Time Matters Blog

Mapping the Momentum of Expanded-Time Schools

By Jessica Edwards on December 12, 2012 – 4:24pm

Over the last few years, NCTL has had the pleasure of visiting hundreds of expanded-time schools and documenting their individual stories which describe, how more time, used thoughtfully, can be a transformative input for students and educators. However, it is not often that we have the opportunity to step back and scan the entire field of schools, and examine the progress being made on the ground nationally in this exciting educational arena.

Our first broad attempt to better define the cohort of expanded-time schools came in 2009 with our report, Tracking an Emerging Movement. This report identified 655 expanded-time schools serving more than 300,000 students. This group represented a few pioneering districts and primarily charter school networks, and the findings of this report suggested that this was a largely decentralized movement, with entrepreneurial endeavors to break from the conventional school calendar still the predominant mode for becoming an expanded-time school.
Yet, a lot has changed in the past three years. As our nation’s educators are being asked to transform educational outcomes, implement even more rigorous academic standards, and employ new reforms in the teacher effectiveness and evaluation arenas, there is a growing recognition that many more of our nation’s schools could benefit from the adoption of an expanded school day and/or year. As such, policy and education leaders have promoted and funded initiatives that enable more school time at unprecedented rates and at this critical point, we were excited to examine whether these policies were having a real-world impact in encouraging more, and particularly traditional district schools, to implement expanded-time schedules.
Earlier this week we were pleased to share with you our second report on the state of the field of expanded-time schools in America. Mapping the Field: A Report on Expanded-Time Schools in America draws from the NCTL Expanded-Time Schools Database to document over 1,000 schools across the U.S. that have expanded their operational days and/or years for all students. These schools are from 36 states and the District of Columbia and serve over 520,000 students – or approximately 1 percent of students nationwide. In addition, 40 percent of these schools are traditional district schools and the same percentages have implemented expanded-time schedules in the past 3 years.
Although these schools have all been established with or converted to an expanded-time schedule for various reasons, the increase in the number schools in the NCTL Database in just three short years, does suggest a burgeoning field that is very much affected by policy. It is hard to overlook the first, powerful finding —the meaningful increase of more than 50% in the total number of schools and 67% in the number of students served since our last census just three years ago.
The bottom line is that the 1,000+ schools featured in our Mapping the Field report demonstrate that operating an expanded-time schedule is not only possible but happening in many places across the country and in many contexts. As someone who has spent the past several years steeped in this work at NCTL, I was encouraged by this finding, but it was not until I had a chance to speak with a school leader earlier this week that I fully recognized the magnitude of this growing national movement. A current school principal at one of the founding schools in the Massachusetts Expanded Learning Time Initiative put it so clearly,
“When we started this work six years ago, we felt like islands off doing some crazy work to really shake things up at our school. Now other principals across the country can look to each other and it’s amazing to see that they are part of a growing network that is really learning from each other and trying to change how we educate our students.”
With committed and energized school leaders like this principal and the strong priorities of policymakers at all levels to close achievement and opportunity gaps and better prepare our students for success in college and the 21st century work force, we are confident that the number and scope of expanded-time schools will continue to blossom over the coming years.
Jessica Edwards is the Research Manager at NCTL and the lead author of Mapping the Field.

Five States Commit to Expand Learning Time for Thousands

By Jennifer Davis on December 12, 2012 – 2:20pm

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.

The Turnaround Arts Initiative

By David Farbman on December 7, 2012 – 2:55pm

What do Yo Yo Ma, the world-famous cellist, and expanded time have to do with each other? For the answer, you have to ask the students at Orchard Gardens, an expanded-time school in Boston. On Dec. 6th, they were privileged to take a master class with Ma as he visited the K-8 school to conduct their orchestra and talk about the power of music.

