Rethinking school time

How much time students spend in school is less important than what they spend their time doing.

As schools across the land seek to address the academic, social, and emotional challenges born of the pandemic, they’re spending heavily on the most elemental of resources: time.

And yet the COVID-19 pandemic shed a harsh light on what schools do with the time they already have. When school leaders across the land abruptly concluded they could squeeze a seven-hour school day into three hours of remote teaching (or 55 minutes of asynchronous instruction), it raised hard questions about what students do all day. When push came to shove, the school day no longer seemed sacrosanct.

Back in 1994, the National Education Commission on Time and Learning observed:

Learning in America is a prisoner of time. For the past 150 years, American public schools have held time constant and let learning vary. The rule, only rarely voiced, is simple: learn what you can in the time we make available.

Given the conviction that learning is limited by the time available, it’s no surprise that there are extensive efforts to boost the amount of time kids spend in school. In the summer of 2022, nearly half of school districts used emergency pandemic-related federal funds to offer summer instruction. A third of districts said they were using those funds to add time to the school day (FutureEd, 2022).

The “more time” solution is ultimately unsatisfying, because if extended learning time means subjecting kids to paper shuffling or soporific instruction, it hardly seems like an improvement. As I argue in The Great School Rethink (2023), the way out of this dilemma starts not with adding time but with rethinking what we’re doing with the time we have.

How much time do kids spend in school anyway?

You’ve probably heard advocates or public officials insist that American kids need more time in school. They fret that American kids are getting less instruction than their global peers and proclaim that we need longer school years or days to catch up. As one U.S. secretary of education told a congressional hearing a number of years ago, “Our students today are competing against children in India and China. Those students are going to school 25 to 30 percent longer than we are. Our students, I think, are at a competitive disadvantage” (Strauss, 2011).

So, is the first order of business to have kids spend more time in school? Not necessarily. For starters, the facts underlying those claims are a bit muddled. Indeed, if we take the data at face value, it turns out that American kids, relatively speaking, spend a lot of time in school.

On the one hand, the U.S. school year is on the shorter side when compared to other advanced economies. Most U.S. students attend school 180 days a year (National Center for Education Statistics, 2020). In Finland, the maximum year is 190 days (though many schools employ a shorter calendar); the school year also is 190 days in Hong Kong, Germany, and New Zealand; and it’s 200 in the Netherlands, 210 in Japan, and 220 in South Korea (Craw, 2018).

But, on the other hand, instructional time isn’t just about the number of days students attend school; it’s also a function of time in the school day. The typical school day for American students is more than 6½ hours. For Finnish students, it’s about five hours; in Germany, 5½; in Japan, six (Craw, 2018) When that’s included, it turns out that American students get at least as much formal schooling as their global peers. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD, 2021) reports that, on average, U.S. students attend school for 8,903 hours over their first nine years in school — or 1,264 hours more than the OECD average.

My point isn’t that American students get enough schooling. After all, if kids spend this much time in school and we’re still disappointed with the results, some change may be in order. The point, rather, is that knowing how much time kids spend in school is more complicated than it may initially appear and, more importantly, that simply boosting the number of hours that kids sit in school may be the wrong goal.

Where does the time go?

If students spend more time in school than one might guess, why does it feel like there’s never enough time? Well, it can be useful to keep in mind some of the big places where time gets lost.

In 2021, in a far-too-unusual study of Providence, Rhode Island, researchers Matt Kraft and Manuel Monti-Nussbaum documented just how many disruptions there are in the course of a school day. They estimated that a typical classroom in a Providence public school is interrupted more than 2,000 times per year and that these interruptions combine to consume 10 to 20 days of instructional time.

Major disruptions included intercom announcements, staff visits, and students entering (or reentering) class in disruptive ways. In explaining the impact of tardiness, for instance, Kraft and Monti-Nussbaum observed:

In many classrooms, locked doors required late and returning students to knock and a teacher or student to stop what they were doing and open the door. Late students often resulted in taking the teacher away from whole-class instruction to orient the student to the current task.

More than half of the interruptions they observed led to spillover disruptions that amplified the impact. Meanwhile, administrators appeared to greatly underestimate the frequency of these interruptions and the time they consume.

