From 1983's A Nation at Risk (National Commission on Excellence in Education) to 1994's Prisoners of Time (a report by the congressionally mandated National Education Commission on Time and Learning) to the federal proposal Time for Innovation Matters in Education (TIME) Act of 2009, the cry has been consistent: The farm- and factory-era schedule of 180 school days per year, 6.5 hours of school each day is insufficient to meet students' current needs and challenges. It's insufficient to meet the needs of teachers, working families, and communities. Yet over the years, most national surveys of school conditions show no detectable change in school schedules throughout the country.
This inertia persists despite plenty of evidence in favor of expanding learning time (Farbman, 2015). We know that many students need more time to reach the high academic skills required in our complex economy and society. We know that individualized support initiatives—such as tutoring and schoolwide systems of data-driven intervention like RTI—work but take more time. Further, we know that too little time is available for a well-rounded education that includes "untested" subjects such as social studies, history, and languages as well as the arts, sports, and myriad "extracurriculars."
Despite positive evidence from a limited number of schools around the country that have expanded their days and years, as well as the growth of the after-school and summer sector in which middle-class families invest a great deal, standard district school schedules remain largely unchanged.
The Pandemic: Shaking Things Up
Now, however, the novel coronavirus pandemic has disturbed this holding pattern. In a flash—out of dire necessity and under legal mandate—all conventions of learning time have been abandoned. From 100 years of following approximately the same learning system, based on being at school and learning in allotted amounts of time, we've gone into a model previously charted only in crises and by the sliver of American students who are home-schooled. With brick-and-mortar schools shuttered, everyone has been forced into some form of home and remote learning. Parents and educators have struggled to do their best. It's been difficult—but we can, and should, learn about and from this experience.
We must be ready to do this better in the future, for two reasons. First, we need to learn to do remote learning well as an alternative way to provide more learning time because we will have more interruptions in schooling, as we always have had, from things like snow days and floods—though hopefully not for this long or universally. Climate scientists say we are likely to expect more severe weather events in coming years. Remote learning, if well done, will set us up to keep students' learning from lagging in such events in the future.
Meanwhile, for too many students, schooling is often disrupted because of student mobility, which is frequently tied to family housing and economic insecurity. Other students have encountered health problems; involvement with youth corrections; or other outside forces that affect their learning time just as a flood or even a pandemic might. Although it's crucial to reduce these kinds of circumstances and inequities, remote learning, done well, could help these students sustain their learning time, and thus better overcome their disadvantage and flourish.
And of course, this pandemic and its effect on school operations may not be over by the end of this school year. Let’s learn from recent months to improve this coming semester.
Second, we need to use novel learning tools and strategies far more effectively when we return to a more traditional version of schooling, to both expand learning time and better personalize learning. Online adaptive tools and videoconference-enabled groupings of students (and teachers) enable a more flexible set of approaches that can be deployed both during a typical in-building school day and beyond—in ways that can benefit students, teachers, and families. Online adaptive tools allow students to get more personalization, whether nested in the school day or beyond it.
The Road Ahead, Starting from Behind
What will be the consequences to students of the sudden shift in schooling? Researchers at the Northwest Education Association created projections based on their large-scale datasets combined with historical "summer slide" trajectories (Kuhfeld & Tarasawa, 2020). If those prove true, students might start the next school year having gained only about 70 percent of what they would've in reading in a typical year and—alarmingly—having accrued less than 50 percent of typical math gains, with students in some grades likely to start next year a full year behind.
With this data in mind, here are three bold suggestions for what should schools and educators do differently as they move beyond the 2019–2020 school year.
1. Switch to continuous learning for this summer.
This is the year we should just keep going. Students, teachers, and families are already converted to distance learning and will be increasingly comfortable with it. It's likely our 2020 summers will be different anyway, with travel plans, summer camps, and other opportunities canceled for students, teachers and parents.
A lot would have to be figured out about how to properly structure the summer term (including providing some time actually off, of course). Leaders would have to determine whether to include all students, target those most in need, or make it optional, as well as how to fairly compensate participating teachers. But because we can, for these months, further support the most challenged students and challenge the most advanced, let's not stop learning just because in previous years, school ended on an arbitrary date.
The payoffs would be short-term and potentially long-term. For now, we would help students make up for lost time and offer, for those who may still be learning remotely amid "social distancing," more structure. Longer-term, we may develop a model that could permanently shift us away from the antiquated idea that learning stops and school systems close for long stretches of the year.
2. Create a "smart ramp" into the next school year.
Over the past few years, many schools have developed transition "academies" for new 6th and 9th graders as they enter the next level of schooling. That approach should be taken for all students.
Let's assume students will not be as ready as usual for the start of the school year, academically or emotionally. Nor will teachers. So let's have teachers and students show up a couple weeks before the official start of the in-building school year for a sort of reorientation to reintroduce structure and rhythm into the lives of students and schools—and to make sure everyone feels safe and connected. During this period, let's gather baseline data on student academic levels and preparedness through adaptive, vertically aligned assessments as the school year starts.
But let's also make a record investment in social-emotional and mental health and well-being benchmarking and support. Schools and systems should use (with students and teachers) relevant surveys they already deploy to gain the benefit of baseline comparisons of well-being from before the pandemic and when students return—or use validated, nationally normed surveys that focus on healthy youth measures of mental health and well-being. Having such data will be crucial to understanding the scale and nature of this PTSD challenge, but schools also must be ready with schoolwide activities like advisory groups and circles as well as high-intensity interventions with psychologists and social workers for students and teachers at highest risk.
3. Switch permanently to mastery-based learning.
This is the moment to take a leap forward on how we allocate and use learning time, moving from an assembly-line model, where time is fixed and results vary, to a mastery-based approach that allows students and teachers the time they need to succeed.
This shift would benefit from having more learning time every day, but much can be done within the current schedule. More time in the school schedule devoted to small-group and one-on-one support for students, targeting skills where data shows students are lagging, is far more effective than traditional whole-group instruction. This approach ensures that all students get the same grade-level content and each student gets the added support they need without using problematic approaches like tracking. Using the most valuable online tools during the school day and through flipped classroom strategies allows more kids to learn and practice at their appropriate level while freeing up teachers to work directly with students who need it most.
Schools should also use time beyond the conventional schedule. In Massachusetts, "acceleration academies" held during spring-break weeks have been shown to be highly effective in multiple studies, including a randomized trial in Springfield (Schueler, 2020). These vacation academies are targeted to students most likely to benefit and are taught in small groups, typically in a 10:1 ratio. Other innovations such as Saturday sessions for particular groups of students, like English language learners, show promise.
Reacting by Rethinking
No one could have wished for this pandemic, and silver linings only come with storm clouds. But educators can react constructively by rethinking, considering what we've learned since February, how school time might be better used. We can rethink archaic structures and approaches and move boldly toward mastery-based approaches that leverage both online tools and the unique human touch of teachers across expanded schedules and forms for learning.
A longer version of this article will appear in Educational Leadership magazine's summer 2020 issue, "Time Well-Managed."
