28 ms·

California’s new law bans schools from starting before 8am

505 points by dpflan 7y ago

awillen 7y ago
I didn't even realize schools started before 8... I believe that's when my high school started. Thinking back to the useless slug that I was in the mornings as a teenager, I can't imagine this will do anything but help learning. If only there had been a law saying college classes couldn't start before 11am (or 2pm on Fridays) when I was there...
- vonmoltke 7y ago
  My last six years of public school in South Florida all started before 0800. As for college, there was one year I was getting on a train at 0530 to make my first class...
- grawprog 7y ago
  I used to have both a technical math and a statistics class that started at 7am in college. Fridays if i remember right for the math class. That was always a 'fun' way to start the day.
  - thrower123 7y ago
    Foreign language drill classes at 7 AM was quite possibly the worst thing I dealt with during college. Rapid-fire German when it is dark and frozen and you are hung over is very rough.
- cgriswald 7y ago
  For us, first period started at 7:10. I had a zero hour class that started some weird amount less than an hour before that.
- alexbanks 7y ago
  My bus throughout the majority of k-12 showed up at 6:50, and first bell rang at 7:23.
socalnate1 7y ago
My high school started at 7am. I also took the bus; which picked up around 6:15am; so I usually woke up around 5:45am during the week. I would often nod off during my first or second period; and routinely took 2-3 hour naps when I got home from school; which screwed up my ability to fall asleep early at night or get much homework done. I sometimes wonder what my academics would have been like if I was actually awake during those first two periods. (This was in the 90's)
- non-entity 7y ago
  I've always been confused by TV shows showing kids leaving for school and it's bright outside with the whole family awake. Growing up, it was dark when we got up for school and just barely sun up (depending on the season still dark) by the time we left to get on the bus.
  - rz2k 7y ago
    On the shortest days of the year in Los Angeles[1], there is civil twilight around 6:30am and full daylight before 7am. Maybe the writers, who even have children, live close to the schools they attend. [1] https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/usa/los-angeles https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/usa/los-angeles
    - widforss 7y ago
      Wow, this really gives you perspective. My corresponding times are 8:21 and 9:55. I would give the world for the opportunity of sunlight evenly distributed over the year.
      - JimboOmega 7y ago
        Move to the tropics; there's some variation but it's never very great.
      - com2kid 7y ago
        I do kind of enjoy the over 15 hours a day of sunlight Seattle gets in the summer, it peaks at around 16hrs on the longest day! I can get off work at 6, be home at 7, and still have 2 hours of sunlight left! Less than 9 hours in the winter though... that part is harsh.
dsalzman 7y ago
School children are sleeping on average 1 hour less than theirs peers did 50 years ago. This has been driven by earlier and earlier school start times. Sleep deprivation in school age children has been linked to lower test scores, lower knowledge retention, higher rates of "trouble making". Really happy to see these laws getting put in place!
- briandear 7y ago
  > This has been driven by earlier and earlier school start times What about later and later bed times?
  - Retric 7y ago
    If both where true you would see more than 1 hour of lost sleep.
  - johnpowell 7y ago
    When I was kid I took apart my tv to disconnect the speakers and wire up my walkman headphones. This was so I could put a blanket over my head and tv and watch some Letterman at night. My mom would notice if there was light and noise coming from my room after bedtime. Now the kids have phones. If I had a phone and internet access I would have never slept.
    - jupp0r 7y ago
      Phones have parental controls. Learning how to hack those is a worthwhile skill to learn, too.
  - cgriswald 7y ago
    Humans get tired from being up for a certain number of hours and also from waning daylight. In teens, both of these are delayed relative to adults and children. You can send a teen to bed early but their bodies aren’t trying to sleep.
  - Alupis 7y ago
    > What about later and later bed times? This is the real factor. When I was a kid - it was in bed, lights out and go to sleep at 9pm the latest during school nights - strictly enforced by my parents. Now I regularly see small children (< 10 years old) out at the store past 10pm or 11pm on school nights.
aidenn0 7y ago
Don't worry, we'll work around that law by switching to year-round DST.
ijpoijpoihpiuoh 7y ago
I wonder how the policy discussions looked when considering the impact on poor parents who have to be at work. Maybe the thinking was that the start time of 7:30-8AM was already too late to save these folks, so 8:30AM would not make them much worse off? Or maybe there are fewer people in these circumstances than I fear?
- secabeen 7y ago
  This law is only for grades 7-12, so most affected kids can get themselves to school, or don't need direct supervision between when parents leave for work and when the bus arrives.
  - kenperkins 7y ago
    My 7 and 9yo kids start school at 8:50am, and don't get off the bus until 4:30pm. It's ridiculous. They're young and need time off but because the district moved everyone back to make room for the High Schools now elementary kids aren't home until half past 4. Not enough time for them to play in the afternoons now.
    - vonmoltke 7y ago
      Either their elementary school is in session for an awful long time (mine was 6 hours), or they have a really long bus ride home.
  - topkai22 7y ago
    I'd also point out I've never lived in a school district that started elementary school before 8a, so these parents must have had solutions for those years. The real problem is going to be if elementary schools get pushed forward to start at 7a and release at 1p or something crazy like that, but I know most districts don't want the liability of 8 year olds waiting for the bus in the dark along side a major road.
- crooked-v 7y ago
  "Every parent in California" is pretty big negotiating block when it comes to setting standard work hours.
jimbob45 7y ago
This seems to flagrantly ignore the parents' need to be to work on time. I think the kids will ultimately be the ones suffering because the parents will struggle that much more. No, the bus is not always an option, nor is leaving your kid alone at home for any amount of time.
- crooked-v 7y ago
  Given that this will be a job-negotiating concern of literally every parent in California, businesses will just have to adapt to the new normal.
  - jimbob45 7y ago
    It's the lower-class parents who can't afford babysitters or who might be divorced that will be the most affected by this. Coincidentally, it's those same parents who have the least room to negotiate in their positions.
- dillon 7y ago
  Many schools have programs to drop your kids off early. The same program is there to keep kids late. If kids are getting out of school at 2:00 pm then the kids are either home alone or taking a bus one way or the other. In my opinion, this has very little to do with parents.
- lemoncucumber 7y ago
  > No, the bus is not always an option, nor is leaving your kid alone at home for any amount of time. This bill applies to middle and high school kids. If you can't leave your high schooler home alone for any amount of time then you probably have bigger problems to deal with than school start time.
dillon 7y ago
My mother works for a school district in California. There was an open hearing around moving the starting school time from 8:00 am to 7:00 am. There's been countless research showing that this is generally bad for children to wake up this early (I'm sorry for not linking a reference). At the hearing, there are some words that go something like "Children come first" printed on some wall in a large font. My mother made her case that starting so early isn't a good idea, and is bad for children and they may as well remove those words. The reason for the change is that teachers generally live pretty close to the school they teach at. They also have a car. So, for them they can wake up at 6:30 and make it on time. Whereas kids, especially poor kids, might live further and may be taking a bus where the bus pick up times could be as early as 6:00 am so the kids are waking up even earlier just to make it. An early starting time, generally, benefited the teachers as they can wake up later and they get out of class around 2:00 pm. The after-school programs then rake in cash by keeping kids longer since most parents don't get off work until 5:00 pm. tl;dr the early starting times were to make teachers happy. Good on California to put students over teachers. Now, if only we can raise teacher's salaries.
- Gibbon1 7y ago
