A report in this issue of Education Next confirms that K–12 schools can make a difference in students’ civic attitudes and behavior (see “A Life Lesson in Civics,” research, Summer 2019). The study finds that attending a charter school operated by Democracy Prep Public Schools nearly doubles students’ rates of civic participation as young adults. Education Next editor Martin West spoke with Seth Andrew, founder of Democracy Prep and senior adviser in the Obama White House, about the schools’ approach to civic education.

Martin West: Democracy Prep students are known as “citizen-scholars,” and the schools follow the motto, “Work hard. Go to college. Change the world!” How do you work to make this identity in students a reality?

Seth Andrew: We break out the schema of citizenship and civic engagement into three elements: civic knowledge, civic skills, and civic dispositions. The first priority is teaching civic knowledge. If you don’t understand how the system works, if you don’t understand that there are three branches of government in the American system or the costs and benefits of a democratic republic compared to other forms of democracy, then you can’t really be an engaged citizen, and the skills and disposition elements have less value down the road.

We start as early as kindergarten getting kids to think about civic knowledge. That means you make word problems in math that include civic content. It means that you valorize civics from the beginning. With kindergartners we talk about community and our responsibilities to one another and the difference between freedom from something and freedom to do something. In high school, there’s a much greater focus on skills. In fact, Democracy Prep high-school students have to demonstrate 10 civic skills in the real world to graduate—speaking in front of a public body, having an opinion published, recruiting 100 followers to a cause of the student’s choice, and more. The skills are not at all theoretical; they’re 100 percent authentic.

MW: There’s a debate in the civic-education world between those who place greater emphasis on knowledge of American history and government—how the political system works—and those who seek to cultivate a disposition in their students to be activists, so-called action civics. Where does Democracy Prep stand in this debate? Is it “both and” rather than “either or”?

SA: It’s unquestionably “both and,” but it involves a sequence. Teaching a kindergartner “action civics” is foolhardy, as is only teaching a 12th grader about the U.S. citizenship exam. We’re trying to develop an arc of knowledge, skills, and dispositions in our scholars from ages 5 to 18. So the answer is “both and,” but not “both simultaneously.” It’s about building a thoughtful pedagogical arc from the beginning of the student’s education to the end.

MW: In their recent study, researchers from Mathematica Policy Research found that attending the Democracy Prep school in Harlem boosted voter registration by 16 percentage points and turnout by 12 percentage points. What was your reaction to the results?

SA: I had a mixed reaction. I was thrilled with the rigor of the study and with the statistical significance in the outcome—that we do have a causal effect on participation in our democracy. But I was also deeply disappointed, because I felt the results weren’t large enough. Our students voted at much higher rates than their peers, but not at the rates that I would have liked to see from our citizen-scholars.

MW: What do you see as the most promising strategies for bringing civics education to scale in the United States?

SA: Starting in 2012, I worked on a policy effort to get states to adopt the U.S. citizenship exam as a high-school graduation requirement. That’s now been implemented in eight states and represents one way to increase civic knowledge, but there’s much more we need to do.

We need more civics taught in middle and high schools, but that doesn’t mean having a boring one-semester course requirement. It means creating outcome expectations around civic skills and knowledge. Lots of states now mandate x amount of civics in high school. I think that’s the wrong way to think about it, because it focuses on input as opposed to outcomes. In the Democracy Prep civic-outcomes model, we actually don’t teach “civics.” There is no standalone “civics” course. However, there is a course on the “sociology of change,” a course on economics, and a senior seminar on American democracy. We require a “change the world” project for seniors, and we hold Election Day get-out-the-vote campaigns at least once every year.

Together, these methods lead to civic outcomes, as the Mathematica study showed. But what we’re trying to do is remind the world that “civic education” is not about a specific course; it’s about the public purpose of education and putting citizenship first.

This is an edited excerpt from an Education Next podcast.

In 2011, with the Obama administration’s Race to the Top program in full swing, an influential white paper from The Hamilton Project criticized education reformers’ preoccupation with “systemic policy changes such as expanding charter schools, overhauling teacher tenure, or implementing more rigorous standards and accountability.” The report authors, economists Brian Jacob of the University of Michigan and Jonah Rockoff of Columbia, worried that this emphasis had dissuaded school-district leaders from implementing managerial and organizational strategies that could improve student outcomes, such as changing high-school start times to align with adolescents’ natural tendency to sleep late. Attending to mundane matters like start times “may not be sexy,” the authors argued, but it offers an impressive return on investment and, moreover, is less likely to be “politically controversial.”

Try telling that to former Boston Public Schools superintendent Tommy Chang. In December 2017, Chang announced an overhaul of start times aimed at having all high schools open their doors after 8 a.m. To contain transportation costs, elementary and K–8 schools, many of which opened after 9 a.m., would assume the early morning slots in the district’s bus schedule. The new scheme would bring the district closer in line with recommendations from the American Academy of Pediatrics that high schools start no earlier than 8:30 a.m. Yet it would also require elementary-school children to make their way to school in the dark for much of the year, not to mention asking families to alter their daily routines and childcare arrangements.

Boston parents reacted as if Chang had proposed moving the Red Sox to New York. An online petition opposing the change quickly garnered more than 8,000 signatures, and City Councilor Matt O’Malley told the Boston Globe that “he had never seen parents mobilize in such high numbers across the city in his seven years in office.” Within two weeks, Chang had rescinded the plan. Six months later, he was gone. In December 2018, the City Council held a hearing on the possibility of abandoning Boston’s long-standing tradition of mayoral control of the schools in favor of an elected school committee. Jane Miller, co-founder of a parents’ organization that formed to oppose the new start times, told the Globe that “a lot of families feel like they are not being heard, and at this time it doesn’t appear the [mayor-appointed] School Committee is accountable to students and families in the Boston Public Schools.”

The episode highlights a dilemma facing many school districts, where high schools have traditionally started near the crack of dawn, often to accommodate students’ afterschool athletics, extracurriculars, and jobs. In this issue of Education Next, Jennifer Heissel and Samuel Norris provide the most definitive evidence to date that this arrangement hurts student learning (see “Rise and Shine,” research). They examine the progress of students who move across a time-zone boundary in the Florida Panhandle, where schools start at similar times according to the clock but up to an hour earlier or later relative to sunrise. They find that moving from the eastern to the central time zone, and thereby gaining an hour of before-school sunlight, leads to a noticeable jump in students’ performance on state tests. Importantly, these effects are only evident for students who have gone through puberty, strengthening the case that biological factors are at play. Changing school start times may be hard, but changing teenagers’ sleep habits may well be impossible.

Yet a growing number of districts have successfully revised their school start schedules, and reporter Danielle Dreilinger investigates how they got it done (see “How to Make School Start Later,” features). Her advice: anticipate and address parents’ concerns, such as the safety of elementary-age children catching early buses, coordinate with community partners to help parents manage childcare, and give plenty of advance notice to allow families to adjust.

The larger point is that it is a mistake to imagine that school reforms can somehow be divided between those that are merely technocratic and those that are systemic and therefore politically controversial. The connections between schools, families, and communities simply run too deep. All education reform is political, and those who seek to improve our schools would do well to keep that in mind.

— Martin R. West

Ghosts in the Schoolyard: Racism and School Closings on Chicago’s South Side
by Eve L. Ewing
University of Chicago Press, 2018, $22.50; 240 pages.

As reviewed by Marilyn Anderson Rhames

Have you ever wondered why some black parents have staged vigorous protests—and even gone on hunger strikes—to save their children’s “failing” public schools from being closed? Want to peek behind what W. E. B. Du Bois dubbed “the Veil” to unpack the often misunderstood intricacies of the segregated black life? Ready to hear a 100-year backstory of hatred, housing redlining, and educational isolation that led up to the Chicago Public Schools closing of 49 mostly black schools in the summer of 2013?

It’s all there in Eve Ewing’s book, Ghosts in the Schoolyard. Ewing, an assistant professor at the University of Chicago School of Social Service Administration, makes it clear from the jump that she is not impartial on the topic. As a black woman who grew up in Chicago and taught in the city’s schools, Ewing views the closures—the largest mass school closings in American history—as yet another racist assault on the black community, which has never been allowed to fully integrate into the fabric of white Chicago. Even with her unapologetic bias, Ewing draws on an abundance of one-on-one interviews, observations, transcripts from school closing hearings, and statistics on race, housing, and education to produce a compelling academic case study.

As much as I enjoyed learning from the book, I do wish that Ewing had offered readers a more thorough, point-by-point takedown of Chicago Public Schools’ reasons for the school closings. That would have provided a more balanced argument for those who were genuinely undecided about what to make of the situation. It also might have quelled the criticism that Ewing’s book is little more than 200-plus pages of identity politics and that it doesn’t address the thorny issue of what to do with schools that are under-enrolled and have poor student achievement.

The book focuses on the four schools in the city’s Bronzeville community that were slated to close and how one of them, Walter H. Dyett High School, narrowly managed to escape.

Ewing challenges the narrative that Barbara Byrd-Bennett, then CEO of the Chicago Public Schools (who, incidentally, is now in federal prison for bribery), gave to justify closing the schools. Byrd-Bennett had insisted that the schools were “underutilized” and “under-resourced.” “How,” Ewing asks, “could the person charged with doling out resources condemn an institution for not having enough resources?”

While Byrd-Bennett and Mayor Rahm Emanuel (who appoints the schools chief and board members) tried to justify the closing of nearly 50 schools because they were “chronically failing,” Ewing argues that residents saw these actions as an affront to their democratic right to decide on the best way to provide a high-quality education for their children. She writes:

We see that this community’s choice to resist a school’s being characterized as “failing” is in fact about much more than the school itself: it is about citizenship and participation, about justice and injustice, and about resisting people in power who want to transform a community at the expense of the people who live there.

Bronzeville, the three-square-mile neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side where some 30,000 black migrants fleeing the Jim Crow South had settled by 1900, grew to 109,000 people by 1920, expanding at a rate that was more than double what the rest of the city underwent. This corridor between 22nd and 51st Streets was once called the “Black Belt” or “Black Ghetto” or worse, “Blackie Town,” but it was ultimately dubbed “Bronzeville” by James Gentry, theater critic and editor for the black newspaper the Chicago Bee. This black metropolis was once home to cultural icons like Ida B. Wells, Richard Wright, Gwendolyn Brooks, Sam Cooke, Nat King Cole, and Mahalia Jackson, among many others.

Bronzeville’s population was bursting at the seams by the late 1940s, and while it was graced with a high concentration of black talent and ingenuity, the community had to struggle with social isolation, violence, and abject poverty. Ewing details how Bronzeville was surrounded by white communities where property owners had signed restrictive covenants agreeing not to sell homes or office space to black people—and how the enforcers of those covenants firebombed nearly 60 homes and businesses of black people who managed to move into those communities anyway. With multiple families living in single “kitchenettes”—tiny, poorly equipped apartments carved from larger rental units—the housing crisis in Bronzeville became untenable. The city’s leaders, most notably Mayor Richard J. Daley and his schools chief Benjamin Willis, refused to promote integration, which led to the construction of low- and high-rise public-housing projects for Bronzeville residents from the 1950s through the 1970s. That activity was paired with the rapid building of new schools so that black families would stop demanding that their children be allowed to fill the thousands of vacant seats in nearby white schools.

Ewing takes the reader through one racist public policy after another, culminating, she asserts, in 2013, when the school system shuttered 49 schools, 90 percent of which served all-black student populations. These closings followed a drastic drop in student enrollment in neighborhood schools in Bronzeville and other black communities on Chicago’s South and West Sides. The enrollment decline was itself an upshot of a misguided urban “renewal” policy: after the Ida B. Wells, Robert Taylor, Harold L. Ickes, and Stateway Gardens housing projects—which were constructed to contain black people within the boundaries of Bronzeville—were demolished in the late 1990s and early 2000s, thousands of black residents were pushed out of the neighborhood to find housing. (In the past decade, the black population has declined throughout Chicago, a phenomenon dubbed “black flight,” spurred by street violence and a lack of economic opportunity.)

Ewing gives voice to community members who are still grieving the death of their schools as one might lament the loss of a loved one. Indeed, she devotes an entire section of the book to this sense of mourning. She writes:

In the public narrative about closed schools, there are stories we rarely hear. Using words like love in a conversation about education policy feels almost taboo, or somehow in poor taste. . . . Instead, closing schools are presented as uniformly valueless, without worth, and characterized by criteria that are as far as you can get from something as base and as messy as human emotion. How many students can the building hold? How much will it cost to repair it? What test scores did it have last year? But to those closest to these schools, these questions swim beneath the surface of something much more important: love.

Readers of this book will come to understand why a group of community activists and parents staged a 34-day hunger strike (involving two hospitalizations) to keep open Walter H. Dyett High School, a so-called “failing” school. They will discover why Ewing describes this school named after a local music teacher as “a testimony to the history of black education in Bronzeville, to a hero and the geniuses under his care, to an institution that successfully educated black children to be great in an era when expectation for their lives were meager. With this understanding, an attack on the legendary Dyett name was an attack on history and identity.”

After reading this book, readers might think twice before labeling yet another segregated, under-resourced, all-black school as “failing.”

If all the pain and trauma of the mass school closings produced positive results for the students involved, they might be forgiven by history. Unfortunately, a comprehensive five-year study from the University of Chicago Consortium on School Research showed that the 12,000 students displaced by the closure saw their standardized test scores decline, even as their attendance and GPAs held steady.

As I was reading Ewing’s book on a plane, my seatmate, a white woman in her 40s, asked me about it. She has lived in downtown Chicago for more than a decade and had not heard that nearly 50 schools in Chicago’s black neighborhoods had closed. It was a sad reminder to me that, even today, some white residents remain wholly unaware that their city leaders shut down some 50 schools in black neighborhoods, angering and traumatizing communities. Ewing’s book, though, makes it clear that it’s the city leadership that has “failed” the schools, not the other way around.

Marilyn Anderson Rhames is an education writer and the founder and CEO of the nonprofit Teachers Who Pray. Born and raised on Chicago’s South Side by parents and grandparents who joined the Great Migration from Mississippi in the 1950s and ’60s, Rhames taught in the city’s public schools for nearly 15 years.

Another review of this book, by Paul E. Peterson, can be found here.

Ghosts in the Schoolyard: Racism and School Closings on Chicago’s South Side
by Eve L. Ewing
University of Chicago Press, 2018, $22.50; 240 pages.