Orchard Gardens were honored by this special visit from Ma, as well as New York City ballet star Damian Woetzel, as part of their participation in a joint program of the U.S. Department of Education and the President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities called the “Turnaround Arts Initiative.” The initiative provides professional development, supplies and other support to a group of eight low-performing schools that are designated as “turnarounds” and funded through the federal School Improvement Grant program. One form of support is pairing each of the eight schools with a famous artist (or two) to demonstrate in a very concrete way the effect that the arts can have. Ma and Woetzel have volunteered their time to be the artists-in-residence at Orchard Gardens and will visit periodically to educate and inspire.
Visits from these famous artists are not the only reason students at OG are fortunate. They are also attending a school that has become a shining example of how it is possible to ensure that demography is not destiny. Though OG’s students overwhelmingly come from low-income families, they are achieving at high levels, far outpacing their peers in other schools serving similar populations. Education is far too complex a process to identify any one factor as the cause of OG’s success, of course, but surely having a substantially longer day opens up more learning opportunities, opportunities which the teachers and students have seized. (For a detailed description of the OG story, see our case study on the school, written by my colleague, Roy Chan.)
News of the visit by the renowned cellist and dancer to OG also calls to mind my own work on the subject of how expanded-time schools offer the platform on which a vision of a well-rounded education—especially one that values the arts—can take shape. In just a few weeks, we’ll be releasing a study that describes how five different expanded-time schools have each forged their own path to positioning the arts at the core of their educational programs.
Like Orchard Gardens, these schools teach us that engaging students in the arts can not only develop in children abilities that we value in their academic lives—“the process of learning a skill, the process of taking risks, the process of practicing over and over to become an expert at something,” in the words of the OG Principal, Andrew Bott—but also that they engage children in experiences that they may not otherwise get. And this is made possible, in part, by simply having the time available to do art.

The “Kernels of a National Movement”

By David Farbman on December 3, 2012 – 4:36pm

At an event today in Washington, DC, NCTL and the Ford Foundation, together with U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, Connecticut Governor Dannel Malloy, Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper, and a host of other education officials from five states, announced the formation of the TIME Collaborative. This new multi-year initiative seeks to develop high-quality and sustainable models of expanded learning time in over 40 schools across five states (Colorado, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New York, and Tennessee).

For those of us (like me) who have been championing for many years the benefits of expanding learning time for children in high-poverty communities, today’s announcement is a pinnacle moment. In a very concrete way, the TIME Collaborative transforms the pilot project that we launched seven years ago in one state (the Massachusetts Expanded Learning Time Initiative) from a one-off into a harbinger. Now, schools in an additional four states (not to mention more schools in Massachusetts) will be able to bring the opportunities that come with more learning time to thousands of more children.
As I watched the event today (we will have a video up shortly!), I was struck by a couple of messages that kept popping up. For one, speaker after speaker intoned in one way or another about how more learning time was simply necessary to close opportunity and achievement gaps. “It’s not rocket science” to have a longer school day, asserted one audience member. And as the Connecticut Commissioner of Education, Stefan Pryor noted, his state underwent many contentious policy discussions over the last year as Connecticut crafted an ambitious education reform package. Yet, through it all, each and every constituency—from parents to unions to superintendents—was firm on the idea that those children coming from disadvantaged backgrounds absolutely needed more learning time to achieve at high levels.
The second message that, frankly, gave me goosebumps to hear was Secretary Duncan’s response to an audience question about whether he thinks there will be a national movement to expand time. Without mixing words, the Secretary suggested that the TIME Collaborative is the “kernel of a national movement.” “We still have a long way to go,” he explained, “but we are starting now.”

Schools in Five States on Track to Expand Learning Time to Dramatically Improve Student Learning

By Jennifer Davis on December 3, 2012 – 3:07pm

This morning, leaders from five states joined the National Center on Time & Learning (NCTL) and the Ford Foundation in announcing a major new effort – called the TIME Collaborative – to expand and redesign the school calendars at 40 schools in 11 districts as early as next September. This means that over 19,500 students across the country will have nearly 6 million more hours to learn, explore and engage in enrichment opportunities in school.

