California schools received over $60 billion from federal and state stimulus funding to help students recover from the pandemic. This infographic summarizes the major programs districts have implemented during the 2022-23 school year. Most districts extended learning time and hired instructional supports, but few provided high-dosage tutoring.…

Extended school year (ESY) services has been an understudied area of special education research. There is limited information available regarding ESY practices by local education agencies (LEAs) in determining eligibility as well as who receives what types of services. We surveyed special education directors across the nation to examine ESY…

We examined differences in the receipt and delivery of extended school year (ESY) services in the United States by locale as being rural, urban, or suburban. We found that there were significant differences in the percentage of students receiving ESY services according to locale, with rural local education agencies (LEAs) having a significantly…

Within the context of this paper, a balanced, or year-round, school year calendar is not one that necessarily increases either the length or number of school days. It is one that provides for "more continuous learning" by dividing up the traditional summer break into shorter intersessions during the year. It might seem to be a…

This paper explores treatment effects in three different contexts: an extended school year pilot program in an urban school district, a library summer reading program serving twenty-one urban school districts, and states passing the Equal Rights Amendment during the 1970s and 1980s. Estimates generated using two years of intervention data along…

Over the last decade, the State of Michigan Public Education Report has marked annually Michigan's progress and performance based on important data-driven measures and outcomes. This year, for the 2020 report, The Education Trust-Midwest (ETM) reports on these important measures while also noting the unprecedented moment in which Michigan, the…

The effects of long school breaks, such as summer vacation, on students' achievement has been an area of interest among educators and researchers for many years (e.g. Austin, Rogers & Walbesser, 1972; Ballinger, 1987, 1988; Borman, Benson & Overman, 2005; White, 1906). Research specific to children and youth with disabilities and the…

For administrators, teachers, students and their families in some districts, summer isn't what it used to be. Trying to stem a "summer slide" of learning loss by students and also to avoid having to build more schools to cope with overcrowding, districts are operating on year-round schedules that shorten the traditional summer vacation…

Many low-performing schools across the nation have increased learning time in response to federal requirements for the School Improvement Grant (SIG) program. The conditions governing federal waivers of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) also require certain schools to redesign the school day, week, or year to include additional…

The National Center on Time & Learning (NCTL), an organization dedicated to redesigning and expanding school time to improve opportunities and outcomes for high-poverty students, has again teamed up with the Education Commission of the States (ECS), whose mission it is to foster the exchange of ideas on education issues among the states, to…

Over the last several years, public education in the U.S. has experienced a remarkable growth in the number of schools that have expanded their schedules beyond the conventional calendar of 180 6.5-hour days. Spurred by significant policy activity at the federal, state, and local levels, more and more educators have capitalized on opportunities to…

The National Center on Time & Learning (NCTL), an organization dedicated to redesigning and expanding school time to improve opportunities and outcomes for high poverty students, and the Education Commission of the States (ECS), with a mission to foster both the exchange of ideas on education issues among the states and long range strategic…

This spring, officials in Fairfax County, Virginia, like those in localities across the country during these economic hard times, were in a fiscal bind and looking for any way to close a projected $650 million budget shortfall. School officials began looking seriously at slashing one line item: the nearly $3 million the county spends to fund a…

Students in the United States spend much less time in school than do students in most other industrialized nations, and the school year has been essentially unchanged for more than a century. This is not to say that there is no interest in extending the school year. While there has been little solid evidence that doing so will improve learning…

The adoption of state accountability testing in the 1990s coincided with the movement of some school start dates from September into August. Using data from Wisconsin, this paper connects these phenomena, showing that some low-scoring districts advanced their school start dates to allow their students more time to prepare for exams. I use a 2001…