Time in class influences school outcomes

Time on task matters.  The conclusion of a multitude of studies conducted by education researchers suggests that there are few substitutes for the amount of time students spend in class and their academic performance.  However, there are two contemporary trends in schools today that are at odds with the age-old adage that time on task matters. The first is the astonishing increase in absenteeism in American schools. The second is a national movement to initiate four-day school weeks.

Chronic absenteeism in our schools has not recovered from the pandemic years. At almost every grade level a significant increase in student absences has occurred in the past few years and its impact is significant. Nationally one in ten kindergartners and first-grade students are chronically absent according to the National Center for Children in Poverty.  Important in today’s environment is the fact that missing school in the early grades has a more powerful influence on literacy development for low income students than it does for more affluent peers, according to Douglas Ready of Columbia University’s Teacher College.

At the middle school level, a study published in Educational Psychologist found that poor attendance and misbehavior among sixth graders explained 60% of the reason some students did not finish high school. And in high school a study by E.M. Allensworth and J.Q Easton in the Chicago Public Schools found that the amount of absenteeism was a better predictor of school dropouts than low test scores.

These studies and many others often mention the fact that while states collect information on attendance, they often fail to make it public.  Such data might be extremely helpful in addressing the problem. Research shows that poor attendance is a solvable problem but only if the characteristics of schools that beat the “attendance odds” are identified and their techniques for doing so are systematically shared and adopted.

Today 850 of school districts in the U.S. have initiated four-day school weeks. The trend also has the real potential of limiting time on the task of learning.  Many of the districts that initiated four-day weeks are in rural areas and did so to make the process of hiring and retaining teachers easier because a four-day work week is attractive and tends to offset the lower pay these districts are able to offer.

The design of the four-day work week differs across schools, but it often includes “no-school” on alternate Fridays and extension of the school day during the rest of the week. The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation hired the RAND corporation to survey teacher, parents and students in rural states of Idaho, New Mexico and Oklahoma with a four-day week. RAND found, not surprisingly, that students liked the concept.  Eighty-nine percent of parents said they were also pleased with a four-day week.  While RAND found that math and English test scores did not fall in schools with four-day schedules, they did report that those scores did not grow as fast as they did in similar districts with a five-day week schedule so the long-run implications of a four-day school week do not look promising.

For most students, learning is best achieved by focused time-on-task. While the correlation between time-on-task and academic performance for students is not exact, the amount of time in the classroom is a key factor explaining gains in student knowledge.  In a period of declining test scores in English, math, history and civics, and with the most recent data showing that ACT scores hit their lowest point in 30 years, we cannot let this basic relationship between time on task and knowledge gained go unnoticed and not acted upon.

Schools should constantly review and reveal attendance figures. They should have explicit strategies for addressing the nationwide attendance problem. The movement toward a four-day school week should be carefully examined and curtailed as the benefits of the program in terms of school budgets and teacher/student satisfaction may not outweigh the probable decline in student learning.

These issues are not the schools' alone.  Parents and even grandparents have a role to play, especially when it comes to attendance.  As Stephen Hawking once said, “Showing up is half the battle.”

Michael A. MacDowell is President Emeritus of Misericordia University and a director of the Calvin K. Kazanjian Economics Foundation. 

This article originally appeared on Fort Myers News-Press: Time in class influences school outcomes