As reviewed by Paul E. Peterson

Closing schools is as American as the 19th-century homesteading land rush. Indeed, it’s the flip side of desperate sprints for land, silver, or gold. When people race for distant treasure, they leave the rest behind.

From its beginning, the United States has been a low-density, highly mobile country, a nation where young men and women sought opportunity in the West, and a place where former slaves hopped on trains bound for factory jobs available near Chicago’s South Side.

When people move, they abandon their friends, neighbors, and institutions. Stay-at-home farmers—the descendants of the homesteaders—were the first to face the loss. When fewer families were needed to till the soil, thriving communities turned into ghost towns. The bell atop the little red schoolhouse became a museum piece.

Efficiency experts like Stanford’s first School of Education dean Ellwood Cubberley accelerated the change. “The [school] district unit is entirely too small an area to provide modern educational facilities,” he said. The “system is expensive, inefficient, inconsistent, short-sighted, unprogressive and penurious; it leads to a great and unnecessary multiplication of small and inefficient schools.” The efficiency argument proved influential. Some 120,000 school districts in operation in 1940 were consolidated into fewer than 15,000 today. Enrollment at the average school climbed from 85 pupils in 1930 to 300 students in 1960. Whatever efficiencies were realized came at the expense of community institutions. When high schools merged, towns lost their own Friday-night football, high-school band, and senior play.

While towns were dying, big-city neighborhoods were swarming with newcomers. Eve Ewing’s account of life in Bronzeville on the South Side evokes the buzzing action at 45th and South Park in the 1940s. Jazz clubs were abundant: Count Basie and Sarah Vaughan were performing at the Parkway Ballroom. The neighborhoods were giving birth to luminaries like Ida B. Wells and Mahalia Jackson. The beloved Walter Dyett, a classical violinist of African American descent, conducted the DuSable High School band.

All that action contained a healthy bundle of graft, corruption, and machine-style politics. Then, in 1947, Chicago’s schools were “reformed.” In the following decades, even Mayor Richard J. Daley, himself a homegrown machine-politics guy, allowed the school superintendent, Benjamin Willis, full discretion over personnel and procurement. Many years ago I wrote in School Politics, Chicago Style that schools and politics in Chicago had become sharply separated. The procedures of the school board reinforced

its isolation from external political forces. The public could attend board meetings, but virtually no provision for audience participation existed. . . . Hearings were held after the “tentative” budget had already been prepared by staff members. . . . The very layout of the boardroom accentuated the separation of the board from the outside world. Board members sat in a semi-circle with their backs to the audience.

Still, Willis, by taking much of the boodle out of building, was able to erect vast numbers of new elementary schools to accommodate both baby boomers and African American migrants. By 1970, 596,375 students attended a Chicago public school.

The efficiency principle was applied to housing policy as well, Ewing tells us. At the height of the New Deal, the federal government encouraged cities to raze “slums” and build high-rise public housing with modern kitchens and bathrooms. The Chicago Housing Authority, with the best of intentions, constructed a massive but deeply flawed low-income public housing complex along a substantial swath of the South Side’s waterfront. By 1970, half the residents of Bronzeville were living in these units.

Unfortunately, the buildings were too tall, the elevators too few, the units too one-dimensional (accommodating large families only), and the complex too segregated. Crime, gangs, property destruction, mismanagement, and chaos were all but inevitable.

In 1999, the housing authority demolished the high-rises, and local schools lost thousands of students. Fourteen years later the school administration announced that several of Bronzeville’s schools would be included in a citywide plan to close about 50 schools on the grounds that the number of students “is below the enrollment efficiency range, and thus the school is underutilized.”

It was not just Bronzeville that was losing students. By 2018 enrollment in district-operated schools in Chicago numbered little more than 300,000. Half of Chicago’s children were gone—57,000 to charter schools and many more to suburbs, private schools, and places unknown. Meanwhile, revenues were not keeping pace with expenditures, and school-district debt was rising.

Ewing barely acknowledges these basic facts in her book. Instead, her case studies rely upon her experiences as a Bronzeville teacher, transcripts of public hearings on the closings, and interviews with no more than 13 teachers and students, all of which arm her with the conclusion that “it is impossible to get around the fact that the school closure process . . . was racist.” Employing what is identified as “critical discourse analysis,” the author takes at face value the charges of racism made by community activists at closure hearings.

At the same time, she refuses to believe Chicago’s superintendent of schools, a black woman, when she denies that charge vehemently at a public hearing Ewing attended: “What I cannot understand, and will not accept, is that the proposals I am offering are racist. That is an affront to me as a woman of color. . . . Underutilized schools in these areas are the result of demographic changes and not race.”

Walter H. Dyett High School, named for Bronzeville’s illustrious band teacher, is the book’s centerpiece. By 2011, its enrollment had slipped to two-thirds its 2004 level. The administration decided to close Dyett on the grounds that its “graduation rate . . . is far below that of other schools in its area and [it] is among the lowest academic scoring schools in the district.” All existing students could remain at the school for the next four years, but no new students would be admitted.

Whether or not Chicago’s administrators were racist, they were surely inept. They gave inadequate advance notice of the time and place of meetings, placed strict time limits on speakers, did not respond to questions, and precluded anyone from speaking who had not registered before the meeting began. But if their intention was to march blithely toward their goal, they made a serious misstep: by permitting Dyett to stay open for four more years, they handed over to activists the time needed to form the “Coalition to Revitalize Dyett,” mount a prolonged protest, and propose a revitalized neighborhood school devoted to “global leadership and green technology.” A hunger strike captured newspaper headlines.

In the end, the administration buckled under relentless charges of racism. Dyett was given $15 million for new facilities, and in 2016 was re-launched in a new South Side location as the Walter H. Dyett High School for the Arts.

To some, the story might appear to be a brilliant display of black power. But for the activists—and for Ewing—it represents another racist abuse of bureaucratic power. “The members of the Coalition did not see their plan for Dyett come to fruition.” Instead of a neighborhood school focused on leadership and green technology, the new school would be devoted to the arts and open its doors to students from across the city. Ewing says the whole story is a “troubling history of racism.”

That conclusion requires better documentation. Ewing says a disproportionately large number of the schools selected for closing had student bodies that were majority African American. But only 9 percent of Chicago’s enrollment was white in 2009, when the closing movement had yet to begin. The main alternative to an African American student in Chicago is a Hispanic one or a student from another minority group.

Nor are we provided with any information on the background of those who opposed the closings or how well they represented the local community. One has to wonder whether the activists really spoke for the neighborhood when 81 percent of the students in the area were choosing to go to a high school other than Dyett, and African American parents were more likely than others to place their children in charter schools.

Ewing also neglects to tell us how much financial and logistical support the activists received from the Chicago Teachers Union, whose then president was adamantly opposed to charter schools and labeled Mayor Rahm Emanuel (formerly chief of staff to Barack Obama) the “murder mayor.” Would the protests have been as effective had they not had unqualified union support?

The author bases her charge of racism largely on the lack of school administrator interest in the testimony presented by activists at public hearings. But such practices are deeply ingrained in the Chicago board’s insular decisionmaking style. The plan to close schools was less likely to be racist and more likely to be driven by fiscal considerations that Ewing chooses to virtually ignore.

Ewing is at her best when she captures the heartache that attends any school closing. Her mourning for lost institutions will resonate with those from small-town USA, who see ghosts of marching bands and teeter-tottering children on vacant lots where schools once stood. Beneath her critical discourse analysis, one finds a melancholy tale that is quintessentially American.

Paul E. Peterson, a professor at Harvard University, is director of its Program on Education Policy and Governance and senior editor of Education Next.

Another review of this book, by Marilyn Anderson Rhames, can be found here.

The name of the study said it all: “Sleepmore in Seattle: Later School Start times Are Associated with More Sleep and Better Performance in High School Students.” In 2016–17, Seattle Public Schools pushed back high-school start times by 55 minutes, from 7:50 a.m. to 8:45 a.m. And just like that, students slept an average of 34 more minutes per night and their grades went up 4.5 percent, researchers found.

It was yet another entry in a long bibliography of studies showing the benefits of a later start time for teenagers (including “Rise and Shine” by Jennifer Heissel and Samuel Norris, in this issue). This growing body of evidence is in line with broad expert consensus that early school days are in conflict with adolescents’ biological sleep patterns and need for 8 to 10 hours of sleep a night. In 2017, the American Academy of Sleep Medicine officially recommended that middle and high schools start no earlier than 8:30 a.m. The American Academy of Pediatrics has been pushing for that same start-time threshold since 2014. And a 2011 study published by the Brookings Institution found that delaying start times by one hour would cost $1,950 per student ($150 per year for 13 years), but lead to $17,500 in additional lifetime earnings.

For a change that seems like a no-brainer, however, delaying high school times can be notably tough to pull off. As of fall 2015, only 13 percent of public high schools followed the American Academy of Pediatrics recommendation, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. In fact, U.S. high schools remained more likely to start before 7:30 a.m. than schools with younger children.

The crux of the matter is that schools are a collection of moving parts, from predawn janitorial and food-service prep to busing and afterschool activities. Family work routines are often organized around school rhythms. Shifting secondary-school start times sends shock waves through those systems.

“Schools are a huge part of a family’s life,” said Deb Putnam, Boston coordinator for Start School Later, a nonprofit advocacy group. “They drive so much.”

Boston Public Schools offers a cautionary tale for changing start times. After the district announced a plan in 2017 to start most high schools later and elementary schools earlier, furious parents packed school committee meetings. Members of the city council and local civil-rights leaders declared that the new schedules would imperil lower-income families’ job security. The school superintendent, Tommy Chang, eventually rescinded the decision. The turmoil was widely considered to be a factor in Chang’s early departure from the job six months later.

Nonetheless, districts continue to make and stick with similar schedule changes. How can communities prepare for the shift, and what have districts done to ensure new start times are put in place as smoothly as possible?

I took a close look at practices in three school districts to find out. They are: Saint Paul Public Schools in Minnesota, a diverse urban district of 38,000 students who speak 125 languages at home; Kanawha County Schools in West Virginia, which serves 26,000 students in the capital city of Charleston and surrounding rural communities covering 913 square miles; and Fort Wayne Community Schools in Indiana, which enrolls 29,000 students. Two of these districts—Kanawha County and Fort Wayne Community Schools—have already pushed back high-school start times. Saint Paul is in the homestretch of a years-long effort to do so. Here is what I learned.

1. Expect an uproar.

Because of the cost of transportation, many districts stagger school start times so their fleets of buses can make multiple runs, called “tiered” scheduling: elementary schools at one time, middle schools at another, and high schools at a third. Typically, when administrators plan to move high-school start times later, they opt to flip busing schedules with elementary schools, giving young students earlier start times. However, that multiplies the anticipated impacts: districts hear complaints not only about how the changes will affect teenagers’ afternoon activities but also about the safety of young kids waiting for buses in the dark, the practicality of moving bedtimes earlier, and the mismatch between earlier dismissals and families’ work schedules. “School’s done at three o’clock and no one’s off work,” said YMCA of Fort Wayne chief operating officer Chris Angellatta, whose organization runs afterschool programs. So families have more hours of childcare to cover—which is especially tough if they’ve relied on an older sibling coming home first.

West Virginia’s Kanawha County instituted new school start times at the beginning of the 2018–19 school year. About half of the primary schools already started before 8 a.m., so some administrators thought adjusting the rest of them to start early wouldn’t be so tough. And in social-media posts in January 2019, some elementary-school families praised the new schedule: “Love the start times, we can get to work on time,” one mom wrote on a local news outlet’s Facebook page. But more families complained. The early bus times mean more parents are driving their kids to school, they wrote, snarling traffic. Some parents had heard that kids were falling asleep in class; others wrote that they barely got to see their children before bedtime. “Elementary school children should not be getting on a bus at 6 a.m. Can we use some common sense here,” one woman posted.

In Saint Paul, the prospect of moving elementary-school start times earlier prompted such a negative reaction—it seemed to “pit schools against each other” according to local board of education member Steve Marchese—that the board put off changing the schedule multiple times. One strategy it considered would have allowed the district to let all schools open late. Older students would have used passes to ride the regional public-transit system instead of taking traditional school buses. It wouldn’t have saved money, Marchese said, but “then we could run a two-tier system” of yellow buses. Unfortunately, the transit system leaders remained firm that their buses could not accommodate a significant influx of students, he said. The plan approved for fall 2019 continued to call for early elementary start times, which roughly half of families had opposed in earlier district surveys.

2. Anticipate and address likely problems.

When changing start times, it’s crucial for districts to try to anticipate their effects and lessen the impact on families—especially those with lower incomes, who tend to have less flexibility in their schedules. Otherwise, they risk sending the message Putnam sensed in Boston: “The perception of the community was, ‘You’re reducing the bus budget by making me pay for daycare,’” she said. (Boston Public Schools did not respond to requests for comment.)

Officials in the Saint Paul and Fort Wayne districts made coordinated efforts with municipal and community partners to help parents manage safety, sports, and childcare. For instance, Saint Paul city government is installing lighting in more municipal fields so they can be used later into the evening. More Fort Wayne sports teams (and some clubs) now meet before school.

All three districts have focused on improving safety for elementary-age children catching early buses. Saint Paul rearranged routes so some younger students have a shorter walk to their stops, district chief operations officer Jackie Turner said, and is providing reflectors for bags and jackets. In addition, the city is starting a long-term project “to put up street lights and install sidewalks” where they don’t exist, she said.

In West Virginia, Kanawha County pupil transportation executive director Brette Fraley thought the new timetable was in itself safer. It’s simpler and more coordinated, he said, and that has “allowed us to build additional time into the schedule to make it a little safer, a little slower.” In addition, the district has installed new safety lighting on 50 buses serving students on rural routes. The lights shine in two directions to illuminate pathways for students getting on and off the bus. The district also added new blinking “STOP” arms on 10 buses.

Perhaps most important, the Fort Wayne and Saint Paul districts expanded childcare for elementary students. In Fort Wayne Community Schools, a fee-based afterschool program is run by the local YMCA. The agency now serves 1,200 students in nearly 30 sites, compared to 300–350 students in half as many sites previously, said Angellatta. He anticipates further growth.

Saint Paul Public Schools runs its own fee-based afterschool program, called Discovery Club. The district is surveying parents to identify where to expand. “We’re hoping to put together a very cost-effective, if not free, program,” Turner said. The system also has discussed expanding its offerings with the help of the Boys & Girls Clubs of the Twin Cities, which has “committed that we are going to be there for kids,” said president and chief executive Terryl Brumm.

“We may need to add staff. We may need to add extension sites,” she said.

