Longer School Days for Struggling Students, or Everyone
by Fawn Johnson

The District of Columbia Public Schools released their test results for the 2012-2013 school year last week to great fanfare, and not without reason. The students achieved their greatest leap in achievement in recent history. They showed the highest growth in proficiency since 2008 in reading and since 2009 in math. Yes, those proficiency levels are still below 50 percent (47.4 percent for reading and 49.5 percent for math), but they are a huge improvement from 2007, when those percentages hovered around 30 percent.

Washington D.C. is something of a petri dish for the nation's education policy. Its schools have all the urban problems of a bifurcated poor and rich population, a long history of neglect, and almost half of the students in charter schools. It's also the place where former D.C. Public Schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee put down her first controversial school reform stamp. Regardless of what you think of Rhee, the progress of D.C. public school students over the last five years can be traced back to the alarm bells she set off.

There are a lot of reasons for the success of the last school year, but one of them caught my eye. As an experiment, Washington D.C. extended the school day in eight of its most problematic schools. In just one year, seven of them showed improvements in both math and reading, and four of them showed double-digit jumps. What's more, the acceleration was twice that of the non-extended day schools. DCPS Chancellor Kaya Henderson says she wants to expand the extended day program for this coming school year with two big "ifs": 1) If she can find the funding. 2) If she can negotiate a satisfactory deal with the teacher's union.

Education Secretary Arne Duncan is a big fan of extending time in school. He pushed for it when he headed up the Chicago Public Schools and included it as one of the pluses for states applying for waivers under No Child Left Behind.

But extended schools hours can't just be done willy nilly. As Education Sector analyst Elena Silva noted in a report last year, the best outcomes of extended learning time come from schools that increase the time that a student is "on task"—i.e., actively engaged. That requires lesson planning, up-to-date technology, and dependable funding. It should come as no surprise, then, that DCPS is being careful in pushing an extended day program too quickly, lest it come apart at the seams.

What are the benefits of extended learning? How is it most effective? How many hours of "on task" learning is needed for students who are behind the curve? Is the number different for kids who are at grade level or above? What do teachers need to support extended learning time? What about school districts? Can teachers unions abide by extended learning programs? What are the alternatives?

The Potential of More and Better Learning Time
Kevin Welner

When we provide children with better opportunities to learn, they have better learning outcomes. While I have not yet seen careful analyses of recent results in DC (which should ideally examine a robust set of outcomes), the premise here is very sound.

Extended school days unquestionably have the potential to improve student learning. We should, however, take care about drawing facile conclusions. Simply adding time is a blunt instrument. If done without awareness of students’ needs and strengths, it could accomplish little or nothing. Past research suggests that extended learning time should be carefully crafted to ensure that students’ opportunities to learn are in fact enriched.

The Opportunity Gap (http://nepc.colorado.edu/book) exists because rich opportunities to learn are not evenly distributed among children. If a child’s parents have available resources, they can provide extensive enrichment after school, over weekends, and over the summer. Top-notch private schools, such as those attended by the daughters of President Obama (Sidwell Friends: http://www.sidwell.edu/about_s... and Michelle Rhee (Harpeth Hall: http://www.harpethhall.org/pod... make a huge investment in creating an engaging set of learning opportunities that go well beyond core academics. Instead, the children engage in interesting, meaningful activities that connect learning to the children’s interests and daily lives.

Accordingly, if extended learning time is used thoughtfully and deliberately, and if it is designed to build on students’ strengths and interests – avoiding deficit thinking – then it is an excellent approach for closing the Opportunity Gap. Some schools have also used the freedom provided by an extended school day as a way to build in time for collaborative teacher planning, which can be very beneficial.

If, however, the extended school day is merely used for more of the same – for test prep and basic skills – then we can expect very little in the way of long-term benefits.

Extended time is best thought of as a resource or tool, rather than merely as additional time. That is, the extended time should be a starting point for a thoughtful rethinking of the entire school day – or even of the students’ entire set of educational opportunities. When approached in this way, new relationships within the school and with potential partners in the community can begin to emerge.

Research does suggest that past efforts to extend the school day have been most effective with elementary-aged students, with less impressive results for high schoolers and (particularly) middle school students. But these differences may very well stem from different needs and approaches regarding how the extra time has been – and could be – used.

The rule of thumb should be that these reforms do not need to reinvent the wheel. In advantaged communities across the US, parents and schools do an excellent job designing extended learning time for their children. Enrichment is not a new idea; it’s just unequally distributed.