Too much time in school an economic waste

This was written by Zander Sherman who is the author of The Curiosity of School.

by Zander Sherman

Last week, as Alberta’s students headed back to school, some were probably wishing they’d had a longer summer holiday.

Easily overshadowed by other issues, the question of our academic calendar and its number of vacation days has long troubled educators. Those who say we should spend more time in school often suggest cutting into the summer break, when kids were once needed to help hay the fields. Because we no longer live in farming times, the tradition is irrelevant. If such reasoning is meant to sustain an argument, it might be pointed out that what we call school today was also invented during the same timeframe—and no one is arguing the irrelevance of it.

While it still eludes Alberta, all-day kindergarten has been adopted to Ontario’s educational legislation, with similar initiatives gaining momentum in other parts of the world. In the US, extended learning has become a central tenet of the charter school movement. In the UK, politicians are campaigning on a proposal that would legally force public schools to provide 45 hours of education a week for 45 weeks. Lengthening school days and cutting holidays is said to be “the perfect election promise.”

Proponents argue that their plan would create more “successful” students. To find out whether this is true, let us first agree that “educational success” is the reason we go to school. Sadly, the phrase “educational success” has come to be defined by a third party. The OECD is a global economic organization that administers PISA, the standardized test taken by all 15-year-olds. Because of the correlation between PISA results and a nation’s gross domestic product, PISA is academia’s raison d’être: If students do well on the test, it means their country is doing well financially. (This is why governments obsess over test results. They indicate a country's rank on the global stage.)

If educational success is the reason we go to school, it will be surprising to many that more time in school does not necessarily lead to it. While there is correlation between PISA outcomes and GDP, there is little correlation between PISA outcomes and the number of hours we spend in school. Consider, for instance, how Canada spends roughly the same number of hours in a classroom as the US, but as a whole does a lot better on PISA than they do. China and Japan spend about the same amount of time in school and come out at or near the top, while India also spends approximately the same number of hours in school and comes out at or near the bottom.

Clearly, instructional time does not lead to better PISA outcomes.

If more classroom hours have little to do with educational success, what does? School’s terrible secret is that students’ “success” is determined long before they enter a classroom. Wealth is the single greatest predictor of academic grades, and therefore of students’ future earning potential. This is true in many ways. Wealthy families have more resources, and can afford private tutors and expensive test prep courses. Wealthy parents have more time to spend with their children, and so engage them more. Poor families view post-secondary education as unattainable. Poor parents are often under chronic stress, which in turn affects their children.

If more time in school doesn’t equal educational success, it only makes sense that we should spend less time in it. It is a principle of economics after all that where there is no benefit to a proposal, it is wasteful to continue using it. The province of Alberta’s education budget is $7 billion per annum. Exams, snow days, and PD days notwithstanding, Albertans spend about 190 days in school. That’s about $37 million a day. For cost reasons alone, school days are precious and not to be wasted. (And that doesn’t include other reasons to avoid over-schooling such as student stress, teacher attrition rates, and the growing number of pediatricians who say that the school day begins too early in the morning—all problems that could be avoided with a shorter school year.)

To those who would shorten our summer holiday, let this be among the first lessons of the year: It doesn’t matter how many hours you spend behind a desk, merely how rich you are. There can be no denying that over-schooling is an economic waste. With that in mind, more vacation hours would solve the problem of spending too much time in school.

Limits of Time on Task

This was written by Alfie Kohn who is the author of 12 books including The Schools Our Children Deserve and the Homework Myth. His website can be found here and he tweets here. This post first appeared here.

by Alfie Kohn

Back “when experimental psychologists mainly studied words and nonsense syllables, it was thought that learning inevitably depended upon time,” a group of educational psychologists explained. But “subsequent research suggests that this belief is false.”[1]

Why? Let’s begin by conceding that the statement “People need time to learn things” is true. The problem is that it’s a trivial truth, one that doesn’t tell us much of practical value. On the other hand, the assertion “More time usually leads to better learning” is considerably more interesting. It’s also demonstrably false, however, because there are enough cases where more timedoesn’t lead to better learning. In the real world, the loose connection between these two variables doesn’t mean very much.

