Expanded learning time
Expanded learning time is a strategy employed by schools in the United States to redesign their school days and/or years in order to provide students, particularly in communities of concentrated poverty, with substantially more and better learning time. ELT is often a core element of school improvement or turnaround efforts, such that other practices like teacher collaboration, data-driven instruction, and integrated enrichment can be more effectively implemented. ELT differs from associated efforts like after-school programs or expanded learning opportunities because ELT requires all students in a given school to attend the longer day and/or year, and the additional time becomes a dependent component of the school's educational practices and objectives.
History of the United States public school calendar
The traditional public school calendar in the United States is an average of 180, 6.5-hour days across the year. Kindergarten and younger grades are 2.5 - 3 hours a day. The school year often begins in late August or early September and ends by early or mid-June. This norm emerged over the latter half of the nineteenth century, and while the states are still responsible for defining their mandatory hours and days, the majority of states have adopted something close to the traditional calendar.A major catalyst for the development of the uniform school calendar was the creation of compulsory education. Before the American Civil War, publicly funded education existed; however, there was no requirement for children to attend school. Additionally these public schools had two distinct calendars: rural and urban. The rural calendar typically operated for at most six months of the year, with most school days taking place during the winter, giving credence to the belief that the current system is based on the agrarian calendar. On the other hand, the urban calendar was much longer, in some cases almost year-round, to correspond with the round-the-clock approach of the industrial sector
During the decades between the American Civil War and World War I, compulsory education became more widespread, as the economic incentive for developing an educated workforce grew. Massachusetts began the movement when, in 1852, it required youths aged 8–14 to attend at least 12 weeks of school; the requirement had increased to 32 weeks by 1902. New York was another leader in the compulsory education movement, passing a law in 1874 requiring youths aged 8–14 to attend school for 14 weeks; over the next 50 years, the requirement slowly increased, settling at 180 days by 1921. In both Massachusetts and New York, the number of days represented a compromise between the shorter instructional year of rural schools and the year-round availability of school in urban areas. Since about 1920, the traditional school year has become a legal and cultural norm.
History
The argument for expanded learning time has been advanced on a national stage since the convention of compulsory education began to take hold. In 1894, U.S. Commissioner of Education William Torrey Harris published a report about the state of American public education in which he complained of the loss of time in urban school days from 193.1 to 191.he constant tendency toward a reduction of time. First, the Saturday morning session was discontinued; then the summer vacations were lengthened; the morning sessions were shortened; the afternoon sessions were curtailed; new holidays were introduced; provisions were made for a single session on stormy days, and for closing the schools to allow teachers... to attend teachers' institutes...
The boy of today must attend school 11.1 years in order to receive as much instruction, quantitatively, as the boy of fifty years ago received in 8 years... It is scarcely necessary to look further than this for the explanation for the greater amount of work accomplished... in the German and French than in the American schools...
A Nation at Risk
Nearly one hundred years after Harris's report, the debate about the school calendar in America continued. On August 26, 1981, President Ronald Reagan's Secretary of Education T.H. Bell created the National Commission on Excellence in response to the "public perception that something is seriously remiss in our educational system". In 1983, the Committee released its report A Nation at Risk which added to the growing consensus that the American school system was failing. The Committee highlighted four areas of findings: content, expectations, time, and teaching. In the section "Findings Regarding Time" the commission made three observations:compared to other nations, American students spend much less time on school work; time spent in the classroom and on homework is often used ineffectively; and schools are not doing enough to help students develop either the study skills required to use time well or the willingness to spend more time on school work.
Specifically, the commission recommended that schools consider a 7-hour day and 200- to 220-day school year. In response to the report, states launched task forces, committees, and study groups to focus on the issue of the education system. Of the five recommendations from the report, learning time is the only recommendation where there has not been a significant change. Schools across the country largely still adhere to the traditional calendar.