  > tl;dr the early starting times were to make teachers happy. I've wondered about adverse section being the cause of this. People that don't wake up early typically won't become teachers. Eventually all your teachers and staff are 'morning people' like my dad. My dad loved going into work at 6am. And getting home at 3 or 4pm.
- topkai22 7y ago
  I'm also pretty sure at the higher grade levels (Middle to high school) it is partially about keeping other professions out of sports coaching. If high school starts at 930a and ends at 4p, an awful lot of working professionals could still be there by 415-430p to coach. When high school let out at 245, it's a lot harder.
kgwgk 7y ago
If the objective is for people to get more hours of sleep probably it would have been better to pass a law dividing the day in 32 hours... Kids will sleep the same amount of time in all cases, but it would be 50% more hours.
DenisM 7y ago
The "early wakeup time makes people groggy" story always looked puzzling to me. I mean, when DST kicks in everyone adjusts in day or two. What prevents one from setting up their own personal DST and getting up earlier still? Certainly not biology.
- drblast 7y ago
  Biology is a factor because the sun isn't up. Also there is the desire to do things in the evening, such as a parent having dinner and interacting with their kids before they have to go to bed. Or to get home from work to help them with their homework. Or let's say as a parent I don't want to have to wake up at 6am because my kids have to wake up that early for school when I don't have to be to work until 9 or 10.
- thrower123 7y ago
  DST is a huge mess for at least a month, sometimes longer. It's massively disruptive. This may be more of an issue in higher latitudes, though. It was always the last straw that signalled the effective end of the school year in the spring. Everyone was so frigged up and groggy from that shift ahead that we might as well have not been there, and by the time people did adjust, there wasn't any time left to recoup.
- topkai22 7y ago
  Every time this comes up, I recommend "Internal Time" by Till Roenneburg. It is wonderfully written, and it demolishes this concept quite thoroughly. It really is biology. Summary of the book as relates here though: People really do have internal clocks and preferred awake/sleep cycles. These internal clocks vary between individuals, and are there is most likely a genetic component. These internal clocks vary with age- in particular, teenagers and young adults clocks are generally shifted much later than kids or older adults. Shifts to people's schedules (such as DST) that cause them to leave their preferred sleep/awake cycle mitigate with time, but do not fully go away. Outside that book, there are plenty of studies showing that a non-standard hours shift work is biologically harmful.
- MauranKilom 7y ago
  It certainly is biology. Your circadian rhythm is strongly influenced by the timing of day (well, blue) light being received by your eyes. It also shifts naturally as you age - for example, in your teenage years you tend to fall asleep and wake up later. There are also interesting effects like the significant differences in school performance between students living at the eastern edge of a time zone vs living at the western.
war1025 7y ago
School K-12 started at 8:30am where / when I grew up. I assumed that was just the universal time school started everywhere. I have a feeling we're in for quite a shock when my daughter starts school in a couple years. Our current routine has her waking up sometime between 7:30 and 9.
meristem 7y ago
Unfortunately, the school systems still rely on one parent at home. It is not just drop off and pick up times: school activities, parent-teacher conferences, etc. For example, in the SF Unified District, school tours for parents of kids entering kindergarten, middle school and high school are during the school hours, mostly in the morning. It is all built around the expectation of a parent at home or a job structure that allows parents to have time off and not be penalized for it. Neither of those are necessarily representative of a family's current reality.
- Hermitian909 7y ago
  I can tell you that, through most of the bay area at least, those policies are mostly about intentional socioeconomic segregation. My family has deep ties to local education infrastructure and its well known that most of the advocates for these policies are trying to keep poor kids out of their schools. While they don't say it in public forums they're generally more than happy to tell you in private.
  - rolltiide 7y ago
    Exactly, gatekeeping everyone that doesn't have two Au Pair that are taking turns sunbathing on your terrace also, squad goals.
  - lonelappde 7y ago
    You are claiming that poor parents will changed their school choice based on the availability of parent-teacher conferences? And that the problem of poverty is overemployment, not underemployment?
    - saagarjha 7y ago
      Poor parents often don't have a choice: they can't afford to take time off from their job(s).
      - protomyth 7y ago
newnewpdro 7y ago
I used to get up well before the sun rose for private school, it wasn't a big deal, we just went to bed earlier than most. It was nice to have more time to myself before parents got home from work. It seems strange for the state to be meddling in this.
- cylentwolf 7y ago
  A bunch of studies came out saying that students are better with more sleep and generally waking up after 7 is best so we get this law. The problem here is that I am betting that the kids still get home before their parents from work and now they will have to start after their parents leave for work so it will put an economic crunch on dual working parents.
  - newnewpdro 7y ago
    Why don't kids just go to sleep earlier? Isn't part of raising children teaching them self-discipline? Things like putting down the electronic gadgets at night, not consuming stimulating food/drinks in the evening, etc. It's shit like this that makes California look so ridiculous to the rest of the nation.
    - arcticbull 7y ago
      No, it's biology.
WillPostForFood 7y ago
Weird thing is the assumption there is a single one-time-fits-all solution. Give some flexibility to kids and families on start time. Optional period 1 paired with optional period 8(or 7 or 9).
- conanbatt 7y ago
  Thats not how public schooling works: its mechanics are rules on rules.
btilly 7y ago
Wonderful. Now can we pay attention to all of the research saying that homework creates stress but doesn't work, and have schools stop assigning so much? More precisely, the research shows that homework done right helps, done wrong hurts, and the result is that more homework increases the correlation between parent's socioeconomic status and student performance. But on average is approximately net neutral for learning. But there is one very strong correlation. More homework means more conflict in the home...
- gregpilling 7y ago
  I have 4 children and I actively help them with/cheat on their homework. They are assigned too damn much of it. They are all getting good grades and I don't think it is impacting them academically.
  - Filligree 7y ago
    If you're doing it right, it's probably helping. Good on you. I find the American school system utterly absurd, especially the amount of homework you get.
- polynomial 7y ago
  A more specific case of the general principle that work involves conflict.
- duderific 7y ago
  FWIW my 5-year-old started kindergarten this year, and not only is he given about two hours of homework a week (expected to be spread out over a few days), but he is expected to do it without parental help/supervision, beyond getting him started/explaining the assignment (because he can't read). If you've ever been around a 5-year-old boy, you know how ridiculous this is.
  - mcv 7y ago
    2 hours of homework at 5? That's nuts. 5 year olds should play, and learn through play, not through study. I've got the feeling even my 10 year old doesn't get 2 hours of homework per week (or if he does, he doesn't tell me). (I also recently learned that Dutch schools have stopped standardised tests at kindergarten. I was appalled when my oldest son had to do those.)
topkai22 7y ago
This is a great move by California. My family engaged with school district officials a few times on why we started school so early, when there is so much research showing it is harmful for teenager. The answer we got was... buses and sports. And little kids. Basically, the district needed to make sure that elementary school kids weren't walking to school or waiting for buses in the dark, so they had to start around 9a at the earliest. Since they needed to share the buses, they couldn't start all grade levels at the same time. The reason why they went 725a, 750a, and 9a instead of something like 8a, 9a, 930a is that if you started Jr high or High school at 930a, they wouldn't start after school activities till 4p and would go after dark in the winter. This always seemed an insane argument to me, but was said multiple times. My home district looks to still use the same bell schedule too.
- skissane 7y ago
