This week’s “Daily Journal” guest columnist is Terry Stoops, education policy analyst for the John Locke Foundation.
Last week, House budget writers proposed a sensible but controversial cost-cutting measure: eliminate five days from the school calendar next school year and 10 days from the school calendar the following year. The savings would have been substantial, approximately $300 million over two years. Nevertheless, the education establishment swiftly torpedoed the idea. Vice chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, Rep. Bruce Goforth, D-Buncombe, followed the lead of the N.C. School Boards Association and declared that the proposed cuts were unconstitutional.
As education reform ideas go, instructional time is overrated. Some believe that reductions in formal instructional time would put U.S. public school students further behind their rivals in Europe and Asia. The N.C. General Statutes require that the public school calendar have a minimum of 180 days and 1,000 hours of instruction over at least nine months. Proponents of maintaining or lengthening the school year point out that our current 180-day school calendar is shorter than a number of high-performing nations by 20 to 50 days a year. (The United States has a shorter calendar than a number of lower-performing nations, too, but I digress.) Thus, their reasoning goes, students in the United States incur a so-called “learning deficit” by the time they reach the 12th grade.
In this case, the “number of school days per year” is not a sound metric to use because it does not take into account important differences in the length of the school day from one nation to another. Annual “hours of instruction” is a more appropriate measure. At 1,000 hours of instruction per year, students in North Carolina receive more formal instructional time than students in most other nations receive during the school year.
According to Education at a Glance 2008, published by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the average nation delivers 971 hours of instructional time for both the compulsory and noncompulsory curriculum. For example, 12-year-old students in Japan and Korea receive an average of 868 hours of instructional time per year. Fifteen-year-old students in Germany receive an average of 900 hours of instruction, and students in England receive an average of 950 hours of instruction per year. While a handful of nations exceed 1,000 hours of instruction per year, very few of them reach the top tier in student performance on international assessments.
More importantly, a number of empirical research studies fail to find a correlation between instructional time and performance on international assessments.
•A 2001 dissertation written by Carol Ann Smyth of St. John’s University analyzed the effects of school policies and practices on 8th-grade science achievement from the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS). Using hierarchical linear modeling, she found that increased instructional time for science simply “reinforced past patterns of achievement.” In other words, high-performing students continued to perform well, while low performing students continued to perform poorly.
•In 2004, a group of researchers from Penn State University published an article in Prospects that compared instructional time and student performance on international assessments, including the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), TIMSS, and the International Study of Civic Education. They found that previous studies related to instructional time and student achievement, predominantly those conducted in the 1970s and 1980s, suffered from methodological flaws or captured educational conditions that were no longer applicable. Their study attempted to fill the void in quality cross-national research on instructional time and achievement. The authors concluded that there was no statistically significant correlation between instructional time in math, science, reading, and civics and test scores on international assessments of those subjects.
•A 2006 dissertation written by Hee Kyung Hong of Loyola University-Chicago assessed math and science data from TIMMS using repeated measures analysis. Hong concluded “the results in this study do not indicate support for instructional time as influencing mathematics and science achievement in either [the developed or the developing country] group. There was no significant effect of instructional time on either mathematics or science achievement across the years.”
The researchers from Penn State could not be more direct: “Do not waste resources in marginal increases in instructional time, as long as the system falls within world norms. If there is a choice between using resources to increase time versus improving teaching and the curriculum, give priority to the latter.”
Indeed, high-performing countries are successful because they employ strong leaders; focus on measurable results; minimize disruptions to classroom instruction; maximize meaningful and efficient instruction; and maintain very high expectations for all stakeholders. It is also no coincidence that many high-performing nations offer school choice options for families.