Updated Jan. 6

Teenagers need  to be at their best, but few get anywhere near that amount. That’s often due to factors outside their control, like school hours and homework levels.

Many schools have been taking notice — and making changes to promote teen sleep.

Even before COVID-19 was added to the mix, teen stress and anxiety were at record levels. In 2019, 36.7 percent of high school students said they felt sad or hopeless, and close to 19 percent had seriously considered suicide, according to .

Meanwhile, teen sleep was at record lows, with just 22 percent of high schoolers getting at least 8 hours of sleep on an average weeknight, the CDC found. Not getting enough sleep is a major contributor to .

Given the growing awareness of the importance of teen sleep, schools around the country (and around the world) have pushed back their start times to more teen-friendly hours, in accordance with the recommendations of the American Academy of Pediatrics and other major medical and public-health medical organizations.

Last year, California became the first (and only) state in the nation to enact statewide requirements for its public secondary schools. Those changes — requiring school start times no earlier than 8 am for middle schools, and no earlier than 8:30 am for high schools — went into effect just before the 2022-2023 school year and have prompted similar proposed legislation in and .

Meanwhile, some schools are making additional modifications to address teen sleep and stress.

Changes schools are making to increase teen sleep and reduce teen stress

Implementing block schedules

In place of a traditional schedule, in which students attend every class every day, block schedules are a way to modify class frequency and duration. For example, students may attend half of their classes one day and the other half of their classes the following day, but have longer class periods. With a block schedule, “homework workload may not decrease in terms of hours… but it will decrease in terms of how many subjects you have to hit each night,” says Denise Pope, co-founder of , an organization that advises schools, students, and parents about more effective approaches to education that incorporate student well-being. While students still have the same amount of homework, focusing on fewer subjects “is better from a brain-efficiency standpoint,” she says.

Two schools that have worked with Challenge Success and subsequently moved to block schedules are , a public school in Burlingame, CA, and , a parochial school in Belmont, CA.

Reducing students’ workload

Another option Challenge Success recommends is re-evaluating overall homework levels, which can include capping the number of  and honors classes that students take. It’s an option that’s increasingly being instituted at many schools, including , a public school in Irvine, CA, which limits freshmen to two AP or honors classes and allows one additional class each year. Students who wish to add another advanced-level class must sign a waiver (as must their parents). The change was one of several instituted at the school after consulting with Challenge Success to help reduce stress levels and allow students to get more sleep.

Limiting sports practices

At , a public school in Biddeford, ME, the focus on teen sleep included restricting morning and evening sports and extracurriculars. The changes took place in 2016 to coincide with the start time shift from 7:15 am to 8:30 am. “During the school year, all morning practices are off limits,” says Jeremy Ray, district superintendent. (Previously, swimming and ice hockey had practices as early as 5 am.)

Evening practices now have a 9 pm ending time, although occasionally games end later than that when travel time is factored in, Ray acknowledges. Still, “I would say 95 percent of our season works within those parameters,” he says.

Using schedule simulators

At , a public school in Fairfax, VA, student programmers launched an online schedule simulator in 2017 that allows students to estimate their total time commitments for school-related activities. The simulator was based on data gathered by polling teachers and students and includes classes, sports, and school clubs.

Shadowing students

As part of the planning process, some teachers even opt to spend an entire school day experiencing what it’s like from a student’s perspective. These “shadow days” can be a good reality check, Pope and her co-authors note in their 2015 book, . As one middle school teacher quoted in the book sums up: “It was a really overwhelming day! The students have so many things they’re trying to do every day, and it was just exhausting for the teachers to be the student for the day and try to follow.”

While shadow days and schedule simulators may not be the norm at every school, there are still ways for students and their families to apply these same principles when planning class schedules. Pope suggests that students talk to peers to get a sense of the workload of various classes, then create a mock schedule listing the estimated time commitments for all of their proposed classes and extracurriculars, making sure to slot in enough time for sleep.

Sharing information about teen sleep

Regardless of which strategies schools use, there’s an additional approach that can help set the stage for success: educating teens and the broader community about the importance of sleep.

One initiative, , was first rolled out at the college level and is now being expanded to middle and high schools. The content was developed in conjunction with Brigham and Women’s Hospital’s Sleep Health Institute. It’s available for free via  and was designed so that teachers can integrate it with each state’s health curriculum, notes Pallas Ziporyn, project manager.

“Education is a key component in promoting awareness about how critical teen sleep is,” adds Joy Wake, California outreach coordinator for Let’s Sleep.

Next steps

For parents

Inquire about the guidelines your teen’s school has in place to address workload issues like teen stress and teen sleep. For resources, including a time-scheduling worksheet, visit .

For teachers and administrators

Read about effective homework and how to manage student workloads in Challenge Success’ blog, . For more information about incorporating information about teen sleep into school activities and classroom instruction, visit .

The answer is two-fold. First, it’s important to know we are not going to give parents information that doesn’t help them, or only helps some of them. Second, we have been consistently adding new data, but its type and source may surprise you.

Omitting new assessment data — for now 

The cancellation of standardized testing in 2020 and the partial resumption in 2021 has produced two years of nonexistent or, at best, incomplete data. In collecting data from all 51 state education agencies, we’ve found that student participation levels differ widely, ranging from 97% in Mississippi to just 23% in California. 

Importantly, even in states with “high” participation rates, we do not know which student groups are represented. History tells us the highest-need students often disappear from these data first — and they are also the ones who have from pandemic learning disruptions.