Although Kanawha County seems to have been less vocal about this issue, “the district also planned for additional childcare staff and hours,” district spokeswoman Briana Warner said. “Teachers were added in areas of need and times were adjusted where needed to allow for additional service hours.”

Districts have also addressed some concerns by providing information. Some Fort Wayne parents worried that a later start time would teach their children to be lazy and ill-prepared for the workplace. “There was just some education around what do jobs look like these days,” district spokeswoman Krista Stockman said. “They’re not necessarily starting a 6 a.m. factory job.” Saint Paul officials are pointing out that an earlier schedule may help parents who have to be at work early and who have been paying for before-school care. Brumm of the Boys & Girls Clubs is touting the benefit of more time in the agency’s care, saying she’s “seen a much better outcome” with more time in afterschool programs.

Finally, Saint Paul is offering an out. Each attendance zone will have at least one 9:30 a.m. elementary option, Turner said, and human resources is trying to make sure that staff can transfer to different schools if necessary. Nor has the district given up hope that it will be able to move elementary-school start times later again: it is still pressuring the public transit agency to accommodate high-school students, Marchese said. Similarly, the Kanawha County Board of Education has promised to see if there’s any way to move elementary schools later, Warner said.

3. Gather evidence, and present it clearly to families.

Change of any kind can be a tough sell: families often prize hard-won stability and predictability over promised improvements they haven’t yet seen for themselves. But a careful study of the potential opportunities to capitalize on sleep science and close efficiency gaps in transportation scheduling can help districts make a strong case to the public.

Several officials said they’d seen how research on teenagers’ biological clocks and sleep needs can convince opponents. For Sissonville High School principal Ron Reedy in West Virginia’s Kanawha County, the alpha and omega of his pitch to parents and his own staff was that the later schedule benefited students. “We as a society have a responsibility to our youth, and whatever is best for the kids ought to be our prime directive,” he said— regardless of the inconvenience for adults.

“Do the research, present it on its face,” he advised. “A reasonably minded person is going to be able to look at this and find no counterarguments.”

It helps to present such data early on. Looking back on what happened in Boston, Putnam of Start School Later rued the fact that the district released an analysis of racial equity and school start times only after angry parents were already crowding meetings. “If they had put that [out] earlier in the conversation … and talked about how disparities exist,” she said, “it may have helped it play out a little differently.”

Sometimes making the case means talking about budgets, which can be well-received if done carefully and if the new schedules actually will save money. Fort Wayne was motivated to change start times by “a need to cut transportation expenses,” Stockman said. The decision allowed the district to transition from a two- to a three-tier bus timetable. Only then did the research come into play: “Someone had to go first, and just based on the research, we decided it would be more beneficial to have the high-school students [start later],” she said. The district simultaneously began enforcing a no-bus policy for students who lived near school and restricting the ability of students who do ride the buses to vary their routes home depending on their after-school plans. “That was a lot harder for parents,” Stockman said.

In Kanawha County, although the superintendent cited sleep research in announcing his decision to change school start times, officials have since emphasized the logistical benefits to the district. The new system requires fewer buses and drivers to cover the rural district’s sprawling territory, which calls for driving up to 18,500 miles per day, transportation director Fraley said. For example, the district started the year 30 drivers short due to a boom in oil and gas jobs, and “if we had been under the old bell schedule we would not have had enough drivers to have school.”

Communication with families goes both ways. Outreach can backfire when districts aren’t willing to take into account what families say. Boston elementary-school parents generally said in a district survey that they wanted later start times and high-school parents preferred 8 a.m. or earlier—and plenty of families were furious when the district announced schedules that did the opposite. Because the district had brought on a team from MIT to redo the scheduling, parents said that their lives were being ruined by an algorithm.

As far as Kanawha County school board member Ryan White can recall, administrators did not formally invite parent comment before announcing or implementing the new start-time plan. He regrets that now. “I think it would have maybe given people more of a sense that they could voice their concerns,” he said, and “maybe prepare the public more for what was going to happen.”

4. Give advance warning.

Saint Paul Public Schools has had a long runway—and used it. As early as 2010, the then superintendent discussed and then officially tabled the issue. Administration studied the issue in 2014, then braked in response to parent concerns. It came up for a vote before the local school board the following year but was defeated 4–3. Meanwhile, other local districts like Minneapolis and Wayzata were successfully changing their high-school start times, which kept the issue in the local news headlines without forcing families in Saint Paul to weather the disruption.

The district opted to test an 8:30 a.m. start time at just one high school in 2015. It provided free transit passes so students could ride city buses to school. The experience was sufficiently positive—the school had a record-high number of students on the honor roll, and students reported greater participation in afterschool clubs and jobs, according to local news reports—that Saint Paul expanded the experiment to a second high school.

The new schedule was initially not welcomed by Saint Paul parent Arline Hubbard and her son Sean, now a senior at the initial test site, Johnson Senior High School.

“When we started talking about the change, I was so against it,” Hubbard said. Then she saw that her teenager really did have an easier time getting up. He said he found it easier to pay attention in school.

When his school started earlier, “once school was over the day did seem to feel longer,” Sean said. However, he also remembered everyone trying to use the bathroom at once before school, seeing his classmates fall asleep, and “not really being all the way focused” until third period. With a later start time, he said he is “getting better grades and [feeling] more energized and ready for school.”

Disrupting teenagers’ family caregiving responsibilities was a major concern in Saint Paul, but the Hubbard family found the new start time did not interfere with Sean’s babysitting his nephew, a pre-kindergartner who starts school at 7:30 a.m. Sean helps his nephew get off to school in the mornings, and Johnson’s 3 p.m. closing time is still early enough that he can help babysit afterward.

In all, families saw that change was not as disruptive as some had feared, and ultimately, in 2016 the district approved changing most school start times. Even then, leaders built in a two-year transition period before the decision would take effect. And that was pushed back in 2018, to give a new superintendent time to get up to speed.

At least, district chief operations officer Turner said, districts should allow more than a semester and a summer. “Any [big] decisions past late winter, like February, you really should be making for the next school year,” she said.

5. Just do it. And don’t expect to win over everyone.

Despite Saint Paul Public Schools’ commitment to parent engagement, there was no point in trying to get complete buy-in, said Turner.

“If we were making this decision based on popularity, we wouldn’t have done it,” she said. “We didn’t approach our engagement with the understanding that we were going to try to get a 90 percent or an 80 percent [agreement] rate.”

Broad change is sometimes only achieved as a mandate. In looking at experiences in changing school start times elsewhere, Turner concluded that “there’s more value in actually doing it,” she said.

Marchese, the Saint Paul board member, agreed.

“Some folks said it’s not equitable to change it, and some said, ‘Well, it’s not equitable the way it is now,’” he said. “There’s only so much you can do about the fact that we have 38,000 kids and 38,000 different ways that families organize their lives.”

So what happens after new schedules go into effect? It’s too soon to consider students’ test scores in West Virginia, but the number of students marked tardy at Sissonville High School has declined noticeably, Reedy said. Bus drivers have filed fewer bus behavior write-ups for younger students, said Fraley. However, at a school board meeting in January, students from Herbert Hoover High School complained about the later dismissal times, saying that they interfered with afterschool jobs.

“Some students have to work in order to help their family pay monthly bills,” junior Cari Hively told the board, according to the Charleston Gazette-Mail.

In Fort Wayne, officials have not seen “a dramatic increase in test scores or anything like that,” said Stockman, the district spokeswoman. Initially, the number of students marked “tardy” declined, but the effect was temporary.

There has been a positive effect on student safety for teenagers driving to school, she said—the extra 90 minutes sometimes let ice, fog, or snow melt or burn off. And students are simply awake. “First period under the old system was kind of a wash,” she said. “It was a real struggle to get kids to engage.”

Occasionally, Stockman still hears from parents who are unhappy about how little time their high-school students have after school, or who say they don’t get more sleep because they have to stay up later. Some coaches are still upset about how the late start has affected their teams’ practices and games. But “most people just make it work,” she said.

“I can’t say I’ve heard a lot of complaints. I think people have adapted to it,” the YMCA’s Angellatta said of Fort Wayne families.

That’s what Saint Paul’s Catherine Nolet, the mother of a pre-K student at J. J. Hill Montessori Magnet School, is expecting to do next fall when the school’s start time shifts earlier by one hour, to 7:30 a.m.

She isn’t looking forward to it. “We’re not morning people,” she said. But she and her husband chose not to move their son to an elementary school with a later start time, even though it would be closer to home. Saint Paul’s long transition period gave them enough time to get used to the idea and prepared for the logistics.

“We knew that the time was going to change when we chose the school,” she said. “For us, I feel the school itself is more important than the start time. We’ll adjust.”

Danielle Dreilinger is a freelance writer based in New Orleans.

American teenagers are chronically sleep-deprived. As children enter puberty, physiological changes delay the onset of sleep and make it more difficult to wake up early in the morning. By the end of middle school, there is a large disconnect between biological sleep patterns and early-morning school schedules: one study found that students lose as much as two hours of sleep per night during the school year compared to the summer months, when they can better control their sleep schedules.

Such deficits may have big implications for learning and cognition. Important memory formation and consolidation processes occur overnight, as the brain replays patterns of activity exhibited during learning. Insufficient sleep also reduces alertness and attention levels the next morning, which likely affects students’ ability to learn. Both the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Academy of Sleep Medicine recommend that high school start no earlier than 8:30 a.m. But most U.S. high schools—87 percent, at the last count in 2015—begin earlier.

Could something as simple as changing when school starts each day really make a difference in how much students learn? And which students would benefit most from a later start time? We consider differences between sunrise and school start times among a group of public schools in northern Florida’s “Panhandle,” which straddles the central and eastern time zones. In this region, sunrise times differ, but school start times do not fully adjust for this difference. Students may start school at the same hour on the clock but not at the same “time”—those in the later time zone could have as much as one additional hour of early-morning daylight before school compared to their neighbors in the earlier zone. How does this affect their performance in school?

We compare test scores for students between the ages of 8 and 15 who move from one time zone to the other and find substantial differences, especially for adolescents. A one-hour delay in start times relative to sunrise increases math scores by 8 percent of a standard deviation for adolescents—the equivalent of roughly three months of student learning—but by only 1 percent of a standard deviation for younger children. The effects on reading scores are similar, but smaller. The benefits of starting school later increase sharply at age 11 for girls and 13 for boys—the gender-specific ages when puberty typically begins, which we take as evidence that the causal pathway is linked to biological changes that affect students’ sleep.

Our findings are the first to quantify the potential academic benefits of changing high-school start times—a seemingly straightforward policy that districts can find difficult to implement (see “How To Make School Start Later” in this issue). If districts in the Florida Panhandle started high schools later and elementary schools earlier, math and reading scores would increase by 6 percent and 4 percent of a standard deviation for high-school students, respectively, with negligible effects in younger grades. Rather than focusing on the disruptions associated with schedule changes, district and community leaders may wish to consider the ongoing costs of not adjusting schedules that are out of sync with sleepy teenagers’ physiological needs.

Sunlight, sleep, and puberty

The role of sunlight in determining sleep schedules is well known. In the morning, light on the outside of the eyelids suppresses production of the hormone melatonin and stimulates brain processes to increase alertness; darkness at night increases melatonin levels and feelings of tiredness. This process changes during adolescence: as children move through puberty, nocturnal melatonin secretion is delayed several hours relative to adults and younger children and sleep patterns become more owl-like, with later bedtimes and wake times, even holding the level of darkness fixed. Teenagers’ sleep patterns, therefore, are linked partially to sunrise and sunset times rather than to clock time.

This means that in terms of student sleep and alertness, the policy-relevant variable is “relative start times,” or start times relative to sunrise time. This becomes an important distinction when comparing schools in different locations, especially those near a time-zone boundary. Suppose that there are two schools close together but on opposite sides of the boundary, where the sun rises at 6 a.m. in central time and 7 a.m. in eastern time. If both schools begin classes at 8 a.m. local time, students attending the school in central time will have one more hour of sunlight before the morning bell compared to their neighbors in eastern time.

This scenario occurs in the Florida Panhandle, an area in the northwestern part of the state that includes the boundary between the eastern and central time zones (see Figure 1). While most of Florida is in the eastern time zone, the western half of the Panhandle is one hour behind in the central time zone. Thus, we have a natural experiment: do students living in the central time zone, who have as much as one additional hour of daylight before school each morning, do better in school than those living in the eastern time zone? Is this effect different for students of different ages? In particular, does it increase as students enter puberty?

To answer these questions, we track the academic achievement of individual students who move between schools on different sides of the time-zone boundary. As students move from central to eastern time, they are exposed to less sunlight before school, which we expect will decrease academic achievement. Conversely, students who move from eastern to central time gain sunlight before school and should see their test scores increase.

Data and methods

Our student and school data come from the Florida Department of Education administrative records for the 15 school years from 1998–99 through 2012‒13, and include all schools except alternative schools, adult education centers, and virtual academies. The data allow us to follow individual students over time, as long as they remain within the Florida public-school system. We look at scores on the annual Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test in math and reading, which students take in various years between grades 3 and 10, as well as students’ race, ethnicity, gender, eligibility for free or reduced-price school meals, and absentee rates. We use birthdays to calculate students’ ages at the start of the school year in September and include all students ages 8 to 15. We approximate students’ entry into puberty using the median age of 11 for girls and 13 for boys, according to data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey.

Our study focuses on students who live near the time-zone boundary and make a substantial move, which we define as consecutive appearances at schools farther than 25 miles apart. Overall, the data show that movers are similar, but not identical, to students who do not move. They come from nearly identical schools, and those moving from west to east are similar to those moving from east to west. Compared to students who do not move, movers are 11 percent more likely to qualify for free or reduced-price school meals and have somewhat lower test scores—0.09 and 0.08 standard deviations lower in math and reading, respectively.

In looking at each group’s pattern of achievement in the years leading up to the move, we find that trends in test scores are similar for movers and non-movers. Among movers, the time until they move is also not a very strong predictor of academic achievement; that is, we find almost no difference in achievement between the year when a student moves and the year immediately before. This suggests that the groups are on similar underlying trajectories, and that any variation in post-move outcomes can be attributed to changes in sunlight before school.

Even so, it is the case that the vast majority of cross-boundary moves are over a great distance, and these moves may impact student outcomes independent of the change in relative start time. We address this concern by including in our analysis students who move schools, but not across the time-zone boundary. This allows us to disentangle the effect of moving from the effect of moving across a time-zone boundary.

