State test results released last fall in math and English scores since 2024, yet still lagged far behind the standard set before the COVID pandemic. Meanwhile, the National Assessment of Educational Progress, a federal exam administered biannually to hundreds of thousands of students, recently placed Oregon in the country. Adjusted for student demographics and poverty levels, it ranked 50th among states in fourth-grade math and reading, 49th in eighth-grade math, and 47th in eighth-grade reading.

Now local observers are pointing to Oregon’s relatively brief school year, as well as high rates of absenteeism, as one explanation for the dismal results. In released by the nonprofit group Stand for Children, researchers show that sizable gaps in seat time between Oregon and other states — and even larger ones separating districts within Oregon — compound over years into massive disparities in opportunities to learn. Advocates argue that loose rules governing how states report attendance data also contribute to the problem.

Sarah Pope, the executive director of Stand for Children’s Oregon affiliate, said her state was “definitely on the low end” in terms of instructional time made available to children. On average, their school year lasts 165 days (compared with 179 days in the U.S. as a whole), and students receive 9 percent fewer instructional hours than their counterparts around the country; over time, that adds up to well over one year of missed schooling.

“When we tell people that we’re 9 percent short, their eyes glaze over because people can’t imagine what that means,” Pope remarked. “But when we tell them it’s a year difference over the course of a K–12 experience, which is like graduating as a junior, they’re like, ‘Oh gosh.’”

The group’s report notes that Oregon is one of just 10 states that sets no minimum of total school days per year, allowing districts to set their own schedules so long as they hit an annual minimum of instructional hours (900 for students enrolled in kindergarten, elementary school, and middle school, and slightly more for high schoolers). In practice, the state’s average K–8 student receives 1,111 hours of designated school time each year, considerably below the national average of 1,231 hours for K–12 students. Only Maine, Nevada, and Hawaii provide less schooling.

Those figures are drawn from by Brown University economist Matthew Kraft, which also found that differences in instructional time between states can be dwarfed by those within states. By the end of elementary school, for example, Oregon students living in a district at the bottom of the state’s school time rankings receive a full 1.4 years less education than those in a district at the top. The gap explodes to nearly three years’ worth of instruction by the time those students graduate high school.

Aside from the length of the school year, the pandemic-era spike in chronic absenteeism (the percentage of students missing 10 percent or more of the school year) has further eroded the amount of time that kids spend learning. And while that trend has proven stubbornly persistent in nearly every jurisdiction, Oregon’s spike has been higher and longer-lasting than most. , a think tank based in Washington, D.C., Oregon’s rate of chronic absence reached a stunning peak of 38 percent in 2022–23, only falling to 33.5 percent by 2024–25 (compared with a national average of 22 percent the same year). 

Kraft, who on the subject before the education committee of the Oregon House of Representatives, said it was “wildly inequitable” for students in different parts of a state to enjoy vastly less time with teachers than those elsewhere. Both researchers and elected officials needed to examine the intersection of poor attendance and inadequate instructional time more closely, he continued.

“The outliers offering substantially less time have wound up with far less learning opportunities for students,” Kraft observed in an interview with ����Ӱ��. “Curriculum is built around having x amount of minutes in a day to teach math or science, and when teachers and students don’t have that, the results illustrate the negative consequences.”

‘We should not be proud’

Those consequences could be reversed with policy changes, according to Stand for Children’s analysis. 

Using existing estimates of the of and on student test scores, the authors calculated that Oregon would dramatically improve its NAEP performance by lifting statutory requirements for schooling time and cutting absenteeism to pre-COVID rates. If those conditions were both reached, they found, Oregon students enrolled in kindergarten today would move from 48th in the nation in reading to sixth-place by the beginning of high school. A somewhat smaller leap, from 49th place to 25th place, could be achieved in math scores.

As of yet, no such sweeping changes are in the offing. If anything, a combination of diminished enrollment figures — the product of both lower fertility and a COVID-era flight from public schools — has led at least some districts to consider paring the school year back further. Reynolds School District, which enrolls around 10,000 students in the suburbs east of Portland, from its school calendar in response.

During , the state was around the country where districts chose to compress learning time. It has also been one of the national leaders in popularizing the four-day school week, with operating on a truncated schedule. While sometimes popular with family and school staff, that shift often leads to a deterioration in learning and comparatively few benefits in faculty retention.

Given Oregon’s clear decline in academic achievement, Stand for Children’s Pope said that district leaders should refuse to shorten their school year at the very least. Her organization is backing the passage of , a bill that would require state authorities to report on absenteeism four times during the school year, rather than just once, as is now mandated. Such a law — scheduled for hearings before the state Senate’s education committee in the coming days — would allow for school systems to conduct earlier outreach to families when their students are at risk of becoming chronically absent.