  As a non-American I find this interesting, that school start times would be decided based on availability of buses. Here in Australia, most schools don't own their own buses (I see a few expensive private schools do). Buses are provided by private bus companies and/or by a government-owned bus company (depending on who provides regular non-school bus services in the area). The bus fare is either paid by the student's parents, or else by the government, depending on factors like how long it would take the student to walk, how old the student is, whether they have a disability, etc. The government subsidises buses for all school students equally, irrespective of whether they attend private schools or government-run schools. I don't know how exactly schools decide their start times, but I doubt bus availability would have much to do with it. Bus availability is something for bus companies to worry about, not schools.
  - dint 7y ago
    In America, most areas (even many cities) lack public bus infrastructure with the reliability or capacity to serve this role. However, in cities that do, busing is often outsourced to public transit - each student in my city gets a bus pass with their student ID.
  - topkai22 7y ago
carapace 7y ago
All this commotion around what time to begin soul-crushing conformity factory amuses me grimly. Studies show children are slightly less psychologically crippled for life if you let them sleep in for an hour before putting them in the electric Skinner Box. Terrific.
- polynomial 7y ago
  We're gonna need a box tightener over here, someone is thinking outside it.
- drak0n1c 7y ago
  Charter schools and home schooling are viable alternatives, and if done well they have decent results as far as college admissions and career opportunities go.
colordrops 7y ago
The implied assumption in all this discussion is that everyone stays up late so 7am doesn't work. Perhaps the question should be why society is so geared for waking hours shifted partly into the night. Perhaps people should wake with the sun and sleep soon after dark. But so much entertainment is scheduled during the evening, and everyone is so deeply entrenched in their habits.
- theptip 7y ago
  I don't think that is the implied assumption; the stated reason for this change, FTA: > The American Academy of Pediatrics, which backed the bill, said in 2014 policy statement that getting too little sleep puts teenagers’ physical and mental health at risk, as well as their academic performance. The organization cited research that shows that biological changes in puberty make it difficult for the average teenager to fall asleep before 11pm, and that teenagers need between 8.5 and 9.5 hours of sleep to function at their best.
  - colordrops 7y ago
    Did they give a cause as to why it's hard for them to sleep before 11pm? That doesn't contradict what I said in the slightest.
    - theptip 7y ago
      > The organization cited research that shows that biological changes in puberty make it difficult for the average teenager to fall asleep before 11pm I didn't follow the citation, but that would be my suggestion for the first place to look if you want to understand their theory better.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- beefalo 7y ago
  If students are to wake with the sun in winter months, that would mean waking up at 8AM where I went to school. You would need to start school around 9:30AM since some students spent over 1 hour on the bus.
35787 7y ago
Public schools are a cancer. They are worse for your intellectual development than just being left alone. They actually damage your mind by suffocating you of free thought and experimentation. And in the name of doing this, they pile on the stress and expose you to viscous bullies. The kids run these schools now, they are closer to day-care centers or zoos than schools. The teachers just watch idly while their students succumb to the horrible circumstances that they are forced into. I know because it happened to me. American public schools in particular are a disgrace. And to top it all off they woke me up at 6AM 5.5 days a week which was never necessary and has been shown to be detrimental to students wellbeing. God damn if there is one thing in this world that I resent it is the mother fucking public schools. God fucking damn them.
- armenarmen 7y ago
  They’re the only place that most people will ever experience physical violence.
  - 35787 7y ago
    This is true for me. Public schools are so horrible that it drives me insane just to think about it. And people brush it off because of some vague notion that there’s no other choice. Look at billy eilish. She’s fantastic and very successful and she was homeschooled. Palmer luckey who founded oculus and is now worth something like 500 million dollars, homeschooled. “I can’t afford homeschooling. I have never even tried to assemble a budget or think critically about it but I just know it would be too expensive and would not work because nobody was ever successful after homeschooling. I guess I’ll just throw my child to the lions and hope they don’t become a shooter.”
    - whymsicalburito 7y ago
      Of course there are exceptions, but most homeschooled people I've met have displayed some sort of social deficiency. I wouldn't support a blanket statement that the solution is more home schooling.
epmaybe 7y ago
I'm extremely oblivious to what the benefits to starting later are, and how stable the benefits will be over time. Anyone care to explain? I'm particularly concerned that this will incentivize students to just stay up later, negating many benefits of increased sleep.
- ryanhuff 7y ago
  As the parent of a high school freshman boy, I've observed that his demand for sleep seems to have recently gone up, but so has his school work load. He's regularly up until 11pm doing homework as it is, and waking up tired at 7am the following day. If they simply shift his school start and end times 30 minutes later, I don't see much net benefit for him.
- mLuby 7y ago
  That assumes sleep(2100, 0500) == sleep(2300, 0700), which anecdataly is false.
  - epmaybe 7y ago
    Could you elaborate? I think you mean that there are benefits to waking up later due to the effect light has on circadian rhythm, but I don't want to assume.
    - mLuby 7y ago
      That, and that some people are naturally early birds and others are night owls.
- joshvm 7y ago
  The benefits are sleep, as the article says. I would guess this outweighs the risk that a few students use the opportunity to stay up longer. (although pre 8am seems excessively early to me - we started around 8:50) > I'm particularly concerned that this will incentivize students to just stay up later, negating many benefits of increased sleep. This is missing the point. Teenagers staying up late is often interpreted as laziness or disobedience, when there is increasing evidence that it's a symptom of an (ab)normal circadian rhythm.
withinboredom 7y ago
On which day and timezone?
- kccqzy 7y ago
  On schools day, in the time zone in use in California (PT).
fortran77 7y ago
Shouldn't the school do what's appropriate for the local community it is in? Now they won't be able to.
avischiffmann 7y ago
Of course this happens after I leave California
malchow 7y ago
California: everything is either banned or required.
- arcticbull 7y ago
  Ultimately the buck for public education in US states stops at the state, therefore, this amounts to an administrative change. They set the curricula, is it a stretch to say they should also decide when that curriculum is administered?
pjkundert 7y ago
Ah, meddling central-planners preventing hard-working families from doing what it takes to achieve their dreams... Don’t you just have to shake your head at people who’ve literally never had to accomplish anything life-and-death in their entitled little lives, making rules to protect us? It brings a tear to the eye.
- pjkundert 7y ago
  My entire family would be on the bus a full hour before dawn at -20C, and wouldn’t return home until dark for 6 months of the year. Learning to bear hardship isn’t a tragedy, in a loving home. One of these things is the important factor to focus on, and one isn’t. As usual, bureaucrats focus on exactly the wrong one.
  - arcticbull 7y ago
    Just because you went through something counterproductive and unhelpful and found positivity in it doesn't mean then next generation should be subjected to it too when we now objectively know better.
- arcticbull 7y ago
  Nope, it's science (https://www.cdc.gov/features/school-start-times/index.html https://www.cdc.gov/features/school-start-times/index.html).
  - conanbatt 7y ago
    Science says 8:30, law says 8:00, so the state is not following the state's recommendation. Also, what is best for an ideal scenario for the idealized kid is not the same as what is best for the parents. Finally the biggest perpetrator of sending kids early is precisely public schooling, private schooling has variety that suits the parent's choices. What is the best public policy then? school vouchers, and let parents decide.
    - arcticbull 7y ago
baby 7y ago
Some classes in my uni started at 7:45am. I never went.
yellowapple 7y ago
