It’s a July morning at 6:45 a.m. and the temperature is starting to climb across the city. Most schoolchildren would expect to have at least a few more weeks of summer. But Quincy Lindsey, a fifth-grader at New Orleans’ ReNEW Cultural Arts Academy, is trying to wake up for his first day of school.
His mother, Calanthia Lindsey, tries to keep Quincy on pace to make it to school by 7:15 a.m., reminding him not to use his pencils as drumsticks and to tuck in his shirt.
ReNEW is one of hundreds of schools nationwide that are adding time to the school year — lengthening school days, requiring Saturday classes or shortening summer. Calanthia Lindsey hopes more time in the classroom will help Quincy stay motivated.
“You know, when things get really complicated for him — high school, college — you got your own schedule,” she said. “You ain’t got Mama standing over you saying, ‘Do your homework.’ He’s gonna want to do it because he’s already set in the mindset early.”
[module align=”left” width=”half” type=”pull-quote”]The jury’s still out on whether more time adds up to more learning.[/module]Nationally, the number of schools adding hours or days has jumped 53 percent since 2009, according to a 2012 report from the National Center on Time & Learning in Boston. New Orleans ranked in the top five cities in the nation for schools extending their day or academic year. The report identified 41 New Orleans schools with expanded time.
The schools have various reasons for adding time. Some cite global competitiveness — pointing to the long day and year at many Asian schools. Others say they want to accommodate the schedules of working families. In addition, charter schools, whose teachers are not usually unionized, have more flexibility in setting calendars and work hours.
But the most common reason school leaders mention is “summer learning loss,” when students forget over vacation much of what they’ve learned during the school year.
Gina Warner, executive director of the National AfterSchool Association, says there’s a reason the movement has been concentrated in low-income communities with poor academic results — places like New Orleans.
“I think it’s definitely the pressure we see to close the achievement gap, and the additional pressure put on schools to have increased test scores,” she said.
Warner thinks more time at school is fine, as long as schools or community partners are offering the students something different, like art or music classes that have been squeezed out of the traditional school day. “If more time is just more of the same, then that’s a problem,” she said.
But Warner worries about why longer school days and years are being touted as the solution only for some children.
“Are we comfortable with a solution that works for other people’s kids, and a solution we wouldn’t want for our own?” she said. “You don’t hear middle-income and upper-middle-income parents talking about expanded day. They want that afternoon, those weekends, those summers, for sports activities, for soccer games, for ballet lessons, for foreign-language instruction, for travel.”
Just ‘get the job done’
Quincy Lindsey was a little hesitant when he learned he would be transferring to a school with a shorter summer. “I was having a lot of fun and I was like, ‘Ahhh, I gotta go to school?’ ”
But he resigned himself to the early start. “You know how you see basketball players on the court?” he said. “Gotta get the job done. So that’s what I have to do.”
Quincy is one of just six students who showed up at his homeroom on the first day, July 22. Some families did not realize just how early the school year now starts.
Gary Robichaux, ReNEW’s chief executive officer, says his network of charter schools has lost a few families because of the extended calendar — but only a few. The network does have longer-than-usual breaks spread throughout the school year.
“I’m not sure why we’ve had this tradition of having 12 weeks off in the summer,” Robichaux said. “I see more and more cities buying into this and doing it. It is a little more expensive to do, but it’s worth the investment.”
In ReNEW’s case, the additional time costs about $500,000 annually per school, which comes out of various grants. U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, a big supporter of expanded learning time, has said that schools ideally would be open “12, 13, 14 hours a day, seven days a week, 11 to 12 months of the year.”
Reluctant converts
Quincy isn’t the only student a bit hesitant to embrace a longer school year. Eleven-year-old A’Lyric Thomas, a sixth-grader at ReNEW, was unsure whether a six-week summer break would be enough.
“I was worried that I wouldn’t have time to do what I wanted to do, and that I would be too focused on school,” she said.
A’Lyric sees one silver lining to a quicker summer, though. “It gets cut short sometimes, but it also gives me a limit so I don’t, like, get addicted to the Internet,” she said.
A’Lyric’s younger brother, Rapheal, likes his teachers and friends at ReNEW. But the nine-year-old still has one big concern about a longer school year. Summer is when Rapheal gets to spend the most time with his father, Bruce Thomas, who works long hours to support his family. Once the school year is in full swing, Rapheal doesn’t see as much of his father as he’d like.
“I can’t see my family at school … like my Daddy,” he said. “Every time he come home and we come home, he’ll be asleep because he got to get his rest [for] work … so we will have food on the table and a place to sleep.”
The close-knit Thomas family makes the most of its limited time together, playing checkers, baseball and other games. And their father believes that the more time his kids spend in school, the better.
“Watching them come home with new ideas and looking at things from a different perspective, that’s what they get from the school experience,” he said.
The jury’s still out on whether more time adds up to more learning. A 2012 literature review by the nonprofit research center Child Trends found most schools that added time showed academic growth. Yet it was impossible to attribute the improvement directly to more time in school. And the report concluded that when it comes to education, more time will never compensate for bad teaching.
This report was a collaboration between the Hechinger Institute and WWNO public radio. WWNO’s Mallory Falk contributed. The story is not covered by The Lens’ republishing guidelines.