Zombies are proliferating in educational administration. We need to fight back.
Category Archives: Thoughts
More on scheduling
How else can we attack the disparities between our richer and poorer districts? We might start by looking further at traditional scheduling. The idea that all of America’s students should be on more or less the same schedule comes from an agrarian time when crops set the schedule. Very few districts in America today need to follow the harvest. Studies document substantial learning loss over summer vacation.
Districts with air-conditioning would benefit from spreading out the school year. Even if the school year cannot be changed, we can create shorter vacations. Four three-week vacations could be scheduled instead of the one, long summer break. For that matter, students in America’s most challenged districts would greatly benefit from a longer school year. The idea that all students should go for 180 days makes little sense. Why do ALL districts need to have approximately the same year? If the job is getting done in 180 days, fine. But if a school’s students lag behind most of their peers, then the job is not getting done.
We don’t set a time limit when mopping the kitchen. We don’t say, “Four minutes. Time to quit.” We stop when the mop has covered the floor and the dirt is gone. There is no reason our academically-challenged districts should not have a 250 day year or a 280 day year if that is the time needed to catch students up in English and mathematics. (I acknowledge the problem of financial constraints.)
Just as the school year and school day should be as long as a district can afford, even schools that cannot significantly extend the school day overall might consider mandatory after-school tutoring for students who are behind grade level. Some districts have already taken this approach, an extension of the concept of mandatory summer school for failing students. The idea that all students should have a school day of the same length is another legacy from the distant past. Why not provide needier, academically-disadvantaged students with a longer school day?
Our time constraints are highly artificial. In urban areas especially, the vast majority of our students have never visited a working farm. Many would have trouble telling a shorn sheep from a goat. It’s long past time to get off the agricultural calendar.
Air-conditioning matters a lot
State intervention has turned out to be a financial godsend to “Gotham City School District 100,” even if the school board members lost their jobs and state representatives were sitting in some school staff meetings. The district finally possesses a functional website and computers without floppy drives. But two years ago, the State Superintendent of Education looked at the district’s schools and suggested knocking down the two middle schools and adding an addition onto the high school to house the middle school students. In the Superintendent’s view, fixing up the dilapidated middle-school buildings was a waste of money. A large portion of any extra money the district receives in the near future will probably have to be sunk into infrastructure, into the buildings and grounds that were built in the middle of the last century.
This year, one of the two middle schools will be closed and those students will be placed in the larger middle school, a school where classrooms sometimes are in the nineties. On other days, these classrooms fall into the midfifties.
This fact alone may clobber any attempts to raise scores. Students seldom function well in such extreme conditions. They also whine a lot.
A Few Changes that Could Provide Genuine Educational Benefit
Many proposed solutions for America’s educational disparities require large sums of money – money that frequently does not exist, at least not in the districts that need that money. With state and federal governments lacking financial surpluses that might be used to fund new programs, I believe we need to stop discussing across-the-board plans for longer school years, more early enrichment programs, and smaller class sizes. America has many solvent, well-funded school districts that might be able to put some of these ideas into action but, overall, these are not the districts where students need extra help.
Districts burdened by academic underachievement and high drop-out rates hardly ever have extra resources available. The costs required to lengthen the school year, add extra years of schooling or seriously shrink classes are formidable. High costs generally render these strategies infeasible on a broad-scale basis, and focusing on such universal, costly strategies keeps us from exploring alternatives in scattered districts where we might make immediate improvements to American education.
We need to focus on what we can do to improve our schools right now. That requires approaching school districts on an individual basis. All of America’s school districts are different, and some vary radically. Whether a district is located in Illinois or Texas or Maine affects what may be done. A school without air-conditioning cannot run classes much past the start of June in states with hot summers. Within a given state, the financial strength of an individual district affects what may be done – or whether anything needs to be done at all. Past performance obviously has to be a major consideration in reform efforts: Part of the absurdity of NCLB has been the many “failing” districts that include schools regularly at the top of their state’s testing pool.
What can be done for those schools that are not yet succeeding? In those districts that have air-conditioning, if we cannot significantly lengthen the total number of days in the school year, due to the large costs involved, we can at least spread out that year, with probably manageable extra costs, such as increased utility bills and the expenses incurred by having staff on site for a longer period of time. More and more schools are starting earlier and ending later, a schedule that may prevent some of the learning loss documented from longer summer breaks. Schools are adding fall breaks and otherwise tweaking the schedule so that instead of one long summer break, for example, three shorter breaks are spread throughout the year.