I have a couple questions/concerns about this: - Does this only impact "regular" classes, or does it also impact optionally-early schedules (a.k.a. "0 Period", as the middle and high schools called it where I grew up)? - Has there been any consideration on the impact from students having less time to do homework every night if school starts (and therefore ends) later?
helpPeople 7y ago
California politics make me think it's a dangerous place to buy real estate. Good intentions, but one of these laws are going to have catastrophic unintended consequences.
jelliclesfarm 7y ago
I don’t know what to say..I grew up in India. My mom would wake me up at 4.30, make me a hot beverage and go back to sleep. I would study in the early hours because she believed that early morning is the best time for the mind to absorb and retain what I study. Go for a brisk walk at 6.00 and leave for school by 7.15-7.30. School was from 8.30-3.30. 8.00-8.30 was morning assembly which was mandatory. Extra curricular activities like music or dance or outdoor sports till sunset(6.00). My grandmother won’t let me in before 6.00 because she thought that outdoor play was important and in the sun. Freshen up and homework till 8.00. Dinner and then TV time. Reading and to bed by 9.00-9.30. In high school, less play and more classes. But these tutoring classes were outside. And I would leave by 5.00 to catch the bus to get to them. I was old enough to travel by myself. I loved school. I loved my teachers. My math tutor from 1989..we keep in touch and she is now teaching me Indian classical music by whatsapp video chat thrice a week. I call her once a year and this year I told her I am joining a neighborhood music group. She made me sing. Entirely disapproved my technique and we started classes immediately. If my teachers asked me ‘jump’, I would. My school years were the best years of my life. I don’t think I would have had this experience had I grown up in CA in this time and age..and gone to public schools here. Case in point: The public school teachers in my Bay Area city recruit parents and students to strike in their support during their union wage negotiations. It’s a travesty. I think children should wake up earlier. It’s delightful to wake up before dawn and have a goal. The rest of the day at school becomes easy peasy.
- rubicon33 7y ago
  Children can still wake up early. They're just not forced to PERFORM well early. You have to understand that not everyone does well in the morning. It's completely unfair to expect everyone to get up and be functioning at the same level in the early morning. That's going to advantage some, and disadvantage others. That's what this is about. Nothing stops the early bird from getting up early and doing all the things you ascribe to.
  - jelliclesfarm 7y ago
    It’s not about fairness. Why is everything about ‘fairness’? It’s not a biological impediment. Getting up early is not a super power nor is childhood a disability. Getting up early and getting an early start gives you a buffer towards the end of the day. If you start late and run out of time, the whole rest of the day will be derailed. Anyways..just my 2c. I am not here to argue because I have no dog in this fight.
duxup 7y ago
Does this allow for before / after school care at schools to start before 8?
devm0de 7y ago
Why not elementary schools too? :(
vinniejames 7y ago
Great, now just add a law banning parents' workplaces from starting before 8am and we are all set
sologoub 7y ago
A lot of the comments are focusing on the burden for the parents, but there is also negative impact on the kids from less wealthy backgrounds. My last 2 years of high school, I went to 7am first period to be able to get out early enough to put in 6-8 hours of work and still have enough time for homework. That extra hour and a half was critical to making it work. Without the work and extra cash, I probably would have had a lot different experience and may have not stayed motivated for college/grad school/etc. But more importantly, this income let me feel on the level around much wealthier kids who didn’t work or worked for their parents businesses. Confidence is priceless at that age!
jdkee 7y ago
https://www.cdc.gov/healthyyouth/data/yrbs/pdf/2017/ss6708.pdf https://www.cdc.gov/healthyyouth/data/yrbs/pdf/2017/ss6708.p...
collyw 7y ago
I am going to ask this again, as I never receive a satisfactory answer when this subject comes up. Isn't time all relative? Its just a number, which we adjust by an hour twice a year. It takes us a couple of days to get used to it. Can't people just be more disciplined and go to bed an hour earlier if they need an hours extra sleep? That's effectively what we do in spring when the clocks change. I came to this conclusion travelling from Chile to Peru, going pretty much directly north. One country had daylight saving for summer the other didn't and on top of that there was an hour difference for time zone - so in total two hours difference. As I say, it took a couple of days to get used to it. Can anyone give me a decent rebuttal to this argument?
- x3n0ph3n3 7y ago
  No, not all time is relative and the presence of light has profound impacts on our biological circadian rhythm. Even DST has shown negative health impacts. [1] 1. https://www.businessinsider.com/daylight-saving-time-is-deadly-2018-3 https://www.businessinsider.com/daylight-saving-time-is-dead...
  - collyw 7y ago
    Ok, that's a fair point, but don't certain countries effectively rise a lot earlier than others? (Greenwich meantime for example passes through London and also through Spain, yet there is an hour difference in the time zone). Is there evidence that that affects these countries differently? Plus we have light bulbs in this day and age, so lighting is not affected by the sun in the same way that it used to be.
- andyljones 7y ago
  Physiologically there's no difficulty in pushing your circadian around. Heck, various studies have shown that in isolation people's clocks will drift by an hour or more a week. Culturally though, there is a preferred cycle, and it's some weighted average of the cycle of all the people you interact with. Moving from Chile to Peru and shifting your cycle 2hrs _to match the Peruvian clock_ isn't so bad, but if you shifted 2hrs the other way you'd find it a lot more painful. This is the problem with shifting school hours: not the hours themselves, but how they interact with everyone else's hours. Finally, there is a privileged circadian, and it's the Sun's. Free, global lighting is just too good to pass up on.
haywirez 7y ago
I think this doesn't go far enough, there should be a ban on starting before 10 am. During high school I recall frequently falling asleep around 3-4 am and having the alarm go off at 6:30.
Dowwie 7y ago
School may start at 8am but morning begins at 5am in an industrious household. Even one solid hour of daily morning practice before school is a great gain.
mcv 7y ago
> " one-quarter will need to wait an additional 31 to 60 minutes to get going." So one quarter of Californian schools were starting between 7 and 7:30? I'm surprised there haven't been revolts in the streets about that. That's completely ridiculous. Apparently this is to accommodate parents who need to leave for work at ridiculously early hours, but if you want to accommodate parents, why only those, and not the parents who prefer to get out of bed a bit later? My wife and I have arranged it so that she works early (she often leaves at 7:15 when the rest of the family is barely out of bed) and is home in time to pick the kids up from day care, while I take the kids to school at 8:30 and am usually home a bit too late to pick them up (though I work fairly nearby and can still pick them up if I have to). But if this isn't an option for whatever reason, why not take your kids to pre-school care? Leave early, drop the kids off at pre-school care, go to work, and when school starts, pre-school care ensures the kids get there on time.
- udkl 7y ago
  > why not take your kids to pre-school care? That’s a very privileged view. I would imagine most of the country cannot afford any sort of paid external care.
  - ahje 7y ago
    I think it's a Western European view. Such services are often free or at least heavily subsidized here.
  - mcv 7y ago
    So what do working parents do after school? Schools starting early also end early, I assume. If kids can't go to school on their own, I guess they can't come home on their own either.
trezemanero 7y ago
Here, in Brazil, when my classes was in the morning, it started 7:00AM. To be at class on time, i was off the bed at 6:00AM, took a breakfast and walked 20 minutes to the school. It was rough. They had 2 classes shifts, a 7-11:30AM and another 1-5:30AM, depending of your grade and the school, it could be on the morning or the evening shift. Edit: I forgot to mention that i live in a city with 80k habitants, a small-medium city. At the biggest cities here, like São Paulo, the kids usually have to wake even early to take the bus.
Raed667 7y ago
My High-school started at 8 and university at 9.. I thought it was too early for both!
pier25 7y ago
8am is still too early for teenagers. Not only their brains need more sleep than adults (9+ hours) but their clocks shift which is why it's common for teenagers to go to bed later than adults.

