Can Sleep Differences Account for the Racial Gap in Educational Achievement

Research has long documented racial gaps in educational achievement (Reardon and Robinson, 2008). Most studies focus on the role of schools and student background to understand these performance differences. The role of health differences in understanding racial differences in educational achievement has been largely ignored. This study focuses on sleep patterns as an important component of child health and its role in understanding educational achievement patterns. Studies have documented substantial sleep differences among African American and Caucasian children. They find that African American children have higher rates of asthma and sleep-disordered breathing than Caucasian children (Buckhalt et al. 2007). One study (Crosby et al. 2005) analyzing a sample of children ages 2 to 8 years old found African American children have shorter average nighttime sleep durations, more napping during the day, and more weekend “oversleep”, a differential between school- and weekend-night sleep commonly considered indirect evidence of sleep deprivation. Crabtree et al. (2005) examine the role of cultural influences on the bedtime behaviors of young children and find that African American children had later bedtimes than Caucasian children with similar rise times, resulting in significantly shorter sleep duration and more excessive daytime sleepiness, independent of socioeconomic status and age. Research also indicates that sleep can affect student performance in school (Yan and Slagle, 2007). Given these strands of research that separately examine racial sleep differences and racial gaps in educational performance, we join these two areas by examining the extent to which racial differences in sleep patterns among middle school and high school students accounts for the racial gap in educational achievement. We use data from the National Sleep Foundation to address this research question. This nationally representative data set is a unique data source on the sleep behaviors of children and youth in the U.S. In addition to sleep information, it contains a wide variety of family background variables and education variables. We use multiple measures for sleep quantity and quality, accounting for both average sleep per night during a week as well as separating sleep into components for school night and non-school night sleep. We further break down these linear measures into categorical measures of “insufficient sleep”, “borderline sleep” and “optimal sleep” as defined by the National Sleep Foundation. Our dependent variable is a binary indicator for getting grades of mostly As and Bs. We control for numerous family background characteristics in the regressions Preliminary estimates suggest that controlling for sleep differences among middle school students lowers the educational performance gap by about 25 percent. Sleep differences by race do not account for educational gaps among high school students, however we found that among these older students, obtaining an optimal amount of sleep on non-school nights was considerably more important in raising performance than was school night sleep. This suggests that high school students who catch up on lost sleep during the weekend perform better than students who do not replenish their sleep stock on the weekend.