The Perennial Reform: Fixing School Time
Education critics often call for longer school days and years. But there is little research to support such demands and several reasons why little will change.
In the past quarter century, reformers have repeatedly urged schools to fix their use of time, even though it is a solution that is least connected to what happens in classrooms or what Americans want from public schools. Since A Nation at Risk in 1983, Prisoners of Time in 1994, and the latest blue-ribbon recommendations in Tough Choices, Tough Times in 2007, both how much time and how well students spend it in school has been criticized no end.2
Business and civil leaders have been critical because they see U.S. students stuck in the middle ranks on international tests. These leaders believe that the longer school year in Asia and Europe is linked to those foreign students scoring far higher than U.S. students on those tests.
Employers criticize the amount of time students spend in school because they wonder whether the limited days and hours spent in classes are sufficient to produce the skills that employees need to work in a globally competitive economy. Employers also wonder whether our comparatively short school year will teach the essential workplace behaviors of punctuality, regular attendance, meeting deadlines, and following rules.
Parents criticize school schedules because they want schools to be open when they go to work in the morning and to remain open until they pick up their children before dinner.
Professors criticize policy makers for allotting so little time for teachers to gain new knowledge and skills during the school day. Other researchers want both policy makers and practitioners to distinguish between requiring more time in school and academic learning time, academic jargon for those hours and minutes where teachers engage students in learning content and skills or, in more jargon, time on task.3
Finally, cyberschool champions criticize school schedules because they think it's quaint to have students sitting at desks in a building with hundreds of other students for 180 days when a revolution in communication devices allows children to learn the formal curriculum in many places, not just in school buildings. Distance learning advocates, joined by those who see cyberschools as the future, want children and youths to spend hardly any time in K-12 schools.4
Time Options
Presidential commissions, parents, academics, and employers have proposed the same solutions, again and again, for fixing the time students spend in school: Add more days to the annual school calendar. Change to year-round schools. Add instructional time to the daily schedule. Extend the school day.
What has happened to each proposal in the past quarter century?
Longer School Year. Recommendations for a longer school year (from 180 to 220 days) came from A Nation at Risk (1983) and Prisoners of Time (1994) plus scores of other commissions and experts. In 2008, a foundation-funded report, A Stagnant Nation: Why American Students Are Still at Risk, found that the 180-day school year was intact across the nation and only Massachusetts had started a pilot program to help districts lengthen the school year. The same report gave a grade of F to states for failing to significantly expand student learning time.5
Year-Round Schools. Ending the summer break is another way to maximize student time in school. There is a homespun myth, treated as fact, that the annual school calendar, with three months off for both teachers and students, is based on the rhythm of 19th-century farm life, which dictated when school was in session. Thus, planting and harvesting chores accounted for long summer breaks, an artifact of agrarian America. Not so.
Actually, summer vacations grew out of early 20th-century urban middle-class parents (and later lobbyists for camps and the tourist industry) pressing school boards to release children to be with their families for four to eight weeks or more. By the 1960s, however, policy maker and parent concerns about students losing ground academically during the vacation months -- in academic language, "summer loss" -- gained support for year-round schooling. Cost savings also attracted those who saw facilities being used 12 months a year rather than being shuttered during the summer.