Prisoners of Time
In the Education Council Act of 1991, President George H. W. Bush established the National Education Commission on Time and Learning, a nine-member commission charged with studying the impact of time on learning Three years later, in April 1994, the Commission published a report, Prisoners of Time, referencing Commissioner Harris's 1894 report and outlining inherent problems with the traditional school calendarThe commission argued that education is a top priority for the United States, citing public opinion polls and the bipartisan support for the Goals 2000, Educate America Act, which introduced eight broad and ambitious goals to improve the education system. In the report, the Commission highlighted how the constraints on learning time present a hurdle to achieve the targets laid out in the Goals 2000 Act. It then presented eight recommendations to correct the "design flaw" of traditional school calendars:
I. Reinvent Schools around Learning, not Time
II. Fix the Design Flaw: Use Time in New and Better Ways
III. Establish an Academic Day
IV. Keep Schools Open Longer to Meet the Needs of Children and Communities
V. Give Teachers the Time They Need
VI. Invest in Technology
VII. Develop Local Action Plans to Transform Schools
VIII. Share the Responsibility
Partly in response to this report, the National Conference of State Legislatures included expanding learning time as an issue at its national conference in 1998. At that event, 14 states indicated they were considering bills to lengthen the school day and/or year. Since that time, however, the calendar of 180 6.5-hour school days has remained the norm.
Role of charter schools in the ELT movement
While both district public schools and state policy on school time have been slow to move away from the conventional calendar, the one sector of public education that has moved away from the standard more readily has been charter schools. Charter schools are public schools that are granted autonomy from traditional school districts while being held accountable for student outcomes. Charter schools have broken from the conventional school calendar in large part because, in most cases, charter schools are legally authorized to set their own operating hours. They take advantage of such flexibility to have longer schools day and a longer school year. About sixty percent of all expanded-time schools nationwide are charter schools.Massachusetts
In 1993, the landmark Massachusetts Education Reform Act created the framework for unprecedented improvements in students' learning, teachers' professionalism, school management, and equity of funding. As a result of MERA, 54 distinct activities were initiated by the then Department of Education to implement the Act In 1995, the First Annual Implementation Report was released, which separated the 54 activities into five goals and evaluated their impact on education throughout the Commonwealth. In the analysis of the first goal—to establish new standards and programs for students that ensure high achievement—the report concluded, "If schools are to meet the enormous demands of assisting students in meeting these new standards, it may become necessary to increase the amount of time that students spend directly involved in education." The legislature then charged the Board of Education to form the Massachusetts Commission on Time and Learning with a mandate to develop "a plan to extend the time during which students attend school to reflect prevailing norms in advanced industrial countries and to address the educational needs of children in the Commonwealth."Following the report, the state took steps forward to advance the potential for schools to break from the traditional school calendar. Like other states, Massachusetts authorized the establishment of charter schools. By allowing the formation of schools that were granted the autonomy to design themselves as they saw fit, the legislature opened the door to a new wave of public schools that were not beholden to certain fixed policies related to school staffing or design, including the schedule. When the first fifteen charter schools were approved by the Board of Education in 1995, almost all of them featured some form of a longer school day and/or year.
Expanded time did not become a cohesive strategy, however, until 2005 when the legislature included funds for planning grants in the FY 2006 budget, which allowed 20 districts to plan how they might use a state grant to expand their school calendar by 25 percent. A year later, the legislature introduced a new line-item in the state budget which allocated $6.5 million to participating schools at a rate of $1,300 per student to fund an expanded school day and/or year. So began the Massachusetts Expanded Learning Time Initiative, the country's first competitive grant program established for the express purpose of expanding learning time in traditional district schools.
Over the next few years, the MA ELT Initiative added a number of schools. In the 2012–2013 school year, 19 schools across ten districts added 300 hours to their school year through the ELT Initiative. No other state had attempted a similar grant program until January 2013 when New York Governor Andrew Cuomo proposed that his state implement a grant program modeled on the one in Massachusetts, which was passed by the Legislature in their 2013–2014 fiscal year budget in March 2013.