The School of Time Management
The importance of quantifying wasted time during the school day.
As explored in the previous series of essays, most school boards spend virtually no time on something that’s supposed to be their central mission, namely improving demonstrated student educational achievement. But if a school board were to focus on creating new programs to improve demonstrated student educational achievement, what questions might its members ask to help clear the way for such programs?
Many education policymakers advocate for policies that would require even more of teachers’ currently limited time. But as Frederick Hess points out, in his book The Great School Rethink, education policymakers should first assess how well teachers’ time is spent under current policies with an eye toward making more productive use of the time students are required to be in school.
As Hess writes, a school policy “Rethinker” often asks “why”:
The best way to resist the temptation to attack poorly understood problems with half-baked fixes is simply by asking “Why?” as in, “Why is this person doing this task?” or, “Why do we give that activity that much time?” Asking questions creates an opportunity to pause and reflect, one that is almost invariably more valuable than a well-practiced answer. It’s not enough to ask the questions, though. It’s critical that Rethinkers also encourage others to ask them and that they foster a culture where asking “why?” is expected (and valued). This means discouraging hurried fixes and creating opportunities for inconvenient questions … I see rethinking as profoundly pro-teacher. Just as students and parents may feel stymied by their schools and school systems, the same holds for plenty of educators. The routines and assumptions that can infuriate families also frustrate the teachers who live them every day. Rethinking seeks to be both implacably pro-student and profoundly pro-educator.
Just as it’s difficult to remove an inefficient bureaucrat from an organization, and so organizations instead just add more bureaucrats on top of others, education policymakers to often avoid the tough job of seeking to abandon formerly-approved but inefficient teaching programs in favor of just adding more programs to the mix. But as Hess points out, before policymakers decide whether educators should spend more of their limited time on some new program, they should evaluate how well educators are currently using their time:
Given the conviction that learning is limited by the available time, it’s no surprise that one evergreen proposal is for kids to spend more time in school. In summer 2022, nearly half of school districts used emergency pandemic-related federal funds to offer summer instruction. A third of districts said they were using those funds to add time to the school day … [B]efore we start adding time, there are many ways to make better use of existing student and staff time … On the one hand, the US school year is on the shorter side when compared to other advanced economies. Most US students attend school 180 days a 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 the number of days students attend school; it’s also the time in each school day. When that’s included, it turns out that American students get at least as much formal schooling as their global peers. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) reports that, on average, US 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 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.) … A Rethinker regards a fixation on adding time as misguided and sees value in focusing instead on murkier but more useful questions: How much time is spent in classes? How much of that time is wasted? How much time are students actually engaged in learning? Do students have enough time to master crucial skills and knowledge? And just what does it mean to be “in school,” anyway? (Are students “in school” when they’re logged into a remote classroom? How about if they’ve logged in but they’re muted, their camera is off, and they’re scrolling through videos on their phone?)
As important as the question of time is, Hess points out how seldom it’s been studied in the education context:
In 2021, in a far- too- unusual study of Providence, Rhode Island, researchers Matt Kraft and Manuel Monti- Nussbaum documented just how many disruptions there are in the course of a school day. They estimated that a typical classroom in a Providence public school is interrupted over 2,000 times per year and that these interruptions combine to consume ten to twenty days of instructional time. Major disruptions included intercom announcements, staff visits, and students entering (or reentering) class in disruptive ways. In explaining the impact of tardiness, for instance, the researchers observed that “[i]n 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. Late students often resulted in taking the teacher away from whole-class instruction to orient the student to the current task.” … [B]ack in 2003, researchers at Columbia University and the University of Maryland published an invaluable study examining how elementary students actually spent their school day. It’s a study I’d expect to see repeated dozens of times a year. Bizarrely, it isn’t. The researchers sent a questionnaire, time diary, and parent sign-off form to the teacher of each of the 553 elementary school students in their sample. On a randomly selected school day, teachers filled out time diaries documenting how students spent their time that day. Teachers tracked when each activity began, when it ended, and what the student did during it. The researchers grouped activities into four categories: academic, enrichment, recess, and maintenance. “Academic” included time devoted to content- based subjects, tasks like homework review and testing, library and study time, field trips, and games that reinforced academic skills. “Enrichment” included curricular offerings that weren’t part of the traditional academic curriculum, like physical education, art, music, or health. “Recess” included playtime, hanging out, and breaks. And “maintenance” included other nonlearning activities like homeroom, announcements, meals, bathroom breaks, lining up, cleaning up, fire drills, or packing and unpacking backpacks. The average elementary student’s school day spanned six hours and thirty- five minutes, of which 64 percent was devoted to academic subject activities. Of the remainder, maintenance activities took up 15 percent, enrichment 12 percent, and recess 7 percent. Notably, the share of the school day devoted to academics shrunk as the school day got longer. The researchers found that students with a seven-hour day wound up with just twenty-nine minutes more academic time than those with a six-hour day. In short, less than half of the added hour was devoted to academic instruction … I’m always surprised at the little we know about how students and educators actually spend their time. The fact that the Columbia time diary study or the Providence disruption study are so novel should be a blaring wake-up call for educators and researchers alike. We need to know much more about how time is used, how much time teachers spend on things that matter, and where time is being frittered away on things that are unproductive.