To determine schools’ start times, we collected schedule data from their websites and followed up with phone calls where that information was not available. We exclude homeroom and breakfast programs to define school start time as the start of the first class where learning takes place, and find they range from 7 a.m. to 9:30 a.m. local time. The overall average in the Panhandle region is 8 a.m., in line with the average start time nationwide. Median start times for students vary by age: elementary students start at 7:55 a.m., middle-school students at 8:25 a.m., and high-school students at 7:50 a.m.

We use school-location data from the National Center for Education Statistics to calculate sunrise times for each school. Combining these with our start-time data, we average the difference over the school year before the testing date to construct a measure of relative start time, measured as the number of minutes between sunrise and school start times. Although school start times may differ across the time-zone boundary, they don’t differ enough to erase the one-hour difference in sunrise times.

To confirm that the time-zone students live in matters for how much sunlight they experience before school, Figure 2 plots relative start times in the years before and after a move for two groups of students: those who moved east to west, and those who moved west to east. We find that as expected, students in central time have more sunlight before school than those in eastern time. In addition, when students move across the boundary, they are affected immediately by the start time of their new time zone.

The relationship between time zone and relative start times differs for younger and older students. Younger children in the eastern time zone have about 25 fewer minutes of sunlight before school than their counterparts in the central time zone, while the difference for adolescents is 41 minutes. In each case, the difference is less than one hour, or what we would expect if all schools opened at the same clock time on both sides of the boundary. We take this as evidence that policymakers faced with later sunrise times may shift school start times later to compensate, and that they may differentially shift elementary-school start times to prevent younger students from waiting for the bus in the dark.

Tracking start times and impacts

We conduct various analyses to explore how start times affect students in terms of their academic performance and attendance in school. On the whole, we find that later school start times increase student achievement on standardized tests in both math and reading. However, the size of those effects varies by students’ ages, with the biggest increases among adolescents in math.

In math, later relative start times increase adolescent students’ scores by 8 percent of a standard deviation, and younger students’ scores by 1 percent to 2 percent of a standard deviation (see Figure 3). In reading, moving start times one hour later increases scores by 6 percent of a standard deviation for both adolescent and younger students. Given that students tend to gain between one quarter and one third of a standard deviation of achievement each year in elementary and middle school, these are substantial effects.

The fact that puberty begins about one and a half years earlier for girls than for boys provides an important testable prediction: if the increasing importance of start times for math performance is a function of puberty, the effect sizes should grow in importance as a larger share of the gender enters puberty. This is precisely what we see.

We find a sharp spike in the effect of school start times on math scores at age 11 for girls, their median age for the start of puberty (see Figure 4). The effect of later school start times is statistically significantly different from zero for girls ages 11 to 13, but not for girls age 10 or younger. We also see an increase in the effect of start times on boys around age 13, their median age for the start of puberty. The effect on math scores is statistically indistinguishable from zero for ages 8 to 12; at age 13, it jumps to nearly 10 percent of a standard deviation from 5 percent. This is evidence that the increasing importance of start times with age is driven by the onset of puberty rather than other academic or behavioral changes.

We also investigate differences among students based on their race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status, and find more similarities than differences. This suggests that changes to start times will affect all students rather than just certain demographic groups. We also look at whether start times have a transitory or permanent effect on academic achievement and find that the short-term and long-term effects of later start times are similar to one another. In the long run, the effect is larger for adolescents than for younger students in both subjects, although the difference is not statistically significant in reading. The bottom line is that changes to start times improve math and reading achievement within a year of the change in sunlight exposure for adolescents, and the effects largely persist over time.

Showing up ready—or just showing up?

There are (at least) two reasons why school start times might affect academic achievement. First, later start times relative to sunrise may make it easier to get to school on time, reducing absences and increasing time spent on instruction. Additionally, more sunlight before school may improve cognitive function by increasing sleep levels and alertness.

We explore the first possibility and conclude that it is unlikely that reductions in absences are a major causal channel through which later relative start times translate into improved test scores. While later start times decrease absences for younger students, there is no statistically significant relationship between start times and absence rates for adolescents.

The evidence is somewhat stronger in favor of sleep and alertness as the causal channel. To determine the effect of the time-zone boundary on sleep, we use time-use diaries for students collected by the Panel Study of Income Dynamics, which has tracked a nationally representative sample of families and their offspring since 1968. We estimate hours of sleep for children within 400 miles of the central and eastern time-zone boundary and find that prepubescent children in eastern time get 6 minutes less sleep per night during the week than children in central time. The difference in sleep is reversed on the weekend, as they attempt to correct the sleep deficit; students in eastern time sleep 4 minutes longer. After the onset of puberty, both gaps widen: children in eastern time get 17 minutes less sleep per night during the week, and try to compensate with 13 minutes more sleep per night on the weekend.

In short, children in eastern time are more sleep-deprived than children in central time and this gap increases in adolescence. It is therefore plausible that moving from eastern to central time increases both sleep and test scores (and increases them more for adolescents), suggesting that levels of sleep and alertness in the morning are important causal channels through which later school start times increase achievement.

The test-day effect

Increased sleep and alertness could likewise improve test scores in two different ways: improved learning in the year leading up to the test, or better testing performance caused by more alertness on the day of the test. Our approach so far has been to estimate the combined effect of learning and testing. What about students’ alertness on test day?

During the study period, testing dates moved twice: first, from late February to early March, and again to mid-April. This changed levels of sunlight on the day of the test, but had only a small effect on average sunlight levels during the school year, when learning occurred. These policy changes enable us to isolate the effects of alertness on the specific day tests were administered.

From 2000 to 2007, students took tests in February, before daylight saving time began. In 2008‒09, test days were in March, immediately after the start of daylight saving time  (when clocks “spring forward” and sunrise moves an hour later). And in 2011‒13, students took tests a month later, in April. This changed the amount of sunlight before the tests: in eastern time, the average was 1 hour 20 minutes in the earliest era, which dropped to 28 minutes after the first change. After the second change, when the test was moved one month later, the amount of sunlight before school on the testing day increased to an average of 1 hour 9 minutes. Based on these differences, we group together 2000‒07 and 2011‒13 into a “late test time” treatment era, and 2008‒09 into an “early test time” treatment era.

Does the effect of relative start times on achievement change depending on test-day sunlight? We find no evidence of a testing day effect in math, but do find suggestive evidence in reading.

In math, moving start times one hour later increases achievement by nearly 10 percent of a standard deviation in both eras for adolescents. In reading, the effect during the relatively earlier testing era is 10 percent of a standard deviation per hour of sunlight compared to 5 percent in the later-start era—a statistically significant difference, which suggests that test-day sunlight may be important for reading achievement.

There is, however, one important reason why the result in reading should be taken with some caution: in the “late test time” era, students took tests almost immediately after the switch to daylight saving time, when they can lose up to an hour of sleep. We therefore interpret the differences as related to differences in sunlight time before school and up to an hour of sleep deprivation.

The safest interpretation, in our view, is for moderate test-day effects in reading of the same order as the full-year learning effects. But we note that our results for start-time effects tied to adolescence are strongest for math, for which we do not find any evidence of test-day effects.

Benefits of rearranging start times

School districts often open different types of schools at different times in the morning. These staggered start times allow districts to use the same buses more intensively, saving on transportation costs. However, high schools typically start first, followed by middle and then elementary schools, which runs counter to research and recommendations from leading medical groups.

What would happen if the districts in our study flipped school start times so elementary schools opened earliest, followed by middle and then high schools? We create this hypothetical scenario by reassigning average start times in each district based on this pattern, which moves elementary start times 22 minutes earlier, middle schools 13 minutes earlier, and high schools 44 minutes later.

We estimate the effects on test scores, including by gender and race, and find adolescents would experience large and statistically significant gains: in math, the proposed policy would increase minority student achievement in high school by 6 percent of a standard deviation in math and 8 percent of a standard deviation in reading. For white students, we expect that math scores would increase by 6 percent of a standard deviation and reading scores by 2 percent of a standard deviation. Male high-school students would benefit slightly more compared with females, but that difference is not statistically significant.

The effects for younger students are negative, but much smaller in size: on average, reading and math scores for elementary and middle-school students would decline by roughly 1 percent of a standard deviation across all student subgroups. Moreover, the high school results are good estimates for the overall potential change in achievement for each student by the end of high school.

Implications

Despite growing medical and physiological evidence that current school start times are too early for optimal adolescent cognitive functioning, there has been little policy response to move start times later. We add to this debate with direct evidence that more sunlight before school—or a later relative start time—increases academic achievement for children of all ages. Further, these effects are cost-effective compared to other proposals to improve educational achievement, such as making classrooms smaller: changing school schedules is estimated to cost $150 per student per year, whereas reducing class sizes by one third costs approximately $6,200 per student per year. There may be other changes in time use resulting from changed start times—research indicates that later start times coincide with less time spent on extracurricular activities, as well as more leisure time for girls and computer use for boys. But it is difficult to reconcile the patterns of achievement by developmental status with an explanation not revolving around the transition to puberty. More importantly, from the perspective of a policymaker, the distinction is moot, since changing school start times necessarily affects both before- and afterschool time.

Our research shows that adjusting school start times so that high school students have the latest start time would significantly increase achievement for older children at a very low academic cost for younger children—who will more than make up for this cost when they grow older. Even when start times are reordered so that the average start time across the district remains the same, there are non-trivial gains in average academic performance that would benefit students in all demographic groups. These gains must be weighed against the concerns and criticism that typically accompany such schedule-change proposals.

Jennifer Heissel is assistant professor at the Graduate School of Business and Public Policy at the Naval Postgraduate School. Samuel Norris is assistant professor at the Harris School of Public Policy at the University of Chicago. The authors’ views do not represent those of the United States Navy or Department of Defense.

Information, Incentives, and Education Policy
by Derek A. Neal
Harvard University Press, 2018, $39.95; 240 pages.

As reviewed by Michael McPherson

We economists like to say that our main goal in teaching undergraduates is to help them learn “to think like an economist.” I suspect that most of us do a pretty poor job of that, in part because we tend to be slaves to teaching from our textbook of choice, and in part because, like most college professors, we get little or no instruction in how to teach.

Derek Neal seems to be an exception to this rule. Winner of a top teaching award at the University of Chicago, where he is professor of economics, Neal has written a sort of textbook for advanced (actually very advanced) undergraduates on the application of modern economic thinking to some core problems in elementary and secondary education in the United States. Information, Incentives, and Education Policy is a true textbook, complete with problem sets and appendices, but because of the quality of Neal’s reasoning and the range of topics he addresses, it deserves attention beyond that of college students.

Neal has his economist lenses firmly in place as he considers issues in education that range from the fundamental reasons for government investment in schools to the role that parental choice can and should play in determining where kids go to school. He succeeds in showing that the economic perspective offers plenty of instructive insights about American education.

The framework that drives economic analysis in Neal’s work is the concept of “individual maximization under uncertainty.” People who are interested in education, including students, parents, teachers, or even fictitious “people” like school districts, determinedly pursue their individual goals, but these efforts may or may not add up collectively to educational policies and practices that give participants what they most want. The essential contribution economists can make, in Neal’s conception, is to design systems of incentives and institutions that harmonize with individual preferences as efficiently as possible.

In Neal’s hands, the tools of economics are powerful, indeed. Readers will find here as clear and cogent an account as they will find anywhere about why test-based accountability systems such as those that emerged under No Child Left Behind tend to go off the rails in either spectacular ways (the Atlanta cheating scandal) or more mundane ways (teaching to the test). Neal offers an ingenious, though perhaps unrealistic, solution to this problem, which is at base that school systems and states tend to use a single test to serve two distinct purposes: one, to see whether the school system is improving over time (are students learning more?), and two, to compare the performance of different teachers or schools at a given point in time in order to reward or penalize them.

To achieve the first purpose, tests must have considerable stability in form and content over time, so that the 7th graders of 2010 in a given school district can be compared to those of 2015 in the same district. This stability, however, means that, if the test is used to compare teachers or schools in that district, teachers or principals who have access to the 2010 test can use it to figure out how to “game” the 2015 test. To achieve the other purpose—comparative evaluation of different teachers in a given year—you need to use tests that change sharply in unexpected ways from year to year (for example, by employing multiple-choice questions one year and short essays the next) to make “teaching to the test” impossible. Developing sharply different high-quality tests from year to year is difficult and expensive, and frequent changes in form and content are unsettling to teachers, students, and parents, so this approach is rarely adopted. But note that the reason it is unsettling is precisely that it’s hard to prepare for the test by looking at old tests, taking practice tests, and other strategies. The only option is to try to get students to learn all the material being tested, which is of course the idea.

Traditionally in the United States, children have attended their neighborhood schools, and alert parents have exerted school choice through their selection of where to live, a mechanism Neal does not examine at length. Much of his book is devoted to newer and more explicit mechanisms of school choice, including the newly popular “public school choice” options that allow parents to choose a different school in their district or even in a neighboring one, while sometimes also factoring in schools’ preferences as to the students they want to accept. Neal also examines charter schools, which run on public money but are largely independent of operational control by the local school system; and tuition vouchers, which give money to parents to help them pay for private schools. Neal does a good job of explaining the complexities of these various choice mechanisms and reporting on what is known about their effects. “Choice” is of course the bread and butter of the economic way of thinking, and the analysis in these chapters will serve well in showing readers how, in practice, economists think.

At the same time, this book will also show its readers what economists, at least economists of the market-loving “Chicago school,” don’t think about. Early in the book, Neal asserts that governments should pay for children’s schooling because, while getting an education will boost children’s adult earning power, some parents are too poor or too neglectful to pay for their children’s schooling, and kids can’t get bank loans. Schooling is human capital, human capital is earning capacity, and boosting earning capacity is the core of what schooling is about. Neal does note, briefly, that other benefits have been alleged for schooling, but he omits the rationale the American founders took as central: that an educated citizenry is essential to a democratic society. If you accept that notion, then you have an interest, as someone who cares about democracy, not only in your own children’s education but in other children’s education as well; there is a collective good here that can only be achieved through public action. Also implied is that we have a collective interest in the aims and content of education: we are not just building workers, we are building citizens.

The fact that parents care about schools as more than vehicles to promote future earning power matters notably in regard to tuition vouchers. Neal equates “quality” of schooling with the degree to which it contributes to human capital, but this view overlooks much of what interests parents in private schools. Most private schools have religious affiliations, which parents may seek out either because they want faith-based instruction or in order to have their children educated with others of the same faith. And, less creditably, many white people want their children educated with other white people. Brown v. Board of Education provoked the opening of private “seg academies” throughout the South that excluded black students. When it comes to parents taking an interest in who else is in their children’s classroom, questions about satisfying people’s preferences—as well as what preferences deserve to be respected—come to the fore.

