Depending on where they grow up, some American students receive significantly less education each year than their peers in other areas, newly published research shows. Worse still, when student absences, suspensions, and classroom interruptions are taken into account, in some districts much of the time allocated for instruction is simply wasted.
Seemingly minute differences in the length of a school day or year, whether resulting from state laws or local rules governing school districts, ultimately grow into colossal gaps in learning opportunities. The authors estimate that children living in jurisdictions that require the most time in school will receive more than two years more education over the course of their primary and secondary education careers than children living in areas that require it least .
“It’s hard for me to understand why some students should have access to a 180-day school year, while others in a district away get two weeks less education,” said co-author Matthew Kraft, an economics professor at Brown University. “Why would we want that inequality to be baked into our system?”
Report: Schools won’t recover from the COVID absenteeism crisis until 2030
The article, published on Monday in the American Education Research Journal, relies primarily on figures collected before the emergence of COVID-19. But its resonance will inevitably be amplified by the post-pandemic crisis of chronic absenteeism, with a quarter of students across the country missing at least 10 percent of the school year by 2023-2024. At the same time, due to both budget concerns and popular choice, a growing number of school districts are switching to a four-day work week.
The pronounced geographic disparities in access to educational time are largely the product of state laws. While 37 states mandate a minimum number of days in the academic year, their requirements range from 160 days in Colorado to 186 days in Kansas; of the 37 states that set a minimum for teaching hours per year, Arizona is at the bottom with 720, while Texas is at the top with 1,260.
It’s hard for me to understand why some students should have access to a 180-day school year, while others in a district down the street get two weeks less instruction.
Matt Kraft, Brown University
In other words, although the average American elementary school provides instruction 179 days a year, just under seven hours a day, the local variation is much greater.
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Using data from the U.S. Census’ nationally representative National Teacher and Principal Survey, the study found that schools in the 90th percentile of instructional time nationally offered 1.17 more hours of school each day than those in the 10th percentile. During the school year, these approximately 70 minutes per day accumulate to a difference of 196 hours of teaching, or approximately five and a half weeks of school per year.
Some school districts set their own requirements for time in school higher than those of their respective states. But on average, schools in the five states with the highest minimum instructional time (Texas, Nebraska, Arkansas, Mississippi and Alabama) are open 133 more hours per year than those in the five states with the lowest minimums (Hawaii). , Nevada, Maine, Oregon and Rhode Island). Cumulatively, students in the first five states will receive an additional 1.4 years of education, from kindergarten through twelfth grade.
Even recognizing these differences, some children actually receive less instructional time than their state or district requires. As a case study, Kraft and co-author Sarah Novicoff examine the Providence Public School District in Rhode Island, which provides 1,174 hours of instructional time annually for elementary schools and 1,215 hours for secondary schools.
After using state data to track excused and unexcused student absences, teacher absences, tardiness, suspensions and a host of outside interruptions, Kraft has previously found that intercom announcements, staff withdrawals and ‘fly -bys” from school leaders can disrupt the typical classroom. as many as 2,000 times per year – the authors calculate that a typical Providence elementary school student misses 16 percent of intended class time. The average high school student misses as much as 25 percent.
Novicoff, a former high school teacher now pursuing her doctorate at Stanford, said school staff and administrators should strive to harvest low-hanging fruit during the school day by doing everything they can to minimize disruptions in the classroom.
“They can say, ‘If I want to take a kid out of that classroom, I’ll instant message their teacher instead of banging on their door,’” she suggested. “The difference is in the extent to which students notice and are disturbed.”
Effects on performance
But while some teachers do their best to maximize available time, others have happily embraced a shorter school week in recent years.
Between 2019 and 2023, the number of school districts operating four days a week increased from about 662 to nearly 900, according to a count by Paul N. Thompson, an economics professor at Oregon State University. The switch has been especially popular in more rural districts, which often face greater transportation challenges and welcome a simplified schedule.
Study: Four-day school week harms learning
But Thompson’s research shows that Oregon districts that implemented the change suffered significant performance losses. Although the schools compensated for the missing day by extending the four remaining days, students still lost several hours of school per week. Strikingly, learning losses at those schools increased the longer they stayed in a four-day week, indicating that the effects became larger as students lost more instructional time.
Recently, Thompson conducted a new study on four-day weeks in the United States, again concluding that they were associated with significant drops in test scores. Academic slippage was greatest at schools that lost more instructional time, as well as at schools in less rural settings.
We have good evidence that summer school can positively influence student achievement, especially in mathematics.
Emily Morton, CALDER
Emily Morton, co-author of that study and a researcher at the Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research, said her findings on the benefits of more instruction time were generally consistent with those of Kraft and Novicoff. But she recommended that before changing the law to require more school hours and days, states should heed Providence’s example and find ways to maximize the instructional time already available.
“It seems sensible and more cost-effective to first focus on regaining the time currently ‘lost’ during the school day or school year (due to interruptions, announcements, absences, etc.),” Morton said. “I would also say that we have good evidence that summer school can have a positive impact on student achievement, especially in math.”
In Rare Move, New Mexico adds weeks of extra teaching time to primary and secondary education
Schools and teachers sometimes even resist when pushed to stay in session longer. After New Mexico passed a law last year that significantly lifted the minimum number of annual instructional hours, the state Education Department said districts must implement the new rule by offering a 180-day year. In response, more than 50 school districts have filed suit.
Kraft suggested that state authorities consider approaches that would allow communities to opt for longer school years or experiment with ways to increase education.
“We need to be aware of the potential unintended consequences of increasing minimums,” he said. “It has to be done in a way that schools and districts feel supported.”
The most important task ahead of education leaders is to stem the tide of disengagement and absenteeism that has rocked schools over the past four years. Kraft and Novicoff’s data from Providence dates back to 2016, but national attendance declined during the era of virtual education and has not recovered. It is reasonable to expect that millions of absent students will have missed tens of millions of hours of instruction during the 2023-2024 school year.
Jennifer Davis, a former official at the U.S. Department of Education and co-founder of the National Center for Time & Learning, called chronic absenteeism a “major problem” that schools would have to overcome to keep their students on track for graduation. Additional resources, including community outreach navigators and alternative learning experiences, may be needed to rebuild connections between students and schools, she added.
“Without this,” Davis wrote in an email, “we will lose the COVID generation.”