In fact, while it can be tough to know how much of kids’ time in school is spent actually learning, it is possible to get a sense of how much time is definitely not. One particularly useful analysis tried to unpack what cuts into all that time that the OECD estimates American kids spend in school (Abrams, 2015).

The researchers took a high school in Holyoke, Massachusetts, with 180 days in its academic calendar and started ticking off lost time. There were seven early-release days for professional development (with class periods compressed by 14 minutes); eight days for exams (four at the end of each semester); and another seven mornings set aside for the Massachusetts state test (with all classes paused on these mornings even though only 10th graders took the exam).

Policies, practices, and programming have a massive impact on how much school time kids spend learning — regardless of the formal length of the school day or year.

When all was said and done, the analysts estimated that total instructional time in this school during a given year added up to just 62% of the 1,076 hours estimated by OECD. That means there were 410 hours devoted to stuff other than instruction (Abrams, 2015). Policies, practices, and programming have a massive impact on how much school time kids spend learning — regardless of the formal length of the school day or year.

The time diary approach

So, only 60% or so of a school day is used for instruction. Some of the rest is consumed by distractions and paperwork. Where does the rest of the time go? What exactly are students doing all day?

Well, back in 2003, researchers at Columbia University and the University of Maryland published an invaluable study examining how elementary students actually spent their school day. It’s a study I’d expect to see repeated dozens of times a year. Bizarrely, it isn’t.

The researchers sent a questionnaire and time diary to the teacher of each of the 553 elementary school students in their sample. On a randomly selected school day, teachers filled out time diaries documenting how students spent their time — tracking when each activity began, when it ended, and what the student did during it (Roth et al., 2003). Activities were grouped into four categories: academic, enrichment, recess, and maintenance. “Academic” activities included time devoted to content-based subjects — tasks like homework review and testing, study time, and field trips. “Enrichment” included curricular offerings that weren’t part of the traditional academic curriculum, like physical education or music. “Recess” included playtime and breaks. And “maintenance” included other nonlearning activities like announcements, meals, bathroom breaks, cleaning up, fire drills, or packing and unpacking backpacks.

The average elementary student’s school day spanned six hours and 35 minutes, of which 64% was devoted to academic subject activities. Of the remainder, maintenance activities took up 15%, enrichment 12%, and recess 7%. Notably, the share of the school day devoted to academics shrank as the school day got longer. The researchers found that students with a seven-hour day wound up with just 29 minutes more academic time than those with a six-hour day. In short, less than half of the added hour was devoted to academic instruction.

It’s easy to fall into the habit of treating “more school time” as shorthand for “more learning.” But the truth is that a given hour of schooling can yield a lot of learning — or none at all. There’s no assurance it will be devoted to boosting academic instruction, or even used productively. When contemplating the time kids spend in school, it’s not just the amount of time that matters but how that time is used.

In some ways, this is another facet of a much-noted pandemic phenomenon, when remote instruction (and especially asynchronous instruction) frequently proved to be a phantasm. For many students, the reported amount of time spent in remote instruction bore little relation to how much time they actually spent learning. What matters, of course, is the harder-to-measure learning time, not the easier-to-measure instructional time.

Disengaged time is lost time, too

Information on what students do during the average school day can be eye-opening, but it can’t tell us whether those students are actually engaged. That’s a problem because tuned-out students aren’t learning — whether or not they’re sitting in classrooms and regardless of what they’re supposed to be doing.

As it turns out, a lot of students spend a lot of school time feeling bored and disengaged. The High School Survey of Student Engagement reports that four out of five public high school students say they’re sometimes bored in class and half say they’re often bored (National Association of Independent Schools, 2017). The pandemic only made things worse, with nine out of 10 teachers saying students were less motivated than before (EdWeek Research Center, 2021).

And students say they’re less engaged as they get older. A Gallup study of 500,000 students found that four in five elementary students said they were engaged in school, but that the ratio fell to three in five middle schoolers and just two in five high schoolers (Busteed, 2013).