She also supports the adoption of a more exacting definition of learning time. At the moment, she said, up to 60 of the required instructional hours can be filled through activities like professional development and parent-teacher conferences, which occur when children aren’t in school.

“Do we think it’s right that our definition of instructional time has an allowance for approximately 10 days when kids don’t have to be there? And it can count for instructional minutes?” Pope asked.

Emielle Nischik, the executive director of the Oregon School Boards Association, said that the state’s students deserved “as much time in school as students around the country. But she added that more instructional hours and better data reporting could only be gained through increases in education spending. 

“Oregon school funding adjusted for inflation has essentially been flat since the 1990s, even as Oregon and the federal government have added staffing and services requirements that cost money,” Nischik wrote in an email. “We are open to any discussion of increasing class time as long as it comes with the understanding that more days will cost more money.”

Last summer, Gov. Tina Kotek of $11.3 billion to cover the K–12 system through 2027. According to by the National Education Association, Oregon spent nearly $19,000 per pupil in daily attendance in the 2023–24 school year, ranking 20th among all states. 

Kraft compared the resource of time to that of money. While lawsuits have been won to force states and districts to spend more money on schools, no such litigation has focused on learning time as a necessary educational input. 

“That has not been the case around time, in large part because schools are following the law, and the minimums we set in many states — not all, but many — are very, very low. We should not be proud to have met these minimums.”

Seemingly minute differences in the length of a school day or year, whether stemming from state laws or local rules governing school districts, eventually grow into colossal gaps in learning opportunities. Over the course of their K–12 careers, the authors estimate, children living in jurisdictions requiring the most time in school benefit from over two years more education than those living in areas that require the least. 

“It’s hard for me to understand why some students should have access to a 180-day school year, and others in a district down the road get two weeks less instruction,” said co-author Matthew Kraft, an economics professor at Brown University. “Why would we want that inequity baked into our system?”

The paper, published Monday in the American Education Research Journal, relies primarily on figures collected before the emergence of COVID-19. But its resonance will inevitably be heightened by the post-pandemic crisis of chronic absenteeism, one-quarter of students nationwide missed at least 10 percent of the school year in 2023–24. At the same time, owing both to budgetary challenges and popular choice, of school districts are shifting to a four-day week.

The pronounced geographic divergences in access to instructional time are largely the product of state laws. While 37 states mandate a minimum number of days in the academic year, their requirements range from 160 days in Colorado to 186 days in Kansas; among the 37 states that set a floor for instructional hours in a year, Arizona is at the bottom with 720, while Texas is at the top with 1,260.

In other words, while the average American K–12 school is in session for 179 days a year, for just under seven hours each day, local variation is much wider. 

Drawing on data from the U.S. Census’s nationally representative , the study finds that schools at the 90th percentile of instructional time nationwide offer 1.17 more hours of school each day than those at the 10th percentile. Throughout the school year, those approximately 70 minutes per day accumulate into a disparity of 196 hours of teaching, or about five and a half weeks of school annually.

Some school districts set their own requirements for time in school higher than those set by their respective states. But at the median, schools in the five states that set highest minimum amount of instructional time (Texas, Nebraska, Arkansas, Mississippi, and Alabama) are open for 133 hours more per year than those in the five states with the lowest minimums (Hawaii, Nevada, Maine, Oregon, and Rhode Island). Cumulatively, students in the first five states will receive 1.4 more years of schooling from kindergarten through the twelfth grade.

Even acknowledging those differences, some kids are actually exposed to less instructional time than their state or district stipulates. As a case study, Kraft and co-author Sarah Novicoff examine the Providence Public School District in Rhode Island, which offers 1,174 annual hours of instructional time for elementary schools and 1,215 hours for secondary schools.

After using state data to tally students’ excused and unexcused absences, teacher absences, tardies, suspensions, and a host of outside interruptions — Kraft that intercom announcements, staff pullouts, and principal “fly-bys” can disrupt the typical classroom as many as 2,000 times each year — the authors calculate that a typical Providence elementary schooler misses 16 percent of their intended instructional time. The average high schooler misses as much as 25 percent.

Novicoff, a former middle school teacher now pursuing a doctorate at Stanford, said that school staff and administrators should aim to harvest low-hanging fruit during the school day by doing everything in their power to minimize in-class disruptions.

“They can say, ‘If I want to pull a kid from that classroom, I’m going to shoot their teacher a chat message instead of banging on their door,’” she suggested. “The difference there is the degree to which students notice and are disrupted.”

Effects on achievement

But while some educators work to maximize the time available to them, others have happily embraced a shorter school week over the last few years.