505 points by dpflan 7y ago

I didn't even realize schools started before 8... I believe that's when my high school started. Thinking back to the useless slug that I was in the mornings as a teenager, I can't imagine this will do anything but help learning. If only there had been a law saying college classes couldn't start before 11am (or 2pm on Fridays) when I was there...

vonmoltke 7y ago
My last six years of public school in South Florida all started before 0800. As for college, there was one year I was getting on a train at 0530 to make my first class...
grawprog 7y ago
I used to have both a technical math and a statistics class that started at 7am in college. Fridays if i remember right for the math class. That was always a 'fun' way to start the day.
- thrower123 7y ago
  Foreign language drill classes at 7 AM was quite possibly the worst thing I dealt with during college. Rapid-fire German when it is dark and frozen and you are hung over is very rough.
cgriswald 7y ago
For us, first period started at 7:10. I had a zero hour class that started some weird amount less than an hour before that.
alexbanks 7y ago
My bus throughout the majority of k-12 showed up at 6:50, and first bell rang at 7:23.

socalnate1 7y ago

My high school started at 7am. I also took the bus; which picked up around 6:15am; so I usually woke up around 5:45am during the week. I would often nod off during my first or second period; and routinely took 2-3 hour naps when I got home from school; which screwed up my ability to fall asleep early at night or get much homework done. I sometimes wonder what my academics would have been like if I was actually awake during those first two periods. (This was in the 90's)

non-entity 7y ago
I've always been confused by TV shows showing kids leaving for school and it's bright outside with the whole family awake. Growing up, it was dark when we got up for school and just barely sun up (depending on the season still dark) by the time we left to get on the bus.
- rz2k 7y ago
  On the shortest days of the year in Los Angeles[1], there is civil twilight around 6:30am and full daylight before 7am. Maybe the writers, who even have children, live close to the schools they attend. [1] https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/usa/los-angeles https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/usa/los-angeles
  - widforss 7y ago
    Wow, this really gives you perspective. My corresponding times are 8:21 and 9:55. I would give the world for the opportunity of sunlight evenly distributed over the year.
    - JimboOmega 7y ago
      Move to the tropics; there's some variation but it's never very great.
    - com2kid 7y ago
      I do kind of enjoy the over 15 hours a day of sunlight Seattle gets in the summer, it peaks at around 16hrs on the longest day! I can get off work at 6, be home at 7, and still have 2 hours of sunlight left! Less than 9 hours in the winter though... that part is harsh.

dsalzman 7y ago

School children are sleeping on average 1 hour less than theirs peers did 50 years ago. This has been driven by earlier and earlier school start times. Sleep deprivation in school age children has been linked to lower test scores, lower knowledge retention, higher rates of "trouble making". Really happy to see these laws getting put in place!

briandear 7y ago
> This has been driven by earlier and earlier school start times What about later and later bed times?
- Retric 7y ago
  If both where true you would see more than 1 hour of lost sleep.
- johnpowell 7y ago
  When I was kid I took apart my tv to disconnect the speakers and wire up my walkman headphones. This was so I could put a blanket over my head and tv and watch some Letterman at night. My mom would notice if there was light and noise coming from my room after bedtime. Now the kids have phones. If I had a phone and internet access I would have never slept.
  - jupp0r 7y ago
    Phones have parental controls. Learning how to hack those is a worthwhile skill to learn, too.
- cgriswald 7y ago
  Humans get tired from being up for a certain number of hours and also from waning daylight. In teens, both of these are delayed relative to adults and children. You can send a teen to bed early but their bodies aren’t trying to sleep.
- Alupis 7y ago
  > What about later and later bed times? This is the real factor. When I was a kid - it was in bed, lights out and go to sleep at 9pm the latest during school nights - strictly enforced by my parents. Now I regularly see small children (< 10 years old) out at the store past 10pm or 11pm on school nights.

aidenn0 7y ago

Don't worry, we'll work around that law by switching to year-round DST.

ijpoijpoihpiuoh 7y ago

I wonder how the policy discussions looked when considering the impact on poor parents who have to be at work. Maybe the thinking was that the start time of 7:30-8AM was already too late to save these folks, so 8:30AM would not make them much worse off? Or maybe there are fewer people in these circumstances than I fear?

secabeen 7y ago
This law is only for grades 7-12, so most affected kids can get themselves to school, or don't need direct supervision between when parents leave for work and when the bus arrives.
- kenperkins 7y ago
  My 7 and 9yo kids start school at 8:50am, and don't get off the bus until 4:30pm. It's ridiculous. They're young and need time off but because the district moved everyone back to make room for the High Schools now elementary kids aren't home until half past 4. Not enough time for them to play in the afternoons now.
  - vonmoltke 7y ago
    Either their elementary school is in session for an awful long time (mine was 6 hours), or they have a really long bus ride home.
- topkai22 7y ago
  I'd also point out I've never lived in a school district that started elementary school before 8a, so these parents must have had solutions for those years. The real problem is going to be if elementary schools get pushed forward to start at 7a and release at 1p or something crazy like that, but I know most districts don't want the liability of 8 year olds waiting for the bus in the dark along side a major road.
crooked-v 7y ago
"Every parent in California" is pretty big negotiating block when it comes to setting standard work hours.

jimbob45 7y ago

This seems to flagrantly ignore the parents' need to be to work on time. I think the kids will ultimately be the ones suffering because the parents will struggle that much more. No, the bus is not always an option, nor is leaving your kid alone at home for any amount of time.

crooked-v 7y ago
Given that this will be a job-negotiating concern of literally every parent in California, businesses will just have to adapt to the new normal.
- jimbob45 7y ago
  It's the lower-class parents who can't afford babysitters or who might be divorced that will be the most affected by this. Coincidentally, it's those same parents who have the least room to negotiate in their positions.
dillon 7y ago
Many schools have programs to drop your kids off early. The same program is there to keep kids late. If kids are getting out of school at 2:00 pm then the kids are either home alone or taking a bus one way or the other. In my opinion, this has very little to do with parents.
lemoncucumber 7y ago
> No, the bus is not always an option, nor is leaving your kid alone at home for any amount of time. This bill applies to middle and high school kids. If you can't leave your high schooler home alone for any amount of time then you probably have bigger problems to deal with than school start time.

dillon 7y ago

My mother works for a school district in California. There was an open hearing around moving the starting school time from 8:00 am to 7:00 am. There's been countless research showing that this is generally bad for children to wake up this early (I'm sorry for not linking a reference). At the hearing, there are some words that go something like "Children come first" printed on some wall in a large font. My mother made her case that starting so early isn't a good idea, and is bad for children and they may as well remove those words. The reason for the change is that teachers generally live pretty close to the school they teach at. They also have a car. So, for them they can wake up at 6:30 and make it on time. Whereas kids, especially poor kids, might live further and may be taking a bus where the bus pick up times could be as early as 6:00 am so the kids are waking up even earlier just to make it. An early starting time, generally, benefited the teachers as they can wake up later and they get out of class around 2:00 pm. The after-school programs then rake in cash by keeping kids longer since most parents don't get off work until 5:00 pm. tl;dr the early starting times were to make teachers happy. Good on California to put students over teachers. Now, if only we can raise teacher's salaries.