At today’s event in Washington, D.C., state and district leaders from the five participating states – Colorado, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New York, and Tennessee – discussed why they have chosen to participate in the TIME Collaborative and how their schools will be redesigned to better meet the needs of today’s students and teachers. All schools will add at least 300 additional hours of instruction and enrichment to the school year. States will receive technical assistance from NCTL and capacity building grants from the Ford Foundation, which has committed $3 million a year over the next three years in support of each state’s efforts. Learn more about the TIME Collaborative here.
At today’s event, NCTL also released Mapping the Field: A Report on Expanded-Time Schools in America. This report shows a significant increase over the last three years in the number of public schools that have expanded learning time. 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. The most rapid growth has occurred among traditional district schools in recent years, not charter schools. As a result, district schools now account for 40 percent of all expanded-time schools, up from 20 percent of the total in 2009.
For more information, click here.

A Step in Time: How We Will Meet the Urgent Needs of Today’s Students

By Julia Falk on November 30, 2012 – 5:49pm

The Ford Foundation and the National Center on Time & Learning invite you to a major announcement with leaders from five states: A Step in Time: How We Will Meet the Urgent Needs of Today’s Students

Please join us for the announcement of a groundbreaking education collaborative, followed by a discussion with state and district education leaders about expanding and redesigning the school day to help level the playing field for children in communities of concentrated poverty.

Featured guests include U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, Connecticut Governor Dannel Malloy, Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper and other officials and policymakers from five states and multiple local districts.
Monday, December 3, 2012
10:30 am – 12:30 pm
Announcement and Discussion
PEW CHARITABLE TRUSTS
901 E STREET NW
WASHINGTON, DC 20004-2008

NCTL’s New Promising Practices Portal

By Claire Kaplan on November 28, 2012 – 8:53am

Over the last ten years, we’ve visited hundreds of schools and talked with thousands of educators. Through our observations, conversations, and research, we know that more time, used well, is a strategic lever to help close the country’s achievement and opportunity gaps. We want to share that knowledge with you in the hopes that principals and teachers are inspired to adopt proven practices; legislatures enact policies that enable schools to lengthen the school day and/or year; parents advocate for expanding learning time in their schools; and, ultimately, more students and teachers across the country benefit from increased academic and enrichment opportunities.

Today, we are launching a new and improved Promising Practices section of our website that will allow you to more readily access our vast collection of resources from successful expanded-time schools and practitioners. The new section allows you to search our resources, share them with colleagues, and provide us feedback. You can read about the transformation of one of Boston’s lowest-performing schools, or see the powerful impacts of teacher collaboration at Jacob Hiatt Magnet School in Worcester, MA. Whether it’s a case study, tool, or video, everything you find on the Promising Practices section demonstrates the power of expanding learning time and comes directly from those who work in and attend expanded-time schools.
You can access our resources through NCTL’s Resource Search or through NCTL’s recently updated Promising Practices section.
We also want to learn from you. In addition to hearing your feedback on our resources and learning what additional information you would find useful, we also want to learn about your success stories. Please send us anecdotes and practices about what is working in your school as you expand learning time to provide students a stronger education. The launch of the Promising Practices section is not just a new part of our website; we hope it will also be the start of a robust online conversation between practitioners and policymakers on how schools are effectively expanding time and better preparing students for success.
We invite you to join us.

A Big Day for Learning Time

By David Farbman on November 13, 2012 – 9:10am

Last spring, California Governor Jerry Brown made clear that, given the state’s ballooning deficit, the state might be forced to make drastic cuts in education funding to local districts and, in turn, to then allow school districts to cut days from the school year by up to three weeks. As one political analyst suggested, losing days of school was the least bad option, “We are way behind the rest of the world in the number of school days, and California is nearly dead last. To further that would be horrible. But to lay off people [or] have larger class sizes, [those] are not a good choice either.” Or, as Superintendent Jonathan Raymond said about his district, Sacramento City Unified, which had already cut athletics, busing and counselors, among other things next school year: “What is there left? Nothing.”

