The Study

Assistant Professor BetsAnn Smith reports findings from a series of instructional time analyses that illustrate how school management, social and cultural welfare programs, high-stake testing, system policies, and a flawed notion of organizational efficiency combine to cripple enormous blocks of annual instructional time in a large urban district.

Findings

Smith and her team of researchers collected data during three years of visits to eight Chicago elementary schools. The schools were considered typical for Chicago. None was in the top or bottom 10 percent of the district’s school ranking, but all served large percentages of poor and minority students, and all were striving to improve student outcomes. Data analyzed included classroom observation records, field notes, teacher interviews, school calendars, and school system documents. What Smith found after analyzing all the data was that “actual instructional time in the Chicago schools is only 40% to 60% of the district’s … goal.” Smith found that many factors combined to radically reduce the amount of instructional time delivered to the urban elementary students. For example, Chicago schools already operated on a more compressed time schedule. Nearly all the district’s schools operate on a 330-minute daily schedule -- of which 300 minutes must be given to general instruction. Most daily instructional programs in the United States are between 330 to 345 minutes. A more alarming finding was that only half of the 180 annual school days appeared “productively focused on grade-level, academic work.” Smith attributes the low percentage to the increasing number of what she describes as “special and bad days.” Special days are those with unusual activities that interrupt the focus of teachers and students for part of the day. Bad days refer to those times when unwanted events occur in the building or in the school’s community. “Like special days, bad days rob teachers and students of their concentration.” Bad days can be caused by ineffective substitute teachers, physical plant problems, or mischief of one form or another. Smith concludes by outlining actions administrators at all levels can take to restore and strengthen instruction time. Administrators should assess and rethink time allocated to instruction and provide teachers with realistic “can-do” schedules. Administrators can also protect blocks of sustained instruction time through more careful scheduling of special events and moving high-stakes testing toward the end of the school year. Simply moving such tests could “restore as much as 20% of annual instruction… The technology constraints that historically justified written test administration are no longer valid.” Systems are now available, she notes, that process and return tests quickly.

What It Means To You

It is clear that instructional time is at a premium. How much instructional time in your district is lost to special or bad days? Are there blocks of time in the school year set aside for sustained instruction? How well does your district manage instructional time?

For More Information

Smith, B. (2000). Quality matters: Annual instruction time in an urban school system. Educational Administration Quarterly, 36(5), 652-682.

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