When Kay Sheehe drives to work in the winter, the sun’s not yet up. It won’t rise until just after 7:30 a.m., and Sheehe and her fellow teachers must be ready to oversee students by 7:15 a.m.
It’s hard enough driving in the dark when you’re fully rested, a state Sheehe rarely experiences during the school week.
“I feel my best at seven hours of sleep, but that doesn’t happen during the work week,” said Sheehe, the chair of the social studies department at Allegany High School in Cumberland, Md., who estimates she gets about six hours of sleep on weeknights instead.
Toward the end of the work week, admitted Sheehe, the lack of sleep begins to take a toll, and she does her best to ignore persistent sluggishness and a low-grade headache. But she doesn’t think her sleep habits affect her work performance.
“I try to really push through,” she said.
So, too, do countless other teachers who don’t get enough sleep. Education Week ran an unscientific social media poll this month asking educators about the quality and duration of their sleep. Of 1,403 respondents, 31% said their sleeping habits are “unstable;” 50% reported sleeping less than seven hours nightly.
Medical experts, including the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, recommend that adults sleep at least seven hours per night, a goal that too many adults, and teachers in particular, fail to meet routinely—especially during the school week.
Like Sheehe, many teachers who have poor sleep habits shrug off the immediate side effects as a mild nuisance. But bad sleep hygiene, over the long term, can increase the risk of a number of serious health problems, including heart and kidney disease, high blood pressure, diabetes, stroke, obesity, and depression.
There’s no simple fix to improve sleep. If good sleep was easy to come by, one-third of the nation’s adults—according to recent Casper-Gallup data—wouldn’t report struggling with it. But for teachers, it can be especially tough.
Several factors outside of educators’ control stand in the way of a decent night’s sleep—early school start times, the pressure to work outside of school hours, nagging work-related stressors that keep them up at night, and the disproportionate burden of household responsibilities that greet many female teachers at the end of their day.
Early start times exacerbate the problem
High schools tend to start their school days earlier than all other grade levels—despite research documenting how adolescents’ biological sleep rhythms naturally respond better to later waking times. In pockets around the country, advocates are pushing for later start times at high schools to better align with teens’ sleep needs. But rarely do these arguments point to the potential benefits of later start times for teachers.
At least one recent study has found positive links between delayed school schedules and high school teachers’ sleep habits. Researchers from the University of Minnesota analyzed the sleep habits of more than 1,800 teachers in a large suburban school district after it implemented a new schedule that delayed start times for middle and high schools.
After the schedule change, the district’s high school teachers reported, on average, sleeping 22 minutes longer and waking 28 minutes later. These teachers also self-reported less sleepiness throughout the day after the switch. Notably, just 20-some minutes seems to make a difference.
A little more shut-eye might also benefit teachers like Sheehe and her colleagues, who used to report to school by 7:40 a.m., 25 minutes later than they do now. The switch to an earlier time happened as students returned from the pandemic, when health protocols required them to be spread out. Rather than clustering in the cafeteria before school officially began, students were instructed to report to individual classrooms, which meant teachers had to arrive by 7:15 a.m. to supervise—a scheduling change that has persisted long past the pandemic-era health protocols.
“Now, getting ready for a work day and not seeing sunlight, even when walking into the school building, creates a draining start to the morning,” said Sheehe, who added that the school’s administration is exploring a proposal recommending to the district a later start time.
The work of a teacher often bleeds into after-school hours
Teachers rarely leave the job when they head for home at the end of the day. They may find themselves grading papers, contacting parents, or planning lessons well after the last bell rings.
The vast majority of teachers regularly work more than 40 hours per week; 32% work between 51 and 60 hours per week, compared to 5% of working adults outside the profession, according to a 2023 RAND Corp. report.
Even when teachers aren’t actively engaged after hours in a work-related task, they may be stewing over a school-related problem—like how to motivate students, adopt a new curriculum, or any number of other concerns. And teachers sometimes take these worries to bed with them.
In a January social media poll, EdWeek asked readers: Educators, how are you sleeping? Several respondents shared their struggles, like this one: “Tossing and turning all night.”
Female teachers likely to shoulder more work at home
About three-quarters of public school K-12 teachers are women, according to the Pew Research Center. Many of these women are mothers who, on average, spend nearly double the amount of time on child care as fathers, and 2.4 times more on household work in general, according to a 2024 report by the Gender Equity Policy Institute. It can be exhausting.
“Being a teacher brings nightly responsibilities to prepare for the next day, including a lot of grading and planning,” Sheehe said. “I am a wife and mother as well, so oftentimes I leave work after eight hours, do all the family things, and only then have time to begin grading and preparing.”
Not bringing work home isn’t an option for Sheehe, who said she needs more time than the 45-minute slot her school schedule allots for daily planning. Limiting planning time to that period would mean forfeiting the creation of new activities or assessments, turning away students who need extra help, and not getting involved in additional school-related organizations, she said.
“Every once in a while, around 9 a.m., I stop and reflect on how much has gone on since 7:15 a.m., and I think about the fact that similar professionals are just starting their days,” Sheehe said. “But teachers love what we do, so we keep on keeping on.”