The question was put to the voters last week in the form of Proposition 30, a ballot referendum that asked for higher taxes on those making over $250,000 and on a higher sales tax for all specifically to fund education. If the initiative passed, the state stood to gain an additional $6 billion in revenue and would thus be able to stave off the cuts in education that had been proposed. By a 54 to 46 percent margin, voters approved Prop 30.
The reaction from the K-12 education community was, obviously, one of relief. Superintendent John Deasy, of Los Angeles Unified, explained, “We are very, very pleased. So, instead of facing a catastrophic situation where we were dismantling public education, we’re stable.”
Further up the Pacific coast, another quite different ballot referendum in Washington State, Initiative 1240, which called for the state to approve up to 40 charter schools, also brought with it implications for learning time. By a close 51 to 49 percent vote, voters approved the measure and so now Washington will join 41 other states to allow charters. As NCTL explained in Learning Time in America, our 2011 policy report, charters stand at the vanguard of the expanded-time movement:
Charter schools, in some ways, offer a kind of “natural experiment” on the question of the adequacy of the conventional school calendar. Founders of charters, most of which start as brand-new schools, are presented with a straightforward challenge to establish a school that will meet their future students’ educational needs. In a majority of cases, charter educators decide that the traditional calendar provides insufficient time for their students to achieve proficiency in the state’s learning standards. So, not bound by fixed district policies related to school time, a longer day and/or year becomes the option of choice.
We are heartened by voters’ willingness to, in California’s case, invest in public schools and, in Washington’s case, to encourage innovation in public education to better serve children. We can only hope that with each passing election, the public becomes ever more attuned to the pivotal role that schools play in our nation’s future and how it is incumbent upon each of us to support their continued growth and improvement in whatever ways we can.
***UPDATE #1: I had missed this one other good-news-for-learning-time story out of Cleveland that deserves attention. Last spring the Cleveland School Board cut 50 minutes from the school day for all K – 8 students (by eliminating art, music and gym classes). But voters approved a new tax levy on Election Day that would restore over $60 million to the school budget. Almost immediately, the school board then voted to restore the classes that had been cut, effective in January.
***UPDATE #2: The vote in California in support of Prop 30 has had an immediate impact on at least one district. And no small thing, too, since it is the largest in the state. On Tuesday, the School Board for Los Angeles Unified voted to restore the academic year to a full 180 days, overriding the cut of five days it had imposed the last couple of academic years.

