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Telling Tales Over Time Calendars, Clocks, and School Effectiveness Joel Weiss and Robert S. Brown
Telling Tales Over Time
Joel Weiss and Robert S. Brow
n
Spine6.452 mm
S e n s e P u b l i s h e r s D I V S
Telling Tales Over Time
Calendars, Clocks, and School Effectiveness
Joel WeissUniversity of Toronto, Canada
and
Robert S. BrownToronto District School Board, Canada
With a foreword by David Berliner
How do calendars and clocks influence considerations of school effectiveness? From the creation of compulsory education to the future of virtual schooling, Weiss and Brown trace two centuries of school practices, policies and research linking the concept of time with ‘opportunity to learn’. School calendars and clocks are shaped by both the physical and social worlds, and the ‘clock of schooling’ is shown to be one of the ‘great clocks of society’ that helps to frame school effectiveness. School time does not operate in a vacuum, but within curriculum, teaching and learning situations. The phrase ‘chrono-curriculum’ was devised by the authors as a metaphor for exploring issues of school effectiveness within the time dimension.
Using American and Canadian sources, stories are created to illustrate four themes about time and school effectiveness. The first three stories utilize access, attendance and testing as criteria associated with these eras of schooling. How will the story read in the fourth era, the digital age, which forces us to a reconsideration of time and its influence on education?
Quoting David Berliner in his Foreword: “this is an opportune time for these authors to bring us insights into the reasons we in North America created our public school systems, and how the chrono-curriculum influences those systems. The authors’ presentation of our educational past provides educators a chance to think anew about how we might do schooling in our own times.”
ISBN 978-94-6209-261-7
Telling Tales Over TimeCalendars, Clocks, and School Effectiveness
Joel Weiss and Robert S. Brown
Telling Tales Over Time
Telling Tales Over Time
Calendars, Clocks, and School Effectiveness
Joel WeissUniversity of Toronto, Canada
and
Robert S. BrownToronto District School Board, Canada
A C.I.P. record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN: 978-94-6209-261-7 (paperback)ISBN: 978-94-6209-262-4 (hardback)ISBN: 978-94-6209-263-1 (e-book)
Published by: Sense Publishers,P.O. Box 21858,3001 AW Rotterdam,The Netherlandshttps://www.sensepublishers.com/
Printed on acid-free paper
All Rights Reserved © 2013 Sense Publishers
No part of this work may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfi lming, recording or otherwise, without written permission from the Publisher, with the exception of any material supplied specifi cally for the purpose of being entered and executed on a computer system, for exclusive use by the purchaser of the work.
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DEDICATIONS
To Debrah and Jody, for providing us with the time and opportunity to complete this journey.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
Foreword ix
Acknowledgments xi
1. Introduction 1
2. Time as Storyline 11
3. Telling Tales Over Time: Constructing and Deconstructing the School Calendar 23
4. Absenteeism: A Case Study of One School Board 55
5. The Current Absenteeism Scene 81
6. Time Structures and the Canons of Testing 107
7. Inequities and Effectiveness: Time Structures and Opportunities to Learn 129
8. The Role of Virtual Learning Environments in Time and Spatial Structuring 145
9. The Challenge of Changing Curriculum Stories Over Time 169
Author Biographies 183
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FOREWORD
I am pleased to introduce this fascinating book about a fundamental structure on which schools rest, the concept of school time. That concept is strongly intertwined with contemporary concerns about the effectiveness of schooling. Discussions of school time and school effectiveness, of course, are tied to broader social, political, and economic concerns, requiring these authors to have considerable breath of knowledge, a challenge which they meet admirably.
The concept of time is a physical concept, but one that is social, as well. A second may be defined as the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium 133 atom. Time is also “the weekend,” “test week,” “prom time,” and for a teacher, a “mental health” day off! Both the physical and the social time required for schooling have become one of the many “great clocks,” along with the political clock and the work clock that significantly influence social life in North America.
The time allocated for schooling our children does not merely influence how we live our social lives, it also influences how much we have to spend, since the expenditure of school time is directly related to the expenditures needed to support schooling. Thus, for public schools, taxes are required. And in that way, school time is entwined with the political and economic decisions every society must face in educating its young. The contemporary demands for school effectiveness by both political and business leaders throughout the industrialized world, as nations seek skilled workers for knowledge economies, may be in direct conflict with the demands made by these same two interest groups for minimum taxes. Thus tensions are bound to exist as our public schools negotiate the social, political and economic forces that affect school time and school quality, particularly since different forces that impact our schools rarely act in concert to promote the same ends. My pleasure in reading this book was to find that Weiss and Brown provided a fresh look into these issues. I am impressed with their introduction of the idea of the chrono-curriculum, the intertwining of what we hope to teach our children, and the time available (and affordable) to do so.
The idea that time for schooling and school learning are related is not new. This is made abundantly clear as these authors show how one simple time variable can even provide an alternative to current assessment methods. Data is presented on the strong relationships of absenteeism to school learning (the less absenteeism the greater the learning), and to school drop out (the greater the absenteeism the higher likelihood of dropping out). Thus a reliable and cheap time metric, student absenteeism, may be as good a way to judge school effectiveness then are the costly and burdensome standardized tests currently in use to accomplish the same purpose.
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What was quite new to me, however, was to learn that conceptions about time have infused so much of the contemporary debates about schooling. This makes this book particularly valuable for those who think about or make school policy. Year round schooling; the summer and winter school break; the placement of courses in the life of students (like when should algebra be taught?); questions about whether a child should be “red-shirted” or not, or retained in grade rather than promoted; scheduling for flipped classrooms; fitting e-learning into the school calendar we now use; figuring out what attending a virtual school means; understanding what “going to the library” means in a digital age; are all contemporary policy issues with deep roots in the concept of school time and the school calendar. And if students learn from many different sources and at many different times, can current estimates of teacher effectiveness using value-added assessments be valid?
An examination of all these issues is particularly of interest in the digital age and an age of accountability, time periods in which we currently find ourselves. Old notions of how school time is used (teachers in classrooms with 25–35 students, 6 hours a day, 180 days a years) are simply not accurate descriptions of how learning now takes place (e.g. 24/7, anyplace, anytime). And old notions of what it means to be literate or how learning is to be financed or assessed do not hold either. So this is an opportune time for these authors to bring us insights into the reasons we in North America created our public school systems, and how the chrono-curriculum influences those systems. The authors’ presentation of our educational past provides educators a chance to think anew about how we might do schooling in our own times. Any book that stimulates such thinking can be recommended highly.
