“When you give kids more time, you are watering down the courses.”—Unnamed Deputy Superintendent

Jay Mathews of the Washington Post would say that this “old-fashioned attitude turns out to be educationally bankrupt.” I would even go a step further. If you hold learning time constant you are building failure into your school and your school system. The fact is that students have learning differences. They learn different subjects at different rates. Forcing all students down the same assembly line at the same rate only ensures multiple failures.

Charter schools have learned the lesson. Increase learning time and student performance will improve. Hold learning time constant and there will be a significant number of students who fail and fall behind. KIPP schools require students to attend school on Saturday and for three weeks in the summer. Students in charter schools attend summer learning sessions at significantly higher rates than their public school counterparts.

I learned some difficult lessons the hard way. First, summer learning loss was undermining all our hard work. Our teachers became discouraged because we were spending far too much time re-teaching students in the beginning of the school year. Second, no matter how effective we made our professional development activities, we simply could not improve teaching methods or make classes small enough to compensate for the need of some students for extended time. In fact, of the three variables that we could control—time, setting, and methods—time was by far the most impactful. Don’t get me wrong. Schools need to address all three variables. Smaller classes for ninth graders and improved teaching methods made a big difference, but we learned that, unless we gave students the time they needed to learn and the teachers the time they needed to teach, student performance would only show moderate gains. Time gave us “quick-wins” in the short-term while we built the collective capacity of our staff to meet the needs of all of our students over the long-term.

We talk a lot about the need for a customized approach for each and every student. We talk even more about differentiating instruction to meet the needs of individual learners. We read articles about learning and the brain. We discuss multiple intelligences. However, when it comes down to it, we don’t really do what we must do to improve student achievement. Extending learning time by offering students multiple time frames to complete courses, after school programs, Saturday instruction, and summer learning opportunities, is inconvenient, complicated, and downright hard work.

Let’s look at the issue of time from another perspective. Suppose that your school was informed that your students would have one hour less than all other schools across the country to complete the SAT or ACT exam. How would you or your parents respond? I would expect that the response would be one of disbelief and outrage. We want our students to have the time they need to complete the exam. What about other peoples’ children? Shouldn’t they be treated the same way that we would want our own children treated? Shouldn’t they have every chance to succeed?

Along the way, I learned another, even more important, lesson. The inconvenient things and the hardest things were usually the most important. In fact, just about everything we did that worked for students required hard work. None of the strategies that worked for students were the easiest. Take it from someone who learned the hard way, following the path of least resistance, searching for the silver bullet, will only lead to frustration and failure. Nobody ever promised us that doing the right thing for our students would be easy. It’s about time!