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In his FY 2015 budget, Governor Deval Patrick increased funding for the MA Expanded Learning Time (ELT) Initiative by $4 million to nearly $18.2 million. Governor Patrick's budget would allow additional schools to work with their teachers and school communities to plan for and implement an innovative, redesigned school day.  The Governor's budget is the first step in the annual budget process.

To better meet the needs of students and teachers, more than 1,500 schools across the U.S. offer expanded time in school. As more educators and policymakers explore this opportunity, one of the first questions they ask is “How do schools pay for that additional time?” NCTL and The Wallace Foundation are pleased to release a new report, Financing Expanded Learning Time in Schools: A Look at Expanded Time in Five District Schools, which presents an in-depth look at how five district expanded-time schools leverage federal, state and local funding to fund the additional time.

Jennifer Davis is the Co-Founder & President of NCTL.

We look forward to seeing the details of the governor’s proposal to expand learning time in New Jersey. States and school districts across the U.S. are expanding learning time to improve student achievement and provide engaging enrichment opportunities.

Last month on CNN's Fareed Zakaria GPS, he and his panelists, including New York Times columnist Tom Friedman, former NYC Department of Education Chancellor Joel Klein, Teach for All CEO Wendy Kopp, Khan Academy Co-Founder Sal Khan, discussed why they thought U.S. students lagged behind other countries on the recent PISA tests.

In a research study published recently in Education Next, Dan Goldhaber and Joe Walch report on changes in the overall cohort of teachers across the country. 

Happy New Year! As this new year begins, NCTL is grateful for the work of educators, administrators, and education leaders across the country who are working tirelessly every day to accelerate achievement and provide well-rounded opportunities for students in high-poverty expanded-time schools.

Nancy Conneely recently posted on the National PTA's One Voice blog on the concept of an expanded school day, an idea that is being discussed more and more across the country. We thought we'd crosspost her thoughts here. 

At NCTL, we rarely spend much of our energy or focus on efforts to expand school time that aren’t in districts with a significant portion of poor students. Students from more affluent communities, on the other hand, spend many out-of-school hours in specialized classes or in environments that promote positive growth and development.

I’ve spent much of the day listening to the presentations and discussions organized by the Alliance for Excellent Education on the release of the PISA data, a once-every-three year event that captures the attention of the education policy world. PISA, the test administered by OECD, is, by all reasonable accounts, the best international measure we have of students’ capacity to engage in problem-solving and deeper thinking in math, reading and science.

When I was in graduate school, I was very intrigued by the work of the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and, specifically, his theory of flow. His theory posits that there are moments in our lives when we are so totally absorbed in the activity in which we are engaged, that we lose all sense of all else that surrounds us. 

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