More than 80 percent of the respondents in a recent survey said more time in school could help improve students' college and career readiness, according to a new report from the National Center on Time & Learning and the Education Commission of the States.

Findings from the survey, which sampled 1,000-plus American adults, are included in the report that examines the current and recent federal, state, and district expanded learning policies and developments. Chicago's shift to longer school days districtwide and federal School Improvement Grants that can be used for expanded learning at the local level are two such examples the report cites to highlight a growing interest in using ELT as a strategy for school reform.

The report also provides an extensive list of pro-ELT state policies that have emerged within the past few years. A number of the legislative actions at the state level have taken place in conjunction with other changes to education policies, such as allowing existing funding streams be used for expanded learning or reining in collective bargaining. Some are tied to policies that encourage overall school redesign, with added time as one feature.

A few state policy highlights:

• Iowa and North Carolina's state commissions that have examined ELT as a state education reform.
• The Time Collaborative, a group of five states that have pledged to support expanded learning efforts in their respective states. (I wrote a story on this in December.)
• New York's recently authorized $20 million competitive-grant program for ELT and school redesign.

There is also a list of policy recommendations for federal, state, and local leaders. These include: focusing on high-poverty students, using expanded learning as part of larger school improvement efforts, exploring cost-effective ways to add time, and using successful strategies from ELT schools on how to restructure the school day.

"[The] growing differential among children in learning outside the current school day and year means that, more than ever, schools operate as the primary institution through which our country can hope to equalize opportunity, and, in turn, expanding and strengthening the education program at high-poverty schools has become a critical lever to achieve such equity," the report says.

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Libraries, museums, and nonprofit organizations interested in promoting hands-on summer learning activities that incorporate technology can now compete for $10,000 grants from the MacArthur Foundation to underwrite their efforts, according to a press release.

The Chicago-based John T. and Catherine D. MacArthur Foundation will provide $150,000 total in awards for the Connect Summer Youth Programming Competition; The Born This Way Foundation will be offering help to grantees to develop activities and projects for the summer.

The goal of the competition is to support single- or multi-day programs that emphasize learning that is engaging, hands on, and has real-world applications that will help reduce learning loss over the summer, in addition to preparing students for the 21st century, the foundation reports.

Since 2004, the MacArthur Foundation has spent more than $100 million on research, projects, and assessments on the impact of digital media use by children and young adults. The summer learning grant project is part of its larger annual Digital Media and Learning Competition that will award $1.2 million this fall.

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Pittsburgh will be home to a summer learning campaign in the coming months as part of a new initiative to "remake summer learning" in the city, according to a press release.

The Days of Summer project is supported by the city's HIVE Learning Network, an organization that advocates new ways to teach and learn, particularly in out-of-school environments. There are HIVE networks in New York and Chicago, all of which receive funding from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

This summer, the Pittsburgh network, with support of a local nonprofit, the Sprout Fund, will coordinate activities at museums, libraries, camps, and other community institutions for students in the city.

A number of these efforts will incorporate digital tools, like mobile phones, to make the activities more appealing to students and to teach 21st-century skills, says the release.

Pittsburgh is not the only place using community institutions to provide real-world learning experiences.

According to an article in the Minnesota Star Tribune, museums in that state (and elsewhere) are increasingly becoming a resource for schools to enrich and enhance their curriculum, especially given budget reductions.

For example, students at a high school in Albert Lea receive hands-on history lessons at a local historical village, learning such skills as planting corn and churning butter, in addition to developing a history lesson to teach 5th grade classes.

Museums invest more than $2 billion a year for educational programming, the article reports.

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Twenty middle schools in New York will be part of a new expanded learning time pilot next school year that adds hours and intensive reading instruction to the day, according to news released this week from TASC.

The pilot will expand the work of the Middle School Quality Initiative, started in 2011 to improve college and career pathways for disadvantaged middle school students in the city. The new efforts will be supported by $4.65 million in funding from the Robin Hood Foundation (a New York-based foundation focused on combating poverty) and the City Council, in addition to $1.55 million from the New York state education department.

TASC, The After-School Corporation, and Harvard University's education innovation lab will collaborate on how to best use the extra hours in the school schedule and how to structure the reading tutoring. It's estimated that 2,000 students will participate in this component of the program within the next three years.

The 20 schools have yet to be selected but will be chosen from a pool of 40 that will be joining the Middle School Quality Initiative this fall. Among other things, it provides additional funding and professional development for teachers at high-needs schools.

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Cities are playing an increasing role in supporting after-school opportunities for students, even with strained resources, says an opinion piece written by local officials, featured on edweek.org today.

Authors Christopher Coleman (mayor of St. Paul, Minn.), Karl Dean (mayor of Nashville, Tenn.), James Mitchell Jr. (city councilmember in Charlotte, N.C.), Betsy Price (mayor of Fort Worth, Texas), and Ronnie Steine (city councilmember in Nashville), write that city governments and community partners play an essential role in providing safe, enriching environments for students when they aren't in school.

