What’s up with car accidents and later school start times?
I was homeschooled through every grade before starting college, so I never experienced having to get up early and drive to school on time as a teenager. However, I am interested in the American education system, especially places where it can be improved, so when I found an article discussing school start times I was immediately intrigued.
Today’s fact-check will feature this article: “New study finds association between later school start times and decrease in teen-related car crashes” from ABC News.
The context for this article is a growing protest from teenagers that school starts too early combined with a clinical hypothesis that those protests are grounded in fact. The idea that schools start too early, causing teens to get less sleep and leading to lower levels of attention and comprehension, is especially alarming when those sleep-deprived teenagers are driving automobiles. This combination has led to more investigation into the matter with a focus on whether or not later school start times can help decrease teen-related auto accidents.
(Both images from Google Images)
Now that some context is established, I’m going to start with move one, checking previous work: looking at other fact-checking sites through DuckDuckGo and seeing what other people have already investigated. Nothing comes up, although I tried various search terms, including: “school start times car accidents” and “school start times Fairfax County”. What I’m looking for is an article from one of our trusty fact-checking sites–Snopes, FactCheck, or Politifact–to see if this claim has already been investigated. No luck. Searching for ABC News using the -abcnews.com format doesn’t glean anything either.
In that case, let’s move on. I want to know more about ABC News and the author of the article. There are a few places I want to check: Allsides, Google Scholar, and DuckDuckGo one more time for good measure. According to Allsides, ABC News leans left–not quite left, not quite center. I’m not sure how relevant this leaning is though, considering we are nott investigating a widely publicized political issue. There is no author listed for the news article, just ABC News. That lessens our workload a bit.
Using move two and “going upstream”, we can still check the journal and authors of the original study. The study referenced in our article was published in the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine.
Move three–“reading laterally”. Is the original source reliable? The Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine has an impact factor of 3.46. That’s pretty good–what about the authors? According to my Google Scholar search, one of them has been cited over 1000 times, two of them are experts in juvenile medicine, and one specializes in sleep medicine. All of them seem to be reliable and knowledgeable.
An additional part of this move is to check Wikipedia pages relating to the subject and see if any of their cited sources can help verify my the claim under investigation. I looked at the “Start school later movement” page and the “Waking up early” page. Both of them provided links to several sites that helped me fact-check our claim.
Now to the actual claim! Is there really a correlation between later school start times and less car accidents involving teens? What do other sources say about this claim?
It seems like the consensus is a resounding affirmative on this point. A DuckDuckGo search reveals the CDC, the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, and the American Academy of Pediatrics all agree teenagers are not getting enough sleep, often because they have to wake up and get ready to start school before 8:30AM.
Also, although the study we are looking at is from this year, it is apparently not the first study in this vein to be published in the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine–there was also one in 2008. This suggests that the issue is not new, not something that was just made up to cause a stir–it is a legitimate issue that researchers have been investigating for over ten years.
(Quote from Google Images)
This was the fastest fact-check I’ve ever done. I went through three of the four moves–checking for previous work, going upstream, and reading laterally. Since this fact-check is still short, I suspect that I’m missing something, so let’s go to step number four and circle back to the original article. Did I neglect anything? Are there points that I still need to address?
I went back to the beginning and started my steps all over again. After checking the news article for new quotes or claims, I tried new searches. I punched in a direct quote from the paragraph quoted below, but I still got nothing for Snopes, Politifact, or FactCheck.
“Results showed that the crash rate in 16-to-18-year-old licensed drivers decreased significantly from 31.63 to 29.59 accidents per 1,000 drivers after the delayed start time,” the American Academy of Sleep Medicine explained. “In contrast, the teen crash rate remained steady throughout the rest of the state.”
(ABC News)
Since I’ve found just about everything I need to know about ABC News and the Journal of Clinical Sleep Medicine, I’m going to take some new information and see if there’s a link to the article from 2008 that I mentioned before. There is–and it brings me to the whole article, which is not hidden behind a paywall like the newer one. There are now a few more authors to check out, so back to Google Scholar it is. Just like the first time around, they are experts in adolescent and/or sleep medicine. The articles I got from Wikipedia, from the American Academy of Pediatrics and the National Sleep Foundation, both stress the importance of opening schools later to decrease “drowsy driving” accidents.
To push the limits of this fact check, I want to add a step here–let’s compare, as much as we can, the facts of the two studies. I want to know the who, what, when, where, and why of these studies and how similar their findings were. This might be difficult since I only have access to an abstract for the newer one, but let’s take a look anyway.
For clarity’s sake:
Article 1:
Who: Teenagers in school
What: Sleep times versus accident rates
When: 2013-2017
Where: Fairfax County, Virgina
Why: To see if there was a way to reduce accident rates
Article 2:
Who: Teenagers in school
What: Sleep times versus accident rates
When: 1996-2000
Where: Kentucky
Why: To see if there was a way to reduce accident rates
Both studies found that pushing the time schools started and increasing the amounts of sleep that teenagers were getting visibly reduced accident rates. Both of them had similar time frames, and both included data from before and after the changes were implemented. They compared the rates they found to other rates throughout the state where the changes had not been made, and they each covered a hefty amount of students.
Basically, I can’t find anything to fault in the methods, authors, or publications of either study. The people and groups who are in the know affirm the claims of this research, and I will have to give this fact check on the claim that later school start times are connected to a decrease in teen car accidents is true.
All of my sources are either mentioned or hyperlinked; the rest is my own, original content. Thanks for reading!
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