Keeping Pace of Falling Behind: Analyzing Learning Time as a Resource for Educational Innovation and Equity

• In Event: Implementing More and Better Learning Time: Understanding the Actors, the Stage, and the Setting

Abstract

Students and teachers often find themselves trying to reconcile and act upon an overwhelming number of goals that various stakeholders have deemed the responsibilities of K-12 education – among them mastery of academic content in multiple subject areas, character development, college and career readiness, and socio-emotional and civic identity development. A foundational resource needed to accomplish any of these goals, and one that is notoriously scarce and hotly contested, is time.

This paper seeks to accomplish two goals: 1. Explore how school administrators, teachers, and students in the state of California experience learning time in their schools; and 2. Analyze the disparities in the amount and quality of learning time that students experience based on economic inequalities.

A great deal of research confirms the commonsense notion that learning time matters – that what students learn is related to the time they spend learning (Carroll, 1963; Berliner, 2007) - and it often does so by demonstrating how lack of access to learning time negatively impacts student achievement (Alexander, 2007; Borman & Dowling, 2006). Specifically, more recent studies have indicated that academic learning time varies widely across classrooms and schools (Phelps et al., 2011; Corey et al., 2012) and that students in classrooms with the most academic learning time were significantly more likely to be white and have fewer special needs (Roth, Brooks-Gunn, & Linver, 2003). Evidence shows that more affluent families use their wealth to provide children with access to a broader range of enriching learning opportunities than children of low-income families (Putnam, Frederick, & Snellman (2012) and that neighborhoods of concentrated poverty negatively affect student attendance and engaged learning time (Balfanz & Byrnes, 2012).

Our paper uses mixed methods to explore the ways that these research findings play out in California K-12 schools by documenting how administrators, teachers, and students from various school contexts experience learning time. We will present initial findings from a statewide survey being conducted in September 2013 with a representative sample of 1,000 teachers detailing how learning time is distributed across California schools and how factors inside and outside of schools shape learning time.

We will also present findings from interviews and focus groups with students, teachers, school leaders, and parents taking place in December 2013 that focus on how members use their own time and how they perceive time being used in their schools. The focus groups will be drawn from four high schools serving socio-economically distinct populations of students in order to highlight similarities and differences across the socioeconomic spectrum.

Our findings will provide evidence about the extent to which learning time is distributed unequally along lines of race and social class and will start a conversation about what classroom, school, and community conditions could enhance learning time in a manner that is associated with positive outcomes for young people who have not been well served in traditional public school systems.

Authors

• Nicole Mirra, University of California - Los Angeles

• John S. Rogers, University of California - Los Angeles