"As mayors and city council members, we have a unique bully pulpit from which to promote the after-school hours as a time of enrichment and learning," they write. "In collaboration with other local partners, we can work collectively to provide all young people in our communities with access to high-quality after-school and expanded learning opportunities."

But after-school programs not only benefit students, they say; the opportunities provided can help in lowering city crime rates and improving career pathways for students, whereby stimulating the local economy.

The piece profiles efforts in their respective cities to promote after-school programs:
- The Nashville, Tenn.: Nashville After-Zone Alliance
- Charlotte, N.C.: city spends $590,000 funding six after-school providers
- St. Paul, Minn.: Sprockets program
- Fort Worth, Texas: city spends $1.4 million annually supporting 94 after-school initiatives for four school districts

The authors also offer recommendations for how cities can strengthen after-school opportunities, namely: improving the data and information for parents and the community about what options are available, combining funding sources and developing creative sources of revenue to support programs, and bolstering the collaboration between city agencies, schools, and community organizations.

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The Seattle district may be implementing a longer school day in the future, adding half an hour to the six-hour school day, according to a recent article.

School administrators are currently planning how added time could best benefit students, but are already concerned that such a plan would run into logistical barriers—namely, funding and teachers' union pushback, according to KPLU.

If time is added, there would likely be some disagreement over what to use it for: more academics or more enrichment time for classes like arts and physical education. That debate has emerged in other districts that have implemented expanded learning models.

"There obviously has to be a commitment that it's sincerely an effort to restore the richness of the school curriculum, and not just double-dipping of the tested subjects," Jonathan Knapp, president of the Seattle Education Association, is quoted as saying in the article.

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More than half of teachers said they did not like the free breakfast program provided for needy students in Los Angeles schools, according to a recent survey by the local United Teachers Los Angeles.

According to the Los Angeles Times, 52 percent of the 729 teachers polled complained the free meals created problems for the school day, contributing to messes, insects and rodents, and a subsequent loss of instructional time. The program was launched in the district in 2011 in an effort to improve student focus, attendance, and general well being—goals the district reports are being attained with the program.

Currently, more than 200,000 students at 274 schools are getting the free breakfasts, with plans to expand the program to 676 schools in the next few years.

The national free-breakfast initiative, supported by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, provides financial assistance to schools and other organizations to serve unprivileged students the first meal of the day. The USDA also backs the well-known free and reduced-price lunch program during the school day, the after-school snack program in out-of-school hours, and the summer food-service program when school is not in session.

According to the Food Research and Action Center, an advocacy group, 12.5 million students and nearly 89,600 schools participated in the breakfast program in the 2011-12 school year. Around 50 of every 100 children who receive free and reduced-price lunches are also served breakfast, FRAC found.

While the program's demand has grown in recent years, so has criticism of its structure, mimicking those gripes aired recently in Los Angeles. Other complaints have also surfaced that the food is not healthy, and the program allows students who have eaten at home to eat breakfast twice, as reported by my colleague Nirvi Shah.

Still others have pushed to expand such food-assistance programs, seen recently in West Virginia, which may become the first state to provide free breakfast and lunch to all K-12 students per requirements of a new bill passed in the state legislature. According to an article in the West Virginia Gazette, some Republican opponents of the bill said free meals encouraged student laziness, while Democrats argued of its necessity to combat student hunger.

"Delegate Ray Canterbury, R-Greenbrier, predicted the program could set up children for failure, 'destroying their work ethic' and 'showing them there's an easy way,'" as reported in The Gazette. "Canterbury suggested that students 'work for their lunches' by mowing lawns and taking out trash at schools."

According to FRAC, 21.9 percent of children younger than 18 (or 16.1 million) were living in poverty in 2011, and 7.3 million (or 9.8 percent) of all children younger thn18 lived in families with incomes below 50 percent of the federal poverty level.

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A longer school day may help students' math performance, according to an evaluation of the expanded learning time schools in New York City, New Orleans, and Baltimore after one year of operation.

The 11 total elementary and middle schools evaluated were part of the ExpandED pilot project of The After-School Corporation (TASC), which redesigned the school day with three additional hours of time. TASC, based in New York City, received funding for the pilot from the Wallace Foundation, the Open Society Foundation, and the Ford Foundation. (Wallace also underwrites coverage of expanded learning in Education Week.)

Community partners, such as AmeriCorps members, coaches, and artists, filled additional time at some of the schools, as did targeted, extra time for academics aimed at improving student performance in weaker subject areas.

The evaluation found students' math scores, attendance, and general attitudes improved in comparison to their peers at local nonexpanded learning schools. But not all ExpandED schools fared equally. According to the report, some schools did a much better job of communicating and engaging with parents and organizing staffing models than others. The report also recommends all the ExpandED schools could do a better job of sharing student academic data with education partners.