Nonetheless, although year-round schools were established as early as 1906 in Gary, Indiana, calendar innovations have had a hard time entering most schools. Districts with year-round schools still work within the 180-day year but distribute the time more evenly (e.g., 45 days in session, 15 days off) rather than having a long break between June and September. As of 2006, nearly 3,000 of the nation's 90,000 public schools enrolled more than 2.1 million students on a year-round calendar. That's less than 5% of all students attending public schools, and almost half of the year-round schools are in California. In most cases, school boards adopted year-round schools because increased enrollments led to crowded facilities, most often in minority and poor communities -- not concerns over "summer loss."6
Adding Instructional Time to the School Day. Many researchers and reformers have pointed out that the 6 and 1/2-hour school day has so many interruptions, so many distractions that teachers have less than five hours of genuine instruction time. Advocates for more instructional time have tried to stretch the actual amount of instructional time available to teachers to a seven-hour day (or 5 and 1/2 hours of time for time-on-task learning) or have tried to redistribute the existing secondary school schedule into 90-minute blocks rather than the traditional 50-minute periods. Since A Nation at Risk, this recommendation for more instructional time has resulted only in an anemic 10 more minutes per day when elementary school students study core academic subjects.7
Block scheduling in public secondary schools (60- to 90-minute periods for a subject that meets different days of the week) was started in the 1960s to promote instructional innovations. Various modified schedules have spread slowly, except in a few states where block schedules multiplied rapidly. In the past decade, an explosion of interest in small high schools has led many traditional urban comprehensive high schools of 1,500 or more students to convert to smaller high schools of 300 to 400 students, sometimes with all of those smaller schools housed within the original large building, sometimes as separate schools located elsewhere in the district. In many of these small high schools, modified schedules with instructional periods of an hour or more have found a friendly home. Block schedules rearrange existing allotted time for instruction; they do not add instructional time to the school day.8
Extended School Day. In the past half century, as the economy has changed and families increasingly have both (or single) parents working, schools have been pressed to take on childcare responsibilities, such as tutoring and homework supervision before and after school. Many elementary schools open at 7 a.m. for parents to drop off children and have after-school programs that close at 6 p.m. PDK/Gallup polls since the early 1980s show increased support for these before- and after-school programs. Instead of the familiar half-day program for 5-year-olds, all-day kindergartens (and prekindergartens for 4-year-olds) have spread swiftly in the past two decades, especially in low-income neighborhoods. Innovative urban schools, such as the for-profit Edison Inc. and KIPP (Knowledge Is Power Program), run longer school days. The latter routinely opens at 7:30 a.m. and closes at 5 p.m. and also schedules biweekly Saturday classes and three weeks of school during the summer.9
If reformers want a success story in fixing school time, they can look to extending the school day, although it's arguable how many of those changes occurred because of reformers' arguments and actions and how many from economic and social changes in family structure and the desire to chase a higher standard of living.
Cybereducation. And what about those public school haters and cheerleading technological enthusiasts who see fixing time in school as a wasted effort when online schooling and distance learning can replace formal schooling? In the 1960s and 1970s, Ivan Illich and other school critics called for dismantling public schools and ending formal schooling. They argued that schools squelched natural learning, confused school-based education with learning, and turned children into obedient students and adults rather than curious and independent lifelong learners. Communication and instructional technologies were in their infancy then, and thinkers such as Illich had few alternatives to offer families who opted out.10
Much of that ire directed at formal public schooling still exists, but now technology has made it possible for students to learn outside school buildings. Sharing common ground in this debate are deeply religious families who want to avoid secular influences in schools, highly educated parents who fear the stifling effects of school rules and text-bound instruction, and rural parents who simply want their children to have access to knowledge unavailable in their local schools. These advocates seek home schooling, distance learning, and cyber schools.11
Slight increases in home schooling may occur -- say from 1.1 million in 2003 to 2 to 3 million by the end of the decade, with the slight uptick in numbers due to both the availability of technology and a broader menu of choices for parents. Still, this represents less than 3% of public school students. Even though cheerleaders for distance learning have predicted wholesale changes in conventional site-based schools for decades, such changes will occur at the periphery, not the center, because most parents will continue to send their children to public schools.12
Even the most enthusiastic advocates for cyberschools and distance education recognize that replacing public schools is, at best, unlikely. The foreseeable future will still have 50 million children and youths crossing the schoolhouse door each weekday morning.
3 Reasons
Reformers have spent decades trotting out the same recipes for fixing the time problem in school. For all the hoopla and all of the endorsements from highly influential business and political elites, their mighty efforts have produced minuscule results. Why is that?
Cost is the usual suspect. Covering additional teacher salaries and other expenses runs high. Minnesota provides one example: shifting from 175 to 200 days of instruction cost districts an estimated $750 million a year, a large but not insurmountable price to pay.13 But costs for extending the school day for instruction and childcare are far less onerous.