A problem with Neal’s analysis is his assumption throughout the book that parents are for the most part good stewards of their children’s interests. He allows that some parents may not care enough—may not be very “altruistic”—but the tougher questions center not on neglect but on parents’ judgments about what is best for their children. Should parents have the last word? As future adults, children have interests that warrant protection; parents don’t own their kids. Should parents be allowed to send their children to a school that teaches only creationism, or that preaches race hatred? Is it in a student’s long-term interest to be isolated from those of other races? These are big questions germane to school choice on which thinking like an economist may not help much.

Derek Neal has written a valuable book from which readers stand to learn a lot (especially if they don’t grow faint at the sight of an equation). That said, it is unsettling to read an analysis of school choice and school policy in which religion, race, and civic preparation receive only passing attention. It is true that these factors don’t fit well into Neal’s preferred economic models, which assume that what a parent looks for in a school is independent of who her classmates are. Neal explains that peer effects complicate rigorous models of school choice greatly and are beyond the scope of his book, which he intends as an undergraduate text. But, at least in my view, that is not a good enough reason to ignore these central factors almost completely. Thus, useful as this book is, it would be still better if the author had found more opportunities to note important issues closely aligned with the book’s topics, where “non-economic” considerations have significant weight. “Thinking like an economist” is a perfect subset of thinking well.

Michael McPherson is president emeritus at the Spencer Foundation.

It’s 7:30 a.m. on a cold morning in downtown Kansas City, Missouri. The sun is barely over the horizon and students haven’t yet arrived at the Crossroads Preparatory Academy charter school, but Crystalle Green is already setting up coffee, orange juice, and an array of LaMar’s doughnuts, a local favorite.

It’s all part of the job for Green, a former teacher turned site coordinator for Communities in Schools, a nationwide nonprofit “integrated student support” organization. Crossroads, which operates three charter schools in Kansas City, partners with Communities in Schools of Mid-America to provide social services to its students, either directly or by connecting them with existing programs in the local community. Green works onsite in a wide-ranging role, from giving out toiletries to counseling students with behavioral challenges. Today, that partnership takes the form of “Motivation Monday,” in which the Crossroads teenage students will be greeted by a group of young professional men from the community recruited to mingle and inspire at the start of the day.

After the students, who are in grades 7 through 11, have passed the gauntlet of fist bumps, high-fives, and snacks, they walk past Green. She greets them:

“I love your coat!”

“I need to see you before the end of the day!”

“Oh, so just because you got a new haircut you think that you don’t need to say good morning to me?”

Many come up and hug her.

Green does not stop moving during an hours-long visit. After she makes sure someone takes a picture of the Motivational Monday festivities, she pokes her head into a dedicated “restorative space” the school has set aside for students with behavior issues to see if anyone on her caseload is in there. Then her cell phone buzzes with a text: a student is having a rough morning, so she makes a note to let the girl’s teacher know they’ll be meeting for the first few minutes of second period. She even pops into the last few minutes of a music class to join students in singing the final chorus of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah.” And that’s all in addition to meeting individually with the six students on that day’s counseling schedule.

This is the nitty-gritty of integrated student supports, which aim to address barriers to learning from students’ lives outside of school, such as homelessness, mental health issues, or food insecurity. In such programs, an onsite coordinator like Green serves as hallway cheerleader, listening ear, and point of connection to social services and other community resources, in addition to implementing schoolwide programming targeted at boosting attendance, persistence, and academic success.

While these interventions are not new, their profile is on the rise since the 2015 passage of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), which for the first time specifically encouraged districts to provide integrated student supports and allowed more federal dollars to pay for them. But a close look at the research on their effectiveness reveals an open question: while integrated supports may help meet students’ physical and emotional needs, their ability to improve student learning remains unproven.

A Holistic Approach

Communities in Schools is one of the nation’s oldest and largest providers of integrated student supports, also known as “wraparound services.” Started in New York City in the 1970s, the agency now works with more than 2,300 schools in 25 states and the District of Columbia. Its board of directors is led by casino magnate Elaine Wynn and includes former federal education secretary Arne Duncan.

The model is straightforward: Communities in Schools recruits, trains, and places “site coordinators” in schools (typically high-poverty campuses where student performance is low), who usually work full time at the school and connect students to community resources available to them. This could include medical and dental care, mental health services, basic needs like food or shelter, academic enrichment programs, tutoring, and mentoring. Its services typically cost around $200 per student per school year.

Communities in Schools also relies on site coordinators like Green as a way to connect local schools with the overall organization, which functions as a federation of 131 “affiliate” nonprofits implementing the model. The national organization will occasionally bring in supports or programs that don’t already exist in needy communities, and also works to evaluate interventions and inform local partners about better practices. Its revenue comes from a combination of sources: about 60 percent comes from public dollars, such as district budgets and federal funding from the Education and Health and Human Services departments, and about 40 percent comes from fundraising, including from supporters like the Wallace Foundation and corporate gifts such as a $30 million grant by pharmaceutical firm AbbVie.

At Crossroads, Green works with 65 students, meeting with each at least once a month; setting goals with that student for either behavioral, academic, or attendance improvement; and tracking his or her progress toward those goals. She also does small-group sessions with multiple students in her caseload who might have similar needs.

Her efforts target student needs throughout the school: she has a spreadsheet of local community-service providers and connects students to mental health counseling, food banks, crisis intervention, or a host of other supports. Onsite, she maintains a stash of hygiene products, school supplies, shoes, and extra uniform pants. And because the school has set improving student behavior as its overall goal, Green has implemented a schoolwide rewards system that includes letting students earn a respite from their uniforms on “dress down” days; a lunch buddies program to encourage students to socialize; “just because” days, when students get rewards “just because”; and social events like dances to help students connect with their school in positive ways.

Similar types of programs are being implemented across the country. A major expansion of wraparound services is underway in New York City, the nation’s largest school district, where Mayor Bill de Blasio has established 239 “community schools” to offer health and social services that will cost $198.6 million and serve more than 100,000 students this school year. Philanthropies have supported similar efforts on a smaller scale, including grants by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, which last year gave $150,000 to 10 coordinators of wraparound services across the country as part of its Together for Students initiative. The Ballmer Group, founded by former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, has given broadly to such initiatives, including $15 million to Communities in Schools to target dropout-prevention efforts.

The growth is no surprise to Heather Clawson, executive vice president for research, learning, and accreditation of Communities in Schools.

“Student supports have been a ‘nice to have,’” she says. However, “it is no longer a nice to have. It is an essential part of educating our children for the future.”

Disappointing Research

The impact of integrated student supports is often obvious when it comes to meeting students’ immediate needs for food or medical care. But the larger-scale goal of such programs is to improve students’ long-term academic and personal success, and in those terms, their effectiveness is less clear. Large-scale evaluations of wraparound programs to date have shown only small benefits to student achievement, at best.

Surveys of research findings by Child Trends in 2014 and 2017 reported “a growing evidence base” for such interventions and noted researchers’ optimism about their effectiveness; however, researchers concluded that “the evidence is not yet complete” and noted the need for more detailed study. The updated 2017 report also looked in-depth at eight programs, including Communities in Schools and City Connects, and noted the importance of high-quality implementation and lack of measures for non-academic goals like improved grit and social skills. In addition, because integrated student-support programs comprise five distinct elements—needs assessment, community partnerships, coordinated student support, integration within school, and data tracking—determining the nature of high-quality implementation is complex. Such study, the researchers noted, is “the critical frontier for research and practice.”

Communities in Schools has invested in multiple third-party evaluations of its programs. The most recent, published by MDRC in 2017, evaluated both of its models: Tier 1 “whole school” intervention and Tier 2 “case management” services for specific high-risk students. The quasi-experimental study of the whole-school model compared 53 schools in Texas and North Carolina with similar schools not implementing the model and found some modest effects: elementary-school attendance rates improved more than in comparable schools, for example. However, although high-school graduation rates increased, they did not improve more than at the comparison schools. The researchers found no impact on middle-school attendance, and were unable to calculate the program’s impact on behavior due to data limitations.

The other evaluation was a random-assignment study of the Tier 2 case-management intervention in 24 mostly urban, low-income secondary schools in two unnamed states. It found that students who had a Communities in Schools case manager used support services more and showed improved attitudes about school and better relationships with adults and peers. Researchers did not, however, find evidence of improved student achievement, attendance, or behavior.

This lines up with most of the research on integrated student-support programs. “There are a lot of null findings,” says Kristin Anderson Moore, a senior scholar and past president at Child Trends who co-authored the “Making the Grade” reports. Results are “neutral to positive when the methods are strong” and there are “almost no negative effects,” but many advocates are still disappointed with findings that are far from a slam dunk. That vexes practitioners, advocates, and researchers alike because, as Anderson Moore puts it, such programs are “aligned with everything we know about child development.”

In addition, researchers and practitioners have made “critical correlations” between key elements of integrated student supports, such as student engagement and student learning, for example, and between self-regulation and academic success, says Brooke Stafford-Brizard, a director at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. And yet when everything comes together, the result underwhelms.

Some impacts simply must be true. If a student has poor eyesight and cannot see her teacher or the words on the page of her book, eyeglasses will improve her ability to learn. Others are quite plausible. For example, it is likely that students who feel that they have trusted adults in their lives, people who will support them in their times of need, will learn better. And yet the findings of large-scale evaluations have not shown significant improvements to student achievement as a result of these programs. There is still a huge gap in understanding which interventions affect which outcomes and how those outcomes are related to each other.

There is at least one exception: City Connects, which began in Boston in 1999 and now serves students in more than 100 schools in six states. In 2018, a Boston College study found that students enrolled at City Connects elementary schools had about half the odds of dropping out of high school as teenagers. Researchers tracked 894 students who entered kindergarten between 2000 and 2004 at City Connects schools, where local site coordinators monitor every student’s progress and challenges, in conjunction with their teachers, every year. Based on those data, students are individually connected to community services and enrichment opportunities to boost their academics, mental and physical health, social development, and family well-being.

One likely source of the model’s impact on dropouts is its early start, according to Mary E. Walsh, a study co-author and executive director of City Connects.

“A comprehensive intervention in elementary school that addresses a wide range of out-of-school factors can disrupt those pathways, supporting strengths and building resilience,” she wrote in a summary published by the American Educational Research Association.

Plumbing the Evidence Base

Still, the overall research base is far from conclusive. There are several potential explanations for the persistent lack of demonstrable success.

First, neither the research community nor practitioners know the right “mix” of services to provide to students. As Anderson Moore puts it: “Is what’s really important stable housing or health insurance? What makes it click?”

Some interventions are more expensive than others. Some are more intense. While many have been studied in isolation, how do they work together? In addition, students have multiple needs that might prevent them from being successful in the classroom. Is meeting just some of those needs enough? Which needs are the highest priority? These are the questions that remain unanswered. It could be that integrated student-support providers are not prioritizing the right interventions, or that they are undercutting their success by promoting multiple interventions at once.

Second, there are local capacity issues. Large organizations like Communities in Schools have the resources to gather and analyze data, and organizations with outside support, such as those subsidized by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, are trying to build capacity around data analytics and coordination. But many communities lack these partners.

Coordinating dozens of service providers helping hundreds of students is challenging. Trying to coordinate these services while evaluating their performance and adjusting behavior based on that information is even harder. Can local site coordinators do this type of analysis and evaluation? How do they know that the partners they choose are the best potential assets in the community? Local coordinators may not have the time or resources to do the type of research needed to weigh one intervention against another. They have to do their best to find partners and then make judgments, often based on limited information, about how well those partners are performing.

This presents a vulnerability. If site coordinators are overwhelmed by the vast array of potential social-service organizations or lack useful data or the ability to analyze which providers might be more effective than others, they can struggle to identify good groups in the community with whom to partner.

Ohio’s Strive Partnership is trying to solve that problem. Described by executive director Byron White as “a backbone organization,” Strive provides data analytics, capacity building, and community strategy support for the web of organizations that provide services for school-age children in Cincinnati and northern Kentucky and the schools and districts looking to partner with them. “To the student,” he argues, “there is not a line of demarcation,” between home, school, and community. Thus, to address student learning, organizations have to look at the whole picture.

The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative has invested in support networks like these around the country. The Together for Students challenge project awarded grants to organizations that are coordinating and building capacity in local communities around six domains; academic, cognitive, socio-emotional learning, identity, physical well-being, and mental health.

A third challenge is the classic problem of implementation. Part of the Communities in Schools model is to try to promote “research-based” whole-school interventions. This would not be the first time that interventions with a promising research base failed to pan out at scale. Such prepackaged efforts often look different when they are delivered by a diffuse set of local actors throughout an entire school than they do in the settings where the original research on them took place. Do school leaders believe in and value these programs? What about teachers? Are the adults in the school supporting these programs? Or, is the local site coordinator swimming against the tide and fighting organizational culture in order to deliver services?

Fourth, and perhaps most troubling, evaluations of these programs might not be measuring the right things. While there are ways to gauge reading and writing, good measurements of speaking and listening are lacking—and those are key to assessing students’ socio-emotional learning. “There is a tremendous amount we have to learn in this space,” says Stafford-Brizard. Without good measures of the constructs that these interventions are trying to change, it’s hard to know whether or not they have changed them.

What’s more, many of these interventions are long term in scope. They aim to make serious changes in students’ attitudes and behaviors, which take time to take root and even longer to fully shape their actions both inside and outside the classroom. Short-term gains in test scores, in other words, might not be the best evaluation of the impact of these programs.

Defining and Measuring Success

There may be larger, worthy questions regarding the best avenue for needed supports. Why don’t schools provide these services directly? Why don’t government approaches use tax programs like the Earned Income Tax Credit to put financial resources directly into parents’ hands? Regardless, integrated student supports are not going away. In communities where children struggle to get their basic needs met, organizations will continue to try to provide for their material well-being as well as their physical and mental health. Schools are a natural location for coordination of these services, even if they rely on outside nonprofits to provide them. Given that, how can such initiatives meet with more demonstrable success? Here are three potential positive steps.

First, if existing measures are not fully capturing the impact of these programs, researchers, in partnership with practitioners, need to work to develop new and better measures. Improved indicators of physical and mental health and of community connections could give a better idea of what programs are actually doing in the lives of children. This is not to say that these measures need to be incorporated into accountability systems or used to reward or sanction schools or teachers; rather, they simply need to help on-the-ground practitioners better understand what programs are doing and how they are doing it.

