Time Matters Blog

Lots Going on in the Nation’s Capital

By David Farbman on March 13, 2013 – 2:43pm

These days, when you read a headline like that, your mind instantly flashes to sequestration or some other partisan fight over the budget. But, in this case, I want to focus on the public schools in Washington, D.C., a system that serves 45,000 students. With the former chancellor, Michelle Rhee, the school system was often in the news, but, of late, the public profile of the DC schools has been lowered somewhat. Yet, the district still has been quietly making a big impact on education and, in particular, in efforts to bring more school time to the largely high-poverty communities that make up its student body.

The first piece of news comes from the decision last week by the school board to approve the largest-ever application for new charter schools in the district. Rocketship Education, which is based in San Jose, California, submitted a plan to open up to eight new schools in D.C. to serve a total of over 5,000 students. Rocketship boasts an eight-hour day and a distinctive educational model. Aside from its record narrowing achievement gaps, the network also stands as one of the true pioneers in the field of blended learning – mixing together face-to-face instruction with the integration of technology to advance students’ basic and more advanced skills. The model boasts three key benefits. First, it develops in students the absolutely essential skill of becoming technologically adept. Second, it helps to individualize learning by carefully tracking (in real time) exactly what each student’s strengths and weaknesses are and then giving the student extra help in those areas that s/he does less well. Since NCTL’s profile of Rocketship last year, the network has announced some tweaks to its model of blended learning that it will implement in 2013-14—giving teachers more direct learning time with students—but the focus on technology will remain.

The second piece of news, to my mind, is even more significant because of what it tells us about the changing face of American education. Before I get to that point, though, a little history,when charter schools first burst onto the scene in the 1990s, the argument among advocates was that these schools would actually be education laboratories for public schools. As they used their autonomy to innovate, charters could test out new instructional and organizational practices to see if they might generate greater learning and achievement. Once these practices were perfected—or, at least, demonstrated to have significant impact— they could then be adopted by non-charter district schools and, in turn, the entire system would become more effective.

The problem with this vision, however, is that those in traditional public schools tended to see the work of charters as so unlike their own or in conditions that were so unlike district schools that they were disinclined to think they could really learn much from charters. Rather than educational testing grounds, charters became educational islands—standing alone and mostly unconnected from the vast majority of public schools.

But over the last couple of years, as more and more charters have come into being, and as their level of effectiveness has increased, that dynamic is starting to shift. And this is where the news from D.C. comes in. Earlier this week, the chancellor, Kaya Henderson, announced that the next teachers’ contract would allow for more flexible rules around instructional days and years, a direct result of the influence of charter schools’ ability to have a longer day and year. As the Washington Post reports:

The rapid growth of nonunionized charter schools has been an important backdrop to teacher contract negotiations, which have intensified since the previous contract expired in September (although that contract remains in force). While charters have the flexibility to design their own schedules, traditional public schools are bound by the terms of a contract that says that the year may not exceed 185 instructional days and that a workday must be limited to 7.5 hours. Washington Teachers’ Union President Nathan Saunders said that although details remain to be worked out regarding longer school days, the union acknowledges “changes that are necessary to make [traditional public schools] competitive in light of the dynamic education environment” in the city.

Now, I must say that there is a lot more to a good charter school than a longer day and/or year. The whole school and individual teachers have to be using that extra time well to have a real impact on student achievement. But the school schedule is one of the most obvious places where district and charter schools differ, so this is often the starting point for adoption by district schools. My hope is that once D.C. district schools start experimenting themselves with expanded time they will see, too, that those additional minutes and days open up fantastic opportunities for students’ learning and that they will take full advantage of these opportunities to develop an excellent education for all their students.

Expanded Learning Time Featured on CBS Evening News

By George Mastoras on March 11, 2013 – 12:11pm

“There’s really no need to continue to schedule the school year and the school day in an old model. We need to be thinking what our kids need in order to be competitive in the 21st century.”
– Fall River Public Schools Superintendent Meg Mayo-Brown

Massachusetts leads the country’s most ambitious statewide initiative to expand the school calendar. This past weekend, CBS Evening News featured one of these pioneering schools, the Kuss Middle School in Fall River, MA, which has gone from the state’s first ‘chronically underperforming’ school into a school with enthusiastic students and parents and strong academic results.

Voices From the Field: Parents’ Perspectives on ELT

By Lindsay Cyr on March 7, 2013 – 2:13pm

Lindsay Cyr is a coordinator for the TIME Collaborative at NCTL.

