adults in the system. We should be really prioritizing the young people themselves. So other people are interested in this and are maybe studying it, are considering bills of their own, and they're watching California to find out if it works here. So I think how it's implemented and whether we do a good job with it, that'll determine a lot for the rest of the country. Will starting school later actually help kids sleep more? That is after the break on Today Explained.

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Love this show Today Five stars Today explains What are you doing? Love this show. Today. Five stars. Today Explained. It's Today Explained. I am Dr. Lisa Meltzer. I am an associate professor of pediatrics at National Jewish Health in Denver,

and I am a associate professor of pediatrics at National Jewish Health in Denver, and I am a pediatric sleep psychologist. Let's just start with the million-dollar question, Doc. Why do we need sleep? That's a great question and something that researchers continue to look at. There's a number of competing theories about why we sleep. There isn't one single one that's been identified, but clearly sleep is essential. Otherwise, it would be, as one great researcher said, evolution's greatest mistake that we need

to sleep every single night. But what I noticed lately in life, because a lot of my friends have kids, is that babies sleep all day. And as someone who makes a daily news podcast, clearly adults can get by with very little sleep. How much sleep do adolescents need? Adolescents have a biological need of about nine and a quarter hours of sleep. Nine and a quarter. Nine and a quarter. Yeah, they did these really cool studies where they put teens in a special sleep lab for several weeks.

They were completely disconnected. No technology, no clocks. They were completely disconnected, no technology, no clocks. They had dim light 24 hours a day. So they never knew what time of day it was. And they let them sleep as much as they wanted. And that's how we know that when you catch up on your sleep, these teens on average need nine and a quarter hours of sleep. So again, that's a range. There's some teens who may only need eight hours, and there's some teens who may need 10 hours. But there are very, very few teens who actually need less than eight hours. Yet in the United States, we know that about 75% of teens get less than eight hours of sleep.

How much sleep do I need? I'm very selfishly wondering the answer to that question now. It's a general range. Adults generally need between seven and nine hours, again, with an average somewhere around the eight-hour point. But there are some adults who definitely do need more than nine hours every night, and there are some adults who really only need seven hours. There are few people who do need less than seven hours, but the majority of people who get less than seven hours of sleep are getting by on that. So that's not their actual sleep need. They're just functioning in a constant state of sleep deprivation. That sounds about right. Why do adolescents need more. Are they lazy? No, their brain is developing and changing. Their bodies are growing. So one of the first

things that happens after you fall asleep is growth hormones released. So our teens, our kids, our babies, they're growing during their sleep. And so sleep is really important for physical growth. It's important for their emotion regulation. So this is just biological development. And this carries into, you know, adolescence continues all the way into the early 20s. So this really is a need for sleep that people often just say is laziness, but it's not. I guess tying this back to this California law and the reality here, I wonder, you know, when I was a teenager, I stayed up until midnight talking to the homies on the phone and stuff. I could have just gone to sleep earlier, I suppose. Is that an issue here,

that giving kids more time in the morning won't necessarily fix their sleep patterns? They'll just stay up even later? No. There are no studies that consistently show that teens stay up later. So when it gets dark out in the evening, most of us, melatonin is released. So melatonin is this hormone. It promotes sleep. Now, what happens in teens is that the timing of that melatonin is released later by about one to two hours for most teens. And what that means is then it's hard for them to fall asleep early. You know, on the other end, when you have the early school start times, we're asking our

teens to wake up 5, 5.30, even 6 o'clock at the latest in order to get to school on time. So it's not just an issue of telling our teens to get off their phones and go to bed earlier. It's about giving our teens the opportunity to get enough sleep each night. Is there a chance here that kids starting school later actually helps them out academically too? So there are a few small studies that do show some improvements in grades, most notably in the first and second periods, because those are the times that are the earliest. So when you delay those start times, then those class periods get later and students are the earliest. So when you delay those start times, then those class periods get later and students do perform better. So that's something that we're

seeing. What we do know is that delaying start times do actually help kids get more sleep. So here in the Denver area, one of our large districts changed their start times and we've been following up. And what we found was that prior to the start time change, just like the national average, less than 30% of our students were getting at least eight hours of sleep. And following the start time change, our students, there's 61% that are now getting at least eight hours of sleep. So we more than doubled the number of students who are getting at least eight hours of sleep simply by starting school later. I mean, the science isn't all new, is it? Why were we having kids wake up so gosh darn early in the first place? So there's, you know, a lot of competing theories for why school start times

have continued to get earlier and earlier. A lot of districts will tell you it's a transportation issue, it's a safety issue, it's a farming issue. None of them are really that important at this point when we know the science, we know the need for sleep, we know the biological importance of teens getting enough sleep. So this is not new information. It's just taken a long time for it to become important enough for our society to act on it. Do you listen to hip hop, Lisa? Not much, no. There's this rapper, Nas, who famously rapped on his 1994 magnum opus, Illmatic.

What do you say to people who are just like, you know, sleep isn't that important. I'll do it when I die for the rest of time. Yeah, when I was in graduate school and I'd complain, my brother would always say, Lisa, you can sleep when you're dead. So now what do I tell people? I tell people that is true. The problem is that if you don't sleep now, you will be dead a lot sooner. Boom! Lisa Meltzer is a pediatric sleep psychologist at National Jewish Health in Denver, Colorado.

Katrina Schwartz, who you heard from earlier in the show, is an education reporter at KQED and the co-host of NPR's Mind Shift podcast. And Zach Hunsaker, who you heard from before Lisa. He's just a dude I've been friends with for 18 years. Can you believe that, Hunsaker? I'm Sean Ramos for him. This is Today Explained.