Between 2019 and 2023, the number of school districts operating on four-day weeks from about 662 to almost 900, according to a count kept by Paul N. Thompson, an economics professor at Oregon State University. The switch has been especially popular in more rural districts that tend to face greater transportation challenges and welcome a simplified schedule.

But Thompson’s research shows that districts in Oregon that made the change have seen substantial losses in achievement. Although the schools compensated for the missing day by lengthening the four remaining, students still lost out on several hours of school each week. Notably, the learning losses at those schools grew the longer they stayed on a four-day week, suggesting that the effects were compounding as students lost more instructional time.

Recently, Thompson undertook of four-day weeks around the United States, again concluding that they were associated with significant declines on test scores. The academic slippage was greatest in schools that lost more instructional time, as well as those in less rural settings. 

Emily Morton, a co-author of that study and a researcher at the said she thought her findings about the benefits of more instructional time generally dovetailed with those of Kraft and Novicoff. But she recommended that, before changing the law to require more school hours and days, states should heed the example of Providence and find ways to maximize the instructional time already being provided.

“It seems wise and more cost-effective to first focus on recovering time that currently is ‘lost’ during the school day or year (through interruptions, announcements, absences, etc.),” Morton said. “I would also say we have good evidence that summer school can positively impact student achievement, particularly in math.”

Indeed, schools and educators sometimes resist when pushed to remain in session for longer. After New Mexico passed a law last year that significantly lifted the minimum number of annual instructional hours s, the state education department declared that districts by offering a 180-day year. In response, . 

Kraft suggested that state authorities consider approaches that would allow communities to opt in to longer school years or experiment with ways of increasing instruction.

“We have to be conscientious about the potential unintended consequences of increasing minimums,” he said. “It has to be done in a way that schools and districts feel supported.”

The most important task lying ahead for education leaders is reversing the tide of disengagement and absenteeism that has rocked schools the last four years. Kraft and Novicoff’s data from Providence dates back to 2016, but nationwide attendance plummeted during the era of virtual schooling and has not recovered. It is reasonable to expect that, during the 2023–24 school year, millions of absent students missed tens of millions of classroom hours. 

Jennifer Davis, a former official in the U.S. Department of Education and the co-founder of the , called chronic absenteeism a “huge problem” that schools would have to overcome to keep their students on-track for graduation. Additional resources, including community outreach navigators and alternative learning experiences, might be necessary to rebuild the connections between students and schools, she added.

“Without this,” Davis wrote in an email, “we are going to lose the COVID generation.”

The Louisiana Department of Education announced Thursday a new workgroup that will seek solutions to problems deemed classroom disruptions.

“One of the best ways we can value teaching professionals is by simply protecting their time to do the important work entrusted to them,” Cade Brumley, state superintendent of education, said in the news release.

The department announced the Let Teachers Teach workgroup to find solutions to certain problems that take up teachers’ time. The news release specifically listed excessive training and paperwork, scripted lessons and student discipline as some of the problems they plan to address with the workgroup.

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The goal of the workgroup is to limit these disruptions so that teachers have more time to devote to classroom instruction.

The group will be made up of pre-kindergarten through high school teachers, but its members have not been chosen yet. Kylie Altier, Louisiana’s 2024 Teacher of the Year and a first-grade instructor in Baton Rouge, was named chair of the workgroup.

The workgroup was formed based on feedback Brumley received through engagement, including classroom visits and the Teacher Advisory Council, a group of 22 classroom leaders from throughout the state.

The goals of the workgroup align with recommendations from one of Gov. Jeff Landry’s transition councils. The K-12 Education Policy Council , released last month, highlighted several issues, including teacher recruitment and retention.

The report recommends legislative action to reduce time-consuming mandates and “examine unnecessary licensure burden… understanding that professional experiences can be more valuable than licensure processes in many cases.”

Posted this morning, results from last year’s administration of the nationally representative test — sometimes referred to as the “Nation’s Report Card” — showed history scores dropping by an average of five points on a 500-point scale. Average civics scores fell by two points on a 300-point scale, the first-ever decline in the 25-year history of the test. After modest increases over the last few decades, performance in both subjects has fallen back to levels measured in the 1990s, when the subjects were first tested. 

Taken together, the scores provide only the latest evidence of declining U.S. academic performance across a range of disciplines. Just last fall, the release of math and English scores showed severe damage inflicted during the pandemic, with years’ worth of academic growth similarly erased or massively reduced.

Peggy Carr, commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, told reporters that the unprecedented reversal in civics was “alarming,” though not of the same magnitude as last year’s release. More disquieting were the history results, she added, which began their slide nearly a decade ago and are now nine points lower than in the 2014 iteration of NAEP. 