Even more attractive than adding days to the calendar, however, is the claim that switching to a year-round school will save dollars. So, while there are costs involved in lengthening the school calendar, cost is not the tipping point in explaining why so few proposals to fix school time are successful.
I offer two other reasons why fixing school time is so hard.
Research showing achievement gains due to more time in school are sparse; the few studies most often displayed are contested.
Late 20th-century policy makers seriously underestimated the powerful tug that conservative, noneconomic goals (e.g., citizenship, character formation) have on parents, taxpayers, and voters. When they argued that America needed to add time to the school calendar in order to better prepare workers for global competition, they were out of step with the American public's desires for schools.
Skimpy Research
In the past quarter century of tinkering with the school calendar, cultural changes, political decisions, or strong parental concerns trumped research every time. Moreover, the longitudinal and rigorous research on time in school was -- and is -- skimpy. The studies that exist are challenged repeatedly for being weakly designed. For example, analysts examining research on year-round schools have reported that most of the studies have serious design flaws and, at best, show slight positive gains in student achievement -- except for students from low-income families, for whom gains were sturdier. As one report concluded: "[N]o truly trustworthy studies have been done on modified school calendars that can serve as the basis for sound policy decisions." Policy talk about year-round schools has easily outstripped results.14
Proving that time in school is the crucial variable in raising academic achievement is difficult because so many other variables must be considered -- the local context itself, available resources, teacher quality, administrative leadership, socioeconomic and cultural background of students and their families, and what is taught. But the lack of careful research has seldom stopped reform-driven decision makers from pursuing their agendas.
Conflicting School Goals
If the evidence suggests that, at best, a longer school year or day or restructured schedules do not seem to make the key difference in student achievement, then I need to ask: What problem are reformers trying to solve by adding more school time?
The short answer is that for the past quarter century -- A Nation at Risk (1983) is a suitable marker -- policy elites have redefined a national economic problem into an educational problem. Since the late 1970s, influential civic, business, and media leaders have sold Americans the story that lousy schools are the reason why inflation surged, unemployment remained high, incomes seldom rose, and cheaper and better foreign products flooded U.S. stores. Public schools have failed to produce a strong, post-industrial labor force, thus leading to a weaker, less competitive U.S. economy. U.S. policy elites have used lagging scores on international tests as telling evidence that schools graduate less knowledgeable, less skilled high school graduates -- especially those from minority and poor schools who will be heavily represented in the mid-21st century workforce -- than competitor nations with lower-paid workforces who produce high-quality products.
Microsoft founder Bill Gates made the same point about U.S. high schools.
In district after district across the country, wealthy white kids are taught Algebra II, while low-income minority kids are taught how to balance a checkbook. This is an economic disaster. In the international competition to have the best supply of workers who can communicate clearly, analyze information, and solve complex problems, the United States is falling behind. We have one of the highest high school dropout rates in the industrialized world.15
And here, in a nutshell, is the second reason why those highly touted reforms aimed at lengthening the school year and instructional day have disappointed policy makers. By blaming schools, contemporary civic and business elites have reduced the multiple goals Americans expect of their public schools to a single one: prepare youths to work in a globally competitive economy. This has been a mistake because Americans historically have expected more from their public schools. Let me explore the geography of this error.
For nearly three decades, influential groups have called for higher academic standards, accountability for student outcomes, more homework, more testing, and, of course, more time in school. Many of their recommendations have been adopted. By 2008, U.S. schools had a federally driven system of state-designed standards anchored in increased testing, results-driven accountability, and demands for students to spend more time in school. After all, reformers reasoned, the students of foreign competitors were attending school more days in the year and longer hours each day, even on weekends, and their test scores ranked them higher than the U.S.
Even though this simplistic causal reasoning has been questioned many times by researchers who examined education and work performance in Japan, Korea, Singapore, Germany, and other nations, "common sense" observations by powerful elites swept away such questions. So the U.S.'s declining global economic competitiveness had been spun into a time-in-school problem.16
But convincing evidence drawn from research that more time in school would lead to a stronger economy, less inequalities in family income, and that elusive edge in global competitiveness -- much less a higher rank in international tests -- remains missing in action.
