TSC Signatory and Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel wrote a compelling op-ed for the Chicago Tribune this week outlining necessary steps to provide a strong education for all students in the city. He explains that one of the important changes has been the Full School Day initiative where Chicago Public Schools expanded learning time for all schools.

Governor Hickenlooper signed the Future School Finance Act this week, which calls for an overhaul of school financing. The bill includes a $100 million innovation fund, which prioritizes ELT. Before the reforms take place, the public must vote to fund the changes. That issue will be on the ballot this November. Read more on our blog.

Delavan-Darien School District in Wyoming is considering an ELT plan for all schools in the district that would, over the course of the 180-day school year, add up to 90 additional hours for the elementary school, 42 more hours for the middle school and 45 more hours for the high school. The school board is discussing the proposal next Tuesday, May 28th.

Edutopia highlighted Clarence R. Edwards Middle School in Boston, Massachusetts in their “Schools that Work” section. The organization created a captivating video about how a longer school days are improving academics, and supplements the video with an article from Amrita Sahni, Director of Instruction at Edwards Middle School outlining the six factors that have led to ELT implementation success at their school!

You may be wondering why this process has taken so long. State Senator Mike Johnson (D), a former teacher and principal in Colorado, drafted a policy paper and legislation after holding 100 public events that reached over 2,000 stakeholders over the past two years.

The outcome of Johnston’s process is a bill that tries to address inequity in the funding of the Centennial State’s schools. As a state, Colorado currently spends $2,518 per pupil which is significantly less than the national average, ranking them 42 out of 51 states. The funding is also unequally distributed across school districts.

In order to address the inadequacy and inequality, the Senator proposed a two step solution:
1: Reform the school finance formula with legislation in the Colorado House and Senate.
2: Raise the revenue to support the changes with a ballot initiative November 2013.

The newly enacted school finance law changes the state’s funding formula so that schools are funded by a per pupil average of students attending throughout the school year rather than the current per pupil count on October 1 – this will help to account for transience. The law also increases funding for schools with higher populations of English language learners (ELL) and at-risk students. Most exciting to us at TSC, the new law includes an innovation grant that would incentivize schools to implement ELT.

For more details, here is a copy of the legislation, or you can visit Senator Johnston’s website.

Now, though, it is a waiting game. Although the bill has been passed in both the House and Senate, and signed by the Governor, the next and final step requires Colorado citizens to vote for a tax increase in November in order to fund the reforms laid out in the new law. The law is a bold statement by Colorado policymakers – but for the moment, it’s unfunded without the voters declaring their support as well.

We will be watching the discussion, and we will keep you informed!

“Because evidence shows it improves kids’ chances to succeed.”
-John Bacon, Teacher, East Hartford, CT

“Students need more time to prepare fully for life’s responsibilities, challenges and opportunities. Providing students with more and better time in school will address the opportunity gap and subsequently the achievement gap.”
-Jonathan Spear, Non-profit leader, Brooklyn, NY

“Expanded Learning Time makes our school [Boston Arts Academy], a dual curriculum arts/academic school, possible!”
-Anne Clark, Principal, Boston, MA

Now it’s your turn! Become a Signatory and tell us why YOU support expanding learning time!

In the fall of 2006, Clarence R. Edwards Middle School (“the Edwards” as it is known locally within Boston Public Schools) became one of the first schools in the state of Massachusetts to implement the Expanded Learning Time (ELT) Initiative. The reasons why were simple: we were not making Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) and we wanted to make significant academic gains with our students. As it turned out, making our school day longer was one of the best things we could have done to help reform our school model and improve student outcomes. Our statewide exam scores, student enrollment, daily student attendance rate, community and family engagement, and time for team teaching/collaboration all improved as a result of ELT.

An Optimized School Day
In essence, the ELT schedule includes three extra hours of school time four days a week, and half-days on Fridays for students. Within a single school day, our pupils are enrolled in four core classes (English language arts, math, science, and social studies), one specialty class, one academic intervention course, and one extra-curricular enrichment course. Fridays, after students are dismissed, we have whole-staff professional development when teachers collaborate with their colleagues in common planning time meetings.

Gathering Stakeholders and Data
Before implementing ELT, the Edwards team formed focus groups consisting of administrators, teachers, staff, and other community partners. The groups met regularly to research the model and to discuss the impact of the proposed changes on daily operations, curriculum, instruction, and enrichment practices. Key school leaders and teachers gathered data, input, and reflections from school-based teams, and used this information to design the content for the grant that ultimately led to program funding from the Massachusetts Department of Education.