Think about it this way: If students are engaged 60% of the time, a 30-hour instructional week amounts to more like 18 hours of actual learning. This means that a 1,080-hour school year amounts to a 650-hour school year. In short, boosting engagement could potentially dwarf the benefits of a longer school day or year. Heck, this means that less school time could conceivably yield more actual learning time — if less time in class meant students were more engaged during class.

A focus on learning rather than time

The trouble with critiquing school calendars, schedules, and the like is that schools need some kind of system for serving hundreds or thousands of kids. After all, hardly anyone thinks the off-the-clock pandemic experiment was a successful one. When we ditched calendars and bell schedules, a lot of kids got lost and a lot of learning didn’t happen.

In other words, while time may be an imperfect measure, we need some way to organize schooling. If not time, then what? The obvious answer, of course, is “learning.” If you’ve spent much time at education conferences, you’ve likely heard the mantra again and again: “Instead of time being the constant and learning the variable, make learning the constant and time the variable.”

This intuition has fueled promising ideas, like “competency-based education,” which seeks to replace time-based measurements of learning with ones based on student mastery of skills and knowledge. In some competency-based programs, mastery is tracked via digital badges, which students accumulate as they progress. The trick is identifying key skills and knowledge and then knowing how to accurately measure mastery of them. That’s no picnic. The challenge may be less daunting in some fields, like math or welding, where the scope and sequence are more clearly defined. At other times, as in literature or civics, the work of defining essential competencies is really tough (Parker, 2015).

When rethinking time, the point is not to dehumanize schools in the name of some false “efficiency” but to have kids spend less time as joyless zombies staring at screens or counting down minutes to dismissal.

Thus far, when it comes to K-12 schooling, badging is mostly just an interesting idea. The practical challenge is that, even if they wish to, school systems can’t commit to a competency-based model until there are reliable, precise assessments and badges for the relevant domains. It’s a chicken-and-egg dilemma. Absent robust competency-based alternatives, it’s tough to move on from time-based policies, but absent a change in those policies, there’s only so much room for competency-based schooling.

How to rethink time

Although large-scale change may be difficult, there are many ways to begin making fuller use of educational time here and now. They may include incorporating hybrid homeschooling, more extended learning time, more nontraditional models, more virtual learning, more apprenticeships, and so on. But all of these efforts should begin with school leaders pondering how they might use time in ways that aren’t necessarily familiar, taught in educational leadership programs, or addressed in professional development. I’ve found at least four habits that can help jump-start the requisite thinking.

Know where time is going

I’m struck by the number of data-driven leaders who talk with great aplomb about achievement data but have to shrug when asked how much instructional time is used for instruction, how much time is consumed by disruptions, or exactly what kids do all day. The funny thing is that this is the kind of management data over which leaders have more direct control. When used sensibly, it can have a huge impact on those crucial achievement outcomes. Monitoring and maximizing the use of time should be a core commitment of any well-run school. And school and system leaders, advocates, and funders should demand researchers do much more work similar to that of the time-diary and class-interruption studies.

Don’t treat all time as equal

When we discuss the benefits of extended learning time or summer programs, it’s easy to get the impression that any additional school time is all pretty much equally useful. Of course, a moment’s reflection shows us just how silly that notion is. Ten minutes of an extraordinary lesson with a gifted teacher can be more valuable than 10 hours in a chaotic classroom supervised by a long-term sub. Rather than continue to tally time in the abstract, it’s vital to assess how valuable different kinds of time may be. (Success Academy’s Eva Moskowitz [2002] helpfully uses the term “learning density” to describe the amount of actual learning in a given chunk of time.) Rethinking time means asking not only how much time there is but also how well it’s used.

Make it a team sport

Monitoring and maximizing time isn’t something that school or system leaders can do by themselves. Understanding where time goes and how well it’s used requires engaging teachers, staff, and researchers. After all, it’s hard for someone in the principal’s office or central office to get good visibility into where time is being lost. The problem is that requests for input can turn all too easily into grumbling sessions. So, there’s a need to approach this as a data question, seeking specific concerns, working to quantify how time is being lost, and soliciting feedback on concrete responses.

