Do American Students Need More Time In School?

Should we be worried that our kids are getting less instruction than their global peers? Advocates and public officials sure are. They’ve long argued that American students need to spend more time in school. Such pleas have been redoubled in the aftermath of the pandemic, with New Mexico just this spring adding weeks to its mandated school year.

Former U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan once told a congressional hearing, “Our students today are competing against children in India and China. Those students are going to school 25 to 30 percent longer than we are. Our students, I think, are at a competitive disadvantage.”

But are the concerns well-founded?

Not necessarily. Getting kids back in school after pandemic closures and disruptions was necessary and vital. But more generally, as I explain in The Great School Rethink, it turns out that American kids spend a lot of time in school compared to their peers around the world. And many parents came away from pandemic-era remote learning with a sense that students do less each day than they’d previously thought.

It’s true that the U.S. school year is on the shorter side when compared to other advanced economies. Most U.S. students attend school 180 days each year. In Finland, the maximum year is 190 days (though many schools employ a shorter calendar). The school year is 190 days in Hong Kong, Germany, and New Zealand; 200 in the Netherlands; 210 in Japan; and 220 in South Korea.

When tallying instructional time, though, it’s not just days in school; it’s also the time in each school day. The typical school day for American students is over six and a half hours. For Finnish students, it’s about five hours. In Germany, it’s five and a half. In Japan, it’s six.

It turns out that American students get as much (or more) formal schooling as their international peers. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) reports that, on average, U.S. students attend school for 8,903 hours over their first nine years in school—which is 1,264 hours more than the OECD average.

The point isn’t that students necessarily get enough schooling. If kids spend this much time in school and yet we’re still frustrated by the results, something needs to change.

The point, rather, is that knowing how much time kids spend in school is more complicated than it may initially appear. More importantly, simply boosting the number of hours or days that kids sit in school may be the wrong goal. Before spending billions to lock kids up longer, we should ensure that schools are making use of the time they already have.

It can be tough to be sure how much time students spend learning, but it’s easier to know how much time they’re not. To see where all that OECD-estimated time really goes, researchers took a Massachusetts high school and started ticking off lost time from its 180-day academic calendar. There were seven early-release days for professional development, eight days for exams, another seven mornings set aside for the state test (all classes were paused though only tenth-graders took the exam), and so on.

Ultimately, the researchers found that total instructional time accounted for just 62 percent of the 1,076 hours estimated by OECD. In other words, 410 hours (or about 13 to 14 weeks) weren’t spent in class.

Then, of course, there’s the question of how much class time is actually devoted to learning. In 2021, in a far-too-unusual study of schools in Providence, Rhode Island, researchers Matt Kraft and Manuel Monti-Nussbaum documented just how many disruptions there are in a school day. A typical Providence classroom is interrupted over 2,000 times per year, with the interruptions consuming 10 to 20 days of instructional time.

Disruptions included intercom announcements, staff visits, and students entering (or re-entering) class. When it comes to tardiness, for instance, Kraft and Monti-Nussbaum note, “In many classrooms, locked doors required late and returning students to knock and a teacher or student to stop what they were doing and open the door.” More than half of the interruptions they observed led to spillover disruptions that amplified the impact. Meanwhile, administrators severely underestimated the frequency of these interruptions and the time they took.

Schools may need more time. But, in many places, an enormous amount of school time—potentially something approaching half the academic year—is not being used effectively.

School and system leaders should scour familiar routines and revisit testing schedules, disciplinary policies, and professional development to maximize learning time. Schools should be expected to report where all that time is actually going. Policymakers should insist on seeing real progress on all before considering costly, intrusive calls for longer school years or school days.