Leadership Structure
Looking back, one of the key lessons learned was the importance of sharing decision-making across three of our major school governing bodies. Together these groups provided the insight, consultation, voting processes, and other elements that allowed us to finalize both the expectations for and details of the ELT plan. These groups were:

1. School Site Council

• Members: principal, teachers, union reps, parents
• Focus Areas: major school policy, family engagement

2. Instructional Leadership Team

• Members: principal, director of instruction, director of ELT, department chair teacher leaders, outside providers
• Focus Areas: teaching and learning, curriculum, assessment, professional development

3. Team Leadership Team

• Members: principal, assistant principal, director of instruction, director of ELT, head of school climate, student support coordinator, team leader teacher leaders, outside providers
• Focus Areas: operations, climate, student support

Union Support
It was essential to get not only staff buy-in, but also the support and endorsement of the Boston Teachers Union (BTU). Early on, school leaders collaborated with the BTU and negotiated the details of teacher compensation for ELT work. The pay agreement established that BTU teachers would continue to work their regular contractual day, and self-select to continue work during ELT hours. Compensation for these hours was based on a negotiated contractual hourly rate. Options for ELT teaching included a one-hour academic intervention course four days a week and/or a two-hour elective course (an extracurricular or academic-based elective) two days a week. Union representatives also believed in the correlation between extra time in school and improved student achievement, and their support for the plan truly helped strengthen staff buy-in, motivating teachers to participate. In our seven years of ELT, over 90 percent of our BTU staff has chosen to work during the expanded hours.

Student Participation to Boost Engagement
Students were also consulted in the original design of ELT. They were surveyed on which electives they would want offered during the last two hours of their school day. Core Boston Public Schools teachers, multiple outside providers, and community partners were recruited to teach our electives courses. These include swimming, tennis, football, basketball, track, baseball, cheerleading, step dancing, karate, break-dancing, ballet, Zumba, art, anime, concert band, rock band, musical theater, cooking, and many others.

Student Data for Targeted Interventions
Another key element driving our instructional design for the academic intervention hour was student performance data. Due to our low statewide exam scores in math prior to 2006, we decided to focus our first-year efforts on math support for all students. As our math scores went up in the ensuing years, we expanded our academic intervention efforts to include ELA and science. We also use our extra academic hours to provide targeted one-on-one and small group intervention for our students with special needs who are significantly behind grade levels in reading, and we offer additional hours of ESL instruction to our beginning ELL students.

There have been many factors leading to the success of ELT at the Edwards. Not least were the essential planning efforts undertaken by school leaders, teachers, and staff before implementing ELT. Today the Edwards is recognized as one of the highest-performing middle schools within the Boston Public Schools, and we have shared our school schedule as a national model for ELT. We are so proud of our many turnaround efforts, from those made prior to implementation of ELT to all those made since. Due to all the hard work and collaborative energy of teachers, administration, school-based leadership teams, community partners, students, and families, the Edwards has reached and continues to meet our goals for student achievement and for providing middle school students in Boston with quality education in academics and enrichment.

The Time to Succeed Coalition launched a year ago with a simple mission: to ensure all children in our nation’s communities have more and better learning time in school. We envisioned an alliance where educators, parents and other concerned citizens would come together with leaders in government, education, civil rights, business, academe and community organizations to advocate for expanded learning time — improving the opportunities and chances of success for every student in our nation’s schools, especially in areas of concentrated poverty. But we did not envision the rapid pace of progress that has followed the launch.

Over the last year, our coalition has grown dramatically. With 25,000 grassroots members and 200 education, business and policy leaders, as well as the increasing support of civic and elected officials, it is clear that more and more people recognize that the time our students currently have for learning is woefully insufficient. In a national poll conducted by KRC Research, 75 percent of adults believe that more time in school will better prepare students for success in college and the workforce. But it’s not just more time that is needed to remedy the glaring opportunity gaps; we need to make better use of that time.

When the coalition launched, its purpose was to reach a wider variety of people to discuss this idea as a possible solution, and we are surprised by the depth of our early results:

• Extended learning time was included as a recommendation in the Equity and Excellence Commission Report to the Secretary of Education, “For Each and Every Child,” citing the five states (Colorado, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New York and Tennessee) that came together to join the TIME Collaborative in December to “further the development of high-quality and sustainable expanded learning-time schools.”
• In the New York state budget, with the leadership of Governor Andrew Cuomo, the Empire State included a new $20 million competitive grant program for expanded learning time schools, the largest such initiative in the country.
• As part of the AFT Innovation Fund, the American Federation of Teachers listed rethinking and expanding learning time for students and teachers as a key priority for the year.
• Gen. Colin Powell called for “Expanding Learning, Expanding Opportunities” as an emphasis of America’s Promise Alliance: More in itself is not sufficient — it must also be better.