Start with quality

It’s important to focus on maximizing the use of existing time before moving to add more time. This signals to teachers and students alike that their time is valued. Indeed, unless school leaders focus first on making the best use of time, the allure of added time can become an unfortunate excuse to avoid asking hard questions or making difficult decisions about how time is used.

One need only recall the pandemic phenomenon of “Zoom in a room” (with masked students in classrooms sitting six feet apart, staring at screens, while their teacher taught remotely) to appreciate how more time, ordered poorly, might be worse than the alternative. While competency-based learning may not be broadly feasible, it can serve as a useful guide here. Is school time leading to the mastery of desired skills or knowledge? If not, that’s a problem.

Weighing the cost

In Walden, Henry David Thoreau famously observed, “The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it.” As Harvard University’s Arthur Brooks (2021) explains:

Thoreau’s point is not that we should be all work and no play — he was one of history’s most prominent critics of that way of living. Rather, he argued that we waste too much of our lives on things we don’t value. Without thinking about it, we are spectacularly failing some cosmic cost-benefit test, as measured not in money but in what matters most: time.

When it comes to how schools use time, parents and educators can inevitably recall some school leader who squeezed out recess or music to add more test prep, and they justifiably fear that talk of “rethinking time” is code for that kind of idiocy. Let me be as clear as I can: That is the very antithesis of rethinking time. It gets things exactly backward.

When rethinking time, the point is not to dehumanize schools in the name of some false “efficiency” but to have kids spend less time as joyless zombies staring at screens or counting down minutes to dismissal. The aim is to reduce frustrating, unproductive time and increase the amount of time that’s devoted to valuable and rewarding activities. And, crucially, what should be understood as productive or unproductive may vary from school to school or system to system.

In Deep Work, Cal Newport (2016) talks of “time blocking,” a productivity strategy for finding better ways to use time and then scheduling accordingly. It’s a good metaphor for all this. In a given school, it may make sense to devote more or less time to academics or the arts; to have students in a building for fewer hours or more. But those decisions should be purposeful, shaped not by inertia but by what students and educators need.

 

References

Abrams, S.E. (2015). The mismeasure of teaching time (working paper).Teachers College, Columbia University, Center for Benefit-Cost Studies of Education.

Brooks, A.C. (2021, April 29). Stop spending time on things you hate. The Atlantic.

Busteed, B. (2013, January 7). The school cliff: Student engagement drops with each school year. Gallup.

Craw, J. (2018, February). Statistic of the month: How much time do students spend in school? National Center on Education and the Economy.

EdWeek Research Center. (2021, January 6). Data snapshot: What teacher and student morale looks like right now. Education Week.

FutureEd. (2022). How local educators plan to spend billions in federal Covid aid. www.future-ed.org/local-covid-relief-spending

Hess, F.M. (2023). The great school rethink. Harvard Education Press.

Kraft, M.A. & Monti-Nussbaum, M. (2021). The big problem with little interruptions to classroom learning. AERA Open 7 (1).

Moskowitz, E (2022). How to supercharge student learning. Thomas B. Fordham Institute.

National Association of Independent Schools. (2017). NAIS report on the 2016 high school survey of student engagement.

National Center for Education Statistics. (2020). Table 1.1. Minimum number of instructional days and hours in the school year, minimum number of hours per school day, and school start/finish dates, by state: 2020. State education practices. U.S. Department of Education.

National Education Commission on Time and Learning. (1994). Prisoners of time. Education Commission of the States.

Newport, C. (2016). Deep work: Rules for focused success in a distracted word. Grand Central Publishing.

Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. (2021), Education at a glance 2021: OECD indicators. OECD Publishing.

Parker, H.E. (2015). Assessment in practice: Digital badges as effective assessment tools. University of Illinois and Indiana University, National Institute for Learning Outcomes Assessment.

Roth J.L., Brooks-Gunn, J., Linver, M.R., & Hofferth, S.L. (2003). What happens during the school day? Time diaries from a national sample of elementary school teachers. Teachers College Record, 105 (3), 317-343.

Strauss, V. (2011, December 13), Report busts myth that U.S. class time is much lower than that of high-performing nations. The Washington Post.

This article appears in the April 2023 issue of Kappan, Vol. 104, No. 7, pp. 36-41.