Funded Research by Theme

The Impact of Texas’s Additional Days School Year Initiative on Student Learning Loss

The Impact of Texas’s Additional Days School Year Initiative on Student Learning Loss

Brian Doran, Ben Hansen, Amreena Hussain

Through a partnership between the Texas Education Agency (TEA), RTI International, and the University of Michigan (UM), this project will assess the impact of the Additional Days School Year (ADSY) initiative on the outcomes of Texas elementary public-school students. Designed to address summer learning loss, ADSY is a critical tool for helping Texas schools and their students recover from COVID-19 disruptions. Established by Texas House Bill 3, ADSY provides half-day formula funding for school systems that want to add up to 30 instructional days to any of their elementary schools. First implemented in the 2020–21 academic year with an estimated 94 local education agencies (LEAs), the number of LEAs participating in ADSY grew in 2021 and is expected to grow significantly in 2022–23 with the continued support of federal funding for pandemic recovery. ADSY has three implementation options that provide remediation and enrichment activities to either all or a targeted set of students on a campus (school). Two options extend the traditional school year calendar in order to increase instructional, enrichment, and teacher planning time while decreasing the amount of time students spend out of school between academic years. The third option adds a summer program to maintain and extend learning gains between grades. TEA is invested in learning more about how this program is moving the needle in combatting student learning loss. As such, the project will evaluate this intervention by analyzing the impact of ADSY on student outcomes. This evaluation will assist TEA in making decisions about how best to scale the program, as well as any design or delivery adjustments that may be needed.

This project builds on four SLDS grants awarded to TEA by IES in 2009 (Texas Longitudinal Data System), 2009-ARRA (Texas Longitudinal Data System), 2015 (Texas SLDS: Enhancing and Expanding Data Usage), and 2019 (TSDS Infrastructure Upgrade).

Funding Source: Institute of Education Sciences (IES)
Funding Period: 5/1/2022 – 4/30/2025