Earlier this year, parents gathered at A.C. Whelan Elementary School in Revere, MA to discuss the impact of expanded learning time. Schools considering adding learning time will find the video of this discussion a great resource to share with their parents. The parents on the panel represented students from both A.C. Whelan Elementary School and Garfield Middle School in Revere. Both schools expanded time in 2008 through the Massachusetts expanded learning time initiative. Some of their children had been a part of A.C. Whelan during the initial transition from a traditional school day to expand learning time, while others started kindergarten with an expanded day. Here’s part one of the discussion:

All of the parents were clear on how much their children benefitted from the extra time to build close relationships with their teachers. One parent, Jeannie LaRosa, commented how an expanded day helped her child because she could participate in more hands-on learning, such as his participation in weekly Fun Science programming.

Adrienne Sacco-Maguire, the parent of a Garfield Middle School student, highlighted how additional time allows students to work with adult role models from their school and community. Students are exposed to positive role models from the community during enrichment blocks focused on banking, athletics, drama, and creative writing, allowing them to develop stronger ties to their neighborhood while staying engaged in their school day.

Sacco-Maguire also commented on the benefits of providing teachers with dedicated, collaborative planning time to establish best practices. She has noticed a demonstrable improvement in the cohesion among staff members and positive impacts on the school culture overall. Here is part two of these parents sharing their experience in an expanded time school:

How to Reach out to Students AND Everyone Else too!

By Lindsay Cyr on March 7, 2013 – 2:00am

At Pennington Elementary in Wheat Ridge, CO, Principal Sandy Craig and TIME Collaborative planning team members have kept their planning process transparent and solicited feedback from all stakeholders from the day the school was selected for the TIME Collaborative. Principal Craig stated that she and TIME Collaborative planning team members knew that their TIME Collaborative work would only be successful if intentional communication with all staff members, families, and the community became a part of their planning process. Within a day of selection, the school shared details about the opportunity with all staff members and with families and invited all stakeholders to an informational meeting.

Teachers, paraprofessionals, parents, Grade 3-6 students, and community members were invited to contribute to a thinking maps brainstorming session entitled, “The Best Day You Can Imagine at School.” Students in the fifth and sixth grades also wrote blog entries and essays about how they would redesign the school day. In January, all feedback was compiled into a single document and shared with stakeholders. Every person who raised a concern or idea was able to see it on the document and recognize that their voice had been heard.
The input provided by stakeholders provided new ideas for the planning team and allowed Principal Craig to be sure that no one would be surprised by any iteration created. Following the generation of the list of ideas and feedback, each stakeholder was asked to highlight suggestions as a Red Light/Yellow Light/Green Light issue. The Red (rejected) and Yellow (unsure) concerns were then tracked, and this data was used to develop Pennington’s first iteration.
Throughout this process, Principal Craig and the school planning team members encouraged parents to be vocal about the TIME Collaborative in their community in order to dispel myths and rumors about the added time. In addition, very early in the process the TIME collaborative team members “had the hard conversation with both community and staff: The bottom line is that extended learning time is what’s best for our kids—it may or may not be what’s best for you, you will need to decide.”
The school’s planning has been received positively as a result of Pennington’s transparency. Staff voted unanimously in favor of moving forward with the TIME Collaborative planning process. Parents and community members have had positive energy about the TIME Collaborative, and they are familiar with the opportunities provided to students and the community with expanded learning time. Craig says that, more than any other grant or initiative undertaken by Pennington, “[stakeholders] feel as though they are a part of it…everybody does.”

NCTL’s President on New Report Showing Success of KIPP Middle Schools

By Jennifer Davis on February 27, 2013 – 1:20pm

Jennifer Davis, NCTL Co-founder & President and Vice President of the KIPP Massachusetts Board of Trustees, issued the following statement today on the release of Mathematica Policy Research’s report, KIPP Middle Schools: Impacts on Achievement and Other Outcomes:

I applaud KIPP’s students, teachers, and school leaders on the report’s findings that KIPP middle schools have significant and substantial positive impacts on student achievement in four core academic subjects: reading, math, science, and social studies as well as on a measure of higher order thinking skills. High-poverty student achievement gains of this kind are unprecedented in education and we hope that more schools – both district and charter – will look to KIPP as a model for what works in helping children in high-poverty communities succeed.

After a rigorous review of the data, Mathematica Policy Research reveals that the KIPP middle schools have positive and statistically significant impacts on student achievement across all years and all subject areas examined. Further, after a three-year period, KIPP students gained 11 additional months of learning in math, 8 additional months in reading, 14 additional months of learning in science, and 11 additional months of learning in social studies when compared to students in comparable traditional public schools. These are the kinds of gains that are necessary for high-poverty students to succeed in high school, college, the workforce and in life.

