Despite efforts to increase the time students spend in school in Michigan, kids are getting less face time than ever with teachers, the state’s top education official warns.
State Superintendent Michael Rice, who retires in October, is sounding the alarm over a problem he says needs to be fixed if Michigan is to improve its dismal national test scores.
The state has gradually increased instruction days from 165 to 180 in an effort to keep kids in class longer, especially after the pandemic left lasting challenges over attendance and learning loss.
But Rice is taking aim at how instructional time is counted in Michigan and what can be included, claiming kids could be getting as little as 149 days of in-person learning under current rules.
That’s because changes approved by state lawmakers in 2019 and 2023 allow teacher professional development time and virtual learning days to be counted as instructional time.
Additionally, under state law, there are nine possible days to be “forgiven” for adverse weather conditions, such as ice storms that devastated northern Michigan and shuttered schools for weeks.
After all these possible exemptions are added in, Rice says students can actually spend less time in front of teachers than they did a decade ago, and less than the minimum required by law.
In Michigan, half school days are counted as full, as well as late-start days and early-dismissal days. In addition, up to 30 minutes of passing time between class periods per day can count toward an hour of instruction, and in elementary or middle school, recess may be counted if supervised by a certified teacher.
Rice, who is retiring this October, says increasing the amount of time students spend in front of a teacher is essential to Michigan’s future as a state. He argues the erosion in actual teaching time is hurting kids’ performance on national tests.
The number of Michigan third-graders who are proficient in reading — a pivotal benchmark in education — slid to its lowest point in the 10-year history of the state assessment test last year.
“A 180-day school year is not a robust school year, not when it can get chipped away by snow, ice, water mains, (professional development) and virtual learning,” Rice told The News during an interview on Aug. 5. “All of a sudden, you’ve given permission for children to not be in space with staff for a considerable period of a school year.”
As 2025 state assessment results are to be released at the end of this month by his own state Department of Education, Rice says he will continue to press for a change in the law, even if it’s the last thing he says on his way out the door.
“I am speaking to anyone who will listen,” Rice said. “Our kids deserve more time. Our kids need more time. I’m simply talking about getting back to what we once had in the state.”
The amount of time children actually spend inside a school learning should be a simple equation of adding up to the state-mandated minimums of 1,098 hours and/or 180 days. An instructional hour is defined as 60 minutes spent in a classroom receiving instruction from a certified teacher, according to the Michigan School Business Officials, a professional nonprofit association.
Yet changes in state law allow time outside the classroom to count as time in the classroom. In 2019 — the year before the global pandemic shuttered Michigan schools — state lawmakers voted to permit seven professional development days to count as student in-person instructional time.
In 2023, as schools emerged from the pandemic, the state Legislature allowed schools to count 15 virtual days of learning away from school buildings as in-person instructional days.
Students can lose up to nine full days of learning under Michigan rules that allow for school cancellations for “acts of God” such as snow, ice, and water main breaks. Six are automatic and three must be requested for forgiveness.
Rice says weather-related closures are a fact of life in Michigan and he is not seeking any changes there.
It’s the 22 days of professional development and virtual learning that could be restored into instructional time he is fighting for. He says if one does the math — take 180, minus the nine, minus seven, and minus 15 — the total days of actual in-person instruction come down to 149.
“A district in the state of Michigan can educate a student for 149 days in person, and that can constitute an entire year for a student in school. We think the last two changes made (professional development and virtual) are overly permissive and need to be reversed,” Rice said.
“(Professional development) is extraordinarily important, but not as a substitute for in-person student instruction. There is no reason PD should crowd out in-person student instruction,” Rice said.
Michigan’s arrangement with its teachers may be unusual compared to other states, but there is no central tracking system.
Individual school districts in Michigan and teacher unions negotiate and agree upon specific schedules and working conditions, including instructional hours and professional development hours, through collective bargaining agreements.
Michigan law requires school districts to provide professional development to teachers each year. Each school district is required to provide five days of professional development to all teachers annually.
State law says up to 38 hours of professional development can be counted. What cannot be counted are record days, parent/teacher conferences, prep hours and time setting up a classroom.
Lakia Wilson-Lumpkins, president of the Detroit Federation of Teachers for the Detroit Public Schools Community District, the state’s largest school district, says professional development, which allows teachers to remain current on best practices in the classroom, directly relates to student learning and should be counted as such.
“Those best practices that we learn during professional development, they trickle down to our students,” Wilson-Lumpkins said. “This is why it is counted towards our instructional hours, because that is what we’re doing. We’re learning best practices in the curriculum and reading methods, in math intervention, in all subject areas. And so when teachers are having professional development, we are learning so that we can best teach our students.”
In the past, teachers had time for professional development during semester breaks and longer summers, Wilson-Lumpkins said. Now, teachers are often working second jobs and teaching summer school courses, or obtaining credentials and courses for license renewals, she said.
