Since schools closed nationwide in March, students have had uneven access to distance learning. A June 2020 survey of nearly 500 nationally representative districts found that, while 85% delivered some kind of materials to students, only one third required teachers to provide remote instruction in which they engaged and interacted with all of their students around the curriculum content (e.g., through online lessons, recorded lectures, or one-on-one support via phone or computer). These expectations were greatly disparate between affluent and lower-wealth communities, as well as between urban and rural districts. Some districts in which students lacked consistent internet access simply sent packets of worksheets home.
The lost opportunities for school-year instruction were compounded by the lack of summer and after-school enrichment opportunities, particularly for students from low-income or immigrant families. Those who traditionally have had the fewest educational opportunities have received even less support over the past several months.
The unequal access to learning during the pandemic further exacerbates the vast differences between learning opportunities that students from lower-income and upper-income families are routinely exposed to during out-of-school hours. Research suggests that students from middle- and upper-income families typically spend 6,000 more hours in educational activities than students in low-income families by the time they reach 6th grade. 1
These opportunity gaps translate to substantial differences in academic achievement. Research estimates that the cumulative summer learning gap over multiple years accounts for more than half of the 9th-grade achievement difference between students from lower-income families and their more affluent peers, which in turn contributes to whether or not students enter college-track high school programs and meet college-going requirements. 2 The U.S. public education system’s 6-hour day and 180-day year cannot, on its own, offset the gap in out-of-school learning opportunities between students from more and less affluent families.
With 55 million students out of school and receiving highly disparate education due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the effects of lost learning time will be widely felt. A McKinsey report suggests that these negative effects could last a lifetime and disproportionately impact Black and Latino/a students from low-income families. Expanded learning time (ELT) is a means by which to recover lost learning opportunities, whether in person or online.
As a number of back-to-school frameworks have argued, 3 a critical approach to restarting and reinventing schooling will be to provide expanded learning time and opportunities for all students, with special attention paid to students with special education needs and those who are English learners. ELT takes place before and after the typical school day and over summer vacation and other scheduled breaks and is one of the four pillars of a comprehensive community school strategy. 4 (See “Priority 8: Establish Community Schools and Wraparound Supports.” ) While many schools offer after-school programs and weekend enrichment opportunities, these opportunities do not necessarily constitute ELT. Quality ELT is not just an add-on program, field trip, or enrichment opportunity; it complements the learning that takes place during the typical school day in ways that support essential curricular standards and the learning activities developed to achieve those standards.
The impact of ELT has been studied by researchers and program evaluators for decades, and an extensive body of research indicates that additional high-quality learning time leads to positive achievement and engagement outcomes for students. For example, a meta-analysis of 15 empirical studies selected for their methodological rigor found that 14 of the studies of extended days and/ or years demonstrated positive achievement outcomes for students. 5 Additional research reviews point to similar findings, often emphasizing that ELT is especially beneficial for students from low-income families, students of color, and students who are academically behind. 6
In the current context, ELT will be particularly important for English learners. For many of these students, these months away from school have meant a lack of exposure to English and adequate online instruction. As a consequence, many will need additional learning time— above and beyond that provided for other students. Students who are English learners will benefit from targeted language instruction (preferably in both English and their primary language) to catch up, as well as regular opportunities to be mixed with other students. In many cases, they will also need social and emotional supports due to the stress they have experienced given efforts to break up families and deport parents .
A research synthesis from the Wallace Foundation notes that quality out-of-school programs that produce positive effects on outcomes offer targeted instruction focused on particular academic and/or social and emotional skills; create a warm, positive climate; enable consistent and frequent participation; and employ a stable group of trained, dedicated instructors who work effectively with youth. Given the strong evidence base that links well-designed additional learning time to positive student outcomes, it is encouraging to see that ELT appears in the majority of state plans for reopening schools that have been developed thus far.
Another form of extended learning is preschool education. Investments in early childhood programs, such as Head Start, lead to substantial gains in attainment and earnings, 7 and those investments could be greatly expanded to reach more eligible children. But high-quality preschool is not available to many eligible students both because of inadequate public funding and because many programs run for only 3–4 hours each day, making them inaccessible to many children from working families. Part- day programs, furthermore, are less effective than school-day programs in boosting child outcomes.
Now, more than ever, policymakers will determine the extent to which out-of-school time exacerbates or mitigates inequitable educational outcomes for students.
Now, more than ever, policymakers will determine the extent to which out-of-school time exacerbates or mitigates inequitable educational outcomes for students. COVID-19 has further illuminated what we have long known: Our current school schedule cannot meet the needs of many students. Innovations made now will have lasting benefits, as school closures are likely to become more common, not only due to public health emergencies, but also due to increasingly common climate crises. 8
In the short term, state and local education leaders can provide opportunities to help make up for learning time lost to the COVID-19 pandemic with resources focused on students who have been most impacted by school closures. In the long term, policymakers also have an opportunity to promote ELT in order to alleviate the out-of-school time opportunity gap by providing high- quality, meaningful learning opportunities for all students. These opportunities should focus on acceleration rather than remediation, building on students’ strengths rather than adopting a deficit-based approach.