Hess also points to the error of assuming “more class time” means “more learning”:
It’s easy to fall into the habit of treating “more school time” as a shorthand for “more learning.” That happens all the time when public officials talk about lengthening the school year or school day. But the truth is that a given hour of schooling can yield a lot of learning— or none at all. There’s no assurance it will be devoted to boosting academic instruction, or even used productively. When contemplating the time kids spend in school, Rethinkers focus not just on the amount of time but on how that time is used … Think about it this way: if students are engaged 60 percent of the time, a thirty- hour instructional week amounts to more like eighteen hours of actual learning. This means that a 1,080-hour school year amounts to a 650- hour school year. In short, boosting engagement could potentially dwarf the benefits of a longer school day or year. Heck, this means that less school time could conceivably yield more actual learning time -- if less time in class meant students were more engaged during class … In his book Walden, Henry David Thoreau famously observed, “The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it.” As Harvard University’s Arthur Brooks has explained: “Thoreau’s point is not that we should be all work and no play— he was one of history’s most prominent critics of that way of living. Rather, he argued that we waste too much of our lives on things we don’t value. Without thinking about it, we are spectacularly failing some cosmic cost- benefit test, as measured not in money but in what matters most: time.” … The point is not to reduce active, engaged learning in the name of some false “efficiency,” but to have kids spend less time as joyless zombies staring at screens or counting down minutes to dismissal.
Hess also addresses the largely useless but time-dominant role “professional development” courses play in teacher credentialing and promotion:
The problem is that [a] blend of licensure, standardized pay, job protections, and (eventually) elaborate collective bargaining agreements has helped forge a rigid, batch-processed profession that is increasingly at odds with how professionals operate today. Take the licensure system. Chad Aldeman of Georgetown University’s Edunomics Lab has estimated that licensure requirements mean that training the average teacher costs about $ 25,000 and requires 1,500 hours. For possible career- switchers, working professionals who sacrifice current pay in order to pursue a credential, the cost is higher still. Today, half of new teachers leave the profession in their first five years … If we can’t recruit our way to excellence, another popular hope is that we can train our way there. But the research on PD [professional development] suggests that’s an equally problematic bet. As a 2007 meta-analysis published by the federal Institute of Education Sciences (IES) reported, of 132 studies of PD, barely a handful offered “scientifically defensible evidence” of effectiveness. A massive 2014 IES follow-up found that just 2 out of 643 studies of math PD could show positive results that met conventional measures of research quality. As the Brookings Institution’s Tom Loveless has politely put it, “In a nutshell, the scientific basis for PD is extremely weak.” … In schooling, things work very differently than they do in medicine. More times than not, for instance, elementary principals will tell me that literacy is their top priority— that it’s crucial that kids are reading comfortably by the end of second grade. Yet, ask an elementary principal to give you a look at their best second- grade reading teacher and you’ll almost invariably see that teacher teaches reading for ninety minutes— and then teaches art for thirty minutes, polices the cafeteria for twenty-five, takes their turn at bus duty, and all the rest. I’ve found that principals rarely see anything odd about any of this— at least until asked what they’d think of a hospital that had its cardiovascular surgeon doing cardiovascular surgery just ninety minutes a day and spending the rest of the day doing patient intake, delivering meals, and organizing medical supplies … By doing nothing more than rethinking the use of staff time, schools could conceivably get thirty- five hours a week of great reading instruction from that one terrific reading teacher— five times as much as before -- while ensuring that many more students get access to high-quality literacy instruction. And it’s a fair bet that, if roles, pay, and responsibilities were reordered sensibly, the teacher would be happier, more professionally fulfilled, and feel like they were making fuller use of their talents.