Second, researchers also need to work to better understand both the relative and combined effect of interventions. What are the major impediments to student success and how can they be removed? Which barriers are less important and can be dealt with later? Similarly, how do interventions work in tandem? Can there be combinations of interventions that act as force multipliers? Do some interventions in tandem actually decrease the effectiveness of others by spreading teachers or coordinators too thin? Is it a small number of higher-intensity interventions or a larger number of lower-touch programs? Which student supports get the most bang for the buck? These are serious questions that will take researchers some time to parse.

Third, advocates and philanthropies that support these types of interventions need to continue to invest in building capacity for local decisionmakers. Can they, like in Cincinnati, provide data analytics that make it easier for overstretched school administrators and site coordinators to weigh the various options available and choose the one with the highest likelihood of success? This is not to say that supporters should push top-down commands of what to track and what interventions to use, but that they should invest in the skill development and infrastructure that local actors can utilize.

Anyone who cares about boosting student success inside the classroom should not necessarily discount serious improvements to students’ quality of life outside the classroom. Getting mental health care that helps students deal with anger issues or process trauma can change their lives. It might not make them better students, but it can certainly make them better people.

Many of our nation’s poorest students have needs that, for whatever reason, are not being met by their families or their schools. Luckily, we have a robust network of civil-society institutions and businesses that work to try to meet these needs. Rather than reinventing the wheel and providing these services in-house, schools and school districts can partner with these organizations for the betterment of their students. Comparing the different options is still a work in progress, but one with the potential to seriously improve disadvantaged students’ lives.

Michael Q. McShane is director of national research at EdChoice, an adjunct fellow in education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, and a senior fellow at the Show-Me Institute.

Bilingual education is on its way back in California.

After decisively rejecting bilingual education in 1998, state voters enthusiastically endorsed its return in 2016. Educators are eager to offer more bilingual classes—and not only to recently arrived immigrants. Increasingly, English-speaking parents are also sold on the cognitive benefits of dual-immersion bilingual education for their own kids. One big factor, though, is holding back growth: a severe shortage of bilingual teachers.

“Every day, my phone rings off the hook,” says Cristina Alfaro, who chairs San Diego State University’s Department of Dual Language and English Learner Education. “Principals say, ‘I need a bilingual teacher. I need six teachers. I need someone right now.’”

No matter how much principals beg, Alfaro will not let her teachers-in-training start working before they’re fully qualified. “It’s not fair to students to have a teacher who’s learning on the job. I tell principals to ‘plan better. If you want a dual-immersion program, do it right. Maybe wait a few years until you can find the teachers. If you don’t have quality teachers, your program will fail.’”

The dual-immersion, or dual-language, model that predominates in California schools today centers on teaching students reading and subject content in two languages, and it aims for biliteracy. Spanish-English programs are the most common, but other languages, including Mandarin and Korean, are sometimes paired with English. Districts looking to offer dual immersion in these less-common languages have even more difficulty finding qualified teachers.

Traditional models of bilingual education teach English learners math, reading, and other subjects in their first language in kindergarten and 1st grade: often, only 10 percent of instruction is in English in the first two years. The goal is to transition students to all-English instruction as soon as possible. While this transitional approach is still common, virtually all new bilingual programs use the dual-immersion model, and some of the old ones are switching to it.

With dual-immersion programs burgeoning in California, school districts are competing fiercely for scarce teacher talent, bidding up compensation for bilingual educators in the manner of consulting firms recruiting new business-school graduates. Districts are stealing each other’s teachers, says Lucrecia Santibañez, an associate professor of teaching, learning, and culture in the School of Educational Studies at Claremont Graduate University. The Pasadena Unified School District, which expanded its dual-immersion programs from three schools to seven, “has been losing teachers to neighboring districts that offer higher salaries and, sometimes, signing bonuses for bilingual skills,” she says. “Teachers can go five miles down the road and make more.”

Los Angeles Unified, which is also ramping up dual-language instruction, offers an annual stipend of up to $5,406 to teachers with bilingual certification. Statewide, stipends vary from $1,000 (in San Francisco Unified) on up. A few districts pay as much as $5,000 as a hiring bonus.

In Sacramento, Natomas Unified pays an extra $5,000 for hard-to-find skills plus a $5,000 “diversity bonus” for experience working with racially, culturally, or academically diverse young people. The district, which hopes to start a dual-immersion school, is “struggling to find Spanish teachers,” says Amreek Singh, human resources director. “We’re all competing for the same group of people.”

Fifty-eight percent of districts surveyed in 2017 by Californians Together, a nonprofit coalition of organizations advocating for English learners, planned to add or expand bilingual programs, but 86 percent of the districts said the shortage of teachers is a “hurdle to realizing those plans.”

As California educators and policymakers talk of a new era of multilingual education, they’re careful to acknowledge that it won’t work without well-trained teachers.

Learning from Past Mistakes

Nearly 1.3 million students in California public schools are classified as English learners. Twenty years ago, 30 percent of such students were taught in bilingual programs. In 1998, state voters approved Proposition 227, and the resulting statute required schools to teach in English unless parents signed waivers requesting primary-language instruction. The share of English learners in bilingual education fell to less than 5 percent.

Before 1998, faced with an acute shortage of teachers, schools often hired teachers without bilingual credentials or skills to lead bilingual classrooms. Sometimes, bilingual teacher’s aides taught reading.

“I would hope we’ve learned from history” not to offer bilingual classes without qualified bilingual teachers,” says Veronica Aguila, who directs the English Learner Support Division of the California Department of Education. Aguila got her start as a bilingual aide and later became a bilingual teacher.

Children from low-income and working-class Spanish-speaking families usually were placed in transitional classes in elementary school and were moved to mainstream English classes as quickly as possible. Most children did not develop strong speaking or reading skills in Spanish.

Some schools offered “developmental” or “maintenance” bilingual classes designed to improve students’ primary-language skills. Again, biliteracy was not the goal.

Expectations often were low, noted the Los Angeles Times in a 2006 editorial attacking a law proposing a simplified curriculum for English learners. “California was supposed to have learned a sad but important lesson from its years of experimenting with bilingual education: when you isolate a group of largely poor, minority students and give them different instruction from what other students receive, they tend to get a dumbed-down, second-rate education.”

In Lillie Ruvalcaba’s first year as a bilingual teacher, her 3rd graders moved from reading in Spanish to reading in English by midyear. The reader, called Ant About Town, “was written at the kindergarten level,” she recalls with a shudder. “‘Ant went up, up, up.’ It was such an insult to the students. We owe it to kids to have grade-level content taught in an interesting, motivating way.”

Ruvalcaba teaches at Mountain View Elementary District in El Monte, a mostly Latino town east of Los Angeles. When she was hired, she had a teaching credential, but not one with a concentration in bilingual-education methods. “If you spoke Spanish, you taught in Spanish,” she recalls. “We didn’t have the best-prepared teachers.”

After Proposition 227 passed, many of Mountain View’s bilingual programs closed. Ruvalcaba became a teacher of structured English immersion, a method that immerses students in English and provides supports to build students’ understanding. She now supports curriculum and instruction in English-learner programs.

The district is transforming its remaining bilingual program from a transitional to a dual-immersion model and hopes to open new bilingual classes at other schools. But, “we don’t want to repeat the mistakes of the past,” Ruvalcaba says. “Now we’re making sure we do it well.”

Nearly all new bilingual programs in California use dual immersion, a model that extends from kindergarten through 12th grade. Ideally, a class of dual-immersion students comprises a mix of children from English-speaking, Spanish-speaking, and bilingual families, with no one group predominating. The children of working-class immigrants learn with the children of middle-class and well-to-do parents. Native English speakers learn a second language as enrichment, while students from newly arrived families gain necessary fluency in English.

Alfaro of San Diego State calls dual immersion “the most powerful model for English learners—and for English-only students,” who stand to gain a “global edge.” By contrast, “the research is weak” for transitional bilingual education, she says. It gives English learners “a crutch” rather than equipping them with facility in both languages from the start.

Even critics of dual immersion concede it can work well if it is done right. But they warn that it’s hard to maintain quality while scaling up the number of programs.

Dual immersion is a risky choice for immigrant students, says Rosalie Pedalino Porter, who helped anti-bilingual crusader Ron Unz pass “English for the Children” measures in California and Arizona. It’s not enough to have “the right curriculum, the right books, and competent bilingual teachers,” says Porter, a former bilingual teacher and administrator in Massachusetts. “You also need a stable group of children who will stick with it” for five or six years. She chairs ProEnglish, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit that advocates for English immersion and making English the official language of the United States. But she also serves on the board of a Mandarin-immersion school that her granddaughter attended. The difference? Students in the Mandarin program are fluent English speakers immersed in a second language.

California’s education leaders say they understand that dual-immersion programs need qualified teachers and a solid curriculum. “Most districts are trying to build the foundation [for bilingual education] first, not creating programs for which they have no teachers,” says Marty Martinez, director of teacher induction for the Sacramento County Office of Education.

“We see people trying to do this right,” echoes Anya Hurwitz, director of the Sobrato Early Academic Language, or SEAL, program.

SEAL has developed a knowledge-rich curriculum for Spanish-speaking English learners in preschool through 3rd grade, which is designed to bring students up to grade level in subject areas by 3rd grade (see “Learning English,” features, Winter 2016). This year, about 100 preschools and elementary schools use SEAL in English or bilingual classes. Five of SEAL’s partner districts are expanding or adding bilingual programs, and SEAL is part of a consortium working on training and retraining bilingual teachers.

Global California

In May 2018, Tom Torlakson, the state superintendent, announced Global California 2030, an initiative to nearly quadruple the number of dual-immersion programs in the state, to 1,600 (see Figure 1); increase the number of bilingual teachers; expand access to “world language” classes; and encourage more students to earn a “seal of biliteracy” on their diplomas by the year 2030.

Tony Thurmond, who was elected in November 2018 to succeed Torlakson, is a staunch advocate of bilingual education. As a state legislator earlier that year, he sponsored a successful bill that earmarked $300,000 for the development of bilingual programs in the schools. He supports Global California 2030 and backed Proposition 58, a 2016 measure approved by 73.5 percent of voters that repealed the English-only requirement and opened the door to expanding bilingual ed in the state. In his campaign for superintendent, Thurmond promised to “continue to work to equip each school district with the resources they need to recruit and train language teachers who can guide our students into a globalized future,” and further pledged “to incorporate foreign language classes in the curriculum for elementary and middle schools so our younger students can get a head start on building this skill.”

In 2017 the state board of education adopted the English Learner Roadmap to guide policy in the Proposition 58 era. The plan envisions a “rich and challenging curriculum from early childhood to grade 12” that “respects the value of English Learners’ primary language and culture.” In addition to a “focus on English proficiency,” the road map calls for “proficiency in multiple languages—and recognition of the role of home language in supporting English and overall literacy.”

About 38 percent of California’s public-school students enter the system as English learners—more than double the national average. About 82 percent speak Spanish at home; Vietnamese, Mandarin, Arabic, and Filipino (including Pilipino or Tagalog) are the next most-common languages (see Figure 2). Most are born in the United States to immigrant parents and are likely to be reclassified as “fluent English proficient” within six years: to earn that designation, students must show they’re fluent in English and performing at or near grade level academically. The annual statewide reclassification rate, which hit 14.6 percent in 2017–18, has more than doubled since 1997–98.

The state department of education doesn’t track the number of students in bilingual programs, says Aguila. The database was abandoned after the passage of Proposition 227 and has yet to be revived. She believes there are 469 dual-immersion programs in the state, based on a 2016–17 survey by the California Association for Bilingual Education, but she offers no guess on the number of programs using other models. These days, “bilingual” and “dual immersion” are sometimes used as synonyms.

In spring 2017, Californians Together partnered with the Association of California School Administrators and the state’s two teachers unions to survey 111 districts and charter schools enrolling 39 percent of California’s English learners. The survey found 27 percent offer dual immersion, 12 percent provide transitional bilingual education, and 5 percent have developmental or maintenance bilingual classes.

The Broken Pipeline

After Proposition 227 limited bilingual education, more than half the state’s teacher-preparation programs stopped offering training in the specialty, reports the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing. The number of new teachers earning bilingual credentials fell.

“[Proposition] 227 was devastating,” says Jan Gustafson Corea, chief executive officer of the California Association for Bilingual Education.

“The pipeline was broken,” says Eduardo R. Muñoz-Muñoz, who was recruited from Spain 12 years after 227’s passage to fill the bilingual teacher shortage. He earned his Ph.D. at Stanford and became an assistant professor of teacher education at San Jose State University.

Two years after Proposition 58’s approval, San Jose State has not seen a spike in demand for bilingual training, he reports. “There is untapped potential. We see bilingual people who want to be teachers but aren’t choosing to become bilingual teachers.”

In part, that’s because many people aren’t sure how much language proficiency is required to be a bilingual teacher, according to Muñoz-Muñoz. “What does it mean to speak ‘academic Spanish’ or ‘high-level Spanish’?” he asks.

To teach English learners in their primary language, California educators must earn a so-called bilingual authorization by passing a test of language, education theory, and culture (see Figure 3). The requirements changed in 2009. Many former bilingual teachers are studying “academic Spanish” to fortify their knowledge of the language.

California needs to “unify how we’re preparing dual-language educators” and “do it right,” says Alfaro. Bilingual educators are “forming consortiums so we can work together to develop new state standards for preparing dual-language teachers. There’s a national effort as well.”

Education schools are pursuing faculty members who can train prospective teachers to teach bilingual education: it’s a hot market for new Ph.D.’s, says Alfaro.

San Diego State, which continued to prepare bilingual teachers even in the Proposition 227 era, has the faculty it needs to create new programs. Alfaro’s department has streamlined its curriculum to enable community-college students to complete a bachelor’s degree and teacher certification in four years instead of five. Some of the teacher trainees are bilingual aides. “They start in community college, do their practicum hours early to make sure they really want to be teachers, and complete their bachelor’s degree with a credential,” says Alfaro. Southwestern College, only a few miles north of the Mexican border, is a prime recruiting ground. Most of the college’s students are bilingual Latinos.

Schools are recruiting from Spain, Chile, Puerto Rico, Argentina, and elsewhere, says Alfaro. The problem is that foreign teachers “lack understanding of the cultural context,” the curriculum, and the Common Core standards, she says. Teachers from Spain “have strict rules for how Spanish should be spoken. They need to honor the Spanish their students speak, which is a border dialect.”

