Even the price is right. When an economist studied the Wake County, North Carolina, school system, he found that “a 1 hour delay in start time increases standardized test scores on both math and reading tests by three percentile points,” with the strongest effects on the weakest students.12 But being an economist, he also calculated the cost-benefit ratio of changing the schedule and concluded that later start times delivered more bang for the educational buck than almost any other initiative available to policy makers, a view echoed by a Brookings Institution analysis.13
