Education Sector Report….

on how schools should properly use time is out. The Washington Post also has an article up on this topic as well.

The report starts out with a little history on school time and says that in the 1800’s that the school year was as long as 250 days in some US cities before settling down on a schedule of 170-180 by the 1960’s.

The report does get into other studies on this topic and what they have said with each study giving out different views on the subject.

The report looks at math ranking of other international counties and the amount of instruction time per year they have. US ranks 24th with 799 instructional hours while Finland at number one has 861 hours per year. Korea locks in at number 2 with over 1000 instructional hours per year.

Figure 2 is very interesting. It show off that low income students with no summer school have a learning loss while middle income students with no summer school have no learning loss based on research done by John Hopkins University.

They look at topics such as Year-Round schools and Block scheduling. They also look at for profit Edison schools which had a longer school year, but dropped it for having longer school days. Kipp Schools also gets a look at as well.

They do give out some recommendations like collect data and pay attention to plans that already exist. I liked the recommendations they give out.

I found this report to be a great read.