David C. BerlinerRegents’ Professor EmeritusArizona State UniversityTempe, AZMarch, 2013
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Many thanks are due in the creation of this book, including:
– David Berliner, for writing the Foreword; – John Fraser, the artist for our cover design; – Debrah Weiss, the inspiration for the cover design; – Michel Lokhorst, our ever-patient Publisher; – Desha Lourens, for coordinating the completion of this project; – Gary Natriello, for his encouragement during the writing of our 2003 Teacher
College Record article that served as the launching pad for this book; – Present and past members of the Toronto District School Board, including (but
not only) Norbert Hartmann, Roula Anastasakos, Barb (Sprumont) Hunsberger, Susan Manning, Suzanne Zeigler, Bill Baird, and Lisa Rosolen (who produced several of the graphics looking at absenteeism);
– Last, but not least, members of school boards, parents and students who enabled us to appreciate the joys and pitfalls of calendar changes.
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CHAPTER 1
INTRODUCTION
The trouble with our times is that the future is not what it used to be1
If this book on the time structures of schools had been written before the Fall 2008 world it would have described a different world than the one we live in today. The global economic meltdown has caused almost inconceivable damage to many of the institutions that had been the backbone of the economic system that we all depend upon.
The effects of 9/11 and turmoil from terrorism, violence and revolutionary actions have had severe global and domestic consequences. The recent economic upheaval has had a domino effect on all other institutions in both the public and private sectors, as well as unimaginable harm to people’s personal lives. The development of the ‘Occupy’ movement, initiated in Vancouver, Canada spread to Toronto, Wall Street and many other global sites, called attention to the increasing divide between the 1% and 99% segments of society.
What had previously been accepted as taken-for-granted is now being questioned as never before, and governments and individuals are scrambling to find strategies for creating stability. Short-term solutions are needed to provide stability, but long-term strategies are required to ensure that such catastrophes won’t be repeated.
Therefore, North American institutions are being re-examined as never before, and this certainly includes public education. It is not surprising that the Obama administration has embarked on a potential major overhaul of the US public school system. Reforms in education, health care and energy sufficiency are viewed as the pillars for recreating the American economy and society, in general.
Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has been looking at school time structures like extending the regular school year; he has also re-examined current accountability measures like No Child Left Behind which has been morphed into Race to the Top. These are issues that , more or less, permeate North American education. It is our assertion that by examining the time structures of schools (and in a holistic way as they relate to larger issues of inequality and opportunity to learn) can measures of accountability have validity. Current emphasis continues to make use of achievement measures as well as concerns with curriculum standards as indicators of effectiveness.
Even before the current economic crisis there was ongoing debate over the relationship between schools and society. The debates centre over who should be educated, what should be learned, how this should be provided, where and when should learning best be provided, and by whom. Issues of accountability, efficiency and equity are strands that permeate these discussions. Given the current state of the
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world, these issues won’t go away as we seek to find solutions to these problems. What role can education play in these solutions, especially when resources are even scarcer than before. With debt piling up across all levels of government, and with downloading expenses onto the next levels of government, what should be done- can we afford to invest more resources? Can we afford not to make this investment? Given the questionable record of success with school reform strategies, where should emphasis be placed? Every generation goes through this values dilemma, but current events make this an even more monumental challenge. Who would have thought that political brinksmanship would lead to debt rating downloads.
Who would have imagined that a major topic for schools would be whether teachers should carry guns in the classroom.
When we started this work, we had intended to look only at the time structures of schools and schooling. However, as we progressed in our research – and as the world changed – we came to realize that explaining time structures meant explaining how effectiveness is discussed and measured in modern public education. That this connection is often not made may have something to do with the current chaos of educational discourse. Our emphasis is to link time indicators with the learning process through discussion of the concept of time, and how this is intertwined with ‘opportunity to learn’. We hope that this work can start to redress the balance in a small way.
PAST INDICATORS OF SCHOOL EFFECTIVENESS
How should schools be judged? Since the foundation of the modern North American public school system, schools have been justified using a combination of the criteria of efficiency and equity. Examples of this dialogue are arguments that the public school system is more efficient for society as a whole than the alternatives (private school, individual instruction and/or no school) and that a school system aimed at all students is more democratic, provides for a more cohesive society, and is less disruptive than the alternatives.
Our previous research pinpointed the importance of time in the development of public schooling (Weiss and Brown, 2003). We believe that time has continued to be a major determiner in how schools have fared. We view the development of these accountability arguments as forms of stories created over time. Time is used in two ways. First, time is part of the history of any story. Indeed, historians view time as the leitmotif of their discipline. Second, as we’ve already suggested, time has been considered a major criterion of school effectiveness.
From the early nineteenth to the mid twentieth centuries, when the standard school calendar was firmly in place, much of the focus had been on the measurement of time structures in schools. Since, at the foundation of the school system, few students would attend full time, the key measurement of efficiency was through attendance and absenteeism—that is, who would show up to school, and how often they would attend. However, in the later part of the 20th century, the focus shifted
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from time structures to measurement of efficiency through standardized testing and other measurements of efficiency. A variety of high stakes testing programs have been developed at the international, national and state/provincial levels, and have dominated the discourse on effectiveness of schools. Time structure information has been imbedded in those measures (time on task, completion of requirements like graduation over time) but were assumed or measured as indirect variables. Cuban (2008) has discussed how time and academic achievement intersect one another.
Another approach that resonates with the current global crisis has been using economic criteria for determining rates of return to society for educational investments. A consultant’s report, “The Economic Impact of the Achievement Gap in America’s Schools”, represents a comparative approach to school effectiveness (McKinsey, 2009). Time considerations such as lengths of school year, school week, school day, and parsing of the periods within a school day have permeated the history of public education policy (National Commission on Time and Learning, 1994). Berliner (in press) has challenged how social inequities are integral to an understanding of school success and we believe that is linked to issues of time.
PURPOSE OF THE BOOK
Our purpose is to elucidate the various stories used to determine how time structures of schooling may impact considerations of school effectiveness. For us, the two are clearly related. These accounts from the past and present are useful in suggesting how stories change over time. In the process, we will suggest that some accounts are myths perpetuated as accurate stories. We will also discuss how potential changes in both form and content of schools will influence stories of effectiveness. Does the content of schooling, usually referred to as ‘the curriculum” impact the ways in which we judge effectiveness?
