Do Longer School Days Improve Performance?

Quartz: Britain “will spend up to £285 million ($400.7 million) for a quarter of secondary schools to extend their school day by an hour, in an attempt to improve academic standards … But do longer school days help? The Education Endowment Foundation, a non-profit group that aims to close the achievement gap between family income and educational attainment through evidence-based research, finds that on average, pupils make two additional months’ progress per year from extended school time or well-designed after-school programs.”

“Research shows there is no magic formula to how many hours of school is best. Formal instruction-time in schools around the world range from 6,054 hours in Hungary to 10,710 hours in Australia … But there are bigger forces at play than number of hours of instruction.”

“Kids in Korea, for example, have a relatively short day, but they then go study so much that the government has to stage 10pm raids on study centers to get kids to go home … In France, kids can go to school early and stay late, until 6:30pm. The US puts in significantly more hours than most, with lackluster performance … the bigger problem is that time spent in school is secondary to the quality of teachers, the quality of the training they get, and how they are treated.”