“For U.S. history, I was very, very concerned,” Carr said. “It’s a decline that started in 2014, long before we even thought about COVID. This is a decline that’s been [going] down for a while.”

Beyond the headline figures, the test also measured lower performance across all four of the sub-themes included on the NAEP U.S. history test, including changes in American democracy (minus-five points), interactions of peoples and cultures (minus-five), economic and technological development (minus-five), and America’s evolving role in the world (minus-three).

Equally noteworthy, Carr observed, was a phenomenon that has been consistent across multiple rounds of NAEP stretching back over the better part of a decade: Scores for the most successful test takers (those at 90th percentile in U.S. history and both the 75th and 90th percentile in civics) are statistically unchanged since 2018, while relatively lower-performing students did significantly worse.

Those diverging trends were reflected in the numbers of participants scoring at NAEP’s different achievement thresholds. The percentage of eighth graders scoring below NAEP’s lowest benchmark of “basic” in U.S. history (defined as only partial mastery of the requisite skills and knowledge in a given subject) grew from 29 percent in 2014 to an incredible 40 percent in 2022. In civics, the proportion of students scoring below the basic level rose to 31 percent from 27 percent in 2018.

By contrast, just 13 percent of test takers managed to score at or above NAEP’s “proficient” benchmark in U.S. history (defined as being able to read, interpret, and draw conclusions from primary and secondary sources) — the lowest proportion of eighth-grade students reaching that level out of any subject tested by NAEP. Only about one-fifth of students met or exceeded the proficient level in civics, the second-lowest proportion for any subject. 

Patrick Kelly, a 12th-grade teacher of AP U.S. government in suburban Columbia, South Carolina, said that the results, while disappointing, could hardly be called a surprise. In spite of their importance to the country’s social fabric, he continued, requisite attention and precedence has not been granted to either history or civics.

“When it comes to social studies instruction, we’ve marginalized it for quite a while nationally,” said Kelly, who also serves as a member of the National Assessments Governing Board, which oversees the construction and administration of NAEP. “You get out of something what you put into it, and we haven’t been putting enough in to get anything other than the results we’re seeing.”

A ‘neglected sphere of learning’

The new scores arrive at a period of contention around social studies, when both policymakers and members of the public allege partisan interference in classroom instruction. 

Conservatives, including a swell of newly emergent parent groups, have spent much of the past few years complaining that teachers and school district leaders are indoctrinating children through ideological instruction on topics like race, gender and sexuality. Progressives counter that Republican-led moves to narrow topics of classroom discussion and remove controversial books from school libraries constitute a more pernicious form of political meddling.

In a statement, Secretary Cardona echoed some of the latter claims, arguing that the lower NAEP scores reflect the disruptive effects of COVID-19. Restricting the autonomy of teachers “does our students a disservice and will move America in the wrong direction,” he said.

“The latest data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress further affirms the profound impact the pandemic had on student learning in subjects beyond math and reading,” Cardona wrote, adding that it is “not the time…to limit what students learn in U.S. history and civics classes.”

But whatever the impact of recent disputes over lengthy school closures or district-led equity initiatives, the drop in history knowledge can be traced back to 2014. It was around that time that a new federal education law, the Every Student Succeeds Act, replaced No Child Left Behind — a development that would reduce classroom focus on the core subjects of math and English and make more room in the school day for instruction in science, social studies, and the arts.

If that shift occurred, it can’t be detected in the latest NAEP results. , a renowned historian who serves as both a humanities professor and president emeritus of the University of Richmond, said that history education still languishes as “a neglected, de-emphasized sphere of learning” within the K–12 world.

The downward-trending performance “reflects 30 years of disinvestment in the teaching of social studies,” reflected Ayers, who recently launched to provide free learning resources to K–12 teachers. “It reflects the diminished amount of testing devoted to those subjects. We have emphasized STEM and reading and sacrificed this kind of learning in schools across the country.”

Recent findings from nationally prominent research and advocacy groups have sounded a similar note. A of the elementary social studies landscape was conducted by the RAND Corporation, warning of a “missing infrastructure” for the teaching of civics and history in elementary schools. Few states require regular assessment of social studies knowledge, the study found, and many rely on low-quality standards. While 98 percent of elementary principals reported evaluating their teachers on math and reading instruction, just 67 percent said the same of social studies. A of teachers said that the task of selecting curricular materials for social studies lessons fell to them, and just 16 percent said they worked from a textbook.

