By Anthony Cody.

Hillary Clinton gave some idea of where she would take education policy last night at a South Carolina town hall, where she spoke of extended learning time as a key education strategy.

She said this:

There’s a lot of research which shows that, for most middle-class or well-off kids, they get out of school in the spring or early summer … and then they do things over the summer that keep them learning, A lot of disadvantaged kids get out and they actually lose some of the learning that they’ve gained during the year. So I want very much to expand the school day and the school year, and provide more structure. Starting with kids who would be most benefited from it, but I am in favor of states looking at how they might do that for every student.

As an educator, I am skeptical about this idea. In my experience, the capacity to learn diminishes as the day wears on. My afternoon classes often got less accomplished than my morning classes. As students grow weary, learning diminishes. High quality summer programs that give low income students access to some of the great learning experiences wealthier students enjoy would be great – but I would argue for programs featuring outdoor education, art and music, rather than more test preparation.

This concept is not new, however. It was actually one of the core strategies to support “turnaround” schools, which was major initiative of Arne Duncan’s Department of Education.

A 2012 report from Ed Sector pointed out some of the limitations of this idea.

The best ELT [Extended Learning Time] plans have real potential to improve student learning. But many of today’s ELT adopters, constrained by limited and temporary funds, are effectively favoring quantity over quality. And they have no plans for sustaining even their modest ambitions. The inevitable result of these shortcomings will be failure: a promising movement fades, improvement strategies falter, teachers get fed up and leave. New designs for extended time should be a part of the nation’s school improvement plans. But policymakers and school leaders must recognize that successful schools use time not just to extend hours and days but to creatively improve how and by whom instruction is delivered. In the end, the ELT movement is more likely to leave a legacy of school and student success if it becomes less about time and more about quality teaching and learning.

The problem, as is often the case with whizz bang ideas like this, comes when budget-strapped school district leaders try to make changes like this without providing adequate resources, and without engaging teachers in the design process. Chicago was a case in point. According to this 2014 report, Mayor Emanuel’s extended school day program there was no silver bullet. The report states:

…longer hours (along with a pension-driven budget crisis) have created new problems:

• Lost collaboration time. Teachers no longer must arrive 30 minutes before students do, so they struggle to find time to meet with colleagues. “There is no common meeting time, none,” said one principal.

• Overworked students. Some teachers say the longer school day is less engaging for students. “It’s double-period English and double-period math,” said one English teacher. “How are they going to be interested in school?”

• Lost extracurriculars. To parents’ dismay, the longer day has led some students to opt out of traditional afterschool activities. “I stopped [sports] last year as soon as the whole extended day started,” said one high schooler.

• Uncertain value. One principal filled out the new schedule by adding five minutes to every period. A teacher responded: “I haven’t been able to get further ahead in the curriculum. There’s no way anyone can tell me kids are learning more.”

• Overworked staff. After hiring hundreds of new teachers in the extended day’s first year, Chicago laid off almost 1,500 (along with almost 2,000 support staff) in the second year, due to the budget crunch. That’s left some teachers feeling more stressed than ever – and, according to Hechinger Report, less likely to take on extracurricular activities like coaching or drama even when extra pay is available.

So clearly, simply adding minutes or hours to the day is not sufficient to improve learning. More to the point, if schools have chosen to emphasize test preparation – which tends to work against student engagement, more of that same sort of instruction is not likely to yield good results.

But if the resources are provided to make an extended day or year lively and rich in the sorts of experiences students thrive on, then who could be against that?