Push Is On to Add Time to School

About 50 6th graders at Roger Williams Middle School hiked with the Audubon Society during a class period last week, examining plant and insect species and cataloging birds from a nearby urban park. For another period, they gathered water samples aboard a boat on Narragansett Bay.

Those experiences were part of their new 7th-period class, which adds an extra hour to the school day, five days a week, focused on building student competency and a deeper understanding of the STEM subjects—science, technology, engineering, and math. For two of those weekly periods, the students venture outside the walls of the Providence, R.I., school for field-based learning experiences led by their teacher in conjunction with community providers.

On the other days, the 7th period is reserved for an added hour of instruction related to the experiences they have off campus, taught by their teacher and an AmeriCorps member. Last week, students spent the extra in-class periods classifying the insect and plant species they found on their hike and peering through microscopes to look for plankton in the water samples they collected.

Providence’s expanded-school-day pilot is a partnership between the school district and the Providence After School Alliance, a nonprofit that manages after-school programs for low-income students in that city. Their efforts come alongside growing national interest in expanded learning time, or adding time to the school calendar as a way to help low-performing students catch up.

But while policymakers and recently proposed federal legislation promote expanded learning time as a strategy for school turnaround, some worry that it may be gaining steam too rapidly as a fix for schools that lack the know-how, resources, or research to implement it effectively.

According to Hillary Salmons, the executive director of the alliance, Providence is taking small steps first.

“Quite honestly, there is no way with our economy that we could robustly afford to expand the school day for all of our kids,” Ms. Salmons said. “For this model to be scalable, we need to be strategic with limited funds. Expanding the day for learning is going to have to be staged in building blocks with a good mix of proven practices and a match of resources and priorities.”

New Models

A number of schools in the Houston district were listed on Texas’ “academically unacceptable” list and faced penalties if they didn’t start improving. As a solution, Houston adopted strategies from high-performing charter schools for its Apollo 20 Initiative, launched last year.

Manny Babbitt, 12, looks at a small plant as he and other sixth grade students from Roger Williams Middle School in Providence, Rhode Island, walk along a trail at the Powder Mill Ledges Wildlife Refuge in Smithfield, Rhode Island, on Oct. 20.

—M. Scott Brauer for Education Week

Nine middle and high schools added five days to the year and an hour of instructional time to the day, four days a week. A new principal was installed in each school, and more than half the teaching staff and a third of the administrators were laid off and replaced. More than 257 math tutors were also hired at a base salary of $20,000 to work one-on-two with students.

Before school started this fall, the 204,000-student district reported academic gains in the nine participating schools after one year of implementation, according to an evaluation of the program by a Harvard University economist. Math scores, on average, improved equivalent to an additional 3½ months’ worth of material. Reading scores increased minimally, however. This school year, every school in the district added five days to the year, and 11 elementary schools are increasing their instruction time on math and reading each day.

Whether the Apollo initiative will be sustainable or the results long-lasting is unclear. Financial support for the program (primarily for the tutors), comes from a combination of public funding and private dollars and supports three years implementation.

Houston is one of several large urban districts that are expanding the learning day. Boston has a number of expanded learning schools, many of them part of Massachusetts’ Expanded Learning Initiative, which uses state funding. And Chicago is feuding with the local teachers’ union over lengthening the days at a few schools this year, with the district seeking to move to a longer day at all schools by 2012-2013.

But these expanded learning time, or ELT, efforts have some questioning if added school time really has an impact on students, and whether schools will be able to use added time effectively to improve student outcomes.

Elena Silva, a senior policy analyst at the Washington-based think tank Education Sector, says there is a lack of research-backed examples of high-performing ELT schools that others can look to for guidance. While charter schools and schools in Massachusetts have been able to use the strategy effectively, she said, the average school would face different circumstances and concerns in...

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