Survey responses from eighth graders who took the exam dovetailed somewhat with those findings. Between 2018 and 2022, the proportion of students who said they were enrolled in a dedicated U.S. history course declined from 72 percent to 68 percent. Just 55 percent said they had a teacher whose “primary responsibility” was teaching U.S. history, compared with 62 percent four years prior.

Ayers said that the “diminished” focus on history endangered the development of civic skills and inclinations. Only a renewed push for more and better instruction in social studies could reverse that, he said.

“I care about people living in public, living with one another. And there’s nothing like getting outside of yourself — that’s kind of what the humanities do generally. To step outside your own perspective and imagine another time, another place, another gender, another skin, is the best way to foster a sense of common purpose.”

Researchers, for their part, believe stagnancy among third graders is preferable to steep declines and proves learning loss interventions like tutoring and additional group instruction have been effective measures. Tennessee is cited as an example of a state taking the lead, with state leaders investing in high-quality instructional materials backed in the science of reading and aligned teacher training to narrow literacy gaps among students.

Elsewhere, data released from separate reports by Chalkbeat and the RAND Corporation, are that are bucking hopes that staffing challenges would mitigate years after the worst of the pandemic. 

Teacher turnover was estimated at 10% nationally at the end of the 2022 school year, at least 4% higher than pre-pandemic — though the rate appears to spike when compared state-to-state, with turnover as high as 15% in places like South Carolina and Louisiana. The RAND data suggests that is around 16% nationally, climbing nearly 13% percentage points through the pandemic. Staff turnover remains high despite nearly 90% of districts reporting they’ve implemented new policies and initiatives aimed at mitigating recruitment and retention woes.

Looking beyond literacy scores and teacher turnover, below is our latest roundup of updates from 10 states about how school systems are confronting the challenges posed by COVID-19 and its variants — and working to preserve student progress amid the pandemic:

WASHINGTON STATE — New Bill Would Reduce Classroom Learning By Four Hours a Week, Prioritizing Teacher Development

A bill proposed in Washington state is raising concerns for allocating up to four hours per week during the school day for teacher professional collaboration and development. Proponents say greater collaboration between teachers will allow for improved instruction and interventions for students, while critics say the measure would result in students instead of 30.

NORTH CAROLINA — Board of Education Aims to Increase Teacher Pay

The North Carolina Board of Education has submitted a teacher pay plan to the state legislature . The proposal is receiving pushback from the state teachers union, which says increases should not be tied to student performance as measured by test scores. If approved by the legislature, a teacher’s starting annual salary in the state would be raised to $38,000.

ILLINOIS — Chicago’s Next Mayor Will Be a Former Educator

After Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s stunning defeat in the city’s recent mayoral election, will proceed to a runoff election on April 4th. Cook County Commissioner Brandon Johnson, a former public school teacher and Chicago Teachers Union organizer, will face off against Paul Vallas, who served as CEO of Chicago Public Schools from 1995 to 2001.

DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA — DC School Aims to Make CTE More Attractive & Accessible

District of Columbia Public Schools (DCPS) are t for an increasing number of students. The district says six high schools now boast 30 industry certifications and 24 career pathways, from computer engineering and hospitality to culinary service and biomedical sciences. “There’s two things we know about our students,” said DCPS Chancellor Lewis Ferebee. “Students who participate in extracurriculars and students who participate in our career and technical education programs are the most successful after graduation in DCPS, and, in fact, that is actually true nationally as you look at outcomes.”

MONTANA — Gov. Gianforte Signs K-12 School Funding Increases Into Law

Montana Gov. Greg Gianforte signed a measure into law , resulting in an additional $85 million in funding for schools in the Treasure State. The budget increases come as lawmakers in the state legislature consider a range of education bills focused on topics like teacher recruitment and retention, early childhood literacy, and the expansion of public charter schools.

KANSAS — As Governor Emphasizes Funding for Special Education, Lawmakers Focus on Private Schools

Kansas Gov. Laura Kelly is continuing her push for a fully funded special education system as the state’s lawmakers convene their legislative session. Kelly’s proposed budget would see an increase in state special education funding of about $75 million a year over the next five years while the governor’s office also increases pressure on the federal government to shoulder a larger share of the funding that it currently is, at 13%. Lawmakers, however, that would allow state funding to be used by families for attendance at private schools.

ILLINOIS — Governor Proposes $70 Million Program to Hire and Retain Teachers Amid Teacher Shortage

State lawmakers are considering a number of education funding increases and new programs put forth in Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s annual budget proposal, including a $250 million investment in early childhood education and as districts struggle with stubborn staffing shortages. Other bills being considered would expand student mental health resources, expand kindergarten across the state, and would bolster resources meant to support migrant youth.

