Five States Commit to Expand Learning Time for Thousands
Submitted by Jennifer Davis on Wednesday, December 12, 2012 - 14:20.
Last week, state and district leaders from five states, including Connecticut Gov. Malloy and Colorado Gov. Hickenlooper, joined NCTL and the Ford Foundation in announcing the TIME Collaborative - an initiative to expand and redesign the school day and year at 40 schools in 11 districts in Colorado, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New York, and Tennessee as early as next September. This means that over 19,500 students across the country will have the equivalent of over 40 more instructional days to boost achievement levels and explore music, arts, hands-on-science, and other engaging learning activities in school. The expanded schedule will also allow teachers more time to collaborate.
At the announcement event in Washington, D.C., state, district, union, and community leaders from the participating states discussed how more time will accelerate their mission to improve the life opportunities of children and how their schools will be redesigned from the ground up to better meet the needs of today's students and teachers.
U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan also underscored the rich potential of an expanded school day noting in his remarks, "Whether educators have more time to enrich instruction or students have more time to learn how to play an instrument and write computer code, adding meaningful in-school hours is a critical investment that better prepares children to be successful in the 21st century."
All participating schools will add at least 300 additional hours of instruction and enrichment to the standard school year of 180 6.6-hour days. States will receive technical assistance from NCTL and capacity building grants from the Ford Foundation, which has committed $3 million each a year for the next three years.
Watch video of the event in its entirety here, and browse coverage from The New York Times, CNN, and NPR's Marketplace.
Meet our new TIME Collaborative team members here!
Mapping the Momentum of Expanded-Time Schools
At the event in Washington, D.C. last week, NCTL also released Mapping the Field: A Report on Expanded-Time Schools in America. The report shows a significant increase over the last three years in the number of expanded-time schools. The report identifies 1,002 expanded-time schools across the United States, up from 655 schools identified the last time NCTL issued the report in 2009, an increase of 53 percent. The number of students being served has increased to 520,000 students, up from 300,000 in 2009. While the early adopters of more time were charter schools, the most rapid growth has occurred among traditional district schools in recent years. As a result, district schools now account for 40 percent of all expanded-time schools, up from 24 percent of the total in 2009. You can access NCTL's full database here.