How will the story read when we consider virtual schooling, which forces us to reconsider the conception of time and its influence on education. How will some of society’s other learning institutions, such as libraries, adapt to changing learning conditions. Also, we do not know how concerns with the planet’s sustainability and globalization challenges will influence the conduct of schooling. These are some of the issues that are driving efforts to view education as a leading force to help staunch the current bleeding of the economy and to help shape future societal directions.
Our journey here is shaped by our biographies as educators and will rely upon curriculum imagery to understand the issues. We have coined the phrase chrono-curriculum as a metaphor for exploring issues of school effectiveness within the time dimension. This will enable us to explore how time is integral to the commonplaces of curriculum- perspectives on teaching, learning, content and milieu (Schwab, 1970).
Our discussions about time are influenced by an understanding of its complexities and usage- ranging from the physical and social phenomena used in the construction of various calendars to calculate time, and the social purposes of time infusing all facets of our lives.
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We will draw upon data and references to North American education, both Canadian and American sources. We will present the argument that our Ontario stories are consistent with American stories.
WHAT FOLLOWS
The organization of our story includes the following chapters.
Chapter Two. Time as Storyline
No discussion about school time can begin without the recognition of the role of time in all facets of our lives. This includes an understanding of how calendars were created and the ways that time intersects and controls every facet of human life. The very complexities of our lives-work, family, leisure among others is dictated and regulated by calendars and clocks.
It is also clear that the various moments of our lives are so intertwined- what parent hasn’t experienced the juggling of the many demands of work and family schedules with their child’s school day, week, or year. So, we start with the reality that education systems have developed in a larger societal context. We investigate the role of time in the formation of education systems, schooling and the broader concept of learning.
The history of North American public education over the past two centuries has been a history of increased participation. First, the public elementary system established itself very quickly in the nineteenth century, but so many students did not attend that increased attendance (or, more properly, decreased absenteeism and truancy) became the key way that school system success was measured. The next stage (throughout the twentieth century) focused on secondary schools—increasing the proportion of students attending secondary schools, and then increasing the proportion of students graduating. In this stage, school success has been assessed through a variety of measures—academic achievement, ‘at risk’ status, dropout rates. The third, more recent stage is focusing on the transition from secondary to post-secondary schools.
This suggests that time has been an important ingredient in determining school effectiveness. Indeed, when considered in the long view, the disappointment about the current priority of standardized test scores may be a result of a proper lack of time context in the current ‘story structure’ around school improvement. There is some discussion around time—e.g. time on task—but it tends to be disaggregated and disembodied. However, there is research that strongly supports how opportunity to learn may be the single most important determiner of productive learning (Berliner and Biddle, 1995; Nicholas and Berliner, 2007). This book will look at the public dialogue over time structures from the foundation of the modern school system to the current uncertain era of the early twenty-first century. We situate the school calendar as one of the ‘great clocks of society’ (Rakoff, 2002), and recognize that
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school time is interwoven with other aspects of societal time. As we will suggest, it’s not just about time in a void, but what you do or don’t do, with that time.
We will present the dimensions of chrono-curriculum, our device for linking the role of time with the features of curriculum that infuse the schooling process. How accountability and effectiveness are linked to chrono-curriculum will be discussed.
Chapter Three. Myth-Making: Constructing and Deconstructing the School Calendar
The focus of this chapter illustrates a key theme of this book: that much of the current educational structure is based on time structures; that these time structures are almost subliminal in the way they are interpreted by those in education; and that many of the assumptions around them are in fact wrong. The origin of the September-to-June school calendar has usually been told as an unexamined tale attributed to features of nineteenth century rural society. We challenge this interpretation with Ontario data by suggesting that multiple pressures arising from increasing urbanization influenced its roots. We present information on the importance of the summer holiday in the development of compulsory schooling in several North American jurisdictions. We suggest, along with Gold (2002), that this development had wider applicability in several Northeastern and Midwestern American states (Weiss and Brown, 2003).
Beyond the issue of having an accurate story line, we examine why there has been such resistance in recent times to changing the school year. The school calendar may be another example of an enduring institutional form referred to by Tyack and Tobin as a “grammar of schooling” that resisted fundamental change in the twentieth century (1994). Viewing the school calendar’s ties with changes over time in the construction of other clocks of society may enable us to rethink the format of the contemporary school calendar.
Chapter Four. Absenteeism: A Case Study of One School Board
This chapter looks at the evolution of educational policy to address absenteeism from the early nineteenth to early twentieth centuries, the the period in which compulsory schooling stabilized. Today we tend to take student attendance at school for granted, and only draw attention to the minority of students whose attendance is deemed to be low enough to be troublesome. In fact, when the public educational system as we know it in North America started in the early nineteenth century, most students did not attend most of their classes, and attendance increased only slowly and incrementally throughout the nineteenth and into the mid twentieth century. Reducing the absenteeism rate became the first measurable outcome for what we now call academic accountability, and most of the dialogue over academic achievement results was created in the constructed ‘story’ of reducing absenteeism.
We continue the story of the Toronto School Board as it made its journey toward a compulsory school system. The story shows how the apparatus for coping with
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absenteeism started with an emphasis on utilizing police as truant officers but morphed into the modern student support structure such as school psychologists, social workers, and health initiatives.
Chapter Five. Present day Absenteeism
We also examine absenteeism in the present ‘bricks and mortar’ school environment. There is an unresolved ‘chicken and egg’ discussion about the role of absenteeism and student performance. The continuation of the Toronto School Board story allows us to see how absenteeism is viewed in the present: how it is measured and what the research literature suggests about its role in schooling outcomes. We then provide a broader review of the research literature on contemporary absenteeism issues. The larger picture is that the advent of compulsory schooling shifted the story from “how many’ to ‘how much’. It went from concerns with the numbers of students in school to how well they achieved what was valued as the major objectives of schooling. As absenteeism gradually declined, the story shifted to the current debate over standardized testing.
