Conventional wisdom tells us that if you think what you are doing is not working, then doing it for a longer period of time probably will not help.
In other words if you continue to do what you've always done, albeit for a longer time, you'll likely get the same result you had before - just more of it.
Which brings us to the provincial election in Quebec where one candidate, Fran莽is Legault of Coalition avenir Qu脙漏bec, has made headlines across the country by saying he would, if elected, adjust secondary school opening hours to 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. to "better reflect the schedule of modern families" and to help fight the province's high dropout rate.
Quebec does seem to have a problem with high-school non-completion. In 2009, Statistics Canada reported 17 per cent of all 19-year-old Quebecers had no high-school diploma and were not in school - the highest rate of any province. In B.C., six per cent of 19-year-olds had not graduated and were no longer in school.
So will longer school hours and more time in the classroom improve Quebec's school scores and, subsequently, graduation rates? Well, according to numerous studies, that depends entirely on what is done with the extra hours.
It turns out that the relationship between time and learning is complicated by the different subsets of school time and how that time is used by schools, teachers and students.
Allocated time, says the research, is just more time at school, meaning the total number of days or hours students are required to attend school.
Engaged time is time during which students are or appear to be participating in learning activities. While any 50-minute class period (so called instructional time) may nominally be devoted to a particular subject such as history, in reality, some portion of the period is almost always consumed by activities having little or nothing to do with learning, such as roll call, disciplinary issues and interruptions by announcements coming over the public-address system.
Then there is actual academic learning time, when there is some measurable certainty that learning actually occurs.
In summary, the research reveals fairly predictable results:
1. There is little or no relationship in terms of student achievement with an just an increase in "allocated time." Just being there for longer hours accomplishes very little.
2. There is some relationship, though, between engaged time, focused classroom activity and student achievement.
3. By far the greatest correlation between school time and learning is between academic learning time - time when kids are actually following a well-constructed lesson - and resulting achievement.
In short, time alone does matter. What matters is the degree to which time is devoted to excellent instruction involving moving students from lesson outline through topic elaboration to supervised independent student practice that reveals that assessable learning has occurred.
Interesting, of course, but none of this takes into account the horrifying logistics and considerable cost issues associated with lengthening school hours.
Making the school day longer anywhere is something of an organizational nightmare, what with bus schedules, kids who have after-school jobs, playschool, community sports or after-school family responsibilities.
As for cost, Legault himself estimates that lengthening school days would be implemented over five years and cost $290 million when fully implemented. Much of that would be in additional teacher time. And that with no definitive research that longer school days produce significantly better results.
In Chicago, where 50 schools of the district's 585 schools have, at the urging of mayor-elect Rahm Emanuel, moved to longer school hours, the results are mixed in terms of testing.
Two of the pioneer schools had double-digit gains on standard achievement tests. The majority showed some improvement, but two lost ground.
And not all improving schools could credit the longer day for their rising test scores. At least 14 other schools around the city saw double-digit improvement using an old six-hour schedule.
On average, the schools that volunteered for the early launch of the longer day boosted test scores by 2.5 percentage points at an estimated cost of $7.5 million.
Maybe, as people with actual experience in education would tell you, forget the headline-grabbing ideas. The money would be better spent first and foremost on promoting excellence in teaching.
Geoff Johnson is a retired superintendent of schools.