Without disaggregation, it is impossible to discern which student groups are under- or unrepresented in a given data set, challenging our ability to present an accurate view on how schools are serving all students. Using incomplete data sets to update our school quality ratings would be like trying to make a recipe with only a partial ingredient list.

This, combined with the concerns we’ve heard from many of our research partners, is why we are excluding 2020 and 2021 assessment data from our GreatSchools ratings. In most states, this means that parents will continue to see test data from 2019 on their school profiles until we can obtain and display 2022 assessment data. Each state’s timeline and data publication process is unique, but we hope to receive this data and make it available to parents nationwide on our profiles by the end of this year.  

Although we are working to collect and display this 2022 assessment data as soon as we can get it from states, we also know that parents can’t wait. They need recent, relevant school information now. For families, parsing through years of school data isn’t an academic exercise — it’s a matter of their child’s education and well-being. According to the , more than a third of K-12 parents are concerned about how schools are supporting students’ learning and their social-emotional and mental health needs amid the ongoing pandemic. 

Parents need timely, robust school information now more than ever, and we have committed to finding and sharing it from several new sources.

Advancing a broader view of school quality 

Data acquisition challenges aside, we know that . Painting a rich picture of school quality includes sharing information on the resources schools have to offer, the practices they employ to support all students, as well as the outcomes the school is achieving and whether all of these things are equitably distributed. 

Even before the pandemic struck, GreatSchools has been collecting and sharing new, relevant school information with parents that goes beyond test scores. We remain committed to presenting families with a more holistic view of school quality by:

• Sharing new data types. School quality is reflected by more than just assessment data. Components of a school’s culture, such as trust and commitment, to student success. We’ve already added this “school climate” data to GreatSchools profiles in Illinois and New York City. Building upon what we’ve learned, we are now preparing to display climate data in five more states in the coming months. By connecting more parents with this valuable, new type of school quality information, we hope more states will see the benefit of making this data accessible for families.

• Leveraging partnerships to improve data access. High schools with strong college outcomes often to advanced course offerings. To help parents discover schools that offer such classes, we’re partnering with national organizations that share our commitment to ensuring parents have equitable access to this information. Starting this week, parents will be able to browse high schools’ advanced course offerings on GreatSchools profiles and explore for their child’s success.

• Spotlighting best practices for college success. In 2021, we with our annual College Success Award, which offers parents a snapshot of whether high schools prepare students to enroll in college, succeed with college-level coursework, and persist into their second year. In 2022, we launched our bilingual collection to highlight for educators and parents how College Success Award-winners are innovating to create more equitable and effective experiences for their students. The two-year project began with a thorough landscape analysis; consultation with school design experts; interviews with experts, parents, and educators; and a data analysis on schools with outsized success among low-income students. 

• Improving opportunities for school leaders to share information. Who better to share what makes a school great than the dedicated leaders that walk its halls each day? School leaders can of their school, then add information about practices, policies and courses to their GreatSchools profile. This newly revamped feature allows leaders to connect directly with current and prospective parents and provide additional context beyond quantitative data, from band to world languages to extracurriculars and more.

• Elevating the voices of historically marginalized families. The Community Reviews section of our school profiles allows parents, students, faculty and community members to share their school experiences with others. We’ve recently improved our to better support parents of diverse backgrounds in sharing their story. In the past three months alone, nearly 10,000 parents and community members added new reviews to school profiles, reflecting upon school safety, learning, social-emotional well-being and more so families of similar identities can understand how the school will support their child.

A call to action for state education agencies

As noted, we are actively working with states to collect 2022 assessment data and look forward to displaying that on our profiles when it becomes available. In the meantime, we urge states to join our efforts to connect parents with the rich school quality information they want and deserve. To do this, state education agencies must:

• Disaggregate data sets. Giving families access to rich, disaggregated data builds knowledge, expands thinking and strengthens positive communication among families, educators and schools. A recent Data Quality Campaign shows that only 28 states disaggregate data by student groups in their state report cards (and six states that previously did have now removed it). The effects of disrupted learning were not evenly distributed and parents deserve to know who is being left behind.
  
• Calculate growth. Even without consistent assessment data from 2020 and 2021, states can — and should — . There is no reason why 2019 and 2022 data cannot be used to quantify how well schools have supported students the past few years. If we only look at students’ current achievement levels, we will not get a clear understanding of how schools are truly serving their students, particularly children of color. This is why growth is now key to our GreatSchools ratings, and why we continue to advocate for states to gather (and disaggregate) this data to provide a more nuanced lens on school quality.

• Prioritize school climate data. School climate data helps parents understand important aspects of their child’s learning environment, such as leadership, collaboration among teachers, instructional rigor, family engagement and student social-emotional support. Although the pandemic disrupted the collection of this information, it’s coming back much quicker than assessment data. However, many states still don’t collect or report climate data, others do so voluntarily by districts, and some share it only at the district or state level. Every school in the country should have a climate survey and parents should be able to see the results. States can make this happen. 

Combining reliable and valid outcomes data — particularly data rooted in equity — and new information about climate, school practices and parent perspectives will give parents more of what they need to obtain a better picture of school quality today. As the ancient proverb goes, “necessity is the mother of invention.” Though the pandemic complicated our usual ways of assessing school quality, it has also created opportunities to find new ways of understanding how well schools are serving their students. 

Parents need accurate and equitable school information now. With a bit of creativity and dedication, together we can find it.