In addition, turnover is high for foreign teachers, who may be working on short-term visas, says Alfaro. For these reasons, she believes it makes more sense to train Californians than to hire from abroad.

“Some districts put interns in the classroom right away, with coaching,” Claremont’s Santibañez says. “English learners often are taught by new or early-career teachers, often with emergency credentials,” her research has found. “It’s a problem. It’s one thing to speak Spanish. It’s another thing to teach reading in Spanish.”

As in other areas of K–12 education, it’s not uncommon for the neediest English learners to get the least-experienced, least-trained teachers. A 2017 National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine report found that teachers who work with English learners often are under-prepared.

Teachers prepared to work with English learners are in short supply nationwide, according to an analysis of federal data by the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education. While 10 percent of public-school students are classified as English learners, only 4 percent of new teachers earned credentials in English as a Second Language instruction and 2 percent majored in bilingual, multilingual, and multicultural education.

California districts also are having trouble finding special education, science, math, and career-tech teachers. The state has made it easier for out-of-state teachers to become certified, and the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing is considering easing subject-matter testing requirements for new teachers. That step could make it easier for teachers to earn a bilingual authorization—but it also would risk lowering teacher quality.

Back to Bilingual Teaching

Education agencies, universities, school districts, and nonprofits are trying to increase the supply of bilingual teachers. While they hope to train new teachers, they’re starting with existing educators.

The Californians Together survey found 6,000 teachers with bilingual authorizations who are teaching in English-only classrooms and another 900 teachers who are fluent in another language but not certified for bilingual instruction. Former bilingual teachers are open to returning but feel they need support to improve their language and teaching skills, says Corea of the California Association for Bilingual Education.

The California Department of Education has awarded Bilingual Teacher Professional Development grants—each in the amount of $625,000—to four school districts and four county offices of education throughout the state. The Sacramento County Office of Education is partnering with seven local school districts, Sacramento State, and Loyola Marymount University to increase the number of bilingual teachers, says Martinez. Some teachers who earned a bilingual authorization never used it, while others may speak Spanish fluently but don’t know how to teach it, says Martinez. “Loyola Marymount works on building teachers’ academic language skills and pedagogy.”

Past and future bilingual teachers can take tuition-free evening and online classes at the university. The next step is to create a pathway to teaching for bilingual aides, some of whom already have bachelor’s degrees, says Martinez.

“We’re looking within our schools” to find teachers who are close to being ready to teach in bilingual classrooms, says Amy Boles, director of educational services in San Jose’s Oak Grove district. Oak Grove is managing a state grant for a 10-district consortium.

However, some credentialed teachers are reluctant to return to bilingual teaching, says Muñoz-Muñoz. “Being a bilingual teacher requires support, and those supports weren’t there in the past. We’re not sure how many we can recapture and perhaps retrain.”

In the East Bay town of San Lorenzo, Annalisa McHenry teaches 3rd grade in an early-exit transitional bilingual program that administrators hope to switch to the dual-immersion model next year. The district is working with SEAL to train more teachers, but it will be a struggle to staff the school, says McHenry. “Being a bilingual teacher is more work, and it isn’t more money.”

California has adopted a demanding, high-level English Language Development framework, says SEAL’s Hurwitz. “To achieve that in two languages requires a strong program. Bilingual teachers need planning, collaboration, and training time. We haven’t done that in the past.”

Priscilla Figueroa, an English Language Development coach in Mountain View Elementary, agrees that dual-immersion settings demand high-level teaching skills. She started teaching 29 years ago as a bilingual teacher with emergency credentials, but never finished certification. Like her colleague Lillie Ruvalcaba, she became an English-immersion teacher after Proposition 227 passed in 1998. She’s now one of a group of Mountain View teachers working to complete a bilingual credential.

“When I was a 5th-grade bilingual teacher, the better students transitioned to English in 3rd grade,” she recalls. Students still in bilingual classes in 5th grade were working below grade level. “You were teaching to a lower reading level.” Dual-immersion teachers are expected to teach grade-level academic content to all students, says Figueroa. “If I taught 5h grade, I’d have to teach 5th-grade science, social studies, math. I’d have to use all my teaching skills to scaffold instruction to achieve that.”

Alicia Raygoza, now a literacy coach in Mountain View, signed up for Loyola Marymount’s online “academic Spanish” program to polish her academic Spanish. She learned Spanish from her parents, but was educated in English and tested out of Spanish in high school, she says.

The dual-immersion model is supposed to continue in middle and high school, so students can become fully literate in both languages. However, finding bilingual secondary-school teachers is even harder than finding such educators at the elementary level. Spanish literature teachers are available, says Hurwitz, but middle and high schools need people who can teach science, social studies, and other subjects in Spanish.

Who Benefits?

Educated parents are leading the push for dual immersion in California and across the nation. That worries many of its supporters, who think the needs of English learners should come first. Bilingual education is enrichment for advantaged students but a critical necessity for those who need to master English.

Dual immersion comes with a tacit promise of desegregation, since it’s so popular with middle-class English-speaking parents, says Hurwitz. “But we have to understand the equity issue. Who is the program serving?”

Dual immersion “is the best public education has to offer,” says Muñoz-Muñoz. “My own child is in dual immersion.” But he worries about the “differential in power and social influence” between educated, English-speaking parents and English-learner parents. Dual immersion “is not delivering its promise to everybody,” he warns.

In Los Angeles Unified, it’s “marketed as enrichment, almost as a gifted program,” says Santibañez, who chose dual immersion for her own child. “There’s enormous growth in dual immersion, because districts have found it’s a way to keep middle-class parents in the district,” she says. Educated, middle-class parents tend to exercise vigilance over their children’s education, and their involvement can serve to ensure that dual-immersion programs don’t cut corners on quality. “Affluent parents are their kids’ biggest advocates,” Santibañez says, “while low-income parents don’t know if their kids are in low-level English classes.”

However, she has seen dual-immersion programs that primarily enroll children from middle-class, English-only families. Some immigrant parents felt unwelcome or intimidated by the English-speaking middle-class parents, says Santibañez. In a meeting with a large number of parents, for instance, if the staff asks, “‘Who needs translation?’ . . . they don’t want to raise their hands.”

Across the state, school officials report English-speaking parents are very interested in dual immersion, but Spanish-speaking parents have to be persuaded of its merits. Bilingual-education advocates say they’re trying to “educate” immigrant parents about research showing that bilingualism builds mental flexibility. In addition, they’re touting evidence that dual immersion is effective at building proficiency in both English and a student’s first language. The parents of English learners, however, don’t always believe that.

Immigrant parents “are very concerned their kids are not learning English fast enough,” Santibañez says, because during the child’s first years in a bilingual program, Spanish predominates over English. “Most dual-immersion programs start with lots of Spanish, then are fifty-fifty by 4th and 5th grade. Parents get worried and pull them out. We see a lot of attrition.”

Sticking with the program for the long haul is important, she notes, because it takes time for English learners to achieve proficiency in English if they’re taught primarily in their first language until 4th grade. If students quit in elementary school—or if schools don’t provide dual immersion in middle school—then many of the promised benefits may be lost.

“Hopeful” is the word bilingual-education advocates use most frequently. California has opened the door to a teaching model they hope will enable students to achieve fluency and literacy in two languages. But achieving that dream will require many more well-trained, bilingual, and biliterate teachers and sustained attention to maintaining quality and equity.

Joanne Jacobs is a freelance education writer and blogger (joannejacobs.com) based in California.

Since the early 2000s, when wireless connectivity and the Internet evolved into everyday technologies, they have come to pervade our home and work lives, revolutionizing the way we share and access information. Wi-Fi circuits, which connect a device to a wireless network and the Internet, are incorporated into billions of devices, ranging from bathroom scales and “smart” electric outlets to equipment that streams movies and music. Wi-Fi is installed on our smartphones and laptops, at home and in the workplace, in cafés and airports, and of course, in schools everywhere.

Digital learning and wireless connectivity have become so entrenched in schools that many educators now consider high-speed Internet access a requirement for effective teaching. The federal government, via the Federal Communications Commission, subsidizes wireless connectivity and other technology in schools through its E-rate program. Advocates aspire to equip every student in America with wireless access, and the organization EducationSuperHighway estimates that as of 2017, 88 percent of schools had robust Wi-Fi capability in their classrooms, up from 25 percent just four years earlier (see Figure 1). Some school districts are providing Wi-Fi access to places like football fields and school buses to help students without reliable Internet access at home complete and submit assignments.

But schools are finding that a substantial number of people have health concerns about the radio frequency, or RF, signals emitted by Wi-Fi devices, even as exposure levels are far below government safety limits. Objectors have banded together to protest what they consider to be the health hazards of wireless technologies, including Wi-Fi in schools. The 2018 documentary Generation Zapped chronicled the efforts of key players in this campaign, who blame RF exposures from low-level sources such as Wi-Fi for a host of detrimental health effects, from headaches and hearing loss to Alzheimer’s and brain cancer. Some scientists and physicians support their views (even though they might not agree on just what those adverse health effects might be), and the issue has been taken up by alternative-medicine proponents such as the physician Joseph Mercola (better known for his anti-vaccine advocacy).

While digital culture has brought great benefits, it has certainly had negative consequences as well—such as loss of privacy, disruptive hacking, and harms to children from misuse of cell phones. But need we worry about the health risks of environmental exposure to radio frequency energy? The evidence we have accumulated so far would suggest not. National health agencies have credibly concluded that no adverse health effects have been demonstrated at radio frequency exposures that fall within established safety guidelines—and the exposures from Wi-Fi fall well below those limits.

Yet a substantial number of people do worry about exposure to RF energy in the environment. In 2017, noted risk expert Peter Wiedemann, then at the University of Wollongong in Australia, reported on a survey of 2,454 people in six European countries about their concerns over electromagnetic-field exposure. The investigators found that 40 percent of the respondents had some concerns, with 12 percent describing themselves as “enduringly concerned”—that is, frequently thinking and talking about electromagnetic-field exposure. Most of their worries were related to radio frequency sources. Cell towers, Wi-Fi, wireless-enabled electric utility meters, and other sources of “involuntary” exposure were noted as particularly troubling. Numerous websites serve as echo chambers for these apprehensions, offering alarming interpretations of scientific developments. Some of the sites sell RF-shielding garments or provide templates of letters for concerned individuals to send to political leaders.

The Science behind RF Energy

With any potentially hazardous agent, the dose makes the poison. At high exposure levels, radio frequency energy can indeed be hazardous, producing burns or other thermal damage, but these exposures are typically incurred only in occupational settings near high-powered RF transmitters, or sometimes in medical procedures gone awry. Two fundamental questions about any health risk are: what kinds of adverse effects may possibly occur under given exposure levels, and how much exposure do people actually receive in the real world?

The very word “radiation” is scary to many people, who may associate it with overexposure to x-rays, or the cancers induced by massive exposures during the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear accident. But, technically speaking, radiation is simply energy moving through space. Thus, even light from a flashlight is a form of radiation. Radio frequency energy transmitted from an antenna is also a form of radiation, but unlike x-rays and other forms of potentially dangerous radiation, RF energy is non-ionizing: that is, the photons that carry the signal do not have enough energy to disrupt molecules in the body to form free radicals, which can damage cells and tissues. RF energy has nothing in common with ionizing radiation in terms of potential health effects. The term electromagnetic field, or EMF, refers to electromagnetic energy in general, regardless of frequency. In health discussions, the term is used broadly to refer to any part of the electromagnetic spectrum, most typically to power-line fields (at 50 or 60 hertz) or radio frequency fields.

“Wi-Fi” does not refer to any specific physical agent, but rather is a trademarked name for devices that conform to a set of engineering standards that enable them to communicate through wireless links. Currently, Wi-Fi devices transmit in two bands of the radio frequency spectrum, near 2.45 and 5 gigahertz, but additional frequency bands will be used in the future. The lower frequency range is part of the industrial, scientific, and medical band that has long been used by household microwave ovens, diathermy and other medical equipment, industrial heaters, and many other devices. Wi-Fi operates in the microwave part of the spectrum (300 megahertz to 300 gigahertz). Nearly the entire microwave region of the spectrum is used for something—cell phones, broadcast applications, radar, industrial heating equipment, and, since the late 1990s, a vast number of low-powered communications devices, of which Wi-Fi is only one of several classes.

A Wi-Fi network (technically called a wireless local-area network) is configured around sets of low-powered RF transmitters. Access points, which in schools are typically mounted high on walls or above ceiling tiles, allow Wi-Fi-enabled devices (called clients) to connect to the network and access the Internet. In a school, these devices would include laptops, tablet computers, and often printers and audiovisual equipment in classrooms.

Wi-Fi devices transmit streams of brief radio frequency pulses at somewhat lower peak power levels than those used by cell phones, and at a very low-duty cycle (fraction of time spent transmitting). Only one device can transmit at a time on a Wi-Fi network. If the network is operating at full capacity (an unusual situation, even in a classroom of students accessing the network), the total amount of RF energy transmitted on the network might be roughly comparable to that from a single cell phone in use in the room or to the small amounts of microwave energy that typically leak from the front door of a kitchen microwave oven while in use. These signals come, in turn, from every device that is connected to the network, most of which are located at some distance from any given individual in the room.

Individuals who are in the vicinity of a Wi-Fi network are exposed to radio frequency signals in two ways: from the typically weak signals in the network and also from the generally stronger but more intermittent signals coming from RF transmitters (such as Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and cell phone antennas) in the user’s own device. Any wireless device that is legally sold in the United States must be authorized by the Federal Communications Commission, which requires appropriate testing by manufacturers to document compliance with the commission’s safety limits. Those regulatory thresholds are far below any demonstrably hazardous exposure level that could cause excessive heating of tissue, which cannot happen with low-powered Wi-Fi equipment.

Exposure in Schools

Numerous surveys have examined levels of exposure to the population from environmental sources of radio frequency energy. While these levels vary greatly, the largest exposure an individual generally incurs is from use of a cell phone. Below that level are signals from cell phones operated in the person’s vicinity. Still lower, on average, are signals from many other sources in the environment: cell towers, broadcast and communications transmitters outside the home, and microwave ovens, wireless baby monitors, cordless phones, Wi-Fi, and other RF-emitting devices within the home. The cumulative exposure from all sources in ordinary environments is invariably a tiny fraction of established safety limits. Those limits are designed to provide adequate protection against all established hazards from radio frequency energy over any duration of exposure.