Chapter Six. The Canons of Testing
During contemporary times, test scores have been the most important indicators of school effectiveness. This movement had its origins in the scientific education movement influencing the Progressive Education era of the 1930’s and 1940’s. By this point, the traditional school calendar was firmly in place. When the Progressive movement collapsed during the 1950’s, the use of standardized tests became the norm for judging the efficacy of schools and school systems. Many states and provinces used these tests as the measure for sorting and allocating students for different educational experiences. On a larger scale, movements such as the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) at the national level, and the tests developed for the International Studies of Educational Achievement (IEA) became the coin of the realm for judging comparative achievement across different jurisdictions and national systems. Lately, high stakes public testing has become the measure in a number of jurisdictions for assessing effectiveness of individual schools. So, instead of a broader metric of school effectiveness over cohorts of schools, the story is shifting to data on individual schools. Financial support has become dependent upon extensive justification of meeting curriculum standards. Recent discourse involves not just school accountability, but making teacher evaluations dependent upon these test scores.
Chapter Seven. Inequities and Effectiveness: Time Structures and Opportunities to Learn
As Chapter Six states, the major indicator of school effectiveness has been achievement test scores, with the story line about the relationship between ‘who
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the students are’ and ‘how much they’ve achieved’. It has helped to document how social class may be linked to inequities in school experiences. This chapter presents material that links time and time structures to issues of equity. The traditional school calendar is associated with disparate test scores among students with varying backgrounds. It has been the object of considerable research studies (New York State Board of Regents, 1978; Heynes, 1978; Merino, 1983; National Education Commission on Time, 1994; Cooper et al, 1996; Borman and Boulay, 2004; Weiss and Brown, 2003; Alexander et al, 2007). The origins of the school calendar included political and economic attempts to ameliorate social conditions.
Often, however, policy decisions have been made which inadvertently lead to inequitable consequences. The focus of much of the current discussion relates to how the long summer holiday disadvantages those students who can least afford opportunities for learning. While most of this discussion has been about increasing the school year by offering summer school to selected groups, there are other issues about the school calendar that have received attention. Among these issues are concerns about increasing the length of the school day, moving to a four day week (which would entail lengthening the school day), changing the hours of the school day to accommodate characteristics of certain groups of students, and even lengthening the number of years of schooling for some students by eliminating automatic promotion, often called ‘social promotion’. We also look at ‘red-shirting’ the exact opposite of ‘social promotion’ where parents try to delay their child’s entry into school.
These features are seen as ways to indicate how time is an integral feature for increasing ‘opportunity to learn’. In some cases, changes might benefit all students, not just those with special needs.
But discussion about ‘opportunity to learn’ must recognize the need to make this a curriculum issue, since what is measured by tests may not fully value the role of schools in society (Nichols and Berliner, 2007). We describe concepts such as ‘the hidden curriculum’, ‘the null curriculum’, and ‘opportunity to learn’ as important ingredients in understanding chrono-curriculum.
Chapter Eight. Learning Beyond Present Schooling Structures
Schooling is changing as our lives are changing. We no longer believe (if we ever did) that learning is the sole province of schools. Other settings may reinforce, and in some situations, replace the school. A prime example is the home environment, which traditionally reinforced the school, and for some families, home schooling serves to replace the school. Other learning institutions, such as libraries, museums, and the workplace, are helping to re-organize the ways that learning might occur.
Perhaps the most significant structural change is the digital revolution that has made computers and other digital devices indispensable parts of our lives. There is no lack of speculation and theorization on the current and future roles of virtual schools. However, when one looks at virtual schools through the prism of the role of
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calendars—the time structure of schools—a different, rather less theoretical picture emerges. Many e-learning institutions call themselves virtual schools, but there is a continuum from ‘bricks and mortar’ schools with elements of virtual schooling, to true virtual schools where all educational teaching and learning occurs in the virtual environment. At this time, more tend to have elements of virtual schooling than to be true virtual schools. Much of the discussion of virtual schools suggests that virtual schooling dates from the widespread growth of the World Wide Web in the early 1990’s, whereas much of the structure is directly attributable to distance education that has existed for nearly two centuries. Despite the hype, the current structure of virtual schooling tends to resemble that of standard educational institutions. Yes, there has been greater use of digital technology in the form of smart phones, tablets and other devices. It is yet to be seen how such devices add to, or complicate what goes on in schools.
Nonetheless, the gradual evolution of the virtual school may also lead to further evolution in tales of school effectiveness. There are a number of unresolved issues around day-to-day organization of virtual schools. What will be the role of attendance (time on task, task completion, time on computer, versus time in the classroom) in a virtual environment? What are the roles and responsibilities of teachers and students? What do we mean by ‘communication’ in a virtual environment? Perhaps most importantly, what does “success” mean in such a context?
Public libraries, museums, and the workplace are undergoing significant changes. The e-library, the e-museum and the virtual workplace offer both virtual and real life settings for learning. There is no question that access to the Internet provides greater access to different content. Again, how does time figure into this expanding equation?
Chapter Nine. The Challenge of Changing Curriculum Stories over Time
School time structures have shown an extraordinary resilience in the face of technological, political, and social changes. Will the virtual school become a truly new step in education? Part of the difficulty in answering this is that we are unclear about how the dialogue around accountability will be conducted in the virtual environment. This dialogue initially centred on the success (or lack) in getting students to come to school, and stay in school. Time structures provided the way through which this was measured—through school days, holidays, days keeping the schools open, and absenteeism/truancy. As student attendance at school became taken for granted by the middle of the twentieth century, the dialogue shifted to accountability through standardized testing. The importance of time structures continued, but their role became implicit and hidden. But with virtual schools, issues of time again become front and centre of how school is conducted. Thus, standardized testing as it now exists will need to change dramatically. Will this happen?
Part of unraveling the puzzle is to make distinctions between virtual learning and learning virtually. The former refers to the new age of computers that is technology-based, but learning virtually relies on imagination and fantasy, components that have
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been a part of educational practices for thousands of years. We must not necessarily equate technology with newer forms of learning, since computers can be used for traditional teaching/learning encounters, which may or not be imaginative in scope. The history of new media may provide some insight into how some forms of technology have been truly transformative (Gitelman and Pingree, 2003). We will speculate about this distinction as a primary cause of why the computer age has, as yet, not morphed schools into a fuller realization of virtual schooling.
The new information age creates challenges for the content of schooling, the other component of ‘chrono-curriculum’. We envision that two, possibly competing, value positions will influence the content of future school curricula. One is the concern for the survival of the planet, and the increasing calls for education for sustainable development. These calls are coming at international, national and local levels. Schools are starting to pay attention to Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) concepts relating to the interactions of environmental concerns, economic strategies and social issues.
