Calendar

Student calendar States generally establish minimum time requirements either in terms of the number of days or hours that students must be in school. Hourly figures do not always equate with instructional time, as some figures include recess, lunch and other non-academic activities. Within the state?s parameters, districts can add time to the school day or year for students. Some districts? calendars may also include built in snow days.

While districts often attend to the details of the teacher work day, few contracts address the length of the student day. Of those that do, criteria for what constitutes the instructional day varies significantly; some districts include lunch, recess and other non-instructional time, while others do not.

Teacher calendar Most states do not have policies regarding the school calendar for teachers.. For example, only six states (Arkansas, Louisiana, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia and West Virginia) specify the amount of planning time elementary teachers receive and California is the only state that has specific requirements for on-site time for teachers beyond the student day.

Unlike states which are often silent with regard to the details of the teacher work day, districts often spell out not only the length of the teacher work day, but also the on-site time requirements beyond the student day, detailing planning time as well as limitations on meetings beyond the contractual work day.

Teacher Contract Database Our database looks at the length of the school year for students and teachers, the length of the school day for students and scheduled work day for teachers, and how much planning and collaborative time teachers receive.

The length of the teacher work year may vary depending on which source one is referring to: the collective bargaining agreement (or handbook), the teacher salary schedule or the district calendar. The inclusion of paid holidays is often the source of these discrepancies. All calculations in our database use the official district calendar and are based on student instructional days and teacher work days, including planning, professional development or conferences.

See our most recent Teacher Trendline on student and teacher school year for a detailed description of policies in our database.

What the research shows

Summer learning loss It's not just time in school that matters, it's also about what's happening when students are not in school. In Lasting Consequences of the Summer Learning Gap, Karl Alexander, Doris Entwisle and Linda Olson found that by ninth grade the achievement gap between students with high and low socio-economic backgrounds could be traced to differential summer learning over the elementary years (2007).

Instructional time Caroline M. Hoxby, Sonali Murarka and Jenny Kang found in How New York City's charter schools affect achievement, August 2009 Report that a ten day increase in the student school year at New York charter schools was associated with an increase of 0.15 standard deviations in achievement (2009).

Researchers Dave E. Marcotte and Steven W. Hemelt examined the effect of lost school days on student performance on state standardized tests. They found that in Maryland, in a year with five school day cancellations due to weather (which is the average number for the state), the number of 3rd graders who met state proficiency targets was 3 percent lower than in years with no such school closings, with smaller effects seen in the 5th and 8th grades(Marcotte and Hemelt, 2008).

But is all instructional time the same? In Improving Student Achievement by Extending School: Is It Just a Matter of Time? Julie Aronson, Joy Zimmerman, and Lisa Carlos find that, "There is little or no relationship between allocated time and student achievement; There is some relationship between engaged time and achievement; There is a larger relationship between academic learning time and achievement. In short, time does matter. How much or little it matters, however, depends greatly on the degree to which it is devoted to appropriate instruction." (1999, page 7). Even when enough instructional time is allocated, it is frequently eroded by non-instructional activities. Overall, research suggests that what matters is the amount of instructional time that students are engaged, which according to the authors? review of research, has no consistent relationship with the amount of instructional time overall.

Elena Silva agrees that proposals for expanding time in school need to focus on how to expand the time that students are engaged in learning, not just expanding the amount of instructional time overall (2007). She explains in On the Clock: Rethinking the way schools use time that extending the right kind of learning time for poor and minority students has the potential to improve student outcomes and contribute to closing the achievement gap, but notes that ?the preponderance of evidence on extending time in schools suggests that the benefits of adding time to the school day or year are by no means certain or universal.? (Page 9)

Teacher planning and collaboration Given that how instructional time is used is an important factor in how time in school affects achievement, increasing teacher time in school may be an important step. Increasing the teacher work day or work year can provide more time for teachers to plan and collaborate, which in turn can increase the effectiveness of the instructional time they have with their students.

Empirical and quantitative research on teacher planning and collaboration is not abundant, however what has been done suggests that increased teacher planning and collaboration is good for teachers. For example, other work has found that collaboration is associated with improved outcomes for teachers such as higher level of self-efficacy and increased knowledge base (Goddard, Goddard, and Tschannen-Moran). In addition, a study of a large, urban school district found a small but statistically significant positive association between teacher collaboration on school improvement and student achievement in both math and reading (Goddard, Goddard, and Tschannen-Moran, 2007).

International comparisons According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation & Development (OECD), in 2012 lower secondary teachers in the United States spent more hours teaching in the classroom than teachers in any other OECD country with data for that year except for Chile. Across all grade levels, U.S. teachers spent over 1,000 hours teaching per year, which is 100s of hours more than the average of across all countries in the report (OECD, 2014). Despite the fact that American students are in school much longer than other countries, our PISA scores are average at best. In 2012, the United States had roughly average scores on the PISA in reading and science, a below average scores in math (OECD).

In The Learning Gap: Why Our Schools Are Failing and What We Can Learn from Japanese and Chinese Education, Harold Stevenson and James Stigler highlight differences in how American and Asian teachers spend their day. They observe that teachers in Japan are with students only 60 percent of the day. The remaining time is mostly spent planning lessons, collaborating with other teachers and meeting with students one on one. American teachers, in contrast, generally have less than one hour of planning a day. These findings are echoed by a study of South Korean teachers by Nam-Hwa and Miyoung which found that South Korean teachers were only with students 35 percent of their day, with the rest going towards administrative work, grading, and preparation for instruction (2008).

Works Cited

Alexander, Karl L., Doris R. Entwisle, and Linda Steffel Olson. "Lasting consequences of the summer learning gap." American Sociological Review72.2 (2007): 167-180.

Aronson, Julie, Joy Zimmerman, and Lisa Carlos. "Improving Student Achievement by Extending School: Is It Just a Matter of Time?." (1999).

Baines, Lawrence. "Learning from the World: Achieving More by Doing Less." Phi Delta Kappan 89.2 (2007): 98-100.

Goddard, Yvonne, Roger Goddard, and Megan Tschannen-Moran. "A theoretical and empirical investigation of teacher collaboration for school improvement and student achievement in public elementary schools." The Teachers College Record 109.4 (2007): 877-896.

Hoxby, Caroline M., Sonali Murarka, and Jenny Kang. ?How New York City's Charter Schools Affect Achivement, August 2009 Report.? Second report in series. Cambridge, MA: New York City Charter Schools Evaluation Project, September 2009.

Kang, Nam-Hwa, and Miyoung Hong. "Achieving excellence in teacher workforce and equity in learning opportunities in South Korea." Educational Researcher 37.4 (2008): 200-207.

Marcotte, Dave E., and Steven W. Hemelt. 2008 ?Unscheduled Closings and Student Performance,? Education Finance and Policy. v. 3(3), pp. 316-38. (a previous working paper version is available here)

OECD (2014), Education at a Glance 2014: OECD Indicators, OECD Publishing. http://dx.doi.org/10.1787/eag-2014-en

OECD. ?Country Note, Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) Results from PISA 2012: United States.? http://www.oecd.org/pisa/keyfindings/PISA-2012-results-US.pdf

Silva, Elena. On the clock: Rethinking the way schools use time. Education Sector, 2007.

Stevenson, Harold and James W. Stigler. The Learning Gap: Why Our Schools are Failing and What We Can Learn from Japanese and Chinese Education. New York: Summit Books, 1992.

Stigler, J. W., and H. Stevenson. "The learning gap: Why our schools are failing and what we can learn from Japanese and Chinese education." (1992).