Education Reform and the Uses of Time.

Some schools in this study completely overlooked the need for time to rethink and restructure the educational environment, while others recognized time as a central issue and made efforts to address it. But across all sites, the authors note, the process of school reform has taken more time than was initially allocated to it. When the U.S. Department of Education announced its intention to fund 12 studies of education reform, most of the proposed themes reflected clear strands of reform activity over the past decade. These were the obvious candidates for study. But the proposed study of the uses of time - conceptually interesting and intuitively right - was by no means an obvious choice. No clear stream of reforms during the 1980s and 1990s had dealt with the uses of time. To be sure, in 1983 A Nation at Risk called for more seat time (Carnegie units) in certain subjects, and the states responded by increasing high school graduation requirements. But these particular time-related reforms were already amply documented, and they represented only a very limited part of the issue of how time might be manipulated to produce improved outcomes. Then, too, throughout the 1980s, journalists, pundits, and policy makers regularly drew attention to the fact that American students spend less time in school than students in other countries that seem to outperform the U.S. consistently on tests of academic achievement. However, no ground swell of support for a longer school week or year emerged, either from education reformers or from the general public.(1) The research of the 1970s and early 1980s on discrepancies between allocated learning time and time-on-task was thorough and persuasive: educational time is wasted in our schools.(2) Once again, however, there has been no clear reformist pressure to fix the problem. Without a definite movement or trend to study, our mandate has been threefold. We have examined 1) reforms that affect the quantity of time in school, 2) innovative strategies and practices that affect the quality of time in school, and 3) the potential of nonschool educators to complement and expand learning opportunities for children and youth. In this article, we focus on just a few of our findings with regard to the interrelationship of the quantity and quality of time and the joint effect on improving the experience of school for students and teachers. Our data are drawn from 14 case studies representing a wide range of approaches to breaking the mold in structuring and using time in education. Nearly all the schools and programs we studied primarily serve disadvantaged students. And not all of them are unmitigated success stories. More Is Not Necessarily Better A key hypothesis for our study has been that increasing the quantity of time that children spend in school will not, by itself, lead to improved outcomes - unless what happens within that time also changes in some way. It is difficult to test this hypothesis directly in American public education. A substantial number of districts and schools (particularly in the West) have adopted a year-round schedule as an expedient solution to overcrowding, and some have actually extended the school year for some students by offering voluntary remedial or enrichment programs during the three- or four-week periods when students on a year-round schedule are on vacation. There is ample evidence that educators and families who are initially resistant to the idea can become enthusiastic supporters of year-round schedules. However, there is no rigorous research documenting improved academic outcomes for students as a result of year-round schooling - with or without added time.(3) We conducted two case studies of public schools that had added significant amounts of time to the school year or day. The results were mixed. In the first case we studied two elementary schools in New Orleans that experimented with a 220-day school year for a brief period (1989-91). …