A second consideration potentially influencing objectives for schooling is increasing emphasis on worldwide economic competition in an increasingly global world. Recent economic events have dramatically shown how world economies are ‘joined at the hip’. What will it take for educational systems to incorporate curricula that indicates a priority on the world economy and its’ impact on local, national and international events? It is becomingly increasingly clear that the current emphasis on a narrow band of cognitive outcomes, often the criteria for judging national school systems, does not capture the kinds of Creative Entrepreneurship (CE) skills and values necessary for future economic progress. We cannot predict what the future holds for how both ESD and CE may influence schools of the future. However, different measures of effectiveness will be required to determine success, hence leading to newer stories.
Perhaps there will be other stories out there that haven’t yet been represented, or even imagined. What will the future shape of schooling look like? We have witnessed tinkering around ideas about the school calendar and changing conditions for ‘opportunity to learn’. What does the history of educational research suggest as past and prologue? The honest answer is that we don’t yet know how time will influence the future. Part of the answer may reside in shifting emphasis to larger contextual issues surrounding social inequities as they relate to ‘opportunity to learn’. Again, who would have considered until recently that violence in the schools would be the ‘elephant in the room’ overshadowing the usual sustantive concerns with schooling. Human structures have an extraordinary ability to adapt and modify, but this is always coupled with conservatism. We wait in anticipation for the crafting of future stories of the effectiveness of schooling.
NOTE
1 Paul Valery.
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Harvard University Press.Tyack, D., & Tobin, W. (1994), The grammar of schooling: Why is it so hard to change?. American
Educational Research Journal, 31(Fall), 453–479.Weiss, J., & Brown, R. (2003). Telling tales over time: Constructing and deconstructing the school
calendar. Teachers College Record, 105(9), 1720–1757.
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“Our obsession with measuring time is itself timeless. After self-awareness,it may be our most distinctive trait as a species, since undoubtedly one of the first things we became self-aware about was our own mortality- the fact that we live and die in a set period of time.” (Duncan, 1998, viii).
The idea of ‘time’ permeates every facet of our lives. Almost from its’ beginnings, the Human species has been obsessed with organizing itself and time has been one of the major organizing principles of life. Indeed, there isn’t any human activity that doesn’t rely on dimensions of time. Whether it’s the physical, social or spiritual world, time matters. It was a socially constructed concept with a history of diverse attempts to devise metrics for travel, commerce and religion.
Over the centuries, concern has been with structuring time through the development of calendars, which is a device for organizing days for a variety of purposes. It is an imperfect metric since so many different versions have been developed using lunar and solar properties. A common theme is to name related periods of time, such as days, weeks, months culminating in the year. Although there are several calendars in use today, the Gregorian calendar, organized by Pope Gregory in the 16th century, has become the de facto international standard.
The key direction at this time in current school calendar research is around the advantages or disadvantages of the full-year school versus the importance of the summer vacation (Weiss and Brown, 2003; Gold, 2002). Attendance has been examined both as a sociological phenomenon and for its role in student achievement (e.g. Brown, 1999). The importance of the organization of the school day is an integral feature of Prisoners of Time, the 1994 report of the National Education Commission on Time and Learning (National Education Commission on Time and Learning, 1994).
In addition to a focus on past issues of school calendar formation, we explore both current and future calendar challenges. We are living in the digital age, and it raises questions about what time signifies in a virtual learning situation. For past, present and future considerations of school time, we believe it appropriate to briefly discuss the concept of the ‘calendar’, its’ importance in the dimensions of our lives, an understanding of the ‘school clock’, and a way of linking issues of time and school effectiveness.
CALENDAR EVOLUTION
The calendar is a social invention. In his examination of the history of the modern calendar, Duncan (1998) noted, “We take the mechanism of the calendar for granted,
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as we do breathing and the force of gravity”(xiv). Yet this current, unexamined part of our lives is the result of a turbulent evolution that has had an important role in the development of today’s society.
For thousands of years the effort to measure time and create a workable calendar was one of the great struggles of humanity, a conundrum for astronomers, mathematicians, priests, kings, and anyone else who needed to count the days until the next harvest, to calculate when taxes were due, or to figure out the exact moment a sacrifice should be made to appease an angry god. A case can be made that science itself was first sparked by a human compulsion to comprehend the passing of time, to wrestle down the forward motion of life and impose on it some sense of order. Examples are offered by Rakoff (2002) in how creating units of time, such as the hour, dated back to the Western development of machines that helped support methods of production (5), and for another, standardization of the time unit was instrumental in allowing for the rise of the influence of the railroad (12–13).
Dimensions of Time in Our Lives
The features of the generic calendar have become commonplace in our lives- witness the use of such phrases as ‘wait a second’, ‘in a New York minute’, ‘wait till next year’ – that have become everyday expressions. As a social construct, we have applied the various features of the Gregorian calendar to the complex facets of our lives and not necessarily in a rigid fashion. Thus, different applications of a calendar have been developed to accommodate other calendars that permeate our lives. We are constantly changing appointments, shuffling competing activities in busy lives.
Rakoff (2002) addressed the history of how the law was, and continues to be, used in framing dimensions of time in the various aspects of our lives. He started with the question “How should we, as a society, structure our time”? (2). The law of time illustrates why we have complex lives. Just think about all the ways that the law structures our time: time zones, statutory holidays, the workweek and overtime pay, Blue laws, transportation regulations, compulsory schooling and school calendars as but a few of the potential impacts on our society.
The different purposes for which we apply time to our lives can be described as “clocks of society” (Rakoff, 2002). His penetrating analysis of the importance of time and the law also includes how other facets of life, both on their own and in relationship with other features, are structured by time considerations. These would include “clocks” of work, family, recreation, religion, and of school. Rakoff looks at the law relating to community and family time, work time, school time. Others have explored the importance of time in various ‘clocks of society’. Rybcyznski’s Home: A Short History Of An Idea presents material on how time is featured in the development of what we call home and home life. Issues about time in our leisure lives have been the subjects of many volumes on vacations (Aron, 1999; Lofgren, 1999). Waiting for the Weekend (Rybcyznski, 1991) is a fascinating account of the changes in the way that the concepts of the week and weekend have been
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transformed. Nippert-Eng (1995) addresses one of the major issues in life, how to manage the boundaries between home and work. People go through their hour, day or week ‘traveling’ through different boundaries of time considerations, for example from home to work, or from home to school to sports event.