The Voice of Teachers

By David Farbman on November 1, 2012 – 4:39pm
I have long been an admirer of Teach Plus, an organization that works with teachers to help make their voice heard within the many education policy debates that run through the public discourse. In service to their mission, Teach Plus recently released the results of a survey of over 1,000 teachers that asked them to respond to some hot topics for today’s teachers that also have policy implications, including teacher evaluations and class size.
Though there are several interesting findings, I wanted to focus on two, in particular, that hold relevance for our own work. The first is that teachers, both veterans and those relatively new to the profession, believed that the number one method schools should employ to improve instruction is to allow time for teachers to collaborate. In fact, this perspective comports with a research study that was conducted a few years ago that showed that having time for teachers to collaborate explained over 70 percent of the difference between the strength of a particular school’s professional learning community. (Professional learning communities, or PLCs, is the term used to describe the effort of a whole faculty working together to improve student performance.) No other factor that researchers tested even came close to having that level of influence. And, as NCTL makes clear, having more time for collaboration is one of the three core uses of additional time that should be employed when a school expands their schedule.
On the other hand, on the same question of rating the importance of a particular change would be to help students achieve more, teachers were less enthused about a longer day. Indeed, among the eight possible reforms listed on the survey, they believed it least likely to make a difference for student achievement (scoring an average of 2.5 on a five-point scale). How to account for this seeming contradiction between wanting more time for teachers and not for students? I would speculate that perhaps too many teachers share the view of the general public such that when they hear the term “longer day,” they tend to think “just more of the same.” Having worked with and studied dozens of schools, we know that this view is disproved by the many expanded-time schools that harness their extra minutes and days to drive deeper, stronger instruction. Also, in our experience, we’ve seen how it is often the act of expanding the school day for all students that then leads schools to re-configure schedules such that teachers have more time to meet. A longer day, thus, helps teachers to reach their primary goal of more time to work together.
The second finding of note concerns the makeup of the respondents themselves. According to Teach Plus, almost half of the random sampling of all teachers surveyed (49%) had 10 years or fewer of teaching experience. The fact that there are so many newer teachers leading our nation’s classrooms is a sharp departure from what had been the norm throughout much of the second half of the 20th century, when most teachers had many years of experience behind them. As the report indicates, in 2012, there are more teachers in their first year than at any other experience level; in 1987, the most common experience level was 15 years.
There are likely many implications of this dramatic shift in the population of teachers for the teaching profession and for American schools, but I think that one of the most important may be that these teachers are entering the school system at a time of tremendous change. Consider that in just the last few years and the few to come, we have experienced or will experience an intense focus on accountability and on the progress of individual students, an explosion of digital learning, and a total reconfiguration of the content and expectations of learning because of the Common Core. With all the new educational demands and opportunities that are taking root in classrooms, teachers have no other course but to be flexible, to be innovative, and to be responsive to the learning needs of students.
Who knows what the future will look like, but if schools take seriously the yearning of teachers to collaborate so that they can process together the many changes they must face, then our students will likely benefit. We know that time well spent for students can make a huge difference for learning, and the same can be said of teachers. To my mind, giving teachers time for their own learning and development can only bode well for the future strength of our education system.

Putting It All Down on "Paper"

By David Farbman on October 22, 2012 – 9:36am

It is not often that one gets the opportunity to capture in one place all one knows about a particular topic. (Certainly, in these blog posts, I often feel like space allows for only “scratching the surface” type discussions.) Recently, however, the Journal of Applied Research on Children, an all online journal, offered us the opportunity to submit an article for publication that would, in about 10,000 words, try to summarize all that we know about expanded learning time. I’m pleased to say that this week, in their latest issue, the Journal included an article I wrote that tries to do just that.

Now, I’m exaggerating, of course. There is much information that I could not include in the article, but I did take seriously the idea that I had the opportunity to explain to folks who had never heard of the movement to expand learning time in public schools—or at least might not have given it much thought—some of the basic structures and forces at work that define its essential challenges and opportunities. As such, the article addresses four questions:
1.  Why do educators and education thought leaders find the current standard American school calendar insufficient to meet students’ educational needs, especially those from high-poverty communities?
2.  When educators perceive this need, how do they go about implementing a day and/or year that not only is longer but that also leverages the nontraditional schedule to offer a higher quality education?
3.  Does the act of expanding time bring improvements in student achievement as intended?
4.  What are the possibilities for more schools to implement similar educational models that rest on a longer day and/or year?
I also made some effort within the body of the article to describe and explain why it is that adding time to the schedule is not, in and of itself, an automatic means to make a school thrive. As I note in addressing the third question, just as the research is fairly clear that providing additional learning time to individual students is likely to generate more learning (i.e., of the kind that can be measured on tests), the research also highlights how adding time to an entire school is a much more complicated matter to assess.
I was honored, too, that Mike Feinberg, co-founder of the KIPP network of schools, responded to my article. In his commentary, he re-inforced the idea that time—and much more time than the conventional schedule has—is a key leverage point for student success. As he explains,
More time in school is by no means a silver bullet for education. It takes hard work, and much more than a few extra hours in the week, to create a model that helps students make learning gains. But if we consider both the risks and the benefits, and focus on developing more extended time programs that take all the factors … into account, we can bring real success to more of this country’s most underserved students.
I do hope that his message (and mine) will lead more people to understand why the time for a total re-make of the traditional American school day and year has come and, then, to join us in championing for its spread.

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