MAINE — Blowing the Whistle on Maine’s Flagrant Fouls With Testing

The state’s failure to comply with federal assessment requirements has drawn firm admonition from the U.S. Department of Education. Maine’s Commissioner of Education, Pender Makin received a strongly worded letter from USED’s James Lane . As a consequence of violating federal requirements, USED is also warned that a quarter of Maine’s Title I, Part A funding — or roughly $117,422 — could be withheld. AssessmentHQ’s Dale Chu, commenting on the developments, says “There’s a symbolic power to the feds taking this action. While the dollar amount is miniscule, Uncle Sam can throw his weight around in other ways and it’s heartening to see him doing so on behalf of Maine’s students even if it is at the eleventh hour.”

NEBRASKA — Lawmaker Proposes Expanding NEST 529 Plans to K-12 Private Education

State Sen. Suzanne Geist is sponsoring a bill that would . The proposal comes as a growing number of states explore ways to increase use of education dollars in private education, though Geist notes that the state’s 529 plans are primarily funded by private funding from families and would not impact public school funding in the state.

NEW JERSEY — State’s Plan to Hire Volunteers to Support K-12 Students Garners Lackluster Response

An initiative announced by New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy in late 2022 is receiving criticism for failing to meet initial goals. The New Jersey Partnership for Student Success aims to recruit community members and organizations into supportive roles in schools, despite the governor’s initial goal of over 5,000 for the 2023 school year. Critics say the state education leaders have been slow to recruit applicants and don’t have a clear pathway for those who are accepted.

This update on pandemic recovery in education collects and shares news updates from the district, state, and national levels as all stakeholders continue to work on developing safe, innovative plans to resume schooling and address learning loss. It’s an offshoot of the Collaborative for Student Success’ QuickSheet newsletter, which you can . 

On Thursday, Democratic Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham , which will lift the state’s minimum amount of instructional time for elementary students by the equivalent of 27 days and for middle and high school students by the equivalent of 10 days. 

Total time in class differs from district to district, but that younger children spend 5.5 hours per day in school, while older pupils spend six hours (lunch time is excluded from both figures). The existing minimums are being revised upward to 1,140 annual hours from the current figure of 990 hours for K–6 students and 1,080 for those enrolled in grades 7–12.

The new law will affect roughly three-quarters of New Mexico’s 89 school districts, the remainder of which already meet the new requirements. But some flexibility will be offered, both in terms of how districts use the time and what can be counted as “instructional” activity. In elementary schools, up to 60 hours of professional development, teacher collaboration, and parent-teacher interaction (whether in home visits or structured meetings) can be counted toward the state minimum. 

Democrat Mimi Stewart, New Mexico’s State Senate President Pro Tempore, said the deal was a difficult one to strike. Some teachers and parents grumbled about the prospect of a longer school day or year — districts will have the option of opting for either, or a mix of both — while the governor and some advocates had hoped for more stringent mandates on the amount of time kids spend in class. 

“It was really hard to get a bill together that was a compromise for everyone, and that’s really what HB 130 represents,” Stewart said.

Still, most local observers agreed that the need for action was dire. For years, New Mexico’s educational outcomes have , dragged down by dishearteningly high rates of child poverty and teen pregnancy. That long history of underperformance was highlighted from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, which showed math and English scores for fourth and eighth graders slipping even further behind the national average.

But asking legislators to authorize more school time has proven a tall order. A review of major school districts conducted last year by Chalkbeat had added days to their school years, even with the looming challenge of reversing pandemic-era learning loss. A 2022 proposal in Los Angeles schools to allow staff to work five extra days on a voluntary basis was from the influential United Teachers Los Angeles union. 

Mandi Torrez, the education reform director for advocacy group Think New Mexico, said she had surveyed the damage from COVID and concluded that recovery would need to move “from the classroom-out.”

“We needed time for small-group tutoring and targeted instruction, time for enrichment, time to plan, time for addressing social-emotional needs, time for our students to catch up after the pandemic,” said Torrez, a . “Time was where we needed to start.”

‘It would really level the playing field’

New Mexico is not dramatically different from most states in how it regulates students’ time in school. a set amount of time — whether a minimum of K–12 hours per school day, hours per school year, or days per school year — typically increasing for older students. Many settle on 180 days in a school year or an hourly equivalent that approaches that number.

Matthew Kraft, a Brown University economist who has studied the use of instructional time, said that the number of hours children spend in classrooms “varies tremendously” depending on geography. In he co-authored with PhD student Sarah Novicoff, he found that differences between schools at the high and low ends of instructional time amounted to as much as 190 hours per year; that equates to roughly five extra weeks of instruction. Similar disparities persist in New Mexico, where 38 school districts (43 percent of all districts across the state) . In , one expert said he regarded the task of restoring foregone instructional time to be a “lost cause” for many students.