The School Clock
The ‘school clock” is the focus of our work. So much of our modern lives that we take for granted has been influenced by the invention of the calendar and its’ components. We recognize that you cannot isolate one ‘clock’ from another. Life is too complex for simple explanations. As you will see, the history of school time interacts with other features of time in our lives. This includes what we assume we know about the calendar of school. However, today’s elementary, secondary and post-secondary time structures have been stable for only the past century or so. Contemporary universities proudly trace their descent to medieval institutions. In the High Middle Ages and early Renaissance, most elements of the university were still evolving- and the time structures of the university year also changed substantially. According to the Catholic Encyclopedia, lectures were given throughout the year, with short recesses at Christmas, Easter and Pentecost, and a longer vacation in summer. Throughout the High Middle Ages, university calendars across Europe varied considerably.
In Germany, there was considerable difference between the calendars of the various universities and even between those of the faculties at the same university. In general, the year began about the middle of October and closed about the middle of June. But at Cologne, Heidelberg, and Vienna there was a break from the end of August to early October. The vacation, however, was not a complete suspension of academic work; the extraordinary lectures, given for the most part by bachelors, were continued, and credit was given to students who attended them. About the middle of the fifteenth century, the division of the year into two semesters, summer and winter, was introduced at Leipzig, and eventually was adopted by the other German universities (Catholic Encyclopedia, 1914).
Our research in Ontario, Canada (Weiss and Brown, 2003) as well as the work of Gold (2002) in Michigan, Virginia and New York in the U.S, chronicles a similar fluidity in the evolution of the summer vacation in North American public schools as they evolved in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Looking at Ontario and Toronto historical documents, we found that legislation established the first minimum school holidays for Ontario elementary schools in 1850 – a short two-week break between terms, the same as at Christmas. It would appear that, at this time, Ontario authorities were most interested in ensuring that the new Ontario schools remained open long enough to ensure an education to those students who could actually attend. The two month long holiday we know today evolved between 1850 and 1913, when it was universally mandated across all schools. Although reasons for the growth of the summer holiday are not totally entirely apparent, the impetus clearly came from cities and urban areas; and rather than being the cause of
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the Ontario summer holiday, the farming communities were in opposition to it. Data for other jurisdictions suggests similar patterns of calendar development.
That the current academic calendars were most stable over the last century—the height of modern industrial technology—may be more than coincidence. So much of our modern lives that we take for granted has been influenced by the invention of the calendar and its’ components. How do issues of time influence how schools function, and become more effective as one of societies’ most important institutions?
CRITERIA FOR SCHOOL EFFECTIVENESS
The history of North American public education over the past two centuries has been a history of increased participation. First, the public elementary system established itself very quickly in the nineteenth century, but so many students did not attend that increased attendance (or, more properly, decreased absenteeism and truancy) became the key way that school system success was measured. The next stage (throughout the twentieth century) focused on secondary schools—increasing the proportion of students attending secondary schools, and then increasing the proportion of students graduating. In this stage, school success has been assessed through a variety of measures—academic achievement, ‘at risk’ status, dropout rates. The third, more recent stage is focusing on the transition from secondary to post-secondary schools.
This suggests that time has been an important ingredient in determining school effectiveness. Indeed, when considered in the long view, the disappointment about the current priority of standardized test scores may be a result of a proper lack of time context in the current ‘story structure’ around school improvement. There is some discussion around time—e.g. time on task—but it tends to be disaggregated and disembodied. However, there is research that strongly supports how opportunity to learn may be the single most important determiner of productive learning (Berliner and Biddle, 1995; Nicholas and Berliner, 2007).
Chrono-Curriculum: A Link Between Time and School Effectiveness
In this and other chapters, we will look at the public dialogue over time structures from the foundation of the modern school system to the current uncertain era of the early twenty-first century. At the heart of this discussion is situating the purposes, practices and contexts for educational settings in a curriculum framework. The term curriculum has its roots in the Latin word currere, which literally means running, or completing, the course. As the field of curriculum developed, a variety of definitions have been posited to account for what occurs in educational encounters (Jackson, 1992). The plurality of perspectives underscores a major facet of discussions and practices in education-individuals, groups and jurisdictions have value orientations that differ about the purposes of education.
In order to encapsulate a diversity of perspectives, we use a conceptual tool, a set of commonplace terms containing minimum features for describing curricular
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situations. These commonplaces are ‘learner’, ‘teacher’, ‘subject matter’, and ‘milieu’, and represent a generative metaphor (Schon, 1979). Such a metaphor represents “…a pervasive tacit image that influences actions, such as development and policy activities”(Weiss, 2006, 5). An educational situation includes various combinations of points of view underlying each commonplace, as well as the complex interactions among the commonplaces. In order to understand how time may be involved in these complex matters, we have coined the term chrono-curriculum. For us, it helps to elucidate how school time represents the complexities of teaching/learning processes, the heart of schooling.
Why Chrono-Curriculum?
Currently, the discussion of time within curriculum tends to be fragmented, and in some ways, chaotic. ‘Time on task’ tends to be considered (when considered at all) as a component of the interpretation of standardized test results. Absenteeism tends to be found within the framework of social work (usually under the aegis of truancy), with some crossover into epidemiology or some discussion around student achievement (e.g. Brown, 1999).
What is missing is the idea that time is the fundamental structure or (to use a word often found in curriculum studies) ‘foundation’ on which the rest of curriculum is based. It needs to be considered this way, in its entirety, rather than as a disaggregated fragment of other parts of curriculum. This is how our discussion of chrono-curriculum will locate time structures within education. Perhaps, the concept of time can be viewed as another curriculum commonplace.
Cuban (2008) provides an example of how the concepts of curriculum commonplaces and chrono-curriculum help to explain how time affects school reform efforts. He believes that various school reform policies have failed because policymakers’ views of the purposes for schooling have been at odds with those of parents. The conflict has been between those espousing the view that schools should create a financially viable market-oriented society and those who have a broader view of socialization, including independent behaviour, accepting personal responsibility, working hard, and fairness toward others. The view of time held by various stakeholders shows marked differences, with policy-makers seeing time in budget and electoral cycles, while teachers, as policy gatekeepers, see time in personal connections, micro-time, and like their students, are clock watchers. He believes that a variety of time considerations have failed to change schools because not enough attention has been paid to ‘academic learning time’, that is, using time effectively.