Across the country, we are already seeing schools make this shift to more and better time in education. From San Diego to Washington, D.C., over 1,000 schools serving hundreds of thousands of children have redesigned and expanded learning time to add both core academic classes and enrichment classes. Elected and civic policymakers are not far behind. As a report released this week by the National Center on Time & Learning and the Education Commission of the States outlines, there has been remarkable momentum at the federal, state and local level to advance policies around expanded learning time. This year alone, Arizona, Indiana, Massachusetts, Missouri, New Mexico and Oklahoma have taken steps toward increasing school time.

As we have discussed this issue with friends and strangers alike, we have been greeted sometimes with reminders that some children are already overscheduled with activities such as dance, travel sports teams, drama and martial arts, as well as homework and tutoring support. It is true that many students have full schedules, rich with learning opportunities; but in far too many communities, there are children who have access to very little constructive activity or even safe supervision outside of school.

In his research, Harvard University professor Robert Putnam has studied the “youth class gap,” as he calls it, documenting how the gap between high and low socioeconomic background students has grown dramatically in recent years. The youth class gap is at present considerably larger than the racial gap. The most revealing element of the reams of data Putnam has uncovered is the huge increase in investment in enrichment activities. Parents with incomes in the top 20 percent now spend about $9,000 per year (that’s twice the average per pupil spending in their public schools!) on enrichment beyond school, up 2.5 times over the last 40 years. By contrast, parents in the bottom 20 percent spend little over $1,000, up only a small percentage in the same period.

With this in mind, it makes sense that parents, depending on their income and class, differ in how they see expanded learning time’s potential for improving children’s opportunities. With more time, schools serving poor children can incorporate many of these academic and extracurricular activities into their days and begin to level the playing field. We can ensure that every child in St. Louis and Detroit has tutoring, arts and physical education as part of their school day, just as their peers in Ladue and Bloomfield Hills do. With communities and schools coming together to provide creative options, there is no limit to what these students can achieve. We must ensure that every student has a pathway to success regardless of his or her ZIP code.

When we launched the Time to Succeed Coalition last year, we said, “If we want American kids to compete and thrive in today’s world, then re-imagining the school day needs to be something we each take up as a cause — in our own schools, in our own towns, and all across the country.” That statement is as true today as it was last year. We hope you will join us as we continue our work to give all children the time they need to succeed.

Over the year, we’ve seen districts expand their learning time in big ways and small. Conversations have started in states – Iowa and North Carolina – and with leadership from Governor Cuomo, a new ELT Initiative is beginning in New York. Five states announced that they are joining an initiative to develop high-quality, sustainable models of expanded learning time schools. We’re seeing more and better learning time become weaved throughout strategies for school turnaround and transformation. All in all, it’s been a year of progress and momentum.

Through all of that, I will say that the best moment of the past year for me came when we launched Time to Succeed Massachusetts at the Massachusetts State House. Governor Deval Patrick spoke as did Representative Alice Peisch and Senator Sonia Chang-Diaz, Co-Chairs of the Legislature’s Education Committee – all TSC-MA Signatories. They were eloquent about the need for expanded learning time for students across the Commonwealth, but the person who stole the show was a young woman named Krystal. Krystal is now a senior at a Boston high school and was a middle school student at the Edwards Middle School during its first three years as an ELT school. Her honesty, candor, and poise were remarkable as she talked about the impact the redesigned and expanded schedule at the Edwards had on her life – she credited the school with giving her opportunities to shine. The teachers gave her intensive individualized academic support while also exposing her to enrichment opportunities she would not have otherwise had, including apprenticeships. As Krystal prepares to head to a four-year college on a full scholarship, the impact is clear.

I’ve been working on the issue of expanded learning time for the better part of six years. What I’ve learned is that sometimes, in the day-to-day advocacy and policy work, it is easy to lose sight of why we do what we do. But Krystal is why. Krystal is extraordinary, that is for sure, but she will tell you that she is where she is because teachers had the time to help her get here. And she is not alone – there are thousands more Krystals out there. We just need to give teachers the time to teach, reach, and inspire them.

• The Colorado state legislature passed the Future School Finance Act last week, which calls for an overhaul of school financing. Governor Hickenlooper is expected to sign the bill later this month; the bill will then be voted on by the public this fall. The bill includes a $100 million innovation fund which prioritizes ELT.
• In Portland, Oregon, a parents’ coalition is working to restore the instructional hours for high school students. Read more on our blog here.
• New York has three districts that have made moves to expand learning time. In Rochester City School District, ten schools are expected to implement ELT this upcoming fall. In New York City, the Department of Education will be extending the Middle School Quality Initiative to expand the school day for 20 schools in collaboration with TASC and Harvard University’s EdLabs. Syracuse City School District has also been approved as an Innovation Zone, providing schools with more flexibility around the school calendar.
• Texas State Representative Dwayne Bohac (R-Houston) wrote an op-ed for the Houston Chronicle that outlines what is necessary for Texas schools to succeed and includes expanding learning time.