It’s hard to deny, for example, that lots of kids spend time in school looking at books, or listening to lectures, without getting much out of the experience. Would more of what the experts call “time on task” (ToT) be likely to make a difference? The answer to that question is so obvious that ToT proponents were forced some years ago to revise their original proposition. In the amended version, learning was said to improve in proportion to the quantity ofengaged time on task. But how do we help kids become engaged with what they’re doing? There’s been quite a lot written on creating classrooms that promote student engagement. These ideas pull us in a variety of directions, some more promising than others. But time is, at best, only one consideration among many. More to the point, compelling students to do more assignments -- at school or at home -- is not especially likely to maximize engaged time. The upshot is that in order for the idea of ToT to be of any use at all, it has to be refined in such a way that time, per se, is no longer the dominant concept.

Let’s look at the research a little more closely. The amount of time a student spends on a task “is not so consistently related to achievement as it may seem,” one scholar concluded from her review of several studies on the subject. “Time is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for learning. Learning takes time, but providing time does not in itself ensure that learning will take place. More time may result in more learning – if [lack of] adequate time was the major cause of the problem in the first place. If other factors were the real cause, then providing more time will not be an effective strategy.”[2]

Let’s come at the question from another direction. Instead of asking “Does more time for academics help?” maybe we should ask “Does more time for academics help more than other things we could do instead?” A Stanford University study compared four different reforms: peer tutoring, smaller classes, more use of computers, and adding an hour of instruction each day. The result: “On a cost-effectiveness basis, the time intervention was found to rank at the bottom with respect to improving student performance in mathematics and third out of the four [in reading].”[3]

Carole Ames, dean of the college of education at Michigan State University, points out that it isn’t “quantitative changes in behavior” – such as requiring students to spend more hours in front of books or worksheets – that help children to learn better. Rather, it’s “qualitative changes in the ways students view themselves in relation to the task, engage in the process of learning, and then respond to the learning activities and situation.”[4] In turn, these attitudes and responses on the part of students emerge from the way teachers think about learning and, as a result, the ways they’ve organized their classrooms. If the goal is to figure out how best to cover a set curriculum – to fill students with facts – then it might seem appropriate to try to maximize ToT, such as by assigning homework or lengthening the school day or year. But that’s highly unlikely to have a positive effect on the critical variables that Ames identifies. Perhaps it makes sense to see education as being less about how much the teacher covers and more about what the students can be helped to discover. More time won’t do a thing to bring about that shift.

On an even more basic level, to think about providing more time for students to learn something is to sidestep the question of whether that something is worth learning. Suppose that extra hours after school really did make it more likely that children would be able to commit a list of dates or definitions to memory. If there isn’t a good reason to make students memorize something they’re likely to forget anyway (and which they can always look up if necessary), then the apparent advantage of more time wouldn’t mean very much. Of course, this invites us to ask what is worth learning, and how that should be decided. But my point is that a conversation on so crucial a topic is less likely to take place when we‘re focused on trying to maximize the amount of time spent on the tasks that comprise the current curriculum.

In fact, the nature of the task helps to determine the relationship between time and achievement. It turns out that more hours are least likely to produce better outcomes when understanding or creativity is involved. “How much is learned by rote is a direct function of time and effort,” acknowledges literacy expert Frank Smith. “But when the learning is meaningful we learn much faster. . . . Having to spend long periods of time in repetitive efforts to learn specific things is a sign that learning is not taking place, that we are not in a productive learning situation.”[5]

Sure enough, researchers have found that when children are taught to read by focusing on the meaning of the text (rather than primarily on phonetic skills), their learning does “not depend on amount of instructional time.”[6] In math, too, even the new-and-improved concept of “engaged” ToT is directly correlated to achievement only if both the activities and the measure of achievement are focused on rote recall. By contrast, there is no “linear positive relationship for higher level mathematics activities, including mathematical applications and problem solving.”[7]

Thus, claims that longer class days (or years) produce "better outcomes" or "higher achievement" should be met with skepticism even if they occasionally turn out to be true. If those phrases mean only that more time might improve standardized test results, that's very different from showing that it leads to better learning -- which, as we've seen, is less likely to be true (by more ambitious criteria). No wonder the folks who confuse higher test scores with better learning are also more likely to think kids should be made to spend more time doing the same stuff.