The Public's Goals for Education
Business and civic elites have succeeded at least twice in the past century in making the growth of a strong economy the primary aim of U.S. schools, but other goals have had an enormous and enduring impact on schooling, both in the past and now. These goals embrace core American values that have been like second-hand Roses, shabby and discarded clothes hidden in the back of the closet and occasionally trotted out for show during graduation. Yet since the origins of tax-supported public schools in the early 19th century, these goals have been built into the very structures of schools so much so that, looking back from 2008, we hardly notice them.17
Time-based reforms have had trouble entering schools because other goals have had -and continue to have -- clout with parents and taxpayers. Opinion polls, for example, display again and again what parents, voters, and taxpayers want schools to achieve. One recent poll identified the public's goals for public schools. The top five were to:
- Prepare people to become responsible citizens;
- Help people become economically sufficient;
- Ensure a basic level of quality among schools;
- Promote cultural unity among all Americans
- Improve social conditions for people.
Tied for sixth and seventh were goals to:
- Enhance people's happiness and enrich their lives; and
- Dispel inequities in education among certain schools and certain groups.18
To reach those goals, a democratic society expects schools to produce adults who are engaged in their communities, enlightened employers, and hard-working employees who have acquired and practiced particular values that sustain its way of life. Dominant American social, political, and economic values pervade family, school, workplace, and community: Act independently, accept personal responsibility for actions, work hard and complete a job well, and be fair, that is, willing to be judged by standards applied to others as long as the standards are applied equitably.19
These norms show up in school rules and classroom practices in every school. School is the one institutional agent between the family, the workplace, and voting booth or jury room responsible for instilling those norms in children's behavior. School is the agent for turning 4-year-olds into respectful students engaged in their communities, a goal that the public perceives as more significant than preparing children and youths for college and the labor market. In elite decision makers' eagerness to link schools to a growing economy, they either overlooked the powerful daily practices of schooling or neglected to consider seriously these other goals. In doing so, they erred. The consequences of that error in judgment can be seen in the fleeting attention that policy recommendations for adding more time in school received before being shelved.
Teaching in a Democracy
Public schools were established before industrialization, and they expanded rapidly as factories and mills spread.
Those times appear foreign to readers today. For example, in the late 19th century, calling public schools "factory-like" was not an epithet hurled at educators or supporters of public schools as it has been in the U.S. since the 1960s.20 In fact, describing a public school as an assembly-line factory or a productive cotton mill was considered a compliment to forward-looking educators who sought to make schools modern through greater efficiency in teaching and learning by copying the successes of wealthy industrialists. Progressive reformers praised schools for being like industrial plants in creating large, efficient, age-graded schools that standardized curriculum while absorbing millions of urban migrants and foreign immigrants. As a leading progressive put it:
Our schools are, in a sense, factories in which the raw products (children) are to be shaped and fashioned into products to meet the various demands of life. . . . It is the business of the school to build its pupils to the specifications [of manufacturers].21
Progressive reformers saw mills, factories, and corporations as models for transforming the inefficient one-room schoolhouse in which students of different ages received fitful, incomplete instruction from one teacher into the far more efficient graded school where each teacher taught students a standardized curriculum each year. First established in Boston in 1848 and spreading swiftly in urban districts, the graded school became the dominant way of organizing a school by 1900. By the 1920s, schools exemplified the height of industrial efficiency because each building had separate classrooms with their own teachers. The principal and teachers expected children of the same age to cover the same content and learn skills by the end of the school year and perform satisfactorily on tests in order to be promoted to the next grade.22
Superintendents saw the age-graded school as a modern version of schooling well adapted to an emerging corporate-dominated industrial society where punctuality, dependability, and obedience were prized behaviors. As a St. Louis superintendent said in 1871:
The first requisite of the school is Order: each pupil must be taught first and foremost to conform his behavior to a general standard. . . .The pupil must have his lessons ready at the appointed time, must rise at the tap of the bell, move to the line, return; in short, go through all of the evolutions with equal precision.
