Longer school days idea gets passing grade

Longer school days idea gets passing grade

(Photo by Susan Hersh, under CC license)

By Jazelle Hunt NNPA Washington Correspondent

     WASHINGTON, D.C.  (NNPA) – Six decades after Brown v. Board of Education, an old idea is being resurrected in hopes of narrowing the education gap between Blacks and whites – expanding the school day.

    “By sixth grade, low-income students have a 6,000 hour learning gap over the course of their lifetime, accounting for these field trips, and summer learning opportunities. That’s an incredible deficit that our low-income students are trying to go through school with,” said Christopher Caruso, senior vice president of Expanded Schools at The After-School Corporation (TASC), a non-profit policy and advocacy organization.

“If your day is limited to St. Nicholas Avenue and Lennox Avenue in Harlem [New York], or a six-block radius for 15 years, you don’t have that experience, that vocabulary. So the amount of work that you have to do to show competency in testing, is tremendous.”

The idea that more time fosters academic achievement has been around almost as long as public education has. Today, ELT is aimed at closing the opportunity gap and saving underperforming schools. The theory is that if there were more time in the school day, under-resourced schools could provide the same rich experiences, in-depth lessons, and extra tutoring that middle- and upper-class students receive. Allowing more time for these perks during school hours ensures that all students receive them.

“It’s not that schools haven’t worked with students in the past to help them catch up, but… usually you would tackle that in an after-school venue,” says Barbara Pulliam Davis, superintendent of the Greene County School District in Greensboro, Ga. “With extended learning time, because it’s part of the school day, every student gets to participate. There’s no ‘I can’t stay late be-cause my mom wants me home.’”

ELT schools and districts devise a daily schedule or calendar year that adds hours or days to the traditional one. School years are usually elongated by shortening summer vacation, or adding Saturday instruction.

School days are extended by combining a variety of tactics, such as: beginning the school day earlier; adding extra blocks of time throughout the day for non-traditional learning; minimizing transitions and other non-instructional moments, and more.

Every school custom builds their program, drawing on best practices at other schools and their own school community’s needs.

Schools generally use this additional time in four ways: remediation for students who need it; advanced lessons and projects for above-average students; peer-development and creative lesson-planning time for teachers; and/or enrichment activities for students. Particularly in the case of enrichment activities, schools partner with organizations, businesses, and individuals to offer a range of engaging, fun activities to students.

For example, students at Thurgood Marshall Academy Lower School in New York City create their own public art exhibits and visit cultural gems such as the Museum of Modern Art, thanks to a partnership with arts education organization, Doing Art Together.

“A lot of upper- and middle-income families find ways to put opportunities in front of their children. There’s a whole cottage industry for upper- and middle-income kids that’s driving the opportunity gap, and low-income families don’t have the resources to pay for that,” Caruso explains. “There’s a lot of data that says two-thirds of the achievement gap is a difference of access to those opportunities. But we’re not going to hold back upper and middle-income families, we have to lift up lower-income families.”

ELT is also used as a “turnaround” method for schools that are doing poorly academically, as measured by state and federal exams. Greene County High School in Georgia, for example, has seen improvement among its students since the district adopted an “increased learning time” schedule.