Students in some Portland-area districts get five weeks more time in class every year than others who live only a few miles away but are enrolled in different school systems, a new analysis by The Oregonian/OregonLive has found.
Oregon’s ignominious status as a state that offers one of the shortest school years in the country is an open secret. Most states mandate that schools offer student instruction for at least 180 days a year; Oregon is one of just 10 states that instead requires a minimum number of hours. That typically translates to school years that average about 165 days.
But Oregon’s vast disparities from school district to school district are far less well known and understood.
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Under the state’s long-standing system of local control, each district bargains separately with its labor unions, arriving at different decisions around the length of the school day, time set aside for lesson planning, professional development, parent-teacher conferences and grading, all of which affect school calendars.
And many districts — but not all — take advantage of little-known, state‑sanctioned loopholes that allow them to count up to 30 hours of professional development and 30 hours of parent-teacher conference time as instructional time, even though students are not in class.
The result: In a state with an already short school year, some metro-area students are scheduled to lose nearly a year in the classroom compared to those in neighboring districts by the time they graduate from high school.
For example, that means in a single year that sixth graders in the Gresham-Barlow School District are provided about 874 hours while their counterparts at the Beaverton School District are scheduled for 980 hours, the newsroom’s analysis found. Add up such discrepancies from kindergarten through graduation and some students get hundreds of hours less in classroom time.
Parent Berenice Arellano, whose son is in seventh grade at Clear Creek Middle School in Gresham-Barlow, feels that impact every Wednesday, when school starts at 10:05 a.m., an hour later than usual, to allow time for lesson planning and educator collaboration. That means, she said, that she isn’t able to get to her job at a behavioral health clinic in Gresham until 10:30 a.m.
“So that’s four patients I am missing out on,” Arellano said. “It puts a strain on people.”
And she worries, she said, about the toll that the time out of school takes on her son’s learning. She tries to help him with homework as much as she can, Arellano said, but that gets harder on days when she has to work late to make up for late starts or the other days off that pockmark the school calendar.
Late starts, early releases and in-service days
There are no discernible socio-economic or geographic patterns underscoring how many class hours metro-area students are offered. Kindergarten students at the North Clackamas School District are provided 983 hours at school with their teachers every school year, for example, while kindergarteners in nearby Lake Oswego are provided 882 hours. That’s a difference of a little over three weeks, since students spend roughly 30 hours a week in school.
High schoolers, meanwhile, have some of the biggest gulfs, from 1,105 hours in classrooms for Oregon City students in grades nine to 11, compared to 964 hours for freshmen, sophomores and juniors in the West Linn-Wilsonville School District — a difference of almost five weeks.
“We have allowed flexibility, low standards and a lack of accountability,” said Sarah Pope, executive director at Stand for Children, an education advocacy nonprofit that recently commissioned a study of the impact of low instructional hours on academic achievement.
State law requires that K-8 students be scheduled for at least 900 hours of instructional time per year; freshmen through juniors must receive 990 hours. Seniors, who typically graduate a week or so before the end of the school year, are supposed to receive 966 hours.
Only three states – Maine, Nevada and Hawaii – offer shorter levels of average instructional time, Stand for Children found.
How much time students spend in school is clearly correlated to how well they master reading, math and other core subjects, said Matthew Kraft, an economics and education professor at Brown University.
Stand for Children’s research models, commissioned from Portland consultant ECONorthwest, suggest that increasing time in school, combined with reducing chronic absenteeism, could put Oregon students among the country’s top performers on nationally normed reading tests, a huge leap from its current basement-level performance.
“When you look at the research overall, there is an overwhelming consensus of evidence that more time on average is converted into higher student achievement in school,” Kraft said. “But the details matter. Efforts to extend time and use it well, combined with efforts to support teachers to know what to do with that time, is what benefits kids.”
District leaders and teachers counter that time set aside for professional development and conferences is well-spent and makes for a richer, more informed educational experience for students.
Mariana Fisher, an elementary school counselor at South Shores Elementary School in Albany who sits on the Oregon Education Association’s board of directors, said direct instructional time is critically important, but teachers need every second of set-aside prep, planning and professional development time to make those classroom minutes count.
