Three Thousand Missing Hours

One of the most remarkable things about American classrooms is how little real teaching goes on there. Over the past five years or so, I have spent at least three or four days a month in schools studying the relationship between classroom practice and school organization. I observe classrooms at all levels—primary, middle, and secondary grades—and in all subjects. One of the most striking patterns to emerge is that teachers spend a great deal of classroom time getting ready to teach, reviewing and reteaching things that have already been taught, giving instructions to students, overseeing student seatwork, orchestrating administrative tasks, listening to announcements on the intercom, or presiding over dead air—and relatively little time actually teaching new content.

When my fellow researchers and I code our observations for teaching new content, it is not unusual to find that it occupies somewhere between zero and 40 percent of scheduled instructional time. Over the course of a typical 180-day school year with a 6-hour day (subtracting an hour for programmed noninstructional time), this means that a student might lose somewhere between 200 and 300 hours of instruction per year (40 to 60 days) to just the daily friction of classroom processes.

Let’s compare two middle-grade math lessons taken from the Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS). The first, in a typical American classroom, begins with a problem-by-problem homework review focused on procedure and factual recall. It proceeds to a teacher-directed lesson with no discernible connection to the homework, and ends with a long period of seatwork focused on tomorrow’s homework. There are probably fewer than 15 minutes of instruction in new content in a 55-minute class.

The second lesson takes place in a Japanese classroom. The teacher begins with a brief introduction to the problem of the day including a short connection to the previous day’s work, followed by a combination of individual seatwork, pair work, and group problem-solving, which in turn is followed by students presenting their work and a discussion among the teacher and students of what the students have produced. All of the content is new. The class moves to another problem; the process is the same.

When American educators watch these two lessons they are shocked by the difference: Students in the Japanese lesson are fully engaged in new content for the entire class, while in the American lesson it is difficult to discern what the new content actually is, much less how much time is dedicated to it. Observers invariably comment on how respectful and comfortable students and teachers are with each other in the Japanese lesson, and how distant and incoherent the discourse is in the American classroom. They see that meaningful work produces meaningful discourse and meaningful results.

The assumption that when teachers are teaching students are learning is, of course, conditional on the quality of instruction. Recent research shows that low-quality teaching results in disengagement by students. A recent article by Sam Intrator describes the “flavors of disengagement” among students in high school classrooms: “slow time” (daydreaming); “lost time” (waiting for class to end); “fake time” (pretending to pay attention); “worry time” (fretting over nonacademic matters); and “play time” (socializing). My calculus of lost instructional time does not even include these categories.

In all my hours in the classroom, I have yet to see a student refuse to engage in meaningful academic work. A good deal of what American students are asked to do with their time in school, however, does not meet this standard.

Time Lost to Testing

Then there is testing. State tests take at least two full days of instructional time for each student, and usually more. In addition, many local districts routinely engage in “benchmark” testing to diagnose how students are doing between state testing periods. These are often given in at least three subjects—reading/writing/English language arts, mathematics, and history/social studies—and each test takes at least half a day. At a minimum, then, state and district tests account for 10 to 18 hours per year (roughly 2 to 4 days) of lost instructional time.

What about test prep? Students ranked proficient or above will often receive a day or two of instruction on the test content and format; lower-scoring students usually receive significantly more. It is not unusual, for example, for schools to program an hour or so of instruction during the school day and an hour or so after school over at least a month for students at risk of failing. Many teachers also spend a week of review—scripted walk-throughs of test content and format—to prepare students for district-administered benchmark tests. So a student might spend as little as 5 hours or as much as 60 hours per year (1 to 12 days) in test prep.

The End-of-Year Letdown

Finally, in American schools instruction in new content basically grinds to a halt anywhere from a month to two weeks before the end of the school year. This is the period when many schools engage in field trips and off-site activities. In the upper grades, there is often a long period of preparation for final exams. In affluent schools, students begin taking Advanced Placement examinations weeks before the end of school, preceded by a week to a month of review. Once the exams are administered, there is basically no further instruction. The end-of-year letdown accounts for anywhere from 30 to 75 hours per year (6 to 15 days) of lost instructional time.

Taking all these factors into account, a conservative estimate would indicate that American students lose at least 245 to 450 hours (approximately 50 to 90 days) of instruction in new content per year. Over the course of 12 years, this amounts to between 3,000 and 5,400 hours (600 to 1,100 days, or somewhere between 3 and 6 full years) of lost instruction in new content. It should not surprise us, then, that American students’ performance on international tests lags behind that of students in other industrialized countries by two years or more in the middle grades, a gap that only increases in the upper grades. Numbers like these make me extremely skeptical of proposals to lengthen the school day and year, which would amount to pouring more water into a very leaky bucket.

Teaching vs. Reteaching

Critics may take issue with “instruction in new content” as the criterion for effective use of instructional time. Aren’t review and reteaching just as important as instruction in new content? Isn’t test preparation a valid form of instruction? Observing classrooms has made me deeply skeptical on both these questions. Most review and reteaching is a consequence of a hopelessly fragmented and disorganized curriculum, often coupled with extremely weak teaching in the first place. Most test prep is low-level instruction with no discernible curricular design. I see almost no evidence that time spent testing delivers anything like the value it extracts from instruction.

In a number of other industrialized countries (such as Japan, Finland, and The Netherlands), teachers base their instruction on a strong, parsimonious curriculum designed around clear and accessible standards for student learning. In high-performing countries like these, the time students spend taking tests is seen as a dead loss to instruction, and as such is carefully weighed against the benefits of more teaching and more active student engagement in learning. In America, testing is viewed as a free good by whoever proposes it, with no clear standard for controlling its costs to instruction.

I am increasingly persuaded that the use of time in classrooms is a measure of the respect adults have for the role of learning in the lives of students. I have also become aware of how profoundly disrespectful schools, and the people who work in them, are of the time and effort they extract from the lives of students and their families, without regard to the value this time adds to students’ learning and development. The way schools use time is a product of many choices: the way the curriculum is designed, the way the school day is organized, the demands of testing on instructional time, the daily routines that teachers establish in their classrooms, and the attention, or lack thereof, to students’ classroom experiences by adults in schools. It would be an enormous step forward if adults in schools treated the time that children and their families give to schools as a precious gift rather than an entitlement. The most valuable resource that schools have is the largely unexploited capacity of students to engage in high-level learning. It is the responsibility of adults in schools to make the best possible use of this resource.

Richard F. Elmore is the Gregory Anrig Professor of Educational Leadership at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and a senior research fellow at the Consortium for Policy Research in Education. His latest book is School Reform from the Inside Out, published by Harvard Education Press in 2004.