“There are huge inequities in access for kids to instructional time based on what state they live in, what school district they live in, and what school they attend,” Kraft said.

That assessment largely matched Torrez’s experience as an educator. One of her favorite methods of reinforcing lessons, she said, was to offer after-school tutoring to small groups of students. But significant numbers, including some who might have benefitted the most from supplemental teaching, were unable to access it.

“I would always have some kids who couldn’t stay after school, for whatever reasons,” Torrez remembered. “If we can build in the time so we can do that tutoring during the school day, it would really level the playing field for all of our students.”

Along with several other proposals that emerged during the 2023 legislative session, HB 130 is effectively an outgrowth of , which offers school districts additional funds to add up to 25 extra school days each year on a voluntary basis. A 2015 study of the program conducted by researchers at Utah State University that participants saw marked gains in academic performance. 

But from the New Mexico Legislative Finance Committee found that the vast majority of districts statewide declined the opportunity to take part in K–5 Plus, often citing the difficulty of staffing rural, low-enrollment campuses for additional school days. Teachers’ unions and school leaders also against a 2021 attempt to make participation in the program mandatory, arguing that it would impinge too much on summer vacations for school staff. Stewart, a former teacher, said that teachers had complained to her of the “miserable” experience of transitioning between in-person and online instruction. 

“It really is pandemic PTSD that I’m seeing now,” Stewart said. “Before the pandemic, teachers would tell me all the time, ‘We just want to teach more and be paid for it.’ Well, that’s what this bill does, but they still had a hard time accepting it.”

‘This is good policy’

Throughout the session, Stewart , an alternate measure that would have imposed the same minimum time requirements but not allowed districts to count non-classroom activities — such as lesson planning and teacher collaboration — as instructional time. That carve-out only applies to 60 hours for K–6 teachers, many of whom are now receiving , and only 30 hours for teachers in grades 7–12. 

The second bill was favored by Gov. Lujan Grisham, she said, but both local education officials and teachers themselves pushed for greater flexibility. In the end, she said, it was “a real effort to get the education community onboard with anything that increased [the length of] the school year.”

“We made the change to the hours to answer the local control cries that we get inundated with every session: ‘We want to decide ourselves! Just give us the money!’” Stewart said. “There’s always this tension between local control and state control, and HB 130 was designed to bridge that divide.” 

Legislators in other states are likely familiar with the political roadblocks. Even with extra funding attached to pay school employees for their additional labors, many teachers around the country of working longer hours after the learning challenges they’ve had to contend over with the past three years. After a pandemic-era dip in turnover, mounting frustration and burnout are being felt in higher teacher quit rates.

Consequently, even with documented learning loss posing a huge threat to the educational attainment of this generation of students, states have been slow to embrace increased instructional time as a solution. One exception is Kansas, where lawmakers are to lift the minimum number of annual school days to 195 — an enormous increase — but the measure’s chances for passage are unclear, and few legislatures are following their lead.

Michael Petrilli, head of the reform-oriented Thomas B. Fordham Institution, lamented the reluctance to expand hours spent in class, calling the approach a “no-brainer” tool to lift student performance.

“To be sure, some advocates chafe at the idea of ‘seat time,’” Petrilli observed. “But academic learning isn’t that much different from sports or music or anything else in life: If we want to get better at something, more time on task is an essential part of the equation.”

Kraft said that most research of the effects of extended learning time , when used appropriately, it reliably lifted outcomes for kids. Still, he added, teachers shouldn’t simply be corralled into working longer hours after the pandemic’s ordeal. Instead, districts should be thoughtful about the ways in which they lengthened the school day and year — perhaps by recruiting more tutors so that teachers themselves could have more time to work together and improve pedagogy. 

“This is good policy,” Kraft said. “It would be even better policy if we also think critically about how that’s going to affect the teacher workforce and how we can support schools to…make sure they use that time well.”

K-12 schools that cut instructional time by switching to a four-day week see meaningful reductions in student learning, according to recently published research. The effects are similar to those resulting from other common approaches to cost reduction, such as increasing class sizes, and the negative academic effects may intensify with the passage of time, the author finds.

The trend toward closing schools for one day each week — or at least replacing academic programming during a fifth day with enrichment, field trips, or professional development for teachers — was spreading quickly before the arrival of COVID-19. But the pandemic’s effects, including significant drops in test scores, also point to the damage wrought by lost hours in the classroom.

The , originally published in January and featured today in the journal Education Next, looks at the academic outcomes of nearly 700,000 Oregon students between the 2004-05 and 2018-19 school years. The total number of schools in the state using a four-day week fluctuated from a low of 108 to a high of 156 during that period, with a large surge in adoption during the budget crunch that followed the Great Recession.

