Instead of talking about cats and dogs, former President Trump and Vice President Harris would have done better to address American children’s education. So, here is a good reform of our education system that I would be happy to see the president-elect steal from me: Let’s prevent schools from starting before 9:30 a.m.

With the average American high school starting at 8:00 a.m., and even around 7:30 a.m. in some states like Connecticut and Louisiana, school buses begin picking up kids at 6:30 a.m. Thus, five days a week, some children and teenagers must wake up at 6 a.m. – or even earlier. As terrible as it already sounds, the reality of the situation is even worse. In fact, Matthew Walker – a neuroscience professor at the University of California, Berkeley – wrote in his NYT best-seller ”Why We Sleep,” “the circadian rhythm of teenagers (their internal biological clock) shifts forward dramatically by one to three hours,” meaning that their body’s release of melatonin — the hormone that makes us feel tired — happens two hours later than for adults. 

Would you be able to stay focused during hours of lectures after having been forced to wake up at 4 a.m., day after day? Because that’s exactly what the education system is asking our children to do. And even if you are a motivated student, your biology won’t let you go to sleep at 7 p.m. to get the nine hours of sleep that you need as a child. This explains why some kids do not feel like going to school in the morning: they’re tired.

Even as a Yale SOM student who loves to study, the struggle to wake up every morning and rush to school — only to find out that I’m five minutes late and my maths teacher might not let me in class — is an incredibly painful and stressful experience that millions of kids and teenagers have to deal with every day. And, as someone who went to school in France, my classes started at 8:30 a.m., so I can’t even begin to imagine how the millions of American night owls whose schools start before 7:20 a.m. felt this morning when their alarm went off and they hit the snooze button for the third time in a row. 

Not only is this state of chronic sleep deprivation especially concerning given the rise of mental illnesses in American teenagers, but it also has serious consequences on children’s academic performance and their unequal access to higher education institutions. Indeed, Walker reported that in Edina, Minnesota, where the school start times were shifted from 7:25 a.m. to 8:30 a.m., the 43 minutes of extra sleep these children reported getting every night enabled a fixed bracket of performing students to increase their SAT average score from 605 to 761; math SAT scores also improved from 683 to 739, for a total net score increase of 212 points — which may radically change the tier of university one teenager goes to, and consequently, their entire life trajectory.

Unfortunately, the impact that sleep quality can have on academic performance is also unfairly reinforcing socioeconomic inequalities. Because their parents often have to start working as early as 6 a.m., children from lower socioeconomic backgrounds are 25 percent less likely to be taken to school by car. Therefore, to catch their school bus, they need to wake up earlier than the more privileged kids, leading to a gap in the hours of sleep they get every night — followed by the significant consequences on academic performance that I discussed earlier. This is why I would recommend an earliest starting time of 9:30 a.m.

One might be afraid that a later school schedule leads to our children doing fewer sports or social activities, but the reality is that, currently, our teens are so tired that they spend almost five hours on social media every day. However, their better sleep is likely to give them the extra energy they need to resist the temptation of checking their notifications and scrolling endlessly on social media and leave their phones earlier, to join their friends in their favorite sports facility.

Overall, this education policy would make our kids’ mental health better by improving their energy levels, grades and self-discipline. So, please, president-elect, if you want to make our education systems significantly more effective and fair — thanks to the same unique reform — add to your program a federal law that prevents schools from starting before 9:30 a.m. You could even come up with a new slogan: “Make our children Sleep Great Again.”

DAVID FERERES is a master’s student at the Yale School of Management. He can be reached at david.fereres@yale.edu.