As one team of researchers noted in explaining the rationale for investing in tutoring:
Students who fall behind grade-level material tend to stay behind. When these students miss developing crucial foundational skills, they can have major difficulties in subsequent learning tasks, which worsens the gap between them and their grade- level peers as they move from one grade to the next. This persistent mismatch between the learning needs of students and what classroom instruction delivers can seriously undermine students’ chances of success in the workforce and beyond. 9
There is a well-established literature on the positive effects of tutoring, which can produce large gains even when conducted virtually. 10 When students return in the fall, whether in-person, online, or in some hybrid form, many will need individualized attention to support learning gains. Effective tutoring is accomplished not by a cadre of ever-changing, untrained volunteers, but by a focused group of trained individuals working consistently with individuals or small groups of students. Effective tutoring is accomplished not by a cadre of ever-changing, untrained volunteers, but by a focused group of trained individuals working consistently with individuals or small groups of students. In particular, research supports high-dosage tutoring in which tutors work consistently every day for full class sessions (during or after school) with students one-to-one or in very small groups, often accomplishing large gains in relatively short periods of time.
These may be specially trained teachers, as in programs such as Reading Recovery that use a set of well-defined methods one-on-one or in small groups and have been found to have strong positive effects on reading gains for struggling readers, 11 including students with special education needs and English learners. 12 They may also be recent college graduates, including AmeriCorps volunteers, who receive training to work with students, as in the Boston MATCH Education program, replicated by SAGA Education in Chicago. In daily 50-minute sessions added to their regular math classes, two students working with a tutor gained an additional 1 to 2 years of math proficiency by focusing on the specific areas they needed to master while also preparing for their standard class. Tutors in programs such as these have the advantage of a well-developed curriculum with frequent formative assessments to gauge and guide where support is needed. 13
Although districts often think of tutoring as too expensive to undertake as a strategy for helping students master missed skills, because of the fact that it can be structured to be conducted by cross- age peers, volunteers, paraprofessionals, or trained teachers—and because of the size and speed of the gains students can make—economists find that tutoring is one of the more cost-effective strategies to promote accelerated student learning. 14 In light of this powerful evidence, the United Kingdom is now investing more than a billion dollars for tutoring to help all students catch up on what they missed during the spring.
Tutoring is also a powerful tool for ensuring that every child has an adult in school whom they can trust. Lawrence, MA, was one of the lowest-performing districts in the state prior to a state-led turnaround. Extended learning time was an important part of the district’s success in raising achievement. The district partnered with MATCH Education to offer intensive mathematics tutoring during or after school to pairs of the 9th- and 10th-grade students attending two of the district’s lowest-performing high schools. In addition, expert teachers were recruited and paid to offer “Acceleration Academies” over weeklong vacation breaks. These provided struggling students with targeted, small-group instruction in a single subject. 15
Extended learning time and opportunities, used well, can accelerate learning and reduce the learning opportunity gap between what students from low-income families and their peers from middle- and upper-income families experience during out-of-school hours.
Additional time will not in and of itself promote positive student outcomes; additional learning time must be high quality and meaningful in order to move the needle on student achievement and engagement. 16 Among the things that can make out-of-school programs more meaningful are connections to the work students are doing in school and culturally relevant strategies that make learning engaging and allow students to explore ideas deeply.
A strong example of this type of collaboration exists in Oakland Unified School District’s community schools, where ELT is a core model of their full-service community schools approach. Schools in Oakland, CA, use a number of different strategies to increase collaboration, such as including partner staff in monthly faculty meetings and providing regular opportunities for ELT staff to meet with teachers to learn about current curricular goals and units. In some Oakland schools, ELT staff are further integrated into the regular school day; they provide extra assistance to teachers by mentoring students and conducting pullout sessions for small-group instruction. A study of the implementation of the community schools approach in Oakland highlighted one school in which ELT staff and regular teaching staff worked so closely together that the principal no longer referred to ELT as “after-school programming.” In this school, where nearly all of the 6th- and 7th-grade students stay after the traditional school day to participate in coding classes, dance classes, and STEM, the after-school program is referred to as the 8th and 9th periods, indicating an incorporation of ELT into the regular school schedule. In this way, the close collaboration among all adults who work with students allows for a seamless integration of all student learning opportunities. 17
Similarly, an extended school-day program offered by Meriden Public Schools District in Connecticut integrated expanded learning time with traditional instruction. In 2012, the superintendent and the local teachers union in Meriden, CT, partnered with the YMCA and the Boys & Girls Club to add 100 minutes per day (roughly equivalent to 40 additional school days) of personalized learning time at three low-performing schools. The three participating schools reengineered their schedules to include an enrichment block, during which community partners staff the classrooms as teachers and provide instruction in three key enrichment areas: healthy living, literacy, and STEM. A key component of Meriden’s after-school program is that staff at the community organizations worked closely with teachers to align after-school activities with learning during the traditional day and with the schools’ instructional goals. Additionally, the participating schools included community partners in professional learning communities with school staff. This type of collaboration between teachers and providers of ELT ensures that additional learning time is strongly linked with the learning opportunities during the school day and that all learning opportunities complement one another in service of supporting primary instructional goals. The results in Meriden were promising: Two of the three participating schools saw gains in attendance rates, core subject test scores, and teacher ratings, which exceeded districtwide averages.
In addition to aligning activities with a school’s academic learning goals, ELT learning opportunities can be more successful if they incorporate meaningful activities that engage deeper learning pedagogies with content that is connected to students’ lives outside of school.