But there are actually things you can do to help kids learn that cost next to nothing. For instance, studies show that kids do better if you ...

There is an endless debate about why school kids in the Western world are falling behind everyone else. Some say it's a shameful lack of funding; others say kids these days are too lazy and too busy Twittering on their iPads about the Justin Biebers to learn calculus.

5 Start the School Day Later (By Just One Hour)

Continue Reading Below Advertisement

Here's something every kid knows, and that parents have been ignoring since the beginning of time.

Sneak a quick peek around your office/classroom/rodeo clown school. Chances are you're going to see one co-worker yawning and rubbing her eyes, another guy pulling the droopy-lid zombie glare and one person who is as chipper and alert as a coked-up bunny rabbit. How do we know? Because two out of three adult Americans are walking around sleep-deprived, that's how. And we push our messed-up sleep patterns off on our kids.

Getty

And our emotional problems.

Continue Reading Below Advertisement

And for those kids, particularly teenagers, sleep deprivation can mean failure at school. Which is why schools that pushed their start time back are reporting remarkable improvements. One school in England reported that persistent absenteeism dropped by 27 percent, while a high school in Toronto, Canada, claimed that the 11th-grade math failure rate dropped from 45 percent to 17 percent. Not only that, but kids going to school later say that they're less depressed, and their parents claim that their kids are easier to deal with.

Getty

"He's still terrible at art, but at least the cat's alive in this one."

Continue Reading Below Advertisement

Why Does This Work?

Because of a hormonal switch in the natural body clock, teens are often not sleepy late at night, unlike most adults and small children, so they stay up late. But then we force them to be at school by 7:30 a.m. As a result, most teens are getting something like 6.9 hours of sleep rather than the nine hours they need. That two-hour difference may not sound like much, but it makes a HUGE difference in the classroom. As many as 20 percent of students end up falling asleep in class altogether.