The amount of instruction students receive has long been viewed as a foundational educational resource. This article presents an analysis of the time students spend in elementary English language arts (ELA) and mathematics instruction. In mathematics, the average student received about 140 hr of instruction, but students in the top sixth of classrooms in this distribution can expect to receive between 80 and 160 hr more instruction over the school year than students assigned to the bottom sixth of classrooms. We found similar magnitudes of variation in ELA. Although most of the variation was due to differences among classrooms, there was also substantial variation among schools. Some variation in instructional time is expected and probably favorable. However, we argue that the large variation demonstrated by these results represent substantial inequity in students' opportunity to learn ELA and mathematics.
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This research is conducted in the context of a large-scale study of three nationally disseminated comprehensive school reform projects (CSRs) and examines how school- and classroom-level factors contribute to variation in instructional time in English language arts and mathematics. When using mean-based OLS regression techniques such as Hierarchical Linear Models (HLM), we found that CSR programs did not have the expected effects on instructional time. However, when using Quantile Regression to estimate the effects at the lower end of the distribution of instructional time, we found substantial effects. These effects were strongest for the subjects that were the focus of the school interventions.
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