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Though New York City public schools spend well above average per student each year, kids in the five boroughs are on track this year to spend significantly less time in class than the national average — and that has potential consequences for learning.
Students are in school about a week less this year than the state’s required minimum of 180 days of instruction. That’s because of this week’s snow day (for which the city got a waiver from the state), four professional days where teachers are working while students are off, and as usual, two half days for spring and fall parent-teacher conferences.
While those days add up, the main driver in the disparity is the length of the city’s school day, lasting 6 hours and 20 minutes. Nationally, students are in school on average about 7 hours a day 179 days per year, according to a 2025 study that looked at federal school time data and analyzed more than 74 studies about the importance of total school time.
Making sure kids are in school is a top priority for the city’s new chancellor, Kamar Samuels, who pledged to focus on addressing chronic absenteeism. About 1 in 3 New York City children were chronically absent last year, which is defined as missing 10% or more of the school year. The chronic absenteeism rate is seen as a major predictor of performance since missing class means missing instruction.
“Folks need to understand that if we’re not in school your child is going to miss work,” Samuels previously told Chalkbeat.
New York City K-12 students with perfect attendance are on track this year to be in school for 1,102 hours. That’s about 20 fewer days than the national average, per the study, of about 1,231 hours in school each year.
And this doesn’t take into account all of the other times New York City students miss out on instruction due to testing and test prep for the math and reading assessments students take three times a year, the state tests for grades 3-8, and Regents exam days in the winter and spring when many high school students don’t attend school.
The quality and quantity of time spent in school both matter, said Matthew Kraft, one of the study’s authors and a professor of education and economics at Brown University.
“Overall the evidence strongly points to additional instructional time increasing student success in school,” Kraft said. “Of course, how much time you add, when you add it, and how it’s used also matter tremendously. But it is one of those necessary but not sufficient inputs into supporting a successful education.”
There’s wide variation in terms of the school day length between states and even within states, Kraft said, urging leaders to examine those disparities.
“I think that’s a really underappreciated element of inequity in our learning system that we don’t talk enough about,” he said. “Of course there are collective bargaining constraints and budgetary constraints, no doubt, and we can’t trivialize those, but it’s at least worth having a conversation about what we think would be best for kids.”
The state laws that set minimum learning time thresholds, he said, are just that: minimums.
“They are not what we should be targeting or aspiring to,” he suggested. “They set a floor that we should be moving beyond.”
Education Department officials reiterated that this year’s calendar met the state’s guidelines for calculating instructional time, which includes allowances for professional development, parent-teacher conferences, and Regents days.
“We also know that instructional time only matters if students are present,” Chyann Tull, an Education Department spokesperson, said in a statement. “That’s why NYC Public Schools continues to provide targeted support to schools and families and helping remove barriers to regular attendance.”
David Bloomfield, an education professor at Brooklyn College and The CUNY Grad Center, emphasized the importance of thinking about “the problems of continuity and opacity” in the school calendar, where interruptions are frequent. Out of 45 school weeks, he said, less than half — about 20 — have complete five-day weeks.
“What seems like 180 days isn’t really,” he said, adding, “A child’s individual calendar may differ from grade to grade, program to program because of testing and other non-instructional obligations.”
Bloomfield staunchly advocated for snow days, but he also believes the city should consider rethinking the calendar to add days at the start of the school year, before Labor Day.
Students return to school the Thursday after Labor Day. Given this year’s late holiday, schools aren’t expected to start until Sept. 10 for 2026-27.
“Since summer camps have already closed, most families would not be unnecessarily inconvenienced by the change,” Bloomfield recently wrote in an op-ed. “The main impediment would be union agreement, a difficult but not impossible challenge for the new administration to overcome.”
Neither the union nor the Education Department responded to questions about next year’s calendar.
Amy Zimmer is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat New York. Contact Amy at azimmer@chalkbeat.org.