Gibbon1 7y ago
> tl;dr the early starting times were to make teachers happy. I've wondered about adverse section being the cause of this. People that don't wake up early typically won't become teachers. Eventually all your teachers and staff are 'morning people' like my dad. My dad loved going into work at 6am. And getting home at 3 or 4pm.
topkai22 7y ago
I'm also pretty sure at the higher grade levels (Middle to high school) it is partially about keeping other professions out of sports coaching. If high school starts at 930a and ends at 4p, an awful lot of working professionals could still be there by 415-430p to coach. When high school let out at 245, it's a lot harder.

kgwgk 7y ago

If the objective is for people to get more hours of sleep probably it would have been better to pass a law dividing the day in 32 hours... Kids will sleep the same amount of time in all cases, but it would be 50% more hours.

DenisM 7y ago

The "early wakeup time makes people groggy" story always looked puzzling to me. I mean, when DST kicks in everyone adjusts in day or two. What prevents one from setting up their own personal DST and getting up earlier still? Certainly not biology.

drblast 7y ago
Biology is a factor because the sun isn't up. Also there is the desire to do things in the evening, such as a parent having dinner and interacting with their kids before they have to go to bed. Or to get home from work to help them with their homework. Or let's say as a parent I don't want to have to wake up at 6am because my kids have to wake up that early for school when I don't have to be to work until 9 or 10.
thrower123 7y ago
DST is a huge mess for at least a month, sometimes longer. It's massively disruptive. This may be more of an issue in higher latitudes, though. It was always the last straw that signalled the effective end of the school year in the spring. Everyone was so frigged up and groggy from that shift ahead that we might as well have not been there, and by the time people did adjust, there wasn't any time left to recoup.
topkai22 7y ago
Every time this comes up, I recommend "Internal Time" by Till Roenneburg. It is wonderfully written, and it demolishes this concept quite thoroughly. It really is biology. Summary of the book as relates here though: People really do have internal clocks and preferred awake/sleep cycles. These internal clocks vary between individuals, and are there is most likely a genetic component. These internal clocks vary with age- in particular, teenagers and young adults clocks are generally shifted much later than kids or older adults. Shifts to people's schedules (such as DST) that cause them to leave their preferred sleep/awake cycle mitigate with time, but do not fully go away. Outside that book, there are plenty of studies showing that a non-standard hours shift work is biologically harmful.
MauranKilom 7y ago
It certainly is biology. Your circadian rhythm is strongly influenced by the timing of day (well, blue) light being received by your eyes. It also shifts naturally as you age - for example, in your teenage years you tend to fall asleep and wake up later. There are also interesting effects like the significant differences in school performance between students living at the eastern edge of a time zone vs living at the western.

war1025 7y ago

School K-12 started at 8:30am where / when I grew up. I assumed that was just the universal time school started everywhere. I have a feeling we're in for quite a shock when my daughter starts school in a couple years. Our current routine has her waking up sometime between 7:30 and 9.

meristem 7y ago

Unfortunately, the school systems still rely on one parent at home. It is not just drop off and pick up times: school activities, parent-teacher conferences, etc. For example, in the SF Unified District, school tours for parents of kids entering kindergarten, middle school and high school are during the school hours, mostly in the morning. It is all built around the expectation of a parent at home or a job structure that allows parents to have time off and not be penalized for it. Neither of those are necessarily representative of a family's current reality.

Hermitian909 7y ago
I can tell you that, through most of the bay area at least, those policies are mostly about intentional socioeconomic segregation. My family has deep ties to local education infrastructure and its well known that most of the advocates for these policies are trying to keep poor kids out of their schools. While they don't say it in public forums they're generally more than happy to tell you in private.
- rolltiide 7y ago
  Exactly, gatekeeping everyone that doesn't have two Au Pair that are taking turns sunbathing on your terrace also, squad goals.
- lonelappde 7y ago
  You are claiming that poor parents will changed their school choice based on the availability of parent-teacher conferences? And that the problem of poverty is overemployment, not underemployment?
  - saagarjha 7y ago
    Poor parents often don't have a choice: they can't afford to take time off from their job(s).
    - protomyth 7y ago

newnewpdro 7y ago

I used to get up well before the sun rose for private school, it wasn't a big deal, we just went to bed earlier than most. It was nice to have more time to myself before parents got home from work. It seems strange for the state to be meddling in this.

cylentwolf 7y ago
A bunch of studies came out saying that students are better with more sleep and generally waking up after 7 is best so we get this law. The problem here is that I am betting that the kids still get home before their parents from work and now they will have to start after their parents leave for work so it will put an economic crunch on dual working parents.
- newnewpdro 7y ago
  Why don't kids just go to sleep earlier? Isn't part of raising children teaching them self-discipline? Things like putting down the electronic gadgets at night, not consuming stimulating food/drinks in the evening, etc. It's shit like this that makes California look so ridiculous to the rest of the nation.
  - arcticbull 7y ago
    No, it's biology.

WillPostForFood 7y ago

Weird thing is the assumption there is a single one-time-fits-all solution. Give some flexibility to kids and families on start time. Optional period 1 paired with optional period 8(or 7 or 9).

conanbatt 7y ago
Thats not how public schooling works: its mechanics are rules on rules.

btilly 7y ago

Wonderful. Now can we pay attention to all of the research saying that homework creates stress but doesn't work, and have schools stop assigning so much? More precisely, the research shows that homework done right helps, done wrong hurts, and the result is that more homework increases the correlation between parent's socioeconomic status and student performance. But on average is approximately net neutral for learning. But there is one very strong correlation. More homework means more conflict in the home...

gregpilling 7y ago
I have 4 children and I actively help them with/cheat on their homework. They are assigned too damn much of it. They are all getting good grades and I don't think it is impacting them academically.
- Filligree 7y ago
  If you're doing it right, it's probably helping. Good on you. I find the American school system utterly absurd, especially the amount of homework you get.
polynomial 7y ago
A more specific case of the general principle that work involves conflict.
duderific 7y ago
FWIW my 5-year-old started kindergarten this year, and not only is he given about two hours of homework a week (expected to be spread out over a few days), but he is expected to do it without parental help/supervision, beyond getting him started/explaining the assignment (because he can't read). If you've ever been around a 5-year-old boy, you know how ridiculous this is.
- mcv 7y ago
  2 hours of homework at 5? That's nuts. 5 year olds should play, and learn through play, not through study. I've got the feeling even my 10 year old doesn't get 2 hours of homework per week (or if he does, he doesn't tell me). (I also recently learned that Dutch schools have stopped standardised tests at kindergarten. I was appalled when my oldest son had to do those.)

topkai22 7y ago

This is a great move by California. My family engaged with school district officials a few times on why we started school so early, when there is so much research showing it is harmful for teenager. The answer we got was... buses and sports. And little kids. Basically, the district needed to make sure that elementary school kids weren't walking to school or waiting for buses in the dark, so they had to start around 9a at the earliest. Since they needed to share the buses, they couldn't start all grade levels at the same time. The reason why they went 725a, 750a, and 9a instead of something like 8a, 9a, 930a is that if you started Jr high or High school at 930a, they wouldn't start after school activities till 4p and would go after dark in the winter. This always seemed an insane argument to me, but was said multiple times. My home district looks to still use the same bell schedule too.