One of KIPP’s original five organizational pillars is “more time spent learning.” KIPP middle school students spend an average of nine hours per day, for 192 days each year, in school, compared to a 6 ½ hour 180 traditional school calendar. This means that KIPP students, on average, spend nearly fifty percent more time in school than their peers in traditional district schools.

As a part of the study, Mathematica also compared higher-performing and lower-performing KIPP schools to better understand what characteristics most impacted learning. The report said that class size, teacher experience, and professional development opportunities were not associated with higher achievement scores. Instead, the report said, achievement was greater at KIPP schools where principals report a more comprehensive school-wide behavior system and where more time was spent on core academic activities.

The National Center on Time & Learning is dedicated to helping traditional district schools implement these types of impactful reforms—especially additional time in school. It is encouraging to have yet another research study point to the importance of schools expanding time for core academic subjects. NCTL believes, as does KIPP, however, that expanded school time must also include time for the arts, music, physical education and opportunities to explore new skills and interests. It is clear, then, if our goal as a nation is to prepare all students for college, career and life success, and provide a high-quality, well-rounded education regardless of socioeconomic status, our schools serving high-poverty students require the reform—and expansion— of the outdated American school schedule.

The National Center on Time & Learning will continue to track the progress of KIPP schools as well as the over 1,000 schools across the country joining KIPP in this movement to expand learning time.

Grad Nation Summit Highlights Expanded Learning Time

By Nancy Conneely on February 26, 2013 – 2:15pm

Nancy Conneely is a senior associate at the National Center on Time & Learning, where she advocates for expanded learning time with members of Congress, the U.S. Department of Education, and other national organizations.

Expanded learning time was prominently featured at one of the largest, most widely covered education events of the year yesterday. America’s Promise Alliance, which was founded in 1997 by General Colin Powell, has been at the forefront of focusing the nation’s attention on the dropout crisis. In 2010, America’s Promise launched its Grad Nation movement, which includes an annual Summit with nearly 1,000 participants. The Summit brought together policymakers, educators, students, and business leaders in Washington, DC to discuss promising strategies for ending the dropout crisis. Among those strategies is expanded learning time (ELT), which was highlighted throughout the Summit. During the opening session, Alma Powell, Chair of America’s Promise, cited ELT as one of several “vital” pieces of the puzzle that can help students stay in school.

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan lent his voice to the discussion, stressing the importance of partnerships between schools and the community to ensure that kids have a safe place to be when school lets out. Secretary Duncan envisions schools as the “hub” of the community, offering enrichment opportunities for students in partnership with non-profit and higher education partners.
When asked about the importance of recess and physical education for students’ social and emotional development, Secretary Duncan said that students need time for both academics and physical activity, stating plainly, “School days are too short.” With tight budgets, schools are going to have to think differently about how they use their time, and about utilizing before school or after school hours to provide opportunities for physical activity.
During a session on expanded learning opportunities, participants learned more about the challenges, as well as successes, of local schools and non-profits providing ELT, afterschool programs, and summer learning opportunities. The session was designed to help give participants useful knowledge and skills to bring back to their communities. Leaders from high-performing expanded time schools described how their schools worked, but focused their presentations on how they started their schools and the barriers to change that they had to overcome. Nancy Mullen, former principal of the Kuss Middle School in Fall River, Massachusetts described the process of taking over a chronically failing public school and searching for solutions with teachers, community partners, and district and state officials who all came together around expanded learning time. Jonathon Spear, from Generation Schools, described the process of taking a creative new ELT school design to district and union officials in New York City and negotiating agreements that led to a school with both longer days and a longer year that fits within the city’s union contract.
To close out the session, we heard from General Powell, via video, about the support of America’s Promise Alliance for expanded learning opportunities, which “helps young people enrich their lives through more and better learning time.” General Powell and Jeannie Oakes, Director of Educational Opportunity and Scholarship at the Ford Foundation, framed the importance of expanded learning time and then the video told the story of Orchard Gardens, an expanded learning time K-8 school in Boston, Massachusetts. NCTL has been working closely with Orchard Gardens since it began planning for its transformation to add more time in 2010.

Gym Class: More than Fun & Games

By George Mastoras on February 19, 2013 – 10:00am

The New York Times recently highlighted the growing trend of school districts pushing physical education teachers to move beyond soccer, kickball, and tennis to include more academics into traditional physical education time. NYT education reporter Motoko Rich cited an intensifying focus on student test scores in math and English as one factor driving this trend but it’s really just the latest example of schools being asked to do more with a resource they don’t have enough of: time. The story does an excellent job outlining the pros and cons of this trend but it’s no surprise that more and more schools are coming to the conclusion that they simply need an expanded schedule to meet their students’ needs.

