The insufficiency of learning time for American students has nearly achieved the status of the climate in the famous saying attributed to Mark Twain: "Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it." From 1983's "A Nation at Risk" (National Commission on Excellence in Education) to 1994's "Prisoners of Time" (a report by the congressionally mandated National Education Commission on Time and Learning) to the federal proposal Time for Innovation Matters in Education (TIME) Act of 2009, the cry has been consistent: The farm-and-factory era schedule of 180 school days per year, 6.5 hours of school each day is insufficient to meet the current needs and challenges of students. It's also insufficient to meet the needs of teachers, working families, and communities. Yet over the years, most national surveys of school conditions show no detectable change in school schedules.
This inertia persists despite plenty of evidence in favor of expanding learning time (Farbman, 2015). We know many students need more time to reach the high academic skills required in our complex economy and society. We know that individualized support initiatives—such as tutoring and schoolwide systems of data-driven intervention like Response to Intervention (RTI)—work but take more time.
Further, we know too little time is available for a well-rounded education that includes "untested" subjects such as social studies, history, and languages, as well as the arts, sports, and myriad "extracurriculars." Upper middle-class families spend lots of time and money to supplement what schools offer, while disadvantaged students are more likely to be bored or unsupported during expanses of out-of-school time. For many families, the mismatch between children's school schedules and the work requirements of parents poses heavy challenges. And for communities, disengaged adolescents can spell potential trouble—from drug use to gangs to teenage pregnancy. Finally, the short school day and year mean too little time for teachers to flourish as professionals with opportunities to look at data to inform instruction, develop their teaching skills, collaborate together, and so on.
Forays into Extended Learning
While the overwhelming majority of districts and schools stick to last year's schedule because it would be hard to change, we see evidence that time use in schools could be improved. Nearly all highly successful charter schools have considerably more time in their school day (typically 30 percent more) than comparable regular public schools. Careful quantitative research (Dobbie & Fryer, 2013) shows that this expanded time—specifically using it to individualize learning for students and to support teachers—is a primary driver of good charters' success.
At the same time, hundreds of district schools across the country enjoy the flexibility to set schedules that work best for students and teachers—and that offer more learning time. Most of them exist in a dozen "empowerment zones" or under other experimental structures that give school leaders greater autonomy, including over scheduling decisions (Kim, Field, & Hassel, 2019). Across the country, the best after-school and summer programs show what's possible in extending learning time. But such programs often rely on either parental ability to pay or philanthropic largesse, leaving the majority of students without such opportunities.
So why don't more schools change to extend learning time? Because it would upset expectations. Because it would mean new contracts and possibly higher costs. Because of culture and traditions. A quote from our Declaration of Independence seems appropriate here: "All experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed."
Insights from the Pandemic
Now, however, the novel coronavirus pandemic has disturbed this holding pattern. In a flash—out of dire necessity and under legal mandate—all conventions of learning time have been abandoned. Students are now home and potentially learning all the time—or not much at all. They are never in school, but they can always be learning, and they are (mostly) connected to school-based and other digital learning platforms and content.
From 100 years of following approximately the same learning system, based on being at school and learning in allotted amounts of time, we've gone into a model previously only charted in crises and by the sliver of American students who are homeschooled. With brick-and-mortar schools shuttered, everyone has been forced into some form of home and remote learning. Parents and educators have struggled to do their best. It's been difficult—but we can, and should, learn about and from this experience.
We're writing this article in late April to be published in June. It's risky to predict or advise about what schools will or should do for the fall because the situation is evolving rapidly and much is fundamentally uncertain. But we can still consider two fundamental questions regarding learning-time reform: What can we learn from this spring's mad scramble? And what should educators do about the coming school year?
What Can We Learn?
In thinking about how the pandemic has upended learning time and what we might learn from this, we are inspired by this John Dewey (1938) quote: "We always live at the time we live and not at some other time, and only by extracting at each present time the full meaning of each present experience are we prepared for doing the same thing in the future."
Why—in terms of doing school remotely and keeping learning time flexible—do we need to "prepare for doing the same thing in the future"? Isn't this a one-time case? Maybe. But while nearly everyone pines for a return to "normal," we believe we must learn from what has worked while being forced to teach in this way—and what hasn't. We must be ready to do this better in the future, for two reasons.
