A recent post from one of my favorite bloggers, discussing teens’ varied sleep patterns, included this line: “You do have to just pick a start time for public high schools, and someone will be harmed by whatever time you end up picking.”
Do you have to pick a start time? In some ways, yes. Do some students have to be harmed? Probably not.
Of course, a high school has a start time, buses have schedules, teachers have contracts, and cafeterias, athletics, supervision, and everything else have to be coordinated around something. But how many readers got to that line in the original post and didn’t think twice about the assumption buried in it: that students all have to start at the same time? My guess is most readers, because the idea that a public high school has one start time is so deeply embedded that it feels less like a design choice than a natural law.
The entrenched assumption is that a public high school has to organize all students around one daily rhythm, and that the only available policy choice is whether the single start time should be earlier or later.
Maybe that was true when the only plausible model was that every student had to be in the same building, moving through the same schedule, at the same pace, five days a week. But that’s no longer the case.
One student might take first-period biology in person, while another uses that time for an online course or independent study. A student who rides the bus could arrive early and do that work at school; a student with other transportation could come later and complete the same work in the afternoon or evening. These ideas should not seem radical, yet they often do.
The same issue shows up in a different way in the growing debate over screens in schools. I’ve argued that ed tech critics and parents worried about screen time have legitimate concerns. But “screens are bad” is not a well thought out policy position for a system serving millions of students with different needs. For example, a recent NPR story on students with disabilities was a reminder that a broad anti-screen policy can easily miss the student who uses a screen to read, write, communicate, translate, organize, access instruction, or manage a disability.
A student using text-to-speech because of dyslexia is not doing the same thing as a student scrolling TikTok under the desk, just as a student taking an online course to solve a scheduling problem is not the same as a student being parked in front of low-quality digital worksheets.
This is where the Starbucks comparison is useful, even though it is obviously imperfect. Nobody would confuse making a latte with educating a student. But it is still striking that many mass-market consumer systems have become highly configurable, while public education often remains organized around a narrow default model. Walk down a grocery aisle and look at toothpaste, cereal, shampoo, or milk. There are dozens of variations, some useful and some ridiculous, but the underlying assumption is that people have different preferences and needs. Starbucks is one of the most mass-market businesses in the country, and its model assumes customization around milk, syrup, size, caffeine, temperature, mobile ordering, and the almost infinite ways people turn coffee into a personal identity statement.
Meanwhile, in too many public school systems, giving students different learning modes, schedules, pacing, or tools is still treated as an exception to be justified rather than a normal feature of good design.
That is why a recent story about Mayfield High School in Ohio is so interesting. The school is giving students a mix of traditional classes, self-paced options, and work-based learning. Some students still take conventional classes. Some use “The Option,” a self-paced model in which teachers are available as guides and supports. Some participate in paid internships that connect school to work. These ideas would seem par for the course for most DLAC members, but in a traditional school setting they are remarkable.
Mayfield deserves credit for building those pathways, and the story deserves attention because it shows what is possible inside a traditional public high school. But part of what makes the example so telling is that it gets covered as innovative when, in almost any other part of modern life, the underlying logic would be obvious: different people expect different options.
Traditional districts are losing enrollment for many reasons, and it would be far too simple to blame the trend only on a lack of flexibility. Demographics, housing costs, birth rates, migration, homeschooling, private schools, charter schools, microschools, and online options are all part of the story. But districts should not ignore the design issue, because many are still operating with grade-level assumptions, staffing patterns, physical buildings, calendars, and instructional models built around a much older idea of how school has to work.
In many cases, the school or district did not create all of these constraints. State policy, funding formulas, seat-time rules, transportation systems, accountability requirements, and labor agreements can all lock in the old model, even when educators and families would welcome more flexibility. The system is often more rigid than many of the people working inside it.
A mass system can survive for a long time when families have few alternatives, but it is going to struggle when families expect options everywhere else in their lives and increasingly have options in education too.
Some students want a traditional classroom; others need a self-paced model. Some expect work-based learning; some want a later start. Some need fewer screens, while others need screens as an accommodation. A strong education system should be able to address all these needs.
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