French Food for Thought

By David Farbman on February 14, 2013 – 9:39am

Recently, I came across an article in the New York Times about a change to the French education system that entails adding in a half day of instruction on Wednesdays—which is currently a full day off with no school—and shortening the other school days by 45 minutes each. Aside from the politics that surround the proposed reform to the school week, what interested me is that tinkering with school time generated an automatic linkage to student achievement. For example, one of those not keen on the move asserts that, “We have to put an end to this magical thinking that just stretching the school week over four and a half days will improve students’ performance.”

France, like the United States, is deeply concerned with the outcomes of its education system. Like their U.S. counterparts, French schoolchildren rank in the middle tier of countries that take the international assessment in reading, math, and science known as PISA or the Programme for International Student Assessment. And also like in the U.S., French students already attend school more than their counterparts in many European countries. (In fact, U.S. students attend more annual school hours than those in France. Though the Times article cites the figure of 950 annual hours across all grades, our research suggests a higher figure of almost 1,200 total school hours, though this figure includes time for activities that are not devoted to instruction, like lunch and transitions between classes.)

To my mind, these two nations are proof positive of the relatively weak correlation at a national level between instructional time and performance on international assessments. As regular readers of this blog know, I will be the first to argue how powerful the impact of time can be for individual students and for schools, but comparing instructional on a national level is just difficult because there are so many confounding factors. Cultural expectations placed on students, student demographics, teacher training, curriculum, social support systems, and how students spend their time out of school, are just a few of the reasons why examining just instructional time among nations probably tells us little about the strength of the individual education system: countries with more time are not necessarily higher performing and students in countries with less time often perform at high levels.

Does this mean that instructional time at the national level is irrelevant? Absolutely not. As I wrote a few months ago, there is also fairly strong evidence that once you increase instructional time within a specific country, the impact on achievement can be marked. That is, all things being equal—and, presumably, changing school schedules as a definitive school reform would keep other things like cultural expectations and the overall quality of the teaching staff the same—increasing time can have a real effect. It will be most interesting to see the experience of France over the coming years as this change in the school schedule begins to take hold.

NPR Considers Longer School Days in Connecticut

By Robert Travaglini on February 11, 2013 – 11:41am

Robert Travaglini is the Senior Director of School & District Support in Connecticut for NCTL.

Last Sunday, NPR’s All Things Considered profiled Pulaski Elementary School in Meriden, CT, an expanded-time school participating in the TIME Collaborative. The school day runs from 7:30 a.m. through 3:20 p.m. and the students first 80 minutes are filled with exercising, breakfast, and enrichment classes.

The Meriden School District and Meriden Federation of Teachers received a grant from the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) Innovation Fund last year to work together to develop a cost-effective model of expanded learning time. In the radio story, Principal Dan Coffee explains that his school expanded learning time by staggering the teachers’ schedules, partnering with community organizations for enrichment classes, and utilizing technology, which costs between $80 and $115 per child for the year.
We will all be watching as Pulaski Elementary School, as well as the other TIME Collaborative schools, leads the way in developing high-quality, sustainable models of expanded learning time. Please listen to the story and let us know what you think in the comments section.

NCTL Supports Gov. Cuomo’s Proposal To Expand Learning Time At Budget Hearing

By George Mastoras on January 29, 2013 – 11:18am

(Albany, NY) Jeff Smink, New York State Director at the National Center on Time & Learning (NCTL), submitted testimony at the Legislature’s Joint Budget Committee’s Hearing on the Governor’s 2013-2014 Executive Budget on Elementary & Secondary Education.

Smink’s testimony highlights the research and policies that NCTL’s experience has learned are critical to the success of an expanded learning time initiative.
 
Highlights from his testimony include:
 
“Given the current interest and activity already underway in New York, Governor Cuomo’s proposal would further position the state as a national ELT leader and help districts plan and implement sustainable, innovative, high-quality programming across the state.”
 
“Based on our experience in Massachusetts and other states, we believe Governor Cuomo’s proposal to fund up to $1,500 per student for ELT is a sufficient and reasonable amount. In Massachusetts, funding is at a similar level and no districts have dropped out of the ELT initiative due to funding levels. Additionally, this funding level helps encourage sustainability and cost-effective strategies that help keep costs down, including staggered schedules for teachers, strategic use of community partners and teaching specialists, and use of technology and blended learning.”

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