It may be that a recognition of the importance of time structures as the backbone of curriculum is what actually distinguishes modern Western public education, as it evolved between the mid nineteenth into the twenty-first century. It is something that we may have forgotten in recent years, but it was certainty prevalent when public education became dominant in North America through the mid nineteenth century.
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Indeed, as we will briefly outline it, the foundation of public education cannot be examined without recognition of chrono-curriculum. We would therefore argue that, with the beginning of the virtual school, which potentially changes the mindset about school time, it is necessary to integrate this into any discussion of the public school.
Before we proceed, it is important to recall that chrono-curriculum is an integration of the dimensions of time and curriculum. This integration involves two components, how the structure is organized and what takes place within that structure. Our conception is that the history of curriculum in public education can be viewed along a continuum. At the beginning, the emphasis was on how time structures the system, with little attention paid to what occurs within that structure. Gradually, as the time structure of schooling became stable, more attention was paid to the content of schooling. This emphasis on content took place within an agreed-upon, almost unconscious, reliance upon time structures. However, as we shall see, the two dimensions become more fully integrated around important topics, such as the length of the school year and summer school. Again, the structure of school time is only one part of the equation. In a later chapter, we will discuss dimensions of schooling that have required value decisions about what is important to learn. Under ‘opportunity to learn’ we will discuss the concepts of ‘null curriculum’, what we choose to spend time on at the exclusion of other topics, and ‘hidden curriculum’, that which is covered, but not revealed.
Time Structure and Nineteenth Century Education
Nineteenth century educators tended to be an extremely pragmatic lot—especially administrators—and their reports tended to be more focused in bricks-and-mortar issues than more abstract curricular issues, although when they had the time, they penned some very articulate discussions around the role and philosophy of education (Wilson, 1999, 41–77). This was hardly surprising given the challenges they had to deal with. In Ontario, as with many states and provinces in North America, the public education system evolved from about the mid nineteenth century to the early part of the twentieth century. Gold (2002) has documented a similar history of the development of public schooling in several American states.
Although schools of one sort or another had existed in Ontario since the eighteenth century (Jarvis Collegiate in downtown Toronto dates to 1807) the public education system, is usually thought to have seriously started with the Education Act of 1850 (e.g. Hardy and Cochrane, 1950, 23). Thus, when the Toronto Board released its first annual Report in 1859, it devoted much time to proudly profiling the six “new” schools such as The Park School. The cover page illustration of a solid stone edifice is unnamed; presumably all six schools, built just a few years earlier, had interchangeable architecture. Two other schools in the east and west extremities of the city still conducted classes in rental accommodation; presumably there had not been enough time and money to build the physical structure yet. It was very much an instant system, and the rules and structures were still being worked out.
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The existing written records of these officials (mostly administrators in the then colony of Upper Canada, and its largest city and capital, Toronto) is permeated with references to time structure. The Toronto Board Report of 1859 serves as a good example. Attention to attendance in the form of absenteeism (or ‘truancy’, as it was often labeled) is probably the most oft-cited reference to time. This is not surprising, since the creation of a system requires students to actually show up on a daily basis. At first, attendance was optional and became the first indicator of success for the system.
Thus, the Toronto Report of 1859 detailed that out of 4,742 “scholars”, 640 attended less than 20 days out of 226 in the 1858 school year; 867 attended 20–50 days; 1,208 attended 50–100 days; 819 attended 100–150 days; 697 attended 150–200 days; and 411 attended 200–226 days (106). In other words, most students did not attend school on most days—which explains the preoccupation with attendance characterizing these documents.
As we will see later, once the system reached the compulsory stage, the flip side of attendance, absenteeism (and its more pejorative label, truancy) became the standard for determining success. However, during the development of the system many, if not most, children did not attend most of the time. Part of the problem was the issue of providing resources for creating the school system. It was difficult to provide enough funds to keep the schools open, especially outside the cities and larger towns.
And if you were able to keep the schools open, how long should they be kept open? The issue of truancy was intrinsic to the development of the modern school calendar, and the modern student support structure. As will be discussed in Chapter Four, during the nineteenth century, absenteeism was front and foremost the indicator of success; indeed was the first indicator of what we would today call “educational outcomes”. And after a period of neglect, the importance of attendance in defining student achievement is being recognized once again. Some of the complexities around this will be discussed in looking at absenteeism patterns in the Toronto District School Board.
In some ways the public school system of the nineteenth century was similar to many of the issues confronting pre-school day care today. As with views on child-care today, there was earlier recognition that having all children in school was important, but how this would take place still had to be worked out. This recognition led to an ongoing evolution of the school calendar discussed in Chapter Four.
If students did get to school, what did it look like, that is, how was it structured in terms of time? Several dimensions of time are always in consideration: the number of days of the week, the length of the day and how it is structured (periods, half-days), and the length of the school year, and how that is structured relative to the various seasons of the year.
Time Structure of the Individual Day
This had two real forms—the length of the school day (and which days in the week) and what was actually taught over the school day. The first is most straightforward.
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In 1854, regulations for Ontario (modeled on American state regulations) specified that each school day had to commence by 9 am and not exceed six hours in duration, excluding lunch and recess. It was also specified that “every Saturday shall be a holiday” although the interesting option of half Saturdays and half Wednesdays was also provided, and for grammar schools (equivalent of secondary education), the option of fewer hours per day was provided at the discretion of school boards. (Government of Canada, 1855, 157). Thus, the structure of the individual day is little different a century and a half later, the only difference being that the current structure has little of the flexibility of its ancestor.
The second component of the school day, what is actually taught during the school day, is what we now think of as the content of the curriculum. However, things were not so straightforward in the nineteenth century. Our current curriculum process assumes many things, but the main one is that the same students are going to be physically in the same classroom for a preset, regular amount of time, over the school year. However, this could not be assumed at the beginning of the school system. For one thing, as noted above, it was probably safe to assume that most of the students would not be in the same classroom over the school year. Secondly, many if not most school systems were unstable enough that one could not take for granted the school (or school system) continuing to operate on a month-to-month basis (or that the same teacher would be present from the beginning to end) (Kliebard, 1995).
