It's About Time
In It's About Time: Opportunities to Learn in Chicago Public Schools, Smith (1998) describes how instructional time is allocated and used in Chicago Public Schools. This study documents that "the cumulative impact of annual and daily start-up routines, special programs and events, holiday slowdowns, test preparation periods, and a steep drop in academic work during the last six weeks of the school year results in an enormous loss of much needed learning time" so that "students experience not the intended 900 hours of annual instruction, but something much closer to 500 hours" (p. 1).
The full report It's About Time: Opportunities to Learn in Chicago's Elementary Schools is available online. (Note: This report is in portable document format [PDF] and requires Adobe Acrobat software for viewing. If you don't already have Adobe Acrobat installed on your computer, download the free Acrobat reader before viewing.)