[For complete citations, please see The Homework Myth]

1. Anderson et al., p. 34.

2. Karweit, p. 33.

3. Levin 1984, p. 3.

4. Ames, p. 268.

5. Smith, p. 46. This view directly contradicts the widespread notion that education is always hard work – an idea that proceeds from a specific and usually unstated set of assumptions about what’s being taught, and how. Some kinds of curriculum, and some instructional techniques, can make learning unpleasant, but the unpleasantness isn’t inevitable.

6. Anderson et al., p. 34.

7. Putnam et al., p. 129. Note that this doesn’t mean ToT loses its relevance for mathematics in the later grades; it means it’s less important at all grades when the subject is taught in a way that emphasizes understanding.

Summer learning loss: What's true and what's false

This was written by Alfie Kohn who is the author of 12 books including The Schools Our Children Deserve and the Homework Myth. His website can be found here and he tweets here. This post first appeared here and also here.

by Alfie Kohn

The idea of summer learning loss -- the implication being that it’s risky to give kids a three-month vacation from school because they’ll forget everything they were taught -- has become the media’s favorite seasonally specific education topic. And that’s not just because they’re desperate for something to write about when school’s out. It’s a story we’re all predisposed to embrace because we’re already nervous about time off for children. It’s widely accepted, for example, that kids need to be doing some homework every night during the school year lest they find themselves gravitating to insufficiently constructive activities.

Experts who study creativity like to talk about doing and resting, painting and stepping back from the canvas, thinking about a problem and taking a break during which a new insight may sneak up when we’re not expecting it. (Recreation can mean re-creation.) If, on the other hand, we’re enamored of a factory model, then we’re going to be more concerned about productivity than imagination -- and, theologically speaking, more worried about idle hands being the devil’s tools. Busyness becomes an end in its own right. We frown when our kids waste time and feel a little ashamed when we ourselves are guilty of it.[1]

I shouldn’t be surprised, therefore, that when I’ve raised questions about the practice of assigning homework on a regular basis, the most common challenge I’ve faced isn’t related to the putative academic benefits (which, incidentally, research generally fails to support)[2] but to the prospect that children will just misspend all that time on Facebook or video games. It’s kind of interesting, when you think about it: No teacher ever admits to assigning busywork, but this defense of homework itself has nothing to do with the value of the assignments; the point is just to keep kids busy.

It’s predictable, then, that we’d be disinclined to let children chill just because it’s hot out. We’re primed and ready to respond when someone claims that all the progress students have made during the school year will be lost forever if they’re allowed to slack off during the summer. It’s a Sisyphusean metaphor buried in our DNA: The minute you let up in your efforts to roll that rock toward the summit, well, you know what happens. “L’école d’été pour tous les enfants!”

What does the research say? Is there any truth to the summer loss claim? Yes. But it’s more limited than is generally acknowledged and it doesn’t point to the solution that’s most commonly endorsed.

First of all, whatever kind of loss does occur, at least in reading skills, is directly related to students’ socioeconomic status. Low-income children are affected disproportionately -- to the point that a good part of what is classified as the achievement gap can be explained, statistically speaking, by class-based differences in what happens over the summer. The “summer shortfall…[of] low-SES youth…relative to better-off children contributes to the perpetuation of family advantage and disadvantage across generations.”[3] That’s very different from sweeping claims about learning, per se, being something that’s inevitably lost when you take a break.

Second, to the extent that low-income kids are likely to lose ground in reading proficiency, Richard Allington, who specializes in this very issue, points out that summer school (and summer homework assignments) aren’t necessary or even sensible. Rather, he and his colleagues have shown that the key is to ensure “easy and continuing access to self-selected books for summer reading”[4] -- a solution that’s not only a lot cheaper than summer school but a lot less likely to cause kids’ interest in learning to evaporate in a sweltering classroom.

Third, in evaluating the nature and extent of the problem, it’s important to keep in mind that virtually all of the research, like almost all talk about the achievement gap itself, is limited to what shows up on standardized tests. Here’s the question we should be asking: “Is there still a summer loss problem when we use more meaningful assessments, or is it an artifact of exams that we already know to be deeply misleading (and to have bias built into them in various ways)?” The answer is: We just don’t know. For the time being, then, we should refer to the phenomenon as “summer loss on standardized tests.”

