Comments on: Time for School?

By: Lengthening: The Way to Go « Lengthening School Days: The Right Thing to Do

Lengthening: The Way to Go « Lengthening School Days: The Right Thing to Do — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 03:34:19 +0000

[...] A school where this method worked is Matthew J. Kuss Middle School, which is located in Fall River, Massachusetts. With the help of the new principal, Nancy Mullen, the middle school has completely changed its reputation (More Schools Turn to Extended Days). Matthew J. Kuss extended the school days and rearranged the school day to create more time for reading and math by eliminating subject areas. [...]

By: Good schools are relentless about basics: School day length « drwilda

Good schools are relentless about basics: School day length « drwilda — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 18:49:22 +0000

[...] http://educationnext.org/time-for-school/ [...]

By: Snow Days-Fun Now, Consequences Later? « walshce2

Snow Days-Fun Now, Consequences Later? « walshce2 — Sat, 08 Oct 2011 19:26:54 +0000

[...] of Education Next’s article “Time for School?” Dave E. Marcotte and Benjamin Hansen to learn more. Share this:TwitterFacebookLike this:LikeBe the first to like this post. Filed under [...]

By: Reality Check: Minnesota Schools Starting Early « CBS Minnesota

Reality Check: Minnesota Schools Starting Early « CBS Minnesota — Mon, 29 Aug 2011 23:49:55 +0000

[...] Educators say it’s a way to start early preparations for standardized testing in early spring and even a few days can make a difference. [...]

By: Catherine

Catherine — Mon, 22 Aug 2011 14:22:12 +0000

Aubrey Heusser says:
01/09/2010 at 11:26 am
“This study does not take into account that kids (especially the littlest ones) can only absorb so much at a time before they shut down. Even now, schools waste much of their year with assemblies and pep rallies and “muffins with mom” events for a half day or more each week. Kids already spend too much of their childhood trapped in an institutional building. The tiny percentages supposedly gained in these studies are not worth the opportunity cost of all the other things those children could be doing with that time. Instead of lengthening the school day or year, let’s cancel all the nonsense and let those children actually be part of their families and communities.”

Absolutely!!! The amount of time “killed” compared to actually used to instruct is astounding!!! Add to that the fact that once testing is completed in April (in Maryland) very little instruction is actually accomplished in most classrooms. This is born out by the fact that in Maryland (and in many other states) the last day for seniors is early in May even though graduation does not occur until the end of May or early June. Teachers breathe a sigh of relief after testing and, although much lip service is given to providing real instruction right up to the end of the year, this does not occur. Extending the school year would only add more do-nothing days to the schedule. Move testing to mid to late May REDUCE the number of days to 170, start school for students just before or after Labor Day, end just after Memorial Day and cut out the GARBAGE. The time wasted during the school year at least in this state boggles the mind. Let that time be used for, as the poster I quoted above said, allowing children to actually be a part of their families and communities, not in an institutional setting.

By: Rocky Shwedel

Rocky Shwedel — Wed, 29 Jun 2011 03:13:40 +0000

While I agree that the authors have taken an interesting and innovative tack at examining the relationship between instructional time and learning, I think that the authors have overlooked an important alternative explanation for the data.

A cancellation not only shortens the total amount of instructional time, but it disrupts the teacher’s planned schedule and the students’ typical learning process. It is very possible that the lower test scores were a function of a disrupted schedule rather than simply the decrease in available instructional time. Perhaps the ‘disruption factor can be teased out of the authors’ data by comparing years when there the number of days cancelled were the same but the number of individual cancellations varied.

By: More Education Reform Discussion on Governor’s Summer To-Do Agenda | Tennessee Report

Tue, 31 May 2011 17:03:37 +0000

[...] study issued six months ago showed that nations leading the list on Program for International Student Assessment tests were [...]

By: Liesl

Liesl — Wed, 09 Feb 2011 04:49:30 +0000

http://www.carolinajournal.com/issues/display_story.html?id=5703

By: Common sense, data, and school days « Independent Educator

Common sense, data, and school days « Independent Educator — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 03:17:27 +0000

[...] Dave E. Marcotte and Benjamin Hansen add add educational data to the discussion in their article Time for School?. The article is based on end-of-year test scores and the small year-to-year differences in [...]

By: Aubrey Heusser

Aubrey Heusser — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 16:26:14 +0000

This study does not take into account that kids (especially the littlest ones) can only absorb so much at a time before they shut down. Even now, schools waste much of their year with assemblies and pep rallies and “muffins with mom” events for a half day or more each week. Kids already spend too much of their childhood trapped in an institutional building. The tiny percentages supposedly gained in these studies are not worth the opportunity cost of all the other things those children could be doing with that time. Instead of lengthening the school day or year, let’s cancel all the nonsense and let those children actually be part of their families and communities.

By: Chris Gabrieli

Chris Gabrieli — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 02:59:26 +0000

The authors are to be commended for a terrific addition to the research base on time and learning. Their ingenious idea to focus on the natural experiment driven by snow days allows us to glean critical support for the point that time for learning is one of the core variables in learning outcomes. It would be especially hard to do such an experiment on a prospective, ramdomized basis.

The Massachusetts Initiative mentioned at the end of the article actually expands the length of days, not the year. This is the crucial alternative expanded time opportunity which offers, I believe, some significant advantages from a cost-effectiveness point of view (all of the money goes into instruction, not buses and lunches and overhead for each extra day), from a public acceptance point of view (summers are sacred to many!) and from a pedagogical effectiveness perspective. But we certainly need more experiments to find out what is best.

Lastly, I think it is important to highlight the research by Caroline Hoxby, sumamrized in Education Next in the past, that shows that by far the most highly correlated school attribute, from a list of about 20, with high performance among NYC charters is expanded learning time. Considering that KIPP, Achievement First, Uncommon Schools and many of the other leading charter schools identify expanded learning time as one of their core design features producing impressive gains for high-poverty students, I believe the question of whether expanded learning time CAN be a powerful tool is pretty well settled. The question of how readily it can be spread to other schools and what other conditions must be in place for the time to be as well used as it is at these great proof point charters remains to be proven.

Chris Gabrieli
Chairman
National Center on Time & Learning

By: Do school closings hurt your child’s performance? | csmonitor.com

Do school closings hurt your child’s performance? | csmonitor.com — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 18:17:20 +0000

[...] Other researchers have found similar results in other states. [...]

By: Benjamin Hansen

Benjamin Hansen — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 17:34:09 +0000

It is up to the discretion of individual local education agencies on when to cancel school. The question of non-random selection is a good one and important one. However, I think it really bowls down variation in cancellations over time rather than levels of cancellations. If you looked at snowfall patterns in Colorado and Maryland, it snows a lot more at the rich schools in CO and the poor schools in MD, because selection of residence isn’t random. But the variation, the change from one year to the next, in snow is independent of variation in income, pupil-teacher ratios, you name it. So even if a school district superintendent is super tough now, the variation of cancellations within his or her school over time will be independent of changes in staffing or other factors that would likely bias the results.

By: School time is money — and learning « Joanne Jacobs

School time is money — and learning « Joanne Jacobs — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 10:20:30 +0000

[...] less school time means less learning, conclude Dave Marcotte and Benjamin Hansen in Education Next. A number of researchers have found [...]

By: Robert Liang

Robert Liang — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 22:46:09 +0000

This is really an interesting study. I agree that weather is outside the control of school districts, however, the decision whether to cancel the class or not because of the weather is I guess the autonomy of the district. I am wondering if there are hard and clear rules for districts to cancel the classes with a cutoff amount of snowfall or certain weather conditions. If not, the self-selection problem may still remain.