Consequently, it would appear that at least in the beginning, public educational systems were structured for time, rather than for content. As an example, the Toronto Board’s 1859 report provides a timetable for the “Third Division” (the modern grade system was adapted only in the early twentieth century), from 9 am to 4 pm. Male and female students had somewhat different timetables. Thus, a male student in third form would, on Monday, take “Reading, Scriptures with Sacred, Geography” from 9 to 10, “Writing—small hand” from 10 to 10.50, and after the morning recess, “Arithmetic—Examine Simple Rules” between 11 and 12. After lunch, the student would be instructed on “Grammar—Letter writing” from 1 to 2, the “Geography of America” from 2 to 2.50, and following the final recess, would end the day with “Arithmetic, Algebra and Euclid” (that is, geometry). Each Monday would find the student with a similar schedule. There were fairly similar themes from day to day. Thus, from 9 to 10 from Monday to Thursday male students would have some type of Reading, with a “Repetition and Elocution” on Friday which could summarize the lessons of the earlier days, but would not require these earlier lessons since many if not most of the students would not have attended all of the preceding days. Female student schedules were fairly similar, but the last period of the day was devoted to sewing, singing, and ‘natural philosophy’ rather than mathematics (Report of 1859, 62–63).
It needs to be remembered that this would be taking place in one or two room schoolhouses, where boys and girls of all grades would be together, but, as the attendance requirements make clear, most of the boys and girls were not together for all the days. The fact that this schedule was provided in the Board’s report to the public shows that they thought it something of an exemplar—that is, it was published
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to show the better sort of schedule, but that schedules of this sort were probably the norm for every grade and every school. Today there is often a gap between the public release of curriculum material and what takes place in the classroom and this was no doubt the case in 1859 as well. However, for our purposes the most important finding here is that for nineteenth century educators, time and the structures and clocks of time were first and foremost in their consciousness—through their attention and sometimes obsession with absenteeism, the structures of the school year, and the structures of the school day. To a degree, for them, the clock and the school were united.
Time Structure Today—The Missing Ingredient in Accountability
What is the importance of time structure, then, besides an interesting discussion of historical background? In part, without understanding, our knowledge of curriculum is incomplete—and, thus, is our ability to make changes. We have moved from a consideration of attendance as a measure of success to the development of testing procedures to determine the effectiveness of the school curriculum. The importance of testing was first realized by progressive educators, such as Rice (1913) and spearheaded during the Progressive Education Association era with its emphasis on applying the scientific movement to schooling (Smith and Tyler, 1942). The rationale behind the use of tests was that they are indicators of the effectiveness of the school curriculum, represented by educational objectives, statements of content and activities most valued by the system. Over the years different educational systems, at the local, provincial/state, or national level, developed testing programs for determining the efficacy of schools. For almost fifty years at the international level, the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement (IEA) testing and research program has made comparisons among national educational systems (Husen, 1967).
There have been many applications using educational testing to measure different types of achievement. However, many have been critical of the use of testing as an appropriate approach for determining schooling success (For example, Berliner and Biddle, 1995; Nichols and Berliner, 2008). Over the years, much research has concentrated on looking more concretely on how time is spent in schooling, using such indicators as time on task and opportunity to learn (Jackson, 1968). In their devastating critique of conservative, right wing approaches to education, Berliner and Biddle have enunciated their Student Achievement Law: regardless of what anyone claims about student and school characteristics, opportunity to learn is the single most powerful predictor of student achievement (1995, 55). As suggested earlier, this reinforces Cuban’s (2008) argument that academic learning time is the most important indicator in considering time in schooling.
It is likely that having a “complete” picture of a public education system is an impossible idea—but the fewer distortions, the less the charge of improper decision-making. At present, without taking into account the full picture of the time
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structures of education, dialog around the educational system is taking place in an incomplete paradigm—one that emphasizes only a part of the whole, and that part in a way that is, inevitably, distorting.
A More Comprehensive Examination of Accountability
Chrono-curriculum involves integrating time into all aspects of accountability. Thus, accountability within the purview of chrono-curriculum could be addressed as: the study of a) achievement over b) time, modified by c) issues of equity.
We introduce issues of equity into the equation because this allows for an understanding of the curricular context, or milieu, that is part of the curriculum commonplaces. Berliner has made many references to how the current paradigm of academic accountability is incomplete without taking into account the external challenges students face. He has most recently shown that without the will to address these challenges, the gaps will always remain (Berliner, 2009).
Without all the interactions among achievement, time and equity, discussion of educational effectiveness is incomplete. Examining achievement by itself, without context, is misleading and ultimately counterproductive, resulting in cycles of ineffective educational reform of which “No Child Left Behind” (U.S Congress, 2002) is only the most recent chapter. Examining achievement in the context of time is an improvement, but allows only a type of efficiency measure. Examining achievement only through the prism of equity by contrast is also an improvement over some of the mindless comparisons seen in North America and Britain in recent years, but tends to miss any discussion of efficiency.
Now, this has some relationship to cost-benefit analysis. Although frequently dismissed as bean counting, some cost-benefit analyses try to integrate issues of equity—for example, a series of studies by the Conference Board of Canada have focused on the long-term costs to society of higher dropout rates (e.g. Lafleur, 1992). And these studies will also often look at certain aspects of time, such as differences in lifetime wages between dropout and high school graduates. However, because of the difficulties in gathering adequate financial as well as achievement, equity, and time data, such studies tend to be highly speculative. Moreover, the nature of looking at financial viability means that only certain types of achievement are looked at—graduation or dropout of high school or university, for example.
To sum up, chrono-curriculum might be looked at as simply a way of more precisely opening up discussions of educational effectiveness. Because time structures of schools are often assumed as background, rather than being in the forefront of discussion, much of our current educational dialogue cannot but lack precision. We propose increasing that precision through making the varying aspects of time structures of schools a part of the dialogue.
Perhaps equally importantly, we need to see how the time structures of education support curriculum, both in the present and in the future. Elements of virtual learning may well result in changes as profound as those of the nineteenth century. Nowhere
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are our assumptions about time more fragile than around the virtual learning environment. Time structures were discussed when the North American public educational system established itself between the early nineteenth to early twentieth century; most of that structure then became forgotten or ignored over the twentieth century, only occasionally raised with discussion over parts of the structure, such as ‘year round schooling’ or summer school debates. But as the virtual school environment becomes more and more a part of mainstream discussion, it is time to re-establish our awareness. In a later chapter we will discuss whether the discussion is nothing more than empty rhetoric. Now we turn to a fuller description of our historical interrogation of the origins of the modern school calendar.
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