Hess also reviews surveys of teachers’ own evaluations of the value of the many different things they’re required to spend their time on:
In 2022, when the Merrimack College Teacher Survey asked a national sample of teachers what they wanted to spend more time on, the top responses were more planning time (29 percent), actual teaching time (28 percent), and time for collaborating with colleagues (17 percent). Nothing else cracked double digits. When asked what they wanted to spend less time on, teachers said general administrative tasks (31 percent), nonteaching student interaction (22 percent), and PD (12 percent). Again, nothing else cracked double digits … [Previously,] we discussed the OECD data on school time. Well, it’s not only America’s kids who spend a lot of time in school; the same is true of teachers. In 2021, at every level of K–12 schooling, American teachers taught at least two hundred hours a year more than the OECD norm. By international standards, teachers in the United States spend a lot of time in classrooms. And yet, I’m struck how little attention gets paid to how this time is used. What’s happening during that extra two hundred hours? How diligently are school leaders protecting teacher time from distractions? These questions should be routine. Yet, my experience is that they don’t get much sustained attention … In Japan, for instance, in order to minimize transition time, many schools have all students eat lunch in their classrooms, and the teachers move room to room during the day while students stay seated. Japanese teachers also have much larger classes than their American peers but that, in turn, means they teach fewer hours and have much more planning time. Is such a model better than ours? Worse? How does one weigh the trade-offs? These are questions that should occasion far more reflection than they do.
Hess reviews the literature showing how largely wasteful teacher-preparation programs are in developing better teachers:
The nation’s 1,200- plus teacher-preparation programs (traditional and alternative alike) are time- consuming but of suspect quality. They do little to screen applicants for academic performance. Researchers have found no demonstrable difference in performance between certified and noncertified teachers. And supervisors also don’t seem to think licenses mean much. The Aspen Institute has found that just 7 percent of superintendents and 13 percent of principals think certification ensures that a teacher “has what it takes” to be effective in the classroom. Licensure systems (in tandem with seniority-based pay) also make teaching inhospitable to career-changers. While midcareer professionals move freely between most jobs, entering teaching requires enduring the licensure gauntlet and then starting at the bottom of an inflexible pay scale. This doesn’t make much sense, given the skills, maturity, and savvy that a veteran engineer, journalist, or staff sergeant might bring to the classroom. Indeed, professionals who enter teaching in their thirties or forties (or fifties) may well be more confident in their career choice and, in today’s workforce, could easily wind up teaching for decades.
Hess also discusses how bureaucratic administrators have come to lord over on-the-ground and in-the-the-classroom teachers:
[F]or many teachers, the primary route to professional (and financial) advancement is to go into administration— a nutty system that either takes veteran educators out of the classroom or else leaves them feeling unappreciated and undervalued … Inflation-adjusted teacher pay did indeed fall by an estimated 3.8 percent over the last decade, [but] even as after-inflation teacher pay fell during the two decades between 1992 and 2014, after-inflation school spending rose by 27 percent (during a period that included the 2001 dot- com crash and the 2008– 2009 Great Recession). So, where’d the money go? Most of it went to adding staff, employee health care, and retirement benefits. Those dollars were spent on employees, just not on boosting take- home teacher pay. Nationally, while student enrollment grew 19 percent during those years, nonteaching staff grew more than twice as fast. Heck, across the nation, from 1950 to 2009, while student enrollment doubled, the ranks of nonteaching staff grew sevenfold. New dollars that could have gone to boosting teacher pay instead went to adding staff. Here’s one way to think about it. In 1970, we had an average student- teacher ratio of about 27 to 1. Today, the ratio is about half that, or about 13 or 14 to 1. Based on long experience, I suspect some readers are saying, “That’s nuts! Our class sizes are nowhere close to that.” If that’s your reaction, take a moment, go to your district website, check the number of students, and divide that by the number of teachers. Having been through this exchange many, many times, I’m confident the student- teacher ratio will be less than 15 to 1. Now, note that we’re talking student- teacher ratio and not class size; even as schools have added staff much more rapidly than they’ve added students, it hasn’t dramatically reduced actual class size (due to contract provisions and staffing practices). Relative to the number of students in school, we’ve roughly doubled the number of teachers since 1970. Alternatively, we might’ve kept student- teacher ratios level and instead put those new dollars into doubling teacher pay. If we’d done that, average teacher pay in the United States in 2021 would’ve been over $130,000. In fact, it’d have been more like $150,000, since schools would only have to make health- care and pension contributions for half as many teachers. Now, while some may find these numbers hard to believe, understand that this is not a controversial calculation! (It’s based on the annual salary figures compiled by the nation’s largest teacher union, the National Education Association.).
In the next essay series, we’ll examine the June, 2023 decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President and Fellows of Harvard College, and how it will affect school and business race-based admissions, program, and hiring policies.
