Longer School Year Benefits Both Students and Teachers

RCE Commentary

The emerging support for expanding pre-kindergarten reflects an underlying and underappreciated truth that lawmakers should emphasize when crafting education policy: Schools, for all their flaws, are the best environments for student learning. Even students in below-average schools learn more in school than they do elsewhere. Recognizing this, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio should not only expand pre-kindergarten, he should lengthen the school year for all students. And others around the country should follow him.

Lengthening the school day ought to be an attractive proposition. Burdened by a shorter school year, our students not only learn less than they otherwise would, but are also forced to spend more time relearning concepts they previously learned but have since forgotten.

Almost every teacher I worked with during my three years teaching tried to increase students' instructional time by spending time with students before and after school. During my first year in the classroom, nearly every middle school teacher hosted afterschool programming. But offering additional instruction by way of optional afternoon activities gives the students who most need to spend more time in school the opportunity to opt out, and frustrates the goals of the entire program. One student consistently tried to avoid tutoring by hiding at soccer practice, forcing me to search for him at the gym to lead him, reluctantly, back to the classroom. On the last day of school I found out that this persistence was one of the things that made his mother confident enough in our school to allow him to stay enrolled.

The lack of meaningful empirical data on what truly works in schools makes it difficult to reach a consensus on how improve them. But lengthening the school year can only benefit students, and policymakers who are serious about education should make this a part of their agenda.

Increasing instructional time means kids learn more each year. Regardless of whether schools quantify that growth with standardized tests, students will benefit academically. High school graduates will bring more skills to their employers. Fewer college students will need to take remedial courses, freeing them to instead spend more time studying the subjects they care about. They will be able to earn their degrees in less time and at lower cost. School is also one of the safest places for students in more dangerous neighborhoods. If students are in school another hour each day, and another month each year, then they spend less time in dangerous and unsupervised areas.

Expanding the academic calendar sends an important expressive message by emphasizing the primacy of education. Most American students spend only about half their year in school. Increasing the amount of time students spend in classrooms demonstrates society's commitment to giving young people the tools they will need in order to successfully face tomorrow's challenges. Redoubling our commitment in this manner sends to the middle school student struggling with his multiplication facts and the freshman struggling to read the novel assigned in her English class the unambiguous message that their success is important, and their community is invested in their learning. It sends a similar message to parents in low-income communities, whose children are unable to supplement their school year with pricy after-hours and summer tutoring to ensure their preparation for college.

Furthermore, this change benefits students' mental and social development by keeping students in contact with mental health counselors and other professionals who are well-positioned to provide services to students who need help but are unable to independently obtain it.

Teachers, already overworked and undercompensated, may resent this proposed addition to their workload. But this change may actually be the most effective way to increase the level of investment in our schools that educators have unsuccessfully demanded for years. Teachers deserve higher pay for the work they do, and they know that. Instituting this change will place teachers in an advantageous position to obtain the compensation they deserve.

Lengthening the school year by hundreds of hours would make it impossible for some politicians to continue to oppose efforts to pay teachers more. Overworked educators already leave teaching in droves. Those who don't leave teaching are often drawn to leave low-income schools for higher-paying ones; at the end of my second year of teaching, a teacher left our school for a neighboring school district, earning himself a $6,000 raise. It would be impossible to expect teachers to build a career in the classroom while working so much more without a pay increase.

Instead of asking whether teachers should be paid more, policymakers will be forced to instead ask how much more teachers should be paid. For the sake of argument, if teachers currently earn $50,000 annually for what is a $70,000 job, making teaching an $80,000 per year job and letting teachers negotiate on that ground both strengthens the position of teachers and weakens their opponents.

Skeptics may be right to wonder whether this will make their political fight easier. It is also true that this proposal may change teachers' job descriptions in ways that some find objectionable. When I taught in a Brooklyn charter school, I frequently found myself working at school late into Saturday night as I wrote lesson plans for my atypically long school week. And I was rarely alone; the lengthened school day and school year made demands of every teacher in the building. There is no question this negatively affected teacher retention. The solution to these challenges may lie partly in giving schools flexibility to design solutions around this revised school year. For example, some schools have staggered start times for teachers. Others might reduce the number of classes each teacher is responsible for teaching.

Education policy suffers for lack of labs in which to test run proposed changes. As a result, many changes are implemented without a clear understanding of their impact. Years of a student's education go by before the effects of a policy are known. Our preference for the status quo is justified only when there is a substantial likelihood the reforms will produce undesirable results. But surely the inverse is true as well; we ought to prefer reform when it's likely to produce better outcomes. If incorporating student test scores into teacher evaluations helps improve student outcomes, for example, it makes sense to do so. Since this change will be unambiguously positive for students, it should be enacted.

While the costs of this change might prevent immediate implementation, the prospect of future rejection should not keep good ideas permanently mothballed. We should force the people who do not want to increase investment in our schools to stand up and say so, and allow the public to be heard on the matter.