The longer school day is another possible, admittedly somewhat expensive change that would benefit academic underachievers. As I write this, Chicago is coming close to establishing that longer school day, adding 144 teachers to create the new schedule. Coming up with more money to keep underachieving schools open longer has proved a difficult proposition, mostly due to increased staffing costs, but the longer school day will allow Chicago to attack critical problems such as lack of reading time and spotty homework performance.
The longer school day does not have to be enacted across the board — Please, no more sweeping laws! — but could reasonably be based on academic performance. The school district where I live does not need to add hours to the school day. Almost 100% of its students go on to higher education after high school, one of the main reasons why my local high school was chosen as one of the top 100 high schools in the country. The district where I worked two years ago, though, is creating a new charter school and one selling point for that school was the plan for a longer school day. The students where I taught had not been succeeding on the standard 8:00 to 2:45 school day. The new school was planned to start at 8:30 and run until 4:00. Those extra minutes could only be beneficial. Somehow the district had also budgeted a 200 day year for the charter school, adding 20 days to the school year.
No Money is No Money is No Money
The state government of Illinois is teetering on financial insolvency. California is almost equally crippled. Most American states have dug their way deep into financial holes. Some school districts have been in the red for years. Most lower-performing school districts are perpetually short of funds and have little prospect of receiving sudden, large infusions of cash. Some of our “solutions” need to be taken off the table. The mandatory, nation-wide, all-year school year requires all-year air-conditioning and all-year teachers at a time when school districts are aggressively laying off teachers and paraprofessionals, while juggling the remaining staff to cut costs. The extended year also requires more busses, more general staffing, and many more “free” breakfasts and lunches. Utility and supply costs go up as days are added. Longer school days, early enrichment programs, and smaller class sizes eat funds rapidly for the same reasons.
School choice?
To borrow a quote from the previous post:
A KPBS news article describes the situation perfectly:Teachers in San Diego schools have been through years of seeing pink slips issued and then rescinded, so many expect the same to happen this year. But Lorena Gonzalez, secretary and CEO of the San Diego and Imperial Counties Labor Council, said Thursday that sitting back and waiting for the district’s more than $120 million deficit to work itself out won’t work this time.
“You see what’s happening up and down our state with the number of school districts that are facing the same kind of economic crisis we’re seeing here,” she said. “Things are different.”
Things ARE different. We’ve hit a number of economic walls. Without changes in how we fund and manage our educational establishments, the already gaping chasm between our have and have-not districts will grow into an abyss.
Thems as has gits. It’s always been that way. But as the world becomes more technologically advanced, the opportunity cost of not-having grows greater. Our poorest districts need longer hours and longer school years. As our municipalities retreat financially, who will provide these hours?
More and more, I favor the School Choice Movement. To quote from a 1/26/2012 article by Michael Wille at http://illinoispolicy.org/blog/blog.asp?ArticleSource=4642:
About ten cents of every dollar allocated to school districts in this country comes from the Department of Education. States and local communities are the sources for the overwhelming amount of public dollars dedicated to the education system. Parents, teachers and local school boards best understand the needs of their students and institutions of learning. The strings attached to federal dollars often burden local community leaders with compliance costs. The teachers are constrained by these regulations, and students suffer as a result. Tying public dollars to families and allowing the money to follow the child will produce a better system for all.
Various government agencies have aggressively attacked the disparity in results between districts in different zip codes and we have received remarkably little return for our tax-dollar investments. It’s time to let parents vote with their feet. It’s time to let teachers teach their students what those students don’t know, and not what some pie-in-the-sky curriculum written by someone who has never taught a single hour in a classroom.
District at a deficit
North Chicago District 187 has historically lacked the money for the programs they put into place, as evidenced by the fact that the district operated for years at a deficit; the district was millions of dollars in the red by 2011 when the state finally began taking over, in part in response to the district’s attempt to sell bonds to continue deficit spending.
From Judy Masterson in the Lake County News-Sun of March 15, 2012:
overturning a North Chicago School Board vote against the establishment of a new charter school in the district) is critical of School Board members who argued that even if military enrollments continue to decline, lawmakers would not allow the district to dissolve. It cited another “glaring example” of the “district’s apparent failure to appreciate the tenuousness” of its financial predicament: The June 2010 decision to sell $39.5 million in revenue bonds funded primarily using federal impact aid, a move that, according to the order, has placed the district on the brink of a financial meltdown.The state order (
Many school districts across America are barely getting by. The following was taken from an educationclearinghouse article from October 2011 about the changes that lack of funds can make in a school district. This snippet and its accompanying graph help quantify the problem (http://educationclearinghouse.wordpress.com/2011/10/18/the-changes-that-insolvency-can-make-in-a-school-district/):
“Across the state (California), more school districts are
edging closer to insolvency, according to the state agency responsible for overseeing districts’ financial health. After the housing bubble burst and Wall Street crashed three years ago, the number of districts flagged by state officials as nearing insolvency spiked.”
