A MARTÍNEZ, HOST:
America's schools are engaged in a war of attrition with the clock. With so many students still struggling to make up ground after the pandemic, many districts are asking, how can we find more time in the day? Well, turns out some new research offers surprising answers, NPR's Cory Turner explains.
CORY TURNER, BYLINE: Believe it or not, every state has its own rules about the minimum amount of time students need to be in school.
SARAH NOVICOFF: The average U.S. school is in session for 6.9 hours per day and a hundred and seventy-nine days per year.
TURNER: But Stanford University researcher Sarah Novicoff says that average hides wild variation between states.
NOVICOFF: The average student in a top-rank state with a lot of time is going to experience one and a half more years of school than the average student in a state with low levels of instructional time.
TURNER: Think about that. Between kindergarten and 12th grade, Novicoff says students in some states are getting nearly a year and a half more class time than students in other states simply because of where they happen to live.
NOVICOFF: The five top-rank states are Texas, Nebraska, Arkansas, Mississippi and Alabama, and the five bottom states are Hawaii, Nevada, Maine, Oregon and Rhode Island.
TURNER: The researchers who published their findings in the American Educational Research Journal poured over dozens of studies of learning time and arrived at a few other conclusions. While many districts have moved to a four-day school week, often because they believe it helps them hire and keep teachers, lead researcher Matthew Kraft at Brown University says the evidence here is really clear.
MATTHEW KRAFT: Four-day school weeks are harmful for students learning and don't appear to be beneficial for teacher retention.
TURNER: Generally, Kraft and Novicoff found that more time has direct positive benefits on student achievement. Sometimes, that's a longer school year or a longer school day. But they found that the places where extra time helps students the most tended to bundle that time with extra supports, like high-dosage tutoring or...
NOVICOFF: ...Data-driven instruction, teacher observations, intervention services.
TURNER: The researchers also wanted to answer another really important question about how schools use the time they do have.
KRAFT: How much time is actually lost during the school day to things that are outside of teachers' control?
TURNER: So they did a deep dive with one big city school district. They went into classrooms...
KRAFT: ...And took out our notebooks and wrote down every time instruction was interrupted due to intercom announcement, due to a knock on the door, due to a phone call to the class phone.
TURNER: When the researchers added up all that time, plus the time students showed up late to class or not at all or had a substitute teacher, high schoolers in the district missed what amounts to 45 days of class time, a quarter of the school year. Overall, the researchers offer a few recommendations. Those states with really low-class time requirements should consider raising them. And for places that can't afford to do that, Kraft says they may want to consider shifting start times later for older students or bumping core classes earlier in the day before student attention fades, or just thinking twice before making all those intercom announcements.
Cory Turner, NPR News. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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