LENGTHENING THE SCHOOL DAY

Lengthening the School Day

Lengthening the School Day

Introduction

This paper is going to discuss about the lengthening of school day timings. Recent attention has once again been directed toward the issue of how much time U.S. students spend in school and its relationship to academic achievement. Adding time to the school year or school day is at the top of the list of measures that have been hypothesized to improve achievement among U.S. students. Furthermore, comments from U.S. President Barrack Osama (“I'm calling for us . . . to rethink the school day to incorporate more time”; March 10, 2009, Speech to the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce) and the Secretary of Education Arne Duncan (“I think the school day is too short, the school week is too short and the school year is too short. . . . You look at all the creative schools that are getting dramatically better results. The common denominator of all of them is they're spending more time”; April 15, 2009 Interview with Richard Stengel, TIME Magazine) suggest that school time is believed to be a promising strategy among the current administration. As in the past, much of the current concern over the association between time in the classroom and achievement has been fueled by international comparisons showing that students in other industrialized nations have higher achievement test scores than students in the United States (Gonzales et al., 2004) and that students of countries outperforming U.S. students often spend more time in school (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development [OECD], 2004).

Time in school reemerged as a relevant policy consideration during the 1990s. In 1991, federal legislation established the National Education Commission of Time and Learning to examine the issue of time in America's schools. The final report produced in 1994, “Prisoners of Time,” reiterated the concern about America's poor standing in international student achievement comparisons and suggested that little progress had been made since 1983's “A Nation at Risk” in extending or reforming time use for learning in school.

Defining Types of School Time

The research on extending the school day (ED) or extending the school year (EY) is complicated because researchers talk about school time in different ways. However, we follow the lead of previous reviewers (Aronson, Zimmerman, & Carlos, 1999; Cotton, 1989; Kuwait, 1985; Silva, 2007) in specifying five different types of learning time. Allocated school time refers to the number of school days in the year or number of hours students are required to attend school. Allocated school time can be narrowed to allocated class time, that is, the time that students are required to be in class. Allocated class time can be broken down into instructional time, or the time devoted to instruction, and no instructional time, in which students spend time in the classroom not engaged in instruction. This includes time devoted to organizational or administrative activities, classroom management, and discipline. Instructional time can be narrowed to engaged time (also called time on task), in which students are paying ...