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28 October 2011Ford Foundation President Promotes Expanded Learning Time
Let me first say what a great pleasure it is to be here today surrounded by so many of our nation’s finest educators. We’re all here because we understand that something has to change, that we cannot continue to make changes on the margin to an education system that quite simply no longer serves our children and our society. We are here because we know we need to ask more of ourselves and our children, and that as a society we must increase the amount of time our children spend in school learning.
Before I begin, let me say that we are also here because of a visionary leader, Chris Gabrielli. Chris’s advocacy on this issue—and the incredibly important, pragmatic research and the on-the-ground work being done by his organization, the National Center on Time & Learning—have been, and will be, essential to ensuring that a full school day becomes the norm in thousands of schools across this country. It is not easy work.
Our leaders simply don’t understand that learning is more than a six-hour endeavor; and that an educational system developed in the 19th century for an agrarian economy cannot possibly be expected to meet the needs of a 21st century high-tech economy. Remember, our current part-year, part-day, part-time school system was designed in the era of manual plows and hand harvesting. It is failing in this era of the ipad and twitter.
In education, unlike in nearly every other sphere of our existence, we still need to traverse the distance between the little house on the prairie where our school system came into being and the world of urban poverty, where it is falling far short of today’s demands. So let’s talk about traversing that distance. I won’t start by making the case for how expanded learning time brings substantial and important improvements in academic achievement. Others have and will do that from this podium. Instead I’d like to focus on a broader view of what happens when we expand and redesign the school day.
For the Ford Foundation, this conversation is about the life of an individual child; about the lives of their parents and caregivers; and about the life of the communities they call home. I enter this conversation as someone who grew up with nowhere to go to after school. So I understand this issue personally. In too many places—as was the case in my neighborhood—there is no after-school program, no afternoon snack to go home to or TV-watching in the apartment, no mommy waiting with a hug. There isn’t even a key to the apartment, because parents fear that the key will be taken and the apartment robbed.
We’ve all heard of “latchkey kids.” Many of us were keyless kids. We all know, all of us in this room know, that the hours from 3pm to 6pm are some of the most important hours of the day, a danger zone for our most vulnerable children. These are the 180 minutes during which—for millions of kids—their destiny is decided. Will they join their friends in experimenting with drugs and alcohol? Will they run with gangs, committing crimes? Will they have unprotected sex, scarring not one but potentially two lives? This is not just hyperbole: 3pm to 6pm, those 180 minutes, are what law enforcement officials call the “danger zone.”
What if we weren’t failing these children? What if they had an alternative to the streets? What if children stayed in school longer? The evidence on the benefits of participation in well-structured extended-day speaks for itself:
- Lower crime rates: kids who are in afternoon school activities are 30% less likely to commit crimes.
- Lower drug use: kids who are busy at school in the afternoon are 49% less like to be involved with drugs.
- Lower levels of sexual activity: kids who are engaged in school in the afternoon are 37% less likely to suffer unintended pregnancy.
We also know that kids who spend more time in school are better behaved, have higher attendance rates, score better on standardized tests, are less likely to drop out, and graduate at a higher rate. Quite simply, for 15 million kids who have nowhere to go after school, an expanded school day can mean the difference between success and failure. And let me add that for the most vulnerable children the advantages of ELT are perhaps the greatest. According to a report done by researchers at Johns Hopkins University, two-thirds of the achievement gap between lower- and higher-income children was the result of unequal access to expanded learning opportunities.
For parents, the benefits of expanded learning time are even more direct—and often underappreciated. An evaluation done of New York’s Out-of School Time Programs for Youth found that more than 70 percent of parents whose children participated reported that the program helped them to miss less work and made it easier for them to keep their jobs. When parents don’t have to worry about what their kids are doing after school it means less stress at work and more time focused on putting food on the table, clothes on the backs of their kids.
