Education and Scholarship

Summer School: What? No More Vacations?

With support from the Ford Foundation, Massachusetts 2020's National Center on Time and Learning has been leading an innovative, statewide effort to expand and redesign the conventional public school day. The Expanded Learning Time school has already garnered broad support throughout Massachusetts and could serve as national model for public schools. This work is part of the foundation's larger effort to increase access to high-quality schooling and to ensure the life chances of young people from marginalized communities are improved.

Published in Time: July 27, 2009
By Gilbert Cruz

...A vacation-crushing theory on how to improve student performance is gaining traction: more time in class. Longer days, longer year. Goodbye, summer.

It's a strategy supported by both President Barack Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan, and cities and states are experimenting with various approaches. Cincinnati, Ohio, for example, in June started giving students in the city's 13 most persistently failing public schools the option of an extra month (a "fifth quarter") of classes. And Ohio Governor Ted Strickland hopes to phase in a similar 20-day extension at all schools statewide...

One of the nation's most closely watched experiments along these lines is Massachusetts' Expanded Learning Time (ELT) Initiative. Launched in 2006, the program involves 26 low-performing schools that have each added approximately 1½ to 2 hours per day to their school calendar. "We're in the early innings of proving how to extend school hours responsibly and effectively," says Chris Gabrieli, chairman of Massachusetts 2020, which helped originate the ELT idea. "But clearly, focusing on the students that are furthest behind is where it makes the most sense. Middle-class kids, they get a lot more learning time outside of school — they get tutors, they get arts programs, they get music programs, they get summer camps."

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