Efforts to improve education outcomes often involve lengthening the school day or the school year in hopes that spending more time in school will boost student learning. Yet, as Frederick Hess explains, U.S. students spend as much or more total time in school as their peers in other industrialized nations. What matters more than the amount of time…

COVID-19 is laying bare two realities in education. Over the past several decades, is has been warned that schools are not making the most of the time they have with students. Despite those warnings, little has changed. Additionally, the school calendar is not friendly to working families. As the education community plans for the upcoming school…

Everybody complains about a lack of time in school, but few are prepared to do anything about it. Laying the foundation before making such a shift is essential to the success of the change. Once a broad-based team has been chosen to do the work, they can follow a process explained in four steps with the apt acronym of T.I.M.E.: Taking stock,…

For more than 30 years, Education Commission of the States has tracked instructional time and frequently receives requests for information about policies and trends. In this Education Trends report, Education Commission of the States addresses some of the more frequent questions, including the impact of instructional time on achievement, variation…

The major challenge with time is finding it. Current school-day schedules and school-year calendars are leaner than ever because of budget reductions. States and districts have implemented furlough days to balance lean-and-mean budgets that show no sign of improving. Few are willing to take the leap toward reducing instructional time to improve…

California high school teachers are constantly racing against the clock. They are expected to provide a strong college preparatory curriculum, promote critical and creative thinking, and meet students' social and emotional needs. Learning time is an essential resource for addressing all of these goals. But, it seems to be in short supply in many…

Fully updated to reflect current issues in the field of art education. Checklists embedded in charts allow users to indicate where their school or district stands in relation to the criteria--which has been expanded to include district wide, elementary, middle, high school, and superior standards. The criteria within the checklists reflect…

At a time when the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and partner countries are trying to figure out how to reduce burgeoning debt and make the most of shrinking public budgets, spending on education is an obvious target for scrutiny. Education officials, teachers, policy makers, parents and students struggle to determine…

The paper explores important issues in today's education, not by analyses and statistics, but by projecting readers into the future and then asking them to look back on today's schools and to act like archaeologists--to surmise from all sorts of things they can observe, what was really important to us, what we really valued, how we treated kids,…

Presidential commissions, parents, academics, and employers have proposed the same solutions, again and again, for fixing the time students spend in school: (1) Add more days to the annual school calendar; (2) Change to year-round schools; (3) Add instructional time to the daily schedule; and (4) Extend the school day. Three reasons--cost,…

The largest issue for schools is not extending the school day or year--as useful as those policies might be--but of meeting time requirements within the constraints of the budgets and personnel given them. Policy makers rarely understand how their policies impact practice. Author Marilyn Crawford suggests a policy-talks-to-practice strategy that…

Under enormous pressure to prepare students for a successful future--and fearful that standard school hours do not offer enough time to do so--educators, policymakers, and community activists are adding more learning time to children's lives. Twenty-five years ago, the still-resonant report "A Nation at Risk" urged schools to add more time--an…

Discusses, in general terms and in light of the experience of the past four years at SUNY-Buffalo, the advantages and disadvantages of teaching beginning level foreign language three days per week instead of five. (EKN)

To serve at-risk minority students better, secondary schools should exchange the usual six-period daily schedule for an intensive, single-subject format (similar to summer school) during the typical 36-week calendar. One immediate advantage of using intensive three-week sessions for each subject is increasing time spent on academics. (six…

A three-hour block of uninterrupted time each morning for the teaching of core subjects has allowed this elementary school to reduce class size, increase the time teachers spend with individual students, increase time on task, increase parent and teacher expectations of students, and improve student/teacher relationships. (DCS)