Recognition and fame went to educators who achieved such order in their schools.23
But the farm-driven seasonal nature of rural one-room schoolhouses was incompatible with the explosive growth of cities and an emerging industrial society. In the early 20th century, progressive reformers championed compulsory attendance laws while extending the abbreviated rural-driven short hours and days into a longer school day and year. Reformers wanted to increase the school's influence over children's attitudes and behavior, especially in cities where wave after wave of European immigrants settled. Seeking higher productivity in organization, teaching, and learning at the least cost, reformers broadened the school's mission by providing medical, social, recreational, and psychological services at schools. These progressive reformers believed schools should teach society's norms to both children and their families and also educate the whole child so that the entire government, economy, and society would change for the better. So, when reformers spoke about "factory-like schools" a century ago, they wanted educators to copy models of success; they were not scolding them. That changed, however, by the late 20th century.
As the U.S. shifted from a manufacturing-based economy to a post-industrial information-based economy, few policy makers reckoned with this history of schooling. Few influential decision makers view schools as agents of both stability and change. Few educational opinion makers recognize that the conservative public still expects schools to instill in children dominant American norms of being independent and being held accountable for one's actions, doing work well and efficiently, and treating others equitably to ensure that when students graduate they will practice these values as adults. And, yes, the public still expects schools to strengthen the economy by ensuring that graduates have the necessary skills to be productive employees in an ever-changing, highly competitive, and increasingly global workplace. But that is just one of many competing expectations for schools.
Thus far, I have focused mostly on how policy makers and reform-minded civic and business elites have not only defined economic problems as educational ones that can be fixed by more time spent in schools but also neglected the powerful hold that socialization goals have on parents' and taxpayers' expectations. Now, I want to switch from the world of reform-driven policy makers and elites to teachers and students because each group views school time differently from their respective perch. Teacher and student perspectives on time in school have little influence in policy makers' decision making. Although the daily actions of teachers and students don't influence policy makers, they do matter in explaining why reformers have had such paltry results in trying to fix school time.
Differing Views of Time in School
For civic and business leaders, media executives, school boards, superintendents, mayors, state legislators, governors, U.S. representatives, and the President (what I call "policy elites"), electoral and budget cycles become the timeframe within which they think and act. Every year, budgets must be prepared and, every two or four years, officials run for office and voters decide who should represent them and whether they should support bond referenda and tax levies. Because appointed and elected policy makers are influential with the media, they need to assure the public during campaigns that slogans and stump speeches were more than talk. Sometimes, words do become action when elected decision makers, for example, convert a comprehensive high school into a cluster of small high schools, initiate 1:1 laptop programs, and extend the school day. This is the world of policy makers.
The primary tools policy makers use to adopt and implement decisions, however, are limited and blunt -- closer to a hammer than a scalpel. They use exhortation, press conferences, political bargaining, incentives, and sanctions to formulate and adopt decisions. (Note, however, that policy makers rarely implement decisions; administrators and practitioners put policies into practice.) Policy makers want broad social, political, economic, and organizational goals adopted as policies, and then they want to move educators, through encouragement, incentives, and penalties, to implement those policies in schools and classrooms that they seldom, if ever, enter.
The world of teachers differs from that of policy makers. For teachers, the time-driven budget and electoral cycles that shape policy matter little for their classrooms, except when such policies carry consequences for how and what teachers should teach, such as accountability measures that assume teachers and students are slackers and need to work harder. In these instances, teachers become classroom gatekeepers in deciding how much of a policy they will put into practice and under what conditions.
What matters most to teachers are student responses to daily lessons, weekly tests, monthly units, and the connections they build over time in classrooms, corridors, during lunch, and before and after school. Those personal connections become the compost of learning. Those connections account for former students pointing to particular teachers who made a difference in their lives. Teacher tools, unlike policy maker tools, are unconnected to organizational power or media influence. Teachers use their personalities, knowledge, experience, and skills in building relationships with groups of students and providing individual help. Teachers believe there is never enough time in the daily schedule to finish a lesson, explain a point, or listen to a student. Administrative intrusions gobble up valuable instructional time that could go to students. In class, then, both teachers and students are clock watchers, albeit for different reasons.24
Students view time differently as well. For a fraction of students from middle- and low-income families turned off by school requirements and expectations, spending time in classrooms listening to teachers, answering questions, and doing homework is torture; the hands of the clock seldom move fast enough for them. The notion of extending the school day and school year for them -- or continuing on to college and four more years of reading texts and sitting in classrooms -- is not a reform to be implemented but a punishment to be endured. Such students look for creative shortcuts to skip classes, exit the school as early as they can, and find jobs or enter the military once they graduate.