Schools elsewhere are not as generous in how much time during the day they set aside for planning time; the national average is 53 minutes per day, while metro area districts range between 65-82 minutes a day for K-8 teachers and about 90 minutes for high school educators. (National surveys also show that nearly 9 of every 10 teachers report working far more hours than covered by their contracts.)
Professional development helps teachers learn how to tailor curriculums to support their individual students, while conferences are a chance to make sure teachers are aware of parents’ expectations, and vice versa, Fisher said. At many districts, she said, early release time affords a chance to problem solve with other teachers in the same grade level or subject matter.
Block schedules at high schools or elementary schoolers’ time in classes like art, music or physical education do free up hours during the school day for their homeroom teachers, she added, but that time is needed to catch up on grading and make sure materials are ready for upcoming lessons.
Without training and conference time, she said, teachers would work unpaid nights and weekends, above and beyond what they may already do.
“Educators care about their students, so they will do it outside of work hours, but that’s not an encouraged work practice,” Fisher said.
A state-sanctioned loophole
A total of 14 metro-area school districts provided The Oregonian/OregonLive with the number of instructional hours they offer at each grade level and whether they count conference and professional development time toward those totals.
Practices vary widely.
The Beaverton, Hillsboro, Oregon City and Parkrose school districts do not factor professional development or conference time into instructional hours, the news outlet’s survey found. Portland Public Schools does not count professional development toward its instructional hours and the Tigard-Tualatin School District does not include conference time.
Five of the districts told the news outlet that they factor in the full 60 hours for professional development and conferences combined: David Douglas, West Linn-Wilsonville, Lake Oswego, Centennial and Estacada, which has a four-day week. School leaders said the practice is dictated by the give-and-take at the bargaining table with unions representing teachers.
Some school districts would fall below the state’s instructional hour minimums at some grade levels if time for conferences and professional development were not counted.
For example, fourth and fifth graders in the David Douglas School District spend 871 hours in class with their teachers, below the 900-hour level for K-8 students. Sophomores and juniors at the North Clackamas School District wind up with 976 hours of scheduled classtime, below the 990-hour state minimum.
School districts are also allowed to count up to 60 hours of recess time for grades K-3 as instructional time; teachers monitor their classes during playground time, which is seen as fertile ground for social and emotional development.
Lawmakers are aware of the workaround, and some have made it clear that they’d like to see the option off the table, although efforts at the Legislature to make adjustments haven’t gained traction in recent years. Oregon is one of only 14 states that allows non-student-facing hours to count toward instructional time; most of the others that allow it cap that allowance at no more than five days, Pope said.
“It is simply not equitable for students in some districts to spend even less time in school than even Oregon’s short school year requires,” said Rep. April Dobson, a Democrat from Happy Valley who also sits on the North Clackamas School Board. “I hope we can be firm with districts. There can be no more erosion of instructional time. We need to ensure that the instructional time we require is spent in class, with students, learning.”
More seat time, more money?
Chris Russo is the superintendent of the Riverdale School District, which counts 30 hours of professional development time and 20 hours of parent-teacher conferences toward instructional time totals in grades K-8. With that time removed from the classtime hours, the small district in a wealthy enclave on the southwestern edge of Multnomah County falls below state instructional time minimums for grades one and two and five through eight.
Riverdale releases K-8 students an hour early every Wednesday and has six days per year set aside for parent-teacher conferences for high schoolers.
That schedule has been baked into the district’s collective bargaining agreements with teachers for years, Russo said.
Professional development, in particular, has a direct impact on the quality of instruction, he added.
“We could gain back a significant number of hours by canceling early release time, but a deeper understanding of the curriculum could be the cost,” Russo said.
In an ideal world, there would be time and funding for both more time in school for students and for educators to plan lessons, grade papers and collaborate with each other, Russo said.
“To give more seat time, there has to be revenue tied to it,” from the state and local taxpayers, he said. Riverdale is among a tiny handful of school districts that allows non-residents to pay tuition to attend its schools and seeks to raise more than $1 million per year to supplement its staffing.
Michael Lopes-Serrao, the longtime superintendent of the Parkrose School District, said his district has prioritized longer school days for middle and high school students. Ideally, he said, it would also be able to afford an additional two weeks or so of school each year or a school day that was 20 to 30 minutes longer for elementary school students.