First, we need to learn to do remote learning well as an alternative way to provide learning time because we will have more interruptions in schooling, as we always have had, from things like snow days and floods—though hopefully not for this long or universally. Climate scientists say we are likely to experience more severe weather events in coming years. Remote learning, done well, will set us up to keep students' learning from lagging in such events in the future.
Meanwhile, for too many students, schooling is often disrupted because of family mobility, frequently tied to housing and economic insecurity. Other students encounter health problems, involvement with youth corrections, or other outside factors that impact their learning time just as a flood or even pandemic might. While it's crucial to reduce these kinds of circumstances and inequities, well-designed remote learning could help these students sustain their learning time, and thus better overcome their disadvantage and flourish.
And of course, this pandemic and its impact on school operations may not be over by the end of this school year. Let's learn from recent months to improve teaching and learning this coming semester.
Second, we need to use innovative learning tools and strategies far more effectively if and when we return to a more traditional version of schooling, both to expand learning time and better personalize learning. Online, adaptive tools and videoconference-enabled groupings of students (and teachers) permit a more flexible set of approaches that can be deployed both during a typical in-building school day and beyond—in ways that can benefit students, teachers, and families. Online adaptive tools allow for greater personalization of learning, whether nested in the school day or outside it. While some of the current emergency remote learning involves little more than worksheets distributed to homes, many schools and districts are trying more promising and cutting-edge tools, as well as innovating on the fly. Once mandatory remote learning is over, we should capture the best of these efforts and incorporate them into our instructional repertoire.
For example, nine middle schools across the Springfield Empowerment Zone in Massachusetts are switching to an approach where lessons on the highest priority core skills in math will be refined and recorded for students to watch. These lessons will be designed and presented by master teachers and shown to students across all the schools. Then all teachers will be able to provide tier 2 and tier 3 supports (in RTI terms) to students in smaller and more personalized groupings. This moves away from a paradigm where each teacher has to teach every topic and support every student to a smarter, better use of talent that allows targeted support time to students who need it.
The bottom line: We need to learn how to do remote learning right and well. We must focus on spots where the most success is achieved as well as on the hardest challenges, like how to ensure special populations, such as students with disabilities, are fully served. We should gather examples, but also data. While states won't be gathering annual summative data this year, many schools and districts already use formative assessments, such as NWEA's MAP, which are administered online and offer large comparative databases. This data should be collected widely at the end of this school year, not for accountability, but to support planning well for next year and inform our understanding about what has worked.
The Road Ahead—Starting from Behind
Some of what we're learning about remote education and learning time can also be used to better support students during the transition to the upcoming school year—which will be unlike any in the past. Some initial data analyses indicate that this spring's closures will have significant negative effects on students' academic skill levels. Researchers at NWEA, for instance, created projections based on their large-scale datasets combined with historical "summer slide" trajectories (Kuhfeld & Tarasawa, 2020). If those prove true, students might start the next school year having gained only about 70 percent of what they would've in reading in a typical year and—alarmingly—having accrued less than 50 percent of typical math gains, with students in some grades likely to start next year already a full year behind. These are projections, of course, which don't assume growth after schools were closed to face-to-face learning—of which we certainly hope there will be some.
With this data in mind, here are five bold suggestions for what schools and educators should do differently as they look beyond this school year. They all involve changing our conceptions of learning time.
1. Switch to Continuous Learning This Summer
Why end school at all this academic year? A fundamental design error in our school system is that it is what process engineers call a batch system, not a continuous process. We run a batch of 6th graders through whatever the 6th grade process is, and then we stop for about 10 weeks before moving them into the 7th grade batch. Whatever didn't get completed in 6th grade is forsaken, and the further summer learning loss of the 10-week hiatus has been well documented.
This is the year we should just keep going. Students, teachers, and families will be already converted to distance learning and increasingly comfortable with it. It's likely our 2020 summers will be different anyway, with travel plans, summer camps, and other opportunities cancelled or restricted.
A lot would have to be figured out about how to properly structure the summer term (including providing some time off, of course). Leaders would have to determine whether to include all students, target those most in need, or make it optional, and how to fairly compensate participating teachers. But since we are able to further support the most challenged students and challenge the most advanced, let's not stop learning just because schools used to end on an arbitrary date.
The payoffs would be short-term and potentially long-term. For now, we would help students make up for lost time and offer more structure—especially for those who may still be learning remotely amid social distancing. Parents would welcome this change as well. Longer-term, we may develop a model that could permanently shift us away from the antiquated idea that learning stops and school systems close for long stretches of the year.