skissane 7y ago
As a non-American I find this interesting, that school start times would be decided based on availability of buses. Here in Australia, most schools don't own their own buses (I see a few expensive private schools do). Buses are provided by private bus companies and/or by a government-owned bus company (depending on who provides regular non-school bus services in the area). The bus fare is either paid by the student's parents, or else by the government, depending on factors like how long it would take the student to walk, how old the student is, whether they have a disability, etc. The government subsidises buses for all school students equally, irrespective of whether they attend private schools or government-run schools. I don't know how exactly schools decide their start times, but I doubt bus availability would have much to do with it. Bus availability is something for bus companies to worry about, not schools.
- dint 7y ago
  In America, most areas (even many cities) lack public bus infrastructure with the reliability or capacity to serve this role. However, in cities that do, busing is often outsourced to public transit - each student in my city gets a bus pass with their student ID.
- topkai22 7y ago

carapace 7y ago

All this commotion around what time to begin soul-crushing conformity factory amuses me grimly. Studies show children are slightly less psychologically crippled for life if you let them sleep in for an hour before putting them in the electric Skinner Box. Terrific.

polynomial 7y ago
We're gonna need a box tightener over here, someone is thinking outside it.
drak0n1c 7y ago
Charter schools and home schooling are viable alternatives, and if done well they have decent results as far as college admissions and career opportunities go.

colordrops 7y ago

The implied assumption in all this discussion is that everyone stays up late so 7am doesn't work. Perhaps the question should be why society is so geared for waking hours shifted partly into the night. Perhaps people should wake with the sun and sleep soon after dark. But so much entertainment is scheduled during the evening, and everyone is so deeply entrenched in their habits.

theptip 7y ago
I don't think that is the implied assumption; the stated reason for this change, FTA: > The American Academy of Pediatrics, which backed the bill, said in 2014 policy statement that getting too little sleep puts teenagers’ physical and mental health at risk, as well as their academic performance. The organization cited research that shows that biological changes in puberty make it difficult for the average teenager to fall asleep before 11pm, and that teenagers need between 8.5 and 9.5 hours of sleep to function at their best.
- colordrops 7y ago
  Did they give a cause as to why it's hard for them to sleep before 11pm? That doesn't contradict what I said in the slightest.
  - theptip 7y ago
    > The organization cited research that shows that biological changes in puberty make it difficult for the average teenager to fall asleep before 11pm I didn't follow the citation, but that would be my suggestion for the first place to look if you want to understand their theory better.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
beefalo 7y ago
If students are to wake with the sun in winter months, that would mean waking up at 8AM where I went to school. You would need to start school around 9:30AM since some students spent over 1 hour on the bus.

35787 7y ago

Public schools are a cancer. They are worse for your intellectual development than just being left alone. They actually damage your mind by suffocating you of free thought and experimentation. And in the name of doing this, they pile on the stress and expose you to viscous bullies. The kids run these schools now, they are closer to day-care centers or zoos than schools. The teachers just watch idly while their students succumb to the horrible circumstances that they are forced into. I know because it happened to me. American public schools in particular are a disgrace. And to top it all off they woke me up at 6AM 5.5 days a week which was never necessary and has been shown to be detrimental to students wellbeing. God damn if there is one thing in this world that I resent it is the mother fucking public schools. God fucking damn them.

armenarmen 7y ago
They’re the only place that most people will ever experience physical violence.
- 35787 7y ago
  This is true for me. Public schools are so horrible that it drives me insane just to think about it. And people brush it off because of some vague notion that there’s no other choice. Look at billy eilish. She’s fantastic and very successful and she was homeschooled. Palmer luckey who founded oculus and is now worth something like 500 million dollars, homeschooled. “I can’t afford homeschooling. I have never even tried to assemble a budget or think critically about it but I just know it would be too expensive and would not work because nobody was ever successful after homeschooling. I guess I’ll just throw my child to the lions and hope they don’t become a shooter.”
  - whymsicalburito 7y ago
    Of course there are exceptions, but most homeschooled people I've met have displayed some sort of social deficiency. I wouldn't support a blanket statement that the solution is more home schooling.

epmaybe 7y ago

I'm extremely oblivious to what the benefits to starting later are, and how stable the benefits will be over time. Anyone care to explain? I'm particularly concerned that this will incentivize students to just stay up later, negating many benefits of increased sleep.

ryanhuff 7y ago
As the parent of a high school freshman boy, I've observed that his demand for sleep seems to have recently gone up, but so has his school work load. He's regularly up until 11pm doing homework as it is, and waking up tired at 7am the following day. If they simply shift his school start and end times 30 minutes later, I don't see much net benefit for him.
mLuby 7y ago
That assumes sleep(2100, 0500) == sleep(2300, 0700), which anecdataly is false.
- epmaybe 7y ago
  Could you elaborate? I think you mean that there are benefits to waking up later due to the effect light has on circadian rhythm, but I don't want to assume.
  - mLuby 7y ago
    That, and that some people are naturally early birds and others are night owls.
joshvm 7y ago
The benefits are sleep, as the article says. I would guess this outweighs the risk that a few students use the opportunity to stay up longer. (although pre 8am seems excessively early to me - we started around 8:50) > I'm particularly concerned that this will incentivize students to just stay up later, negating many benefits of increased sleep. This is missing the point. Teenagers staying up late is often interpreted as laziness or disobedience, when there is increasing evidence that it's a symptom of an (ab)normal circadian rhythm.

withinboredom 7y ago

On which day and timezone?

kccqzy 7y ago
On schools day, in the time zone in use in California (PT).

fortran77 7y ago

Shouldn't the school do what's appropriate for the local community it is in? Now they won't be able to.

avischiffmann 7y ago

Of course this happens after I leave California

malchow 7y ago

California: everything is either banned or required.

arcticbull 7y ago
Ultimately the buck for public education in US states stops at the state, therefore, this amounts to an administrative change. They set the curricula, is it a stretch to say they should also decide when that curriculum is administered?

pjkundert 7y ago

Ah, meddling central-planners preventing hard-working families from doing what it takes to achieve their dreams... Don’t you just have to shake your head at people who’ve literally never had to accomplish anything life-and-death in their entitled little lives, making rules to protect us? It brings a tear to the eye.

pjkundert 7y ago
My entire family would be on the bus a full hour before dawn at -20C, and wouldn’t return home until dark for 6 months of the year. Learning to bear hardship isn’t a tragedy, in a loving home. One of these things is the important factor to focus on, and one isn’t. As usual, bureaucrats focus on exactly the wrong one.
- arcticbull 7y ago
  Just because you went through something counterproductive and unhelpful and found positivity in it doesn't mean then next generation should be subjected to it too when we now objectively know better.
arcticbull 7y ago
Nope, it's science (https://www.cdc.gov/features/school-start-times/index.html https://www.cdc.gov/features/school-start-times/index.html).
- conanbatt 7y ago
  Science says 8:30, law says 8:00, so the state is not following the state's recommendation. Also, what is best for an ideal scenario for the idealized kid is not the same as what is best for the parents. Finally the biggest perpetrator of sending kids early is precisely public schooling, private schooling has variety that suits the parent's choices. What is the best public policy then? school vouchers, and let parents decide.
  - arcticbull 7y ago

baby 7y ago

Some classes in my uni started at 7:45am. I never went.

yellowapple 7y ago

I have a couple questions/concerns about this: - Does this only impact "regular" classes, or does it also impact optionally-early schedules (a.k.a. "0 Period", as the middle and high schools called it where I grew up)? - Has there been any consideration on the impact from students having less time to do homework every night if school starts (and therefore ends) later?

helpPeople 7y ago

California politics make me think it's a dangerous place to buy real estate. Good intentions, but one of these laws are going to have catastrophic unintended consequences.