Expanded Learning Time does more than just help students. It gives parents the opportunity to succeed at their jobs. It helps communities keep streets clear of trouble. It is the cascading positive outcomes of ELT that make it such a powerful reform tool. But, of course, none of these benefits should be a surprise. A school day designed the century before last, for farmers, couldn’t possibly be expected to be effective in 2011.
Now, of course, like so many areas of education policy, there is a familiar retort to those of us who understand the imperative of expanded learning time: we are told it’s simply not going to happen. The barriers to implementation are too great say naysayers. The teachers’ unions, the administrators, the politicians won’t get on board. But we know the reality is quite different.
Today, in literally thousands of schools across America, these obstacles are being broken down. The teacher’s unions are agreeing to add hours to benefit the children; administrators are dedicating resources. Even the politicians in some places are making this a priority, finally understanding that leaving hundreds of billions of dollars in education facilities empty and unused 85 percent of the time over the course of a year is inexcusable. More importantly, schools themselves are approaching this from an innovative standpoint, working with groups like Citizen Schools, which provides volunteers to work as a second shift of educators, and City Year, which supplies AmeriCorps members who support teachers all day.
In New York, Brooklyn’s Generation High School, in collaboration with the New York City teachers union, has used creative staffing, staggered vacation time and outside internships to increase the number of school days from 180 to 200, at no incremental cost. In the school’s most recent graduating class, 90 percent of its seniors finished on time and the same percentage matriculated to college. And consider for a moment that when these students entered Generation High from traditional part time, part year schools only about 20 percent of them were reading at close to their grade level.
Not surprisingly, administrators and unions elsewhere are adopting the Generation school design. This fall, West High School in Denver—one of that city’s most challenged schools—is converting to the Generation School design. At Newark’s North Star Academy an intense focus on utilizing every minute of the school day has led to an extraordinary college acceptance rate of 100 percent. At IDEA College Preparatory in Donna, Texas, four classes of seniors have not only matched that 100% matriculation rate, but 97 percent of all students who entered college remain in school—a number that dramatically outpaces national average for first generation college students and low-income, Hispanic students. In Houston, the Jane Long School saw test scores and enrollment dramatically improve after they adopted ELT practices. These are just a few of the growing number of educational institutions that are today utilizing expanded schedules—from charters to public schools; from Brooklyn and Boston to New Orleans, Houston and Stockton, California.
Even more important, we’re seeing buy-in from both national and local political leaders. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has made it clear to states, schools, and non-profits that expanding learning time must be an essential strategy in turning around the nation’s lowest-performing schools. His Department has begun providing greater resources to achieve that goal. The guidelines for the Department of Education’s School Improvement Grant program now include provisions that directly encourage and even require increased learning time for students. States currently applying for waivers from the requirements of the No Child Left Behind law are being encouraged to expand learning time. At the local level, innovative Mayors like Rahm Emanuel in Chicago and Cory Booker in Newark are making expanded learning time an educational priority.
These advances are long overdue, a half century overdue, but they are not enough. Additional hours have to be successfully integrated into the design of the school day and year. We need to be discussing the question of how those extra hours can be used most effectively. How can the school day be expanded so that it most directly serves the needs of students, teachers and parents? My hope is that these are the sorts of questions all of you will be discussing today, and you can be confident that Ford Foundation will continue to work in supporting and advocating for these extended day initiatives.
Let me close with a little story. In the city of Philadelphia, which has begun to adopt the ELT approach, there is a school called the Mastery Charter School. A simple sign in one of the classrooms there reads: “We have 90,000 minutes this year. Let’s make each one count.” The children who wrote those words understand the value of time. I think that’s a lesson that those advocating for expanded learning time need to keep front and center. Time is one of the most precious resources our schools have—certainly it’s the most irreplaceable.
Let’s also remember that, in the end, what we are talking about here is more than the essential responsibility of educating our kids for the challenges of a 21st century economy. With extended time we have the opportunity to do something even more profound—transform entire communities for the better. We can make places more livable and self-sustaining environments for the most vulnerable of our fellow citizens.
Thank you.
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