RALEIGH – In an earlier column, I wrote about the gap between research findings and public opinion on frequently debated issues of education policy. Large numbers of voters lack basic information about the questions they are asked – be they on charter schools, student testing, or teacher compensation – and thus provide answers of questionable analytical value.
There’s another gap to worry about: between the education establishment and the data. In theory, it ought to be easier to close this gap than to close the other one. Average voters have lots of other things on their minds. It will always be a challenge to grab their attention long enough to communicate, say, the relative importance of teacher quality and class size reduction in improving student outcomes. But among those who work in education or policymaking, the problem isn’t attention. It’s an unwillingness to let go of pet ideas that may sound plausible but don’t comport with reality.
For nearly 20 years, as I have engaged in public-policy debate about school reform in North Carolina, I have heard the complaint that our standard school calendar is outdated, that it reflects our agrarian background more than educational necessity, and that North Carolina politicians ought to muster the courage to lengthen both the school day and school year. More time spent in the classroom, advocates argue, will lead to more learning.
It’s just not so. Most of the times I’ve heard this argument, I’ve been told that other countries outperform American students because of differences in the school calendar. But rarely have advocates been able to provide me with comparable data, or with evidence of a causal relationship. Regarding the data, they often point to sheer counts of the number of days spent in school, failing to recognize that in a number of European and Asian countries, students spend fewer hours a day in public-school classroom instruction (though some stay after-school for paid tutoring). You have to measure classroom time by the hour, not by the day, to get an accurate picture.
When my colleague Terry Stoops recently took a fresh look at the international comparisons, he found that there was no reliable relationship between the amount of time spent in school each year and the success of the educational experience. “ More is not necessarily better,” Stoops concluded. “American students already receive the equivalent of four more weeks of math instruction than students in the average nation linked to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. But U.S. students’ standardized math test scores rank 27th out of 39 OECD countries.”
Stoops found that in just two of the five highest-performing countries did students spent more time in math instruction than American students did. “There is no consistent relationship between in-school instructional time in mathematics and the country’s average score on this standardized math test,” he said.
The lack of relationship between school hours and school effectiveness is evident for subjects other than math. Stoops cited a Pennsylvania State University study from 2004 that found no statistically significant correlation between instructional time in math, science, reading, and civics and test scores on international assessments of those subjects.
That’s not to say that, all other things being equal, extra time spent studying a solid curriculum taught by an excellent teacher wouldn’t be beneficial. But trade-offs are inherent in public policy. It is wrongheaded to think that if North Carolina public education is mediocre, which it is, then adding 10 or 20 days to the school calendar will significantly improve the situation. For most students, the likely result would be merely to increase their exposure to mediocrity.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.