Finally, even within standardized test measures, summer loss mostly applies to “factual and procedural knowledge” such as “math computation and spelling skills,” according to the 1996 meta-analysis that’s still the most widely cited source on the topic.[5] This echoes what we know about the whole idea of “time on task,” which turns out to have a much less significant relationship to learning outcomes when those outcomes are intellectually ambitious. More time reliably leads to higher achievement mostly when the task involves very little thinking.

As progressive educators have been pointing out for a long time, one of the flaws of traditional instruction is that it consists of transmitting a bunch of facts and skills to students, which they then promptly forget. Summer loss thus should be seen not as a sad but inescapable truth about education, but as one more indictment of traditional education, with its reliance on lectures, textbooks, worksheets, grades, tests, and homework -- all employed in the service of making students cram bits of knowledge into their short-term memories. (And how absurd to think that the solution to this predictable forgetting is to give students more of the same!)

By the time September rolls around, kids may indeed be unable to recall what they were told in April: the distance between the earth and the moon, or the definition of a predicate, or the approved steps for doing long division. But they’re much less likely to forget how to set up an experiment to test their own hypothesis (if they had the chance to do science last spring), or how to write sentences that elicit a strong reaction from a reader (if they were invited to play with prose with that goal in mind), or what it means to divide one number into another (if they were allowed to burrow into the heart of mathematical principles rather than being turned into carbon-based calculators).

Summer learning loss? It’s just a subset of life learning loss -- when the learning was dubious to begin with.

NOTES

1. For a refreshing perspective on this issue, see Tim Kreider, “The Busy Trap,” New York Times, June 30, 2012.

2. See my book The Homework Myth: Why Our Kids Get Too Much of a Bad Thing (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2006), especially chapter 2.

3. Karl L. Alexander et al., “Lasting Consequences of the Summer Learning Gap,” American Sociological Review 72 (2007): 175.

4. Richard L. Allington et al., “Addressing Summer Reading Setback Among Economically Disadvantaged Elementary Students,” Reading Psychology 31 (2010): 423.

5. Harris Cooper et al., “The Effects of Summer Vacation on Achievement Test Scores,” Review of Educational Research66 (1996): 260.

Time on Task = Better Learning = Fallacy

I was reading Jay Mathews' Class Struggle when I came across Read to expand school day where Jay was suggesting that we need to enforce reading over the lunch hour. Jay Mathews writes:

Do away with hot lunches. Serve box lunches, or let students bring their own food. Hand out the food at their desks as their pre-lunch period ends, and have them stay here, with a book of their choice and a teacher reading her own book. Everyone sits and reads, and eats if they want to. No exceptions. Try to arrange that pre-lunch class so friends are not together. It is quiet time, to feed the soul and the mind, and calm everyone down for the rest of the day.

Here is the comment I left:


"We know that we need longer days in schools full of kids who need to catch up to grade level."

Stop right there, Jay! Are you sure this is true.

Saying that kids that simply spend more time on task (ToT) will learn more is a gross misassumption and the proof is in the reasearch. (see sources below) Alfie Kohn writes about this extensively in his book "The Homework Myth."

"More time usually leads to better learning", is very misleading. Alfie Kohn (p.103) writes that years ago, the proponents of ToT were forced some years ago to revise their original proposition. In the amended version, learning was said to improve in proportion to the quantity of engaged time on task.

Enforcing our will on those kids to read during their lunch hour may gain more time on task, but you will be hard pressed to enforce their authentic engagement.

What will happen is you will wind up with a whole bunch of fat, ticked off kids who hate reading.
If we want kids to improve and enjoy reading more - rather than doing things to them - we need to work with them.

Check out:
Anderson, Richard C., Jana Mason, and Larry Shirley. "The Reading Group: An Experimental Investigation of a Labrynth." Reading Research Quarterly 20 (1984): p.34

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Do you see how we get ourselves in trouble? This entire idea was based on a misconception about learning. Unfortunately, this is exactly what happens far too often. We make suggestions for schools, teachers and students based on misinformation. Makes me appreciate Mark Twain when he said:

It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so.

There is a lot of good educational research out there, but you have to wade through the educational myths and folklore to get to the truth.

Your first homework assignment Jay Mathews is to read The Homework Myth by Alfie Kohn. (And yes I see the irony in that statement)