jelliclesfarm 7y ago

I don’t know what to say..I grew up in India. My mom would wake me up at 4.30, make me a hot beverage and go back to sleep. I would study in the early hours because she believed that early morning is the best time for the mind to absorb and retain what I study. Go for a brisk walk at 6.00 and leave for school by 7.15-7.30. School was from 8.30-3.30. 8.00-8.30 was morning assembly which was mandatory. Extra curricular activities like music or dance or outdoor sports till sunset(6.00). My grandmother won’t let me in before 6.00 because she thought that outdoor play was important and in the sun. Freshen up and homework till 8.00. Dinner and then TV time. Reading and to bed by 9.00-9.30. In high school, less play and more classes. But these tutoring classes were outside. And I would leave by 5.00 to catch the bus to get to them. I was old enough to travel by myself. I loved school. I loved my teachers. My math tutor from 1989..we keep in touch and she is now teaching me Indian classical music by whatsapp video chat thrice a week. I call her once a year and this year I told her I am joining a neighborhood music group. She made me sing. Entirely disapproved my technique and we started classes immediately. If my teachers asked me ‘jump’, I would. My school years were the best years of my life. I don’t think I would have had this experience had I grown up in CA in this time and age..and gone to public schools here. Case in point: The public school teachers in my Bay Area city recruit parents and students to strike in their support during their union wage negotiations. It’s a travesty. I think children should wake up earlier. It’s delightful to wake up before dawn and have a goal. The rest of the day at school becomes easy peasy.

rubicon33 7y ago
Children can still wake up early. They're just not forced to PERFORM well early. You have to understand that not everyone does well in the morning. It's completely unfair to expect everyone to get up and be functioning at the same level in the early morning. That's going to advantage some, and disadvantage others. That's what this is about. Nothing stops the early bird from getting up early and doing all the things you ascribe to.
- jelliclesfarm 7y ago
  It’s not about fairness. Why is everything about ‘fairness’? It’s not a biological impediment. Getting up early is not a super power nor is childhood a disability. Getting up early and getting an early start gives you a buffer towards the end of the day. If you start late and run out of time, the whole rest of the day will be derailed. Anyways..just my 2c. I am not here to argue because I have no dog in this fight.

duxup 7y ago

Does this allow for before / after school care at schools to start before 8?

devm0de 7y ago

Why not elementary schools too? :(

vinniejames 7y ago

Great, now just add a law banning parents' workplaces from starting before 8am and we are all set

sologoub 7y ago

A lot of the comments are focusing on the burden for the parents, but there is also negative impact on the kids from less wealthy backgrounds. My last 2 years of high school, I went to 7am first period to be able to get out early enough to put in 6-8 hours of work and still have enough time for homework. That extra hour and a half was critical to making it work. Without the work and extra cash, I probably would have had a lot different experience and may have not stayed motivated for college/grad school/etc. But more importantly, this income let me feel on the level around much wealthier kids who didn’t work or worked for their parents businesses. Confidence is priceless at that age!

jdkee 7y ago

https://www.cdc.gov/healthyyouth/data/yrbs/pdf/2017/ss6708.pdf https://www.cdc.gov/healthyyouth/data/yrbs/pdf/2017/ss6708.p...

collyw 7y ago

I am going to ask this again, as I never receive a satisfactory answer when this subject comes up. Isn't time all relative? Its just a number, which we adjust by an hour twice a year. It takes us a couple of days to get used to it. Can't people just be more disciplined and go to bed an hour earlier if they need an hours extra sleep? That's effectively what we do in spring when the clocks change. I came to this conclusion travelling from Chile to Peru, going pretty much directly north. One country had daylight saving for summer the other didn't and on top of that there was an hour difference for time zone - so in total two hours difference. As I say, it took a couple of days to get used to it. Can anyone give me a decent rebuttal to this argument?

x3n0ph3n3 7y ago
No, not all time is relative and the presence of light has profound impacts on our biological circadian rhythm. Even DST has shown negative health impacts. [1] 1. https://www.businessinsider.com/daylight-saving-time-is-deadly-2018-3 https://www.businessinsider.com/daylight-saving-time-is-dead...
- collyw 7y ago
  Ok, that's a fair point, but don't certain countries effectively rise a lot earlier than others? (Greenwich meantime for example passes through London and also through Spain, yet there is an hour difference in the time zone). Is there evidence that that affects these countries differently? Plus we have light bulbs in this day and age, so lighting is not affected by the sun in the same way that it used to be.
andyljones 7y ago
Physiologically there's no difficulty in pushing your circadian around. Heck, various studies have shown that in isolation people's clocks will drift by an hour or more a week. Culturally though, there is a preferred cycle, and it's some weighted average of the cycle of all the people you interact with. Moving from Chile to Peru and shifting your cycle 2hrs _to match the Peruvian clock_ isn't so bad, but if you shifted 2hrs the other way you'd find it a lot more painful. This is the problem with shifting school hours: not the hours themselves, but how they interact with everyone else's hours. Finally, there is a privileged circadian, and it's the Sun's. Free, global lighting is just too good to pass up on.

haywirez 7y ago

I think this doesn't go far enough, there should be a ban on starting before 10 am. During high school I recall frequently falling asleep around 3-4 am and having the alarm go off at 6:30.

Dowwie 7y ago

School may start at 8am but morning begins at 5am in an industrious household. Even one solid hour of daily morning practice before school is a great gain.

mcv 7y ago

> " one-quarter will need to wait an additional 31 to 60 minutes to get going." So one quarter of Californian schools were starting between 7 and 7:30? I'm surprised there haven't been revolts in the streets about that. That's completely ridiculous. Apparently this is to accommodate parents who need to leave for work at ridiculously early hours, but if you want to accommodate parents, why only those, and not the parents who prefer to get out of bed a bit later? My wife and I have arranged it so that she works early (she often leaves at 7:15 when the rest of the family is barely out of bed) and is home in time to pick the kids up from day care, while I take the kids to school at 8:30 and am usually home a bit too late to pick them up (though I work fairly nearby and can still pick them up if I have to). But if this isn't an option for whatever reason, why not take your kids to pre-school care? Leave early, drop the kids off at pre-school care, go to work, and when school starts, pre-school care ensures the kids get there on time.

udkl 7y ago
> why not take your kids to pre-school care? That’s a very privileged view. I would imagine most of the country cannot afford any sort of paid external care.
- ahje 7y ago
  I think it's a Western European view. Such services are often free or at least heavily subsidized here.
- mcv 7y ago
  So what do working parents do after school? Schools starting early also end early, I assume. If kids can't go to school on their own, I guess they can't come home on their own either.

trezemanero 7y ago

Here, in Brazil, when my classes was in the morning, it started 7:00AM. To be at class on time, i was off the bed at 6:00AM, took a breakfast and walked 20 minutes to the school. It was rough. They had 2 classes shifts, a 7-11:30AM and another 1-5:30AM, depending of your grade and the school, it could be on the morning or the evening shift. Edit: I forgot to mention that i live in a city with 80k habitants, a small-medium city. At the biggest cities here, like São Paulo, the kids usually have to wake even early to take the bus.

Raed667 7y ago

My High-school started at 8 and university at 9.. I thought it was too early for both!

pier25 7y ago

8am is still too early for teenagers. Not only their brains need more sleep than adults (9+ hours) but their clocks shift which is why it's common for teenagers to go to bed later than adults.