“So they are in school outside of school hours,” Wilson-Lumpkins said.
The Michigan Education Association, the state’s largest teachers’ union, defended the need for professional development time. The MEA values local control for districts, spokesman Doug Pratt said, “and providing Michigan’s widely varying school districts individual flexibility to meet their students’ needs.”
“We supported the 2019 change to count professional development as instructional time, as it’s important for educators to get the latest and best training so they can help every student succeed,” Pratt said.
Lane Wright, a spokesman for the National Council on Teacher Quality, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit research and policy organization, said his group does not have the data to know whether other states allow professional development to count as instructional time.
“We’d be surprised if Michigan’s case was common among other states,” Lane said in an email.
Educators across Michigan say professional learning is typically built into the school year and occurs during the regular work calendar rather than solely in the summer, as had been the case for decades in Michigan and at a time when school always started after Labor Day.
That means every local school district negotiates professional development into teacher contracts, so the number of days educators take as instructional time is different, and there is no one accounting for all those scenarios.
In the Troy School District in Oakland County, five instructional days are scheduled and counted for professional learning each school year, said district spokesperson Kendra Montante, but that number can vary year to year. The district’s calendar has recently included between a half day and one full day of virtual learning for staff, Montante said.
“The Troy School District believes in a balanced instructional approach. An approach that maximizes student learning while also recognizing the importance of professional collaboration time for staff,” Montante wrote in an email. “This structure ensures that students receive high-quality instruction each day while providing our educators with the time and resources they need to continuously improve teaching and learning.”
Not all districts use the maximum number of seven professional days allowed by law. The Plymouth Canton Community School District in western Wayne County, for example, counted three professional development days last school year as part of its 180 days.
“We have two full days of (professional development) prior to the students attending,” spokesman Frank Ruggirello wrote in an email, adding one day counts as an instructional day and one does not. “The other three are done during the school year,” with two that count as instructional days and one on election day that does not count towards instructional time.
“Teachers typically complete professional development (PD) during scheduled PD days built into the school calendar, including a few days before students return in the fall (late August), on designated days throughout the school year,” Ruggirello said.
Michigan is among 31 states plus the District of Columbia that require at least 180 days of instruction, according to 2023 data provided by the Education Commission of the States.
In Colorado, public schools are required to be in session for a minimum of 160 days per school year, the lowest minimum among all U.S. states, while Illinois, North Carolina and Maine require 185 days, according to a Pew Research Center analysis. Kansas mandates 186 days for kindergarten through 11th grade and 181 days for 12th grade.
Attempts to add more days and hours to Michigan’s instructional time rules failed in 2022, two years after the pandemic.
House Bill 6014 would have increased instructional hours and days in Michigan every year for five years, starting with at least 1,128.5 hours and 185 days of pupil instruction in the 2022-23 school year and building up to at least 1,250.5 hours and 205 days of pupil instruction in the 2026-27 school year. It kept the professional development hours intact. The measure never got out of committee.
Since then, several state lawmakers have called for changes in the law to remove all professional development days as instructional days and reduce virtual days that can be counted from 15 to seven.
Republican state Sen. Thomas Albert of Lowell has sponsored a bill that remains locked inside the school aid budget, which has stalled in Lansing along with the state budget, that removes professional development days as instructional time.
“I didn’t realize the magnitude of the number of days kids could be missing from instruction. If you just look at the learning losses in the pandemic, it’s unacceptable the amount of days kids can miss from school,” Albert said. “I asked Dr. Rice what was the best way to get kids caught up. He said you need instructional time. You need time in front of a teacher.”
Nikolai Vitti, superintendent of Detroit Public Schools Community District, says the solution is for the Michigan Legislature to create a standard for professional development and be done, eliminating waivers and flexibilities.
“This shouldn’t be an ‘instructional time v. PD time is more important’ issue,” Vitti wrote in an email. “They are both important and both contribute to student achievement.”
DPSCD gives teachers five days of PD that count as instructional time. Teachers also attend optional summer PD and PD in the evenings after school throughout the school year, Vitti said.
Michigan’s decline in national testing results showed the pandemic’s continued toll on student learning. The pandemic, which began in 2020, closed schools in some districts for more than a year and routinely disrupted learning for Michigan’s 1.4 million students for two full school years.
The number of Michigan third graders who were proficient in reading — a pivotal benchmark in education — declined in 2024 to its lowest point in the 10-year history of the state assessment test.
The 2025 results are expected to be released later this month. Rice says the need to restore time in the classroom is urgent. Kids also need time in school for social and emotional practice, interacting with other peers and adults, and other lessons.
“You have to put the time in to improve in math, science, social studies, reading and writing,” Rice said. “It’s important that students and staff have enough time to get it done. … It’s ironic that we would reduce the amount of time that young people have, particularly given our experiences of the last few years and what we know about the relative merit of in-person versus remote instruction.”