Most students, however, march from class to class until they hear "Pomp and Circumstance." But a high school diploma, graduates have come to realize, is not enough in the 21st-century labor market.
College for Everyone
In the name of equity and being responsive to employers' needs, most urban districts have converted particular comprehensive high schools into clusters of small college-prep academies where low-income minority students take Advanced Placement courses, write research papers, and compete to get into colleges and universities. Here, then, is the quiet, unheralded, and unforeseen victory of reformers bent on fixing time in school. They have succeeded unintentionally in stretching K-12 into preK-16 public schooling, not just for middle- and upper-middle class students, but for everyone.
As it has been for decades for most suburban middle- and upper-middle class white and minority families, now it has become a fact, an indisputable truth converted into a sacred mission for upwardly mobile poor families: A high school diploma and a bachelor's degree are passports to high-paying jobs and the American Dream.
For families who already expect their sons and daughters to attend competitive colleges, stress begins early. Getting into the best preschools and elementary and secondary schools and investing in an array of activities to build attractive résumés for college admission officers to evaluate become primary tasks. For such families and children, there is never enough time for homework, Advanced Placement courses, music, soccer, drama, dance, and assorted after-school activities. For high-achieving, stressed-out students already expecting at least four more years of school after high school graduation, reform proposals urging a longer school year and an extended day often strike an unpleasant note. Angst and fretfulness become familiar clothes to don every morning as students grind out 4s and 5s on Advanced Placement exams, play sports, and compile just the right record that will get them into just the right school.25
For decades, pressure on students to use every minute of school to prepare for college has been strongest in middle- and upper-middle-class suburbs. What has changed in the past few decades is the spread of the belief that everyone, including low-income minority students, should go to college.
To summarize, for decades, policy elites have disregarded teacher and student perspectives on time in school. Especially now when all students are expected to enter college, children, youths, and teachers experience time in school differently than policy makers who seek a longer school day and school year. Such varied perceptions about time are heavily influenced by the socialization goals of schooling, age-graded structures, socioeconomic status of families, and historical experience. And policy makers often ignore these perceptions and reveal their tone-deafness and myopia in persistently trying to fix time in schools.
Policy elites need to parse fully this variation in perceptions because extended time in school remains a high priority to reform-driven policy makers and civic and business leaders anxious about U.S. performance on international tests and fearful of falling behind in global economic competitiveness. The crude policy solutions of more days in the year and longer school days do not even begin to touch the deeper truth that what has to improve is the quality of "academic learning time." If policy makers could open their ears and eyes to student and teacher perceptions of time, they would learn that the secular Holy Grail is decreasing interruption of instruction, encouraging richer intellectual and personal connections between teachers and students, and increasing classroom time for ambitious teaching and active, engaged learning. So far, no such luck.
Conclusion
These three reasons -- cost, lackluster research, and the importance of conservative social goals to U.S. taxpayers and voters -- explain why proposals to fix time in U.S. schools have failed to take hold.
Policy elites know research studies proving the worth of year-round schools or lengthened school days are in short supply. Even if an occasional study supported the change, the school year is unlikely to go much beyond 180 days. Policy elites know school goals go far beyond simply preparing graduates for college and for employability in a knowledge-based economy. And policy elites know they must show courage in their pursuit of improving failing U.S. schools by forcing students to go to school just as long as their peers in India, China, Japan, and Korea. That courage shows up symbolically, playing well in the media and in proposals to fix time in schools, but it seldom alters calendars.