Study author Paul Thompson, an economist at Oregon State University, said that most of the schools making the switch were highly rural, enrolling as few as 20 students. The change was implemented differently across districts, he added.

“These are unique situations, and after surveying these schools and talking about why they adopted this four-day week, there’s no one-size-fits-all approach in terms of why they adopted it or how they structure them or what they do on the off day,” Thompson said. “That makes it difficult to think about one blanket type of policy for these schools.”

One consequence that doesn’t vary much, however, is lost learning time. Even though schools tend to expand the remaining school days by roughly 50 minutes to compensate for the missed day, that still leads to students losing out on three to four hours of learning each week.

By studying districts that switched to a four-day week during the period under study and comparing them with other districts that did not, Thompson found that the reduction in teaching resulted in lower test performance for both math and reading. The decline was particularly pronounced for students in the seventh and eighth grades; those larger impacts may result from the earlier start times necessitated by lengthening the other four school days, which could adolescent sleep schedules.

But the average loss in learning may mask even greater detrimental effects. Some schools in the study shortened their week for a year or two as a result of financial necessity, then quickly returned to a standard schedule when their circumstances permitted it. Those schools still experienced a drop in student achievement, but it faded over time as things reverted to the status quo. For those that stuck with the four-day week, learning loss grew considerably as the years passed.

“The important piece here is that if you’re losing instructional time year-over-year, that learning loss is growing over time,” Thompson said. “For schools that continually have reduced instructional time year over year…relative to what they would have had if they’d gone back to the five-day schedule, they see this compounding negative effect.”

The movement toward reducing instructional time is by no means exclusive to Oregon. According to analysis from the Center for Reinventing Public Education, half of all states are home to at least one school running on a four-day week; in five states, all in the West, over 20 percent of all schools have followed that course. Examining the policy’s nationwide spread, Thompson found that the number of such schools grew from 257 in 199 to over 1,600 in 2019. While some provide office hours or other supplemental learning options on their fifth day, others are fully closed to staff and students.

Pre-COVID, the trend had already grown so quickly that researchers at CRPE called it a “”; in one state they studied, , 42 out 115 districts had changed to a shorter schedule. And while the arrangement is often popular with both teachers and families, who can struggle to commute long distances to reach schools in rural areas, the hoped-for cost savings don’t necessarily arrive as advertised. In on six four-day districts, Learning Policy Institute analyst Michael Griffith found they saved between .4 percent and 2.5 percent of their total budgets by instituting the change — largely because they continued to keep schools open for a fifth day to allow for teacher training and student extracurricular activities.

The negative impacts measured by Thompson may also hold ominous implications for students who spent months out of school during the pandemic. Even those who were long ago allowed to return on a hybrid schedule experienced disruptions to the traditional rhythms of school that far exceed those imposed by a shorter week. According to RAND’s ongoing surveys of American teachers, just said that they had covered all of the curriculum that they would have if their schools had stayed open. A California analysis found that as many as 20 percent of low-income students received no live instruction during the course of a given week.

To address the huge needs faced by families and schools looking to get back to normal, Democrats in Congress passed the mammoth American Rescue Plan, including over $120 billion in new funding for K-12 schools. The money can largely be used at the discretion of states, and may ultimately be spent providing summer programs and intensive tutoring that effectively lengthen the school year.

Robin Lake, director of CRPE, compared the “heavy burden” borne by families struggling to adjust to four-day school schedules — and often left without child care coverage for part of the week — with the challenges posed by the year of COVID. Contemplating what it would take for kids to recover from being separated from teachers and classmates, she argued that the solution “can’t be less of anything. It has to be more of everything.”

“I look out at the next couple of years, and I see an almost impossible problem to solve,” she said. “A very concerning lost instructional time, especially in math and especially for certain kids. Extraordinary challenges for kids when it comes to mental health and social-emotional learning. Lost therapeutic services and other supports for students with complex needs. It’s just an extraordinary challenge, and how do we solve that without maximizing the time that kids have in school with teachers?”

Thompson said he was optimistic about the evidence from schools that only temporarily used a four-day week, which ultimately saw “minimal” learning losses as a result. But the long-term consequences for the students involved, including on important benchmarks like persistence in school and high school graduation, still need to be closely studied, he cautioned.

“That’s good news to think about, and it’s what we’re hoping will happen if schools are able to open full-time and kids can get back to instructional time consistent with what we saw pre-pandemic. Hopefully some of these knowledge losses can be caught up. But there are questions about some of the long-run ramifications on outcomes besides achievement.”