This graph does not fully capture the picture, however. For example, the bars do not include San Diego. According to the article, the San Diego Unified District had not been flagged by state officials since the district reported that it expected to be able to pay its bills for the following two years, using money expected from the state. Yet as of December 11th, 2011, the San Diego Unified School Board was considering spending cuts, trying to deal with possible insolvency, because major cuts were expected to come down from the state unless “something drastic happens.”[1] Board members were considering cutting 55 positions and imposing a district-wide hiring freeze, shutting down non-critical overtime, raiding the reserves and selling property just so that the district could pay its bills. By May 24, 2012,[2] the San Diego Board of education trustees finalized more than 1,500 layoffs – most of them teachers.
A KPBS news article describes the situation perfectly:Teachers in San Diego schools have been through years of seeing pink slips issued and then rescinded, so many expect the same to happen this year. But Lorena Gonzalez, secretary and CEO of the San Diego and Imperial Counties Labor Council, said Thursday that sitting back and waiting for the district’s more than $120 million deficit to work itself out won’t work this time.
“You see what’s happening up and down our state with the number of school districts that are facing the same kind of economic crisis we’re seeing here,” she said. “Things are different.”
A spoonful of honesty
As we meander through the pros and cons of the proposed solutions to America’s educational problems, we easily become lost. There are no simple solutions to our problems, despite what is written across cyberspace and into newspaper columns daily. The problems are too complex for any fast fix.
We discuss longer school years, longer school days, early enrichment programs, and smaller class sizes. We talk about more intensive teacher training. We write articles about raising the bar and creating tougher standards. In a gingerly fashion, we sometimes even address the issue of educational funding, although one problem with attacking the funding problem is that the current system tends to work very well for our legislators. They don’t live in our poorest school districts and when they do, like the President, they send their children to private schools.
I believe part of the problem can be found in the steadily increasing centralization of education. We are standardizing education at a time when our population is diversifying. We are taking control away from local officials and local school boards by creating national requirements, many of which take away/reallocate scarce local resources. All across America, academically healthy districts are devoting time and money to preparing for the common core curriculum even though their students are/were doing great under the old standards. Academically-challenged districts are also preparing for the new curriculum, even though preparing for a harder test when you can’t yet pass the first test seems absurd. Can’t pass the test? We’ll make it harder!
(The people who came up with that solution ought to demand their college tuition back. They’ve learned so little about how the world works that I think they are entitled to the refund.)
Eduhonesty: Discussing plans we can never put into action cannot help us. Discussing plans we SHOULD NOT put into action helps us even less.
Student Loans and Majors
When we read these articles about new graduates struggling with loan debt, or see these students on TV, it’s worth paying attention to the fact that the graduates in question are hardly ever engineers or computer programming students. Liberal arts majors need to recognize the greater risk in their loans. If you want to study art history, fine, but don’t delude yourself into thinking you will find a high-paying job in the field. You will be extraordinarily lucky to find any job at all.
Eduhonesty: Where’s the money? That’s the question that all high school students should be forced to answer for themselves before they enter college. High schools owe students a realistic understanding of student loans, weighed against the likely earning potential of different college majors.
Another Reason Why Doubling Student Loan Rates is a Good Idea
Super low or even low loan rates can sound like a deal.
My daughter: “Mom, I saved $200 on these boots. They were only $150 dollars.”
It’s her money and she’s a sharp girl, if a little too fond of flashy boots. But many people respond to deals this way. I can easily hear a similar young woman saying, “And the interest rate is only 3.8%. I saved so much money!”
Then year by year, this same girl will “save” money as she tacks another ten or fifteen thousand onto her debt.
Kids take loans out without thinking. Parents obligate themselves without thinking. They don’t necessarily run the numbers to find out what will be coming at them in a few years.
Students and their parents need to run those numbers and ask themselves a few pertinent questions: What is the job market for dance majors? How much are loan payments likely to be? How much money will I have to make to pay that loan back? Higher loan rates are likely to stimulate thinking that does not happen nearly often enough.
Eduhonesty: The U.S. government is selling college to America’s students. They want to keep the loan rates down to encourage college enrollment. But legislators and members of the Department of Education don’t pay the loan debts they facilitate. They don’t forgive them either.
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