Introducing Educating the Exhausted: How We Got Here—and Why Change Has Been So Hard

by Terra Ziporyn

After years of watching communities struggle to align school schedules with what we’ve long known about adolescent sleep, Amy Wolfson and I finally wrote the book that explains how we got here. Educating the Exhausted: Adolescent Sleep and the Struggle for a Later School Start, published by Johns Hopkins University Press, traces the history of adolescent sleep science and the complicated, often maddening path from research to policy. It’s a story about biology at the heart of this story, but also about culture, politics, and the institutional habits that keep school hours out of sync with human development.

This book isn’t about an easy fix for tired kids. It’s about understanding the systems that (unnecessarily) create exhaustion and why evidence alone has never been enough to change them. If you’ve ever wondered why something so clearly beneficial has taken decades to implement, this is the story. For more on why Amy and I wrote it—and how it connects to Start School Later’s mission—you can read my longer announcement on my substack, Terra Incognita.