Two studies illustrate the exposure levels involved. In 2017, Lena Hedendahl and colleagues in Sweden fitted 18 teachers in seven schools with instruments that recorded exposure from multiple RF sources many times a day for entire school days. The average RF exposures to the teachers from Wi-Fi in school were comparable to that from sources outside the school (chiefly, for those schools, “downlink” signals from nearby cellular base station antennas, which are the yard-long antennas seen today on many rooftops) and considerably below “uplink” signals from cell phones in the teachers’ vicinity. All exposure levels were a tiny fraction of U.S. and European safety limits.

More recently, a large multinational group of investigators led by Elisabeth Cardis of the University of Barcelona surveyed radio frequency exposures to 529 children ages 8 to 18 living in five countries (Denmark, the Netherlands, Slovenia, Switzerland, and Spain). The investigators fitted the kids with personal RF dosimeters that recorded their exposures from a variety of sources in and out of school for up to three days. Consistent with other studies, Wi-Fi amounted to only a small fraction of the children’s total RF exposure (see Figure 2). RF exposures in the schools, the study found, were generally comparable to or lower than those in other environments: 95 percent of the children had Wi-Fi at home, and three quarters of them used cell phones, with more than one third of the students accessing the Internet via cell phones for more than 30 minutes a day.

The overall conclusion from these and other surveys is that exposures to radio frequency signals from Wi-Fi are far below accepted safety limits, and generally lower than exposures from other RF sources in the environment. And while our environment is awash with radio frequency energy, Wi-Fi is only a small part of the total picture.

Research on Health Effects

Spurred in part by public concerns, many studies on radio frequency exposure—nearly 4,000 to date—have been done over the past half century. From the beginning, a large share of these studies used radio frequency energy in the industrial, scientific, and medical band in which Wi-Fi operates (see Figure 3), in part to address occupational health concerns from the use of high-powered microwave sources. More recently, starting in the mid-1990s, many additional studies have investigated RF exposures at cell phone frequencies (typically, 800–1950 megahertz). A small but growing number of studies have considered RF exposures from Wi-Fi signals.

The studies vary widely in quality and approach. A comparatively few studies have used standard protocols and exacting quality standards, as a drug or chemical company would in assessing the safety of a product. Such rigorous studies are expensive undertakings because they require large numbers of subjects, exacting methodology, and sophisticated engineering to produce well-defined RF exposures.

The great majority of these studies, though, are not standard risk-assessment investigations. A large share of them are smaller, often exploratory studies that vary greatly in quality, in the endpoint they investigate, and in their relevance to health. Many are one-of-a-kind studies, not replicated even in the investigators’ own labs, and many have used RF exposures well above safety limits, where heating of the sample may have produced effects. A large proportion have serious methodological problems, such as inadequate assessment of exposure levels or a lack of appropriate controls, both of which prevent reliable interpretation of the results.

While many of the studies—particularly the better-designed ones—reported no statistically significant effects of exposure apart from those caused by heating, many others have reported impacts of some sort that the authors did not consider to be thermal in origin. This vast literature shows clearly that excessive exposure is dangerous because of heating, but it also contains a wealth of often contradictory reports of small effects with no clear health significance. There have been too many fishing expeditions in this field.

In reviews of this literature, health agencies have generally applied a systematic approach, using panels of professional scientists and engineers to examine all relevant studies according to defined protocols. These reviews aim to be comprehensive, acknowledging but giving little weight to studies with obvious methodological deficiencies. In addition, the panels look for consistencies in the evidence across studies, and are reluctant to draw conclusions from one-off exploratory studies in the absence of other supporting evidence for specific conclusions. Anti-Wi-Fi campaigners, for their part, seem inclined to cherry-pick the literature and compile lists of studies that support their views, regardless of methodological quality.

High-quality reviews by health agencies run to the hundreds of pages of highly technical discussion. They have consistently failed to find convincing evidence for health hazards of radio frequency exposure that falls below internationally accepted limits. But they also point to gaps in knowledge and call for more research.

In France, for example, the Agency for Food, Environmental and Occupational Health & Safety has extensively reviewed the issue of radio frequency exposure and health. In its most recent review, 16 independent experts worked for three years, holding multiple meetings and public consultations. The final report, issued in 2013, concluded that “no available data makes it possible to propose new exposure limit values for the general population,” but it listed a number of questions needing further study.

In 2016, the same French agency issued an opinion on RF exposures to children age six and under who (the review pointed out) are exposed to such signals from a number of sources, including remote-controlled toys, walkie-talkies, and cell phones. The opinion considered evidence on nine different health-related endpoints, ranging from behavior and cognitive effects to toxicity to various body systems. The committee found that the available data for seven of these endpoints were insufficient to establish effects (either beneficial or adverse) from RF exposure. The committee found “limited evidence” for effects of cell phone use on cognitive function and general well-being, adding that “these effects may however be linked to the use of the mobile telephones rather than to the frequencies they emit.” The opinion mentions Wi-Fi only once, in passing.

Claims of Harm

In contrast to the cautious but generally reassuring findings of health agencies, those who oppose Wi-Fi argue that radio frequency exposures are hazardous to human health, even at exposure levels far below international limits. Their basic argument, which is appealing to many laypersons but not persuasive scientifically, is that the many reported bioeffects of RF energy mean that Wi-Fi fields must have some health effect, even though we cannot discern it clearly.

Undoubtedly the most widely cited document supporting this position is the BioInitiative Report, a nearly 1,500-page review of research on the biological effects of electromagnetic fields over wide ranges of exposure, compiled by a group of self-selected authors. Unlike the health agencies that sponsor the critical reviews, the report’s editors made little attempt to assess the methodological quality of the studies they discussed or evaluate the consistency of findings of different studies with similar endpoints. The report shows strong confirmation bias—paying more attention to studies reporting biological effects than to other, possibly stronger, studies finding no effects.

In a concluding chapter, the editors proposed a “precautionary action level” for radio frequency exposure that is a tiny fraction of existing international limits—less than one millionth of the current limits set by the Federal Communications Commission. The limit recommended by the report, if applied consistently, would effectively rule out any application of RF energy transmitted where people are present—not only Wi-Fi but also cell phones, broadcast television and radio, radar, and even emergency police communications.

The BioInitiative Report has been widely criticized by health agencies and other expert groups for its lack of balance. Nevertheless, it is often cited by those who campaign against the installation of cell phone towers, electric utility meters, power lines, and other electrical infrastructure. Its alarmist perspective is echoed in a number of statements by self-selected groups, such as the 2017 “Reykjavik Appeal,” which arose from a conference on “children, screen time, and wireless radiation” and urged schools to forbid cell phone use and to install hard-wired connections instead of Wi-Fi.

Two health issues dominate current arguments by Wi-Fi opponents. One is that Wi-Fi exposures might lead to cancer. This derives from a 2013 study by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), a component of the World Health Organization that conducts highly regarded reviews of suspected human carcinogens. The study concluded that there was “limited evidence” from human or animal studies for carcinogenic effects of RF radiation, and it classified RF electromagnetic fields as “possibly carcinogenic” to humans. In the agency’s specialized terminology, this designation indicates that the available evidence was sufficient to raise suspicions, but insufficient for the working group to conclude that a causal relationship “probably” or actually does exist. (The agency’s strongest classification is “carcinogenic to humans,” followed by “probably carcinogenic”; “possibly carcinogenic”; “not classifiable as carcinogenic”; and “probably not carcinogenic.”)

While the agency’s “possibly carcinogenic” classification for radio frequency energy has drawn wide attention, it has been frequently misunderstood by the public. “IARC is an international agency for cancer research, not a public health agency,” noted Peter Wiedemann in a 2014 paper. “Therefore, the categorizations made regarding human carcinogens were not supposed to be interpreted as public health messages, as they have been used recently.” As a group of senior scientists associated with the panel wrote in their 2015 review, European Code Against Cancer, “radiofrequency electromagnetic fields are not an established cause of cancer and are therefore not addressed in the recommendations to reduce cancer risk.”

In short, IARC’s “possible” classification for RF fields does not tell us about the actual health risks, if any, from RF exposures, nor is it a recommendation for public policy. It points to the need for more research, which should focus on stronger sources of RF exposure than Wi-Fi.

The second health issue raised by those opposed to RF exposure is “electromagnetic hypersensitivity,” a syndrome marked by non-specific symptoms such as headache, sleep problems, and anxiety, which many people attribute to low-level radio frequency fields. There is no doubt that many of these individuals have serious health problems; their symptoms are genuine. However, many well-controlled studies have failed to link electromagnetic-field exposure of any kind to these symptoms. In blinded and controlled tests, electromagnetically “sensitive” individuals typically report symptoms when they think they are exposed to electromagnetic-field energy, not necessarily when they demonstrably are exposed. According to the World Health Organization, the condition “has no clear diagnostic criteria and there is no basis to link” electromagnetic hypersensitivity symptoms to electromagnetic-field exposure. The agency said electromagnetic hypersensitivity “is not a medical diagnosis, nor is it clear that it represents a single medical problem.”

Better Safe Than Sorry?

The Environmental Health Trust, an advocacy group concerned about the health effects of radio frequency fields, has published a list of dozens of actions taken by governments, health authorities, and schools around the world intended “to reduce radiofrequency radiation exposures.”

The list, though, is a mixed bag that includes policies that are not principally aimed at reducing radio frequency exposure. It cites a statement by the Canadian Paediatric Society, for example, that aims to promote physical activity in children. The statement encourages less sedentary time and screen time but says nothing about RF exposure. And policies on the list aimed to limit use of wireless communications in schools have a variety of goals. In 2018, when the French legislature banned the use of cell phones and tablets in schools by children age 15 and under, the aim was indeed to “protect children and adolescents,” according to Jean-Michel Blanquer, minister of education—but not from RF exposure. “We know today that there is a phenomenon of screen addiction, the phenomenon of bad mobile-phone use,” Blanquer told a French news channel. (Since nearly every French student has a cell phone, one wonders how French teachers will manage to enforce the ban.)

France has also banned the marketing of child-friendly cell phones to children under six, and using wireless devices in daycare centers and nurseries for children under three. The country allows Wi-Fi to be used in primary schools, but requires that Wi-Fi networks be deactivated except when they are used for educational activities.

The Environmental Health Trust lists a number of schools around the world, including some in the United States, that have removed Wi-Fi and reverted to hard-wired Ethernet connections for Internet access. (The inventory includes some Waldorf and Montessori schools for young children, which would seem to have little to lose by forgoing Wi-Fi in any event.) The list contains a miscellany of other actions, such as an order by the mayor of a small Italian town to shut off Wi-Fi in the community’s two schools because of health concerns. “Who knows?” the mayor said to the daily newspaper La Stampa. “In 20 years, some people might thank us for it.” But the action was opposed by some parents and other town leaders. “What’s the point?” a former mayor said, observing that there was already Wi-Fi in several other places around town, including the library, where children spent a lot of time.

The town’s order, as well as most of the other actions in the Environmental Health Trust’s list, are precautionary, that is, predicated on the notion of “better safe than sorry” rather than on any identified hazards of wireless communications.

An influential 2000 commentary by the European Commission, the governing body of the European Union, defined how the “precautionary principle” should be used. The commission indicated that the principle should only be invoked after a health hazard is identified, after “as complete as possible” an analysis of the relevant scientific evidence is conducted, and after the probable costs and benefits of precautionary policies is assessed. It noted that a wide range of “precautionary” policies could be adopted, from simply keeping track of scientific developments to outright bans on a technology. There is little sign that officials conducted that kind of analysis before instituting the measures listed by the Environmental Health Trust. They may well have been political accommodations to a concerned public rather than carefully considered health measures.

The precautionary principle has little standing in U.S. and Canadian law. Health agencies in the two countries generally refrain from offering health advice unless substantial scientific evidence supports it. For example, in October 2017, Health Canada advised, in response to a petition from a parents’ group in Peel, Ontario, that:

It is Health Canada’s position, based on the latest scientific evidence, that exposure to low-level RF energy, including that from Wi-Fi technology, is not dangerous to the public if the recommended exposure limits in Safety Code 6 [Canadian RF exposure limits, which are generally similar to U.S. limits] are respected. Accordingly, no additional precautionary measures are required, since RF energy exposure levels from Wi-Fi are typically well below Canadian and international safety limits. Internationally, while a few jurisdictions (cities, provinces or countries) have applied more restrictive limits for RF field exposures from certain wireless devices/apparatus (whether it be Wi-Fi or cell towers), scientific evidence does not support the need for such restrictive limits.

On its website, the Peel District School Board described its consultations with “trusted medical experts” and measurements by a consultant that showed that radio frequency exposures from Wi-Fi in its classrooms were far below Canadian limits. This approach makes sense; school officials are not capable of adjudicating complex scientific issues, nor should they be asked to.

Inevitably, some schools will have to address concerns of staff or parents of children with perceived electromagnetic hypersensitivity. Following recommendations of the World Health Organization, individuals reporting electromagnetic hypersensitivity should be referred to health professionals for assistance without the assumption that their symptoms are directly caused by electromagnetic-field exposure. Schools should be wary of requests to provide “radiation free” environments. Given the many sources of exposure that “hypersensitive” individuals cite as causes of their symptoms—compact LED and fluorescent light bulbs, electric light dimmers, Wi-Fi devices, cell phones, cell towers outside the building—trying to produce a “radiation free” environment could be highly disruptive to schools; achieving it would also be impossible, if “radiation free” means a total lack of RF signals in the environment. And, in the absence of a demonstrated link between exposure to electromagnetic fields and the symptoms that some individuals experience, there is no way to identify an exposure level that is low enough not to “cause” symptoms.

The Internet and wireless communications do present risks that schools need to manage. It would not do, for example, for Johnny to be touching up his Facebook page (or worse) during class or sending inappropriate photos to his classmates. Wireless networks and wireless-connected devices are susceptible to hacking and other cybercrimes with potentially significant impact to schools. Schools need to adopt appropriate policies for safe use of cell phones and the Internet by children—not because of unproven radiation hazards but to avoid the harms that these otherwise highly useful technologies can pose. If health agencies eventually conclude that radio frequency signals from Wi-Fi are hazardous in some way, schools can revise their policies accordingly. In light of half a century of research on the biological effects of radio frequency energy, such a conclusion seems unlikely.

Kenneth R. Foster is professor emeritus of bioengineering at the University of Pennsylvania and an engineering consultant to government and industry. In 2012 he participated in a review of the literature related to health effects of Wi-Fi for the Wi-Fi Alliance, an industry group.