The Portland Parents Coalition formed shortly after Superintendent Carole Smith released her budget on April 15. The coalition delivered a letter to the superintendent last week asking for 58 classroom teachers to be added back to the district in order to provide a full school day for all students. The superintendent heard their call and took the request to the school board on Monday night.

The parents are hoping for change before next school year, and while there is much still be worked out, we applaud the parents for standing up. Quality instructional time is critical for student success – it cannot be on the chopping block.

Two Portland Tribune articles provide more background information: Check them out here and here.

Are parents getting involved in your school district? What role do you believe parents can play in the ELT movement?

“The current school day limits the time for academic pursuits, individualized explorations, active play, nutrition, and personal growth. In addition, students with limited resources in their communities miss out on many out-of-school opportunities and become less competitive with their more affluent peers. I believe productive use of expanded learning time that is safe, personalized, and culturally and intellectually enriching addresses each of these concerns.”

Kathleen Wright, Education Reform Policy Analyst, Waban, MA

“For years the traditional school day and calendar have held time as a constant and have allowed learning to be the variable. It is time to shift this paradigm ensure that students are engaged in high-quality expanded learning opportunities that prepare them for success in academic learning, life, and the global economy.”

Caterina Leone Mannino, District Administrator, Rochester, NY

“It’s one critical component to accelerate learning and close the achievement gap for this generation.”

Sneha Sheth, Business Person, Boston, MA

Now it’s your turn! Become a Signatory and tell us why YOU support expanding learning time!

Painting a picture of a “typical” high school dropout is not an easy task. The reasons behind a student’s decision to leave school can vary from specific life events, such as pregnancy or work obligations, to no longer seeing a reason to come to school due to boredom or frustration. One thing we do know is that the dropout crisis disproportionately affects high-poverty communities. Low-income students fail to graduate at five times the rate of middle-income youth and six times that of higher-income youth, according to a recent study by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES).

So how can schools and communities in these high-poverty areas combat the high number of students dropping out of school? And where does expanded learning time (ELT) connect to preventing school dropouts?
There are strong examples across the country of how completely redesigning the way schools use time allow them to better serve our high-poverty communities. From those examples, a few themes emerge – engaging opportunities, strong school culture and individualized support – and it is clear that these schools are working hard to shed the historical ideologies of what “school” looks like.

Students want to see the connection between school and the real world, and ELT allows schools to be more engaging by offering hands-on, experiential learning. Students also want opportunities to express themselves outside of traditional subjects, and ELT enables schools to have time for subjects such as art, music, and physical education that open students’ minds to new ways of thinking and build different skill sets, such as teamwork, collaboration and leadership.

Secondly, research shows that one distinguishing feature of a high-performing, high-poverty school is its high expectations for student behavior and academic achievement. Redesigning the school day with the help of more time allows schools to establish and maintain a school-wide culture that sticks. Clearly, time allocation is not the only driver affecting school culture, but high-performing ELT schools invest time in their schedules for activities that build a culture of high expectations.

One of my favorite examples of this comes from IDEA College Preparatory Donna (ICP Donna) in Donna, Texas. The Peer Assistance Leader (PAL) Program runs an orientation session for all new students at the beginning of the school year to teach the expectations, values and routines of the school. Each student is paired with a “PAL” with the goal of the program being to ensure that each student persists from year-to-year at ICP Donna. Students are able to provide one another with valuable and unique support, and they also are able to alert the adults if more social or academic support is needed. It is a pretty remarkable program that would take away from critical instructional time if ICP Donna did not have an expanded day and year.

Additionally, for struggling learners, more individualized instruction is the key to helping them stay engaged and motivated. When teachers have the time to review student assessment data and identify problem areas, they are able to individualize instruction based on students’ unique learning needs, recognizing that each student learns at his or her own pace, and that different strategies may work for different students.

With the additional time, ELT teachers report they also are able to foster more nurturing relationships with their students. These types of relationships are crucial in ensuring that students stay in school.

For the more than 1,000 ELT schools across the country that are excelling with additional learning time, time really is one of the game changers. These schools are using more time to foster deeper collaboration among teachers, strengthen instruction, and above all else, create more meaningful opportunities for both students and teachers to build relationships. If we can create meaningful opportunities and make connections that make students want to stay in school, then we – as teachers, parents, advocates – have done our job.

It sounds counterintuitive to say “to combat students from dropping out, keep them in school longer!” But it may be true. Time allows for the reimagining and innovation needed to truly transform schools and student learning. We know that building strong student-teacher relationships and making learning engaging both help students recognize the importance of their education. Now we just need to give more schools additional opportunities to redesign how they make that happen. Time is of the essence.