However, the authors conclude, many best-practice decisions need to be made at the school level, not "prescribed externally," and transformation does not happen overnight.

"Even with intensive advanced planning by principals, teachers, community partners, and families, changing the roles and responsibilities of faculty as well as the expectations and schedules of students and parents is an iterative process," they write. "Shared leadership and accountability requires partners to intentionally and continuously plan together, share student data and results, and engage in a constant feedback loop."

A five year evaluation of the ExpandED schools is currently being performed by Policy Studies Associates.

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By guest blogger Gina Cairney

Children learn best when they're healthy, and while summer is usually a time when many children participate in a myriad of summer enrichment programs, some children who could most benefit don't get that opportunity, according to the National Summer Learning Association. This can have an impact on not only their physical health during the summer months, but their academic health as well.

Without equitable high-quality summer learning opportunities that are engaging and enriching, achievement gaps are likely to persist, the Baltimore-based advocacy organization says. Moreover, a new report from the California-based Summer Matters campaign suggests that unequal access to summer learning programs may be a key factor in continuing academic disparities between low-income students and their higher-income peers.

The report, "Summer Matters: How Summer Learning Strengthens Students' Success," published this month, looked at the effects high-quality summer learning programs in Los Angeles, Sacramento, and Fresno had on their students. The findings suggest that summer programs with engaging enrichment activities may help address the widening achievement gaps.

All three of the programs evaluated, LA's Best, Central Enrichment Summer Adventures, and Summer of Service are in districts where over half of the students are eligible for free or reduce-priced lunches, and serve a large number of English-language learners.

Each of the programs has its own unique curriculum, but the overall findings show that these programs had a positive effect on student learning, including improved academic efficacy, positive peer and adult relationships, and strong academic work habits.

Using the San Diego Quick Assessment, the programs were able to measure students' vocabulary skills and found that students who participated in the programs ended their summer with vocabulary skills that were closer to their grade level. The report also found that English-language learners also shows significant increases in grade-level vocabulary skills.

One key factor the report found was that the quality of the program does matter. The three programs surveyed in the report were "very intentional about building great programs," Jennifer Peck, co-chair of the Summer Matters campaign said in an email. The program organizers were "thoughtful about hiring and training the right staff to design and deliver these activities," she said.

The Summer Matters report adds to a 2011 study by the RAND Corp., which also found that high-quality summer programs can help combat summer learning loss. It characterized successful programs as having small classes with engaging activities and individualized attention.

Although this new report looks specifically at programs in California, its findings may have larger implications on what summer learning programs throughout the country can do to provide high-quality environments.

There is no one-size-fits-all approach to creating and sustaining a summer program, but Peck noticed some foundational elements shared by Summer Matters pilot communities: Leadership.

"Leaders who have a clear vision for the program, are committed to making it better every year, and work to secure resources on an on-going basis," Peck said is what leads to successful programs.

Some districts may experience financial barriers to implementing and sustaining summer programs but "not paying for summer learning is also a cost," said Peck, and although the cost of programs can vary depending on district's needs, Peck suggests districts don't need to spend a lot of money on programs.

"Communities can be creative about their approach," she said which includes developing partnerships between community-based organizations and districts, and stepping away from a "traditional" learning environment to get students engaged in learning during the summer months.

In Kentucky, for example, various camps try to cater to differing student interests, from ballet camps to dog training camps. There are even academic camps focused on improving skills like reading and writing for those students interested in developing those skills.

YMCA branches in the greater Cincinnati area take a more academic approach, using a workbook to ensure students don't forget the skills they just learned, while building on them for the next school year.

In Chicago, Mayor Rahm Emanuel announced an increase in summer opportunities for Chicago youths—including summer jobs, as well as educational and recreational activities—to help keep students safe and learning throughout the summer season.

"Summer learning is essential to K-12 students' success," said Peck, and the report's findings "spotlight the numerous ways that summer learning programs bolster academic and social skills that are vital to children's educational achievement."

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School districts should make use of existing funding streams and partnerships to support the community schools model rather than try to obtain new funding, says a new brief from the Partnership for Children and Youth, an Oakland, Calif.-based organization.

The report provides strategies for financing and sustaining community schools, with specific guidance on how to develop partnerships with local government agencies and repurpose existing education funding.

A few successful community schools efforts are profiled in California: the Sacramento City, Ontario-Montclair, Bear Valley, and Redwood City school districts, and the Lake County office of education. All are in California.

In other community schools news, New Mexico's governor, Susana Martinez-R, signed a community schools measure into law this month, which in addition to supporting community schools throughout the state, enables districts to apply for additional grant funding to implement such a model. Also this month, legislation was introduced in Connecticut that would enable qualifying districts to choose two elementary schools and one high school to remake as community schools with funding support from the state.

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