Improving Student Achievement by Extending School: Is It Just a Matter of Time?

by Julie Aronson, Joy Zimmerman and Lisa Carlos
©1998 WestEd. All rights reserved.

Introduction

The widespread concern that American schools are not serving up a quality education for all students has been fueled in part by international comparisons of student achievement, which seem to show American students lagging behind their counterparts in other leading industrialized nations. Some of these same studies also indicate that American students spend considerably less time in school than those in some of the countries that outperform us.

That apparent correlation of time and achievement reinforces a common assumption that when it comes to time in education, more is better. If the American school year or day were longer, the theory goes, our students would learn more. Some policy makers are betting on it.

With the stated hope of raising student achievement, California's Governor Pete Wilson, for example, has recently proposed expanding the school year by requiring that 180 days a year be spent on instruction. Current law, by contrast, provides funding incentives to encourage a 180-day school year, but allows schools to use up to eight of the days for staff development. Wilson’s proposal comes on top of a new state incentive program encouraging districts to add a day per year to the school calendar through 2005.

How such well-intentioned efforts play out remains to be seen, for the relationship of time to learning is neither as direct nor as simple as it might initially seem. Rather, as this paper will point out, it's a complex and intriguing equation, with results depending in large part on how we use time as an education resource.