“However, we would likely be asked to integrate more prep time for teachers, so that’s the challenge with negotiating more time,” Lopes-Serrao said.
Kraft, the Brown University researcher, said money is a factor but other states, including North Carolina and Michigan, have still found ways to keep students in class for more days of the year by setting requirements for both how many days and hours students must be in school.
In many states, even those with well-established unions that push hard for teachers’ rights, educators are paid for about 185 days per school year and students are in school for 180 of those days, Kraft said.
In contrast, Portland Public Schools pays most teachers for 187 days of work, 176 of which are instructional or student-contact days (including 18 hours over 2 days that are set aside for conferences). The remaining 11 are for grading, planning and professional development.
Because of an atypical midyear budget shortfall of $14 million, the district is currently negotiating with its teachers union to cut four days from the calendar. It’s not yet clear whether those days would be solely instructional days or whether they would include professional development and grading days scheduled for early April.
According to a database maintained by the National Council on Teacher Quality, Boston teachers are paid for 183 days of work, 180 of which students are in school. In San Francisco, the contract covers 184 days, only three of which are non-student-contact days, while in Seattle, teachers are paid for 185 days of work, 180 of which are spent in class with students.
“All of the work teachers do is valuable,” Kraft said. “But I have to ask, why is it that in other contexts, teachers are able to teach 180 days with a handful of other noninstructional days? What is different about that context than this one?”
A fix to the system
Fixing the system doesn’t necessarily require more money so much as it requires political will, said Marguerite Roza, director of the Edunomics Lab at Georgetown University. Educators already have periods of time during the regular work day for lesson planning and grading, Roza said.
“If the trade-off is a grading day or students learning to read day, I would like to look around the room and see how many people think we would get more out of a grading day,” Roza said. “The teacher time is already paid for. The cost (of more student days at school) would be the incremental increases for transportation and food.”
Parents upset about the lack of instructional time can file a complaint with the state Department of Education. But that rarely happens. The last time one gained traction was in 2013, when state officials ordered Portland Public Schools to change its high school schedules in response to parent complaints that their students were routinely being shortchanged.
Pope, with Stand for Children, is building a searchable statewide database of instructional time. She said she believes broader awareness of the extreme variation between the teaching time offered for students in different districts could change that or even open the door to legal challenges, given that Oregon’s constitution requires a uniform set of standards for schools.
Charlene Williams, director of the Oregon Department of Education, acknowledged that the average Oregon student spends less time in school than their peers in other states, and said that deserves, “serious attention. We know that expanding learning time has the potential to benefit students, and it’s something we must continue working together to address.”
Instruction time requirements in Oregon are set via administrative rule by the State Board of Education, said Liz Merah, a spokesperson for the state education agency. Changing those requirements would require “a formal rulemaking process,” she said, with broad community engagement.
The State Board of Education could also move to close off the loopholes that allow conferences and professional development time to count toward instructional time, said Ali Lanenga, a school board member and parent from the Riverdale School District. The current system, she said, is “impossible both as a working parent and as a caregiver.”
Brianna Wilson, a parent of two students in the West Linn-Wilsonville School District, said with all of the days off, attending school five days in a row can feel like the exception, not the rule. That’s particularly difficult for students with complex disabilities like her kindergartener, she said, who loves his teachers, his paraeducators and going to school.
“My child thrives on routine and needs to be able to anticipate what will happen during the school day,” Wilson said. “That is how his mind works. He knows what specials are on what days, he knows whether it is mom’s day or dad’s day to pick him up.”
When that routine is disrupted, she said, it can take days for her son to readjust to the morning rhythm of getting up, dressed and out the door to school.
She’s said she’s a big supporter of professional development time for teachers, but doesn’t think it’s a substitute for time in the classroom, especially not in a year when her school district has trimmed two days from the calendar in order to save funds, another layer of lost time that she said families must absorb.
“The state needs to set a standard and hold districts to it to make sure students are actually in their seats for a certain amount of time every school day,” Wilson said. “Students need instructional time to be the time that they are directly being instructed.”