While cost is a factor, it is the stability of schooling structures and the importance of socializing the young into the values of the immediate community and larger society that have defeated policy-driven efforts to alter time in school over the past quarter century. Like the larger public, I am unconvinced that requiring students and teachers to spend more time in school each day and every year will be better for them. How that time is spent in learning before, during, and after school is far more important than decision makers counting the minutes, hours, and days students spend each year getting schooled. That being said, I have little doubt that state and federal blue-ribbon commissions will continue to make proposals about lengthening time in school. Those proposals will make headlines, but they will not result in serious, sustained attention to what really matters -- improving the quality of the time that teachers and students spend with one another in and out of classrooms.
1. I wish to thank Selma Wassermann for her most helpful comments and suggestions on the penultimate draft and Bruce Smith for inviting me to do this special report.
2. National Commission on Excellence in Education, A Nation at Risk (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1983); National Education Commission on Time and Learning, Prisoners of Time (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1994); New Commission on the Skills of the American Work Force, Tough Times or Tough Choices (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2006).
3. David Berliner, "What's All the Fuss About Instructional Time?" in Miriam Ben-Peretz and Rainer Bromme, eds., The Nature of Time in Schools: Theoretical Concepts, Practitioner Perceptions (New York: Teachers College Press, 1990).
4. See, for example, North Central Regional Educational Laboratory, "E-Learning Policy Implications for K-12 Educators and Decision Makers," 2001, www.ncrel.org/policy/pubs/html/pivol11/apr2002d.htm.
5. Strong American Schools, A Stagnant Nation: Why American Students Are Still at Risk (Washington, D.C., 2008), pp. 3-4.
6. Joel Weiss and Robert Brown, "Telling Tales Over Time: Constructing and Deconstructing the School Calendar," Teachers College Record, 2003, pp. 1720-57; Shaun P. Johnson and Terry E. Spradlin, "Alternatives to the Traditional School-Year Calendar," Education Policy Brief, Center for Evaluation & Education Policy, Spring 2007, p. 3; for a description of the "Gary Plan" of year-round schooling, see Ronald Cohen, Children of the Mill: Schooling and Society in Gary, Indiana, 1906-1960 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990).
7. Strong American Schools, op. cit., p. 4.
8. Robert Canady and Michael Rettig, Block Scheduling: A Catalyst for Change in High Schools (Larchmont, N.Y.: Eye on Education, 1995); personal communication from Michael Rettig, 28 April 2008.
9. Lowell C. Rose and Alec M. Gallup, "38th Annual Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup Poll of the Public's Attitudes Toward the Public Schools," Phi Delta Kappan, September 2006; Sarah Huyvaert, Time Is of the Essence: Learning in School (Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 1998), pp. 59-67; for KIPP, see: www.kipp.org/01/whatisakippschool.cfm.
10. Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society (New York: Harper & Row, 1971).
11. For a politically conservative view on home schooling and its history, see Isabel Lyman, "Home Schooling: Back to the Future?" Cato Institute Policy Analysis No. 294, 7 January 1998, www.cato.org/ pubs/pas/pa-294.html. Beginning nearly a decade ago, state- and district-funded cyber schools, such as Florida Virtual School, provide courses for homeschoolers, parents who want more learning options for their children, and students in isolated rural areas who lack access to advanced high school courses. Florida Virtual School served over 50,000 students in 2006-07 and expects to reach 100,000 in 2009. See www.flvs.net.
12. For predictions from the 1990s and current ones for distance learning and students' use of the Internet, see "Predictions Database" in Elon University's "Imagining the Internet," www.elon.edu/predictions/q13.aspx. For an astute analysis of distance learning, see Clayton M. Christensen and Michael B. Horn, "How Do We Transform Our Schools?" Education Next, Summer 2008, www.hoover.org/publications/ednext/18575969.html. For the 2003 figure on home-schooled children, see "Fast Facts" from National Center for Education Statistics, http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=65.
13. The Minnesota example comes from Elena Silva, "On the Clock: Rethinking the Way Schools Use Time," Education Sector Reports, January 2007, p. 8; for cost savings in year-round schools, see Nasser Daneshvary and Terrence M. Clauretie, "Efficiency and Costs in Education: Year-Round Versus Traditional Schedules," Economics of Education Review, 2001, pp. 279-87.
