To students, the school year may seem interminable. To teacher, it may seem brief and inadequate. To policy makers, it may seem infinitely flexible, able to accommodate the addition of one more mandatory program about an important issue of the day.
Critics of public education, going all the way back to the Reagan-era “A Nation at Risk” have often echoed that proverbial restaurant critic (terrible food, and the servings are too small) with calls for a longer school day or school year.
Required hours in the year vary from state to state, with Arizona mandating 720 hours and Texas requiring 1,260. Eight states currently allow four day weeks. States set minimums, but many local school districts choose to exceed those. U.S. schools tend to run under 7 hours a day, around 180 days a year.
Internationally, there is considerable variation. Top-ranked Finland has a roughly five hour school day that includes break time and lunch. China’s school days for high school students can run 10-12 hours.
New research from Matthew Kraft (Brown University) and Sarah Novicoff (Stanford) creates a more detailed picture of how America uses its school hours (full paper is here behind a paywall, but the working paper version is available here).
Some of their findings are clear and useful. Kraft told Cory Turner at NPR, “Four-day school weeks are harmful for students learning and don’t appear to be beneficial for teacher retention.” Four day weeks appear to result in considerably fewer instructional hours for students.
The study found that the ranged between the most and least hours spent in schools amounts to about 200 hours—the equivalent of over five weeks of school.
Teachers will be particularly interested in the section of the paper that considers instructional hours lost during the day. The researchers did in depth study of the Providence Public School District and found what will be a familiar-to-teachers litany of interruptions. In addition to behavior issues and transitions between parts of the lesson, time is lost due to student absence, outside interruptions, and teacher absence.
Many interruptions are in the hands of building administration and simple policies, like those governing when announcements may be made, or how and when students are called to the office. These may seem like minor issues, but they add up. Pulling a student from class may only disrupt that class for five minutes, but if that is repeated every day for 180 days, that is 15 hours of instructional time. The researchers found a total of 258 hours of instructional time lost in a year.
That 258 hours did not include other issues such as non-instructional activities. The research did not address the amount of instructional time lost to the big standardized tests, time spent not just taking the test, but preparing and practicing for it.
The researchers also note another issue. While instructional time is the critical element in school, school is also where children and teens live their lives and learn how to function socially. A school could resolve to allow nothing except pure instruction every minute of the school day, but how much humanity would be stripped from student learning in such a system. Schools are “complex social organizations where unpredictable things happen.”
The researchers suggest that the direct effect of learning time is substantial. They recommend that states with low requirements raise them. And while the cost of increasing undisrupted learning time may be prohibitive for some districts, any districts can look at actions such as later start times for older students and morning core classes to capitalize on students’ most productive hours of the day.
The researchers also echo a recommendation that most teachers would also make; the front office in every building can make instructional time the prime value, to be interrupted only for the most extreme and urgent emergency.