2. Create a "Smart Ramp" into the Next School Year
The start of every school year is a bit chaotic. But even if fall of 2020, allows for resumption of traditional schooling with some face-to-face interaction, it will be more challenging than ever. Over the past few years, many schools have developed transition "academies" for new 6th and 9th graders as they enter the next level of schooling. That approach should be taken for all students this year.
Let's assume students will not be as ready as usual for the start of the school year, academically or emotionally. Nor will teachers. So let's have teachers and students show up a couple weeks before the official start of the in-school school year for a sort of reorientation, to reintroduce structure and rhythm into the lives of students and schools—and to make sure everyone feels safe and connected. During this period, let's gather baseline data on student academic levels and preparedness as the school year starts through adaptive, well-aligned assessments.
But let's also make a record investment in social-emotional and mental health and well-being benchmarking and support. Schools and systems should use (with students and teachers) relevant surveys they already deploy to gain the benefit of baseline comparisons of well-being from before the pandemic and after students return—or use validated, nationally normed surveys that focus on measures of mental health and well-being. Having such data will be crucial to understanding the scale and nature of the challenges students and teachers are facing. In addition, schools should also be ready with schoolwide activities like advisory groups and circles, as well as high-intensity interventions with psychologists and social workers for students and teachers at highest risk. Everyone has been through a lot. Some people will be suffering more than others. It's crucial we understand where we are and identify students and educators who need immediate support.
3. Switch Permanently to Mastery-Based Learning
This is the moment to take a leap forward on how we allocate and use learning time, moving from an assembly line model, where time is fixed and results vary, to a mastery-based approach that allows students and teachers the time they need to succeed. This will require structural and pedagogical changes—and even more so, a philosophical shift.
This shift would benefit from allowing more learning time every day—but much can be done within the current schedule. More time in the school schedule devoted to small-group and one-on-one support for students, targeting skills where data shows students are lagging, is far more effective than traditional whole-group instruction. This approach ensures that all students get the same grade-level content and each student gets the added support they need without using problematic approaches like tracking. Using the most effective online tools and flipped classroom strategies can allow more kids to learn and practice at their appropriate level, while freeing up teachers to work directly with students who need it most.
Schools should also use time beyond the conventional schedule. In Massachusetts, "acceleration academies" held during spring break have been shown to be effective in multiple studies, including a randomized trial in Springfield (Schueler, 2020). These vacation academies are targeted to students most likely to benefit and are taught in small groups, typically in a 10:1 ratio. Other innovations such as Saturday sessions for particular groups of students, like English language learners, also show promise.
These new approaches to scheduling involve multiple, immediately feasible tactics, but also a sea change in perspective from seat time accounting to mastery-oriented thinking that allows students to progress at the best rate they can, not to the arbitrary metronome of grade progressions.
4. Remember—Teachers' Learning Matters, Too
While our top focus should be on students, support for teachers' learning must be considered as well. This summer and fall will offer unique opportunities to pursue approaches not normally possible in the traditional school structure. For example, leaders and teachers in the Springfield Empowerment Zone schools in Springfield, Massachusetts, are experimenting with videoconference-based "triad collaborative planning" for teachers whose schedules normally make it hard for them to collaborate. Middle school content experts are able to work with ELL and special education experts to chart joint approaches to ensure vulnerable students are well served by new lesson plans in remote learning. Similarly, school systems will have unprecedented opportunities for novice teachers to work with experts and with online professional development tools to focus on their greatest needs.
5. Engage Parents More
Most parents will be glad to see their "crisis deployment" to remote learning come to an end, and they'll likely have gained a greater appreciation for how much goes into successful schooling. But educators should also seek to sustain and refine much higher parent engagement. Parents have always been an underutilized partner in schools, with parent engagement usually limited chiefly to attendance at school events and conferences. Remote learning shows that parents can be much more engaged partners in students' actual learning. Let's seize this moment to consider how newly made online connections can help parents better partner with teachers—and understand and support their children's learning.
Reacting by Rethinking
No one could have wished for this pandemic—and silver linings only come with storm clouds. But educators can respond constructively by rethinking, in light of what we've learned since February, how school time might be better used. We can re-evaluate archaic structures and approaches and move boldly toward mastery-based approaches that leverage both online tools and the unique human touch of teachers across expanded schedules and forms for learning.