14. Shaun P. Johnson and Terry E. Spradlin, op. cit., p. 5; Harris Cooper, et. al., "The Effects of Modified School Calendars on Student Achievement and on School and Community Attitudes," Review of Educational Research, Spring 2003, pp. 1-52.
15. Bill Gates, "What Is Wrong with America's High Schools?" Los Angeles Times, 3 March 2005, p. B11.
16. One of the better summaries of how schools had become the central problem to the future of the nation in the 1980s can be found in Chester E. Finn, Jr, We Must Take Charge: Our Schools and Our Future (New York: Free Press, 1991); also see Diane Ravitch, "The Test of Time," Education Next, Spring 2003, www.educationnext.org/20032/32.html; and, in the same issue, see a reprint of Albert Shanker's retrospective (9 May 1993) on A Nation at Risk report. For analyses of other countries compared to the U.S., see Norton Grubb and Marvin Lazerson, The Education Gospel: The Economic Power of Schooling (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), pp. 170-72.
17. John Goodlad, A Place Called School (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1984); and David Labaree, "Public Goods, Private Goods: The American Struggle over Educational Goals," American Educational Research Journal, Spring 1997, pp. 39-81.
18. Lowell C. Rose and Alec M. Gallup, "The 32nd Annual Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup Poll of the Public's Attitudes Toward the Public Schools," Phi Delta Kappan, September 2000, p. 47.
19. There are other personal values, such as honesty, trustworthiness, etc., that are highly prized and reinforced by teachers and school policies, but I will focus on the obvious societal values embedded in the structures and processes of tax-supported schooling. See Robert Dreeben, On What Is Learned in School (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley, 1968); Steven Brint, Mary C. Contreras, and Michael T. Matthews, "Socialization Messages in Primary Schools: An Organizational Analysis," Sociology of Education, July 2001, pp. 157-80; and Philip Jackson, Life in Classrooms (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1968).
20. For examples of the pejorative use of "factory-like schools," see, Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, Schooling in Capitalist America: Educational Reform and the Contradictions of Economic Life (New York: Basic Books, 1976); and Joel Spring, "Education as a Form of Social Control," in Clarence Karier, Paul Violas, and Joel Spring, eds., Roots of Crisis: American Education in the 20th Century (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1973), pp. 30-39.
21. Quote cited in Raymond Callahan, Education and the Cult of Efficiency (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), p. 152. It comes from Stanford Professor Ellwood P. Cubberley in his textbook, Public School Administration, written in 1916.
22. David L. Angus, Jeffrey E. Mirel, and Maris A. Vinovskis, "Historical Development of Age-Stratification in Schooling," Teachers College Record, Winter 1988, pp. 211-36.
23. David B. Tyack, The One Best System: A History of American Urban Education (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1974), p. 43.
24. Marty Swaim and Stephen Swaim, Teacher Time: Why Teacher Workload and School Management Matter to Each Student in Our Public Schools (Arlington, Va.: Redbud Books, 1999); Claudia Meek, "Classroom Crisis: It's About Time," Phi Delta Kappan, April 2003, pp. 592-95; and National Center for Education Statistics, Time Spent Teaching Core Academic Subjects in Elementary Schools (Washington, D.C.: National Center for Education Statistics, 1997).
25. Although aware of anxiety-stressed teenagers, I was surprised by an article that described students in an affluent high school being required to eat lunch because they skipped eating in order to take another Advanced Placement class. See Winnie Hu, "Too Busy to Eat, Students Get a New Required Course: Lunch," New York Times, 24 May 2008, pp. A1, A11.
LARRY CUBAN is professor emeritus of education, Stanford University. He is author of the forthcoming book, Hugging the Middle: How Teachers Teach in an Era of Testing and Accountability (Teachers College Press, 2008).1
Kappan's focus on the use of time in U.S. schools was made possible by the generous support of Don Duncan, a retired Oregon educator and a longtime member of Phi Delta Kappa.
