Teachers’ union president: Overstuffed school day will short-change kids and cause morale problems

At last week’s school board meeting, Tom Yates, the president of the Iowa City Education Association (that is, our local teacher’s union), spoke up about the demands being made on kids and teachers in our district’s elementary schools:

And somebody finally reduced it for me today and said, “You know, we have stuff in minutes. We have, you know, x number of minutes for this. Well, if you add up all the number of minutes, it doesn’t fit in the day.” [Laughter.] Consequently, and I was inclined to let this go a couple of years ago when I was still in secondary and said, you know, people were saying, “Wow, you know, my kid’s only got fifteen minutes for lunch,” and right now I would say, “Your kid’s got fifteen minutes for lunch? That’s the longest block of anything the kid’s got all day!” . . .

[B]ut really, it’s, it’s going to cause morale problems, and I can’t help but believe that kids, in the total realm of everything that they have to do during the elementary day, are getting short-changed somehow.

I think he could have put the case even more strongly, but I’m glad that the teachers are pushing back against the absurd allocation of time in our elementary school day. Our district seems to be driven by a kind of box-checking mentality – Health? Check. Character education? Check. An hour of math every day? Check. A guidance curriculum? Check. And so on – that is divorced from any sense of limits, priorities, or effects. The district needs to step back and re-evaluate what can realistically be accomplished in the school day, and recognize that it is better to do a few things well than a lot of things poorly – especially since some of what they’re doing is of very questionable value, if not outright detrimental (for example, this, this, and this). And this manic accumulation of “material” to be “covered” is coming at the expense of physical activity and social down time (such as lunch and recess) that everyone should be entitled to and that can only help kids learn better. Elementary school shouldn’t be a rat race, for kids or their teachers.

A full transcript of Yates’s comments appears after the jump.



Tom Yates: The last thing I want to mention has to do with something relative to the mission of the ICEA and the state and national organizations, which is, always I say, you know, part of our mission is to make sure that we help contribute to the best quality educational environment, and we can make that broad or narrow depending on what we need to look at, right? I’ve been to almost every elementary school in the district this fall, which is something I’ve wanted to do in the past, and after talking to people and looking at things that are going on in various schools, I’m a little baffled by the complexity of the elementary day. And somebody finally reduced it for me today and said, “You know, we have stuff in minutes. We have, you know, x number of minutes for this. Well, if you add up all the number of minutes, it doesn’t fit in the day.” [Laughter.] Consequently, and I was inclined to let this go a couple of years ago when I was still in secondary and said, you know, people were saying, “Wow, you know, my kid’s only got fifteen minutes for lunch,” and right now I would say, “Your kid’s got fifteen minutes for lunch? That’s the longest block of anything the kid’s got all day!” It’s – I understand some of the difficulties, I understand the schools have brought in curricula that other schools have had for a couple of years, and that there are implementation issues going on, but, but really, it’s, it’s going to cause morale problems, and I can’t help but believe that kids, in the total realm of everything that they have to do during the elementary day, are getting short-changed somehow. I hope not, because it’s a lot of stuff, but that’s also the issue – it’s a lot of stuff. And I just want you to be aware, again, that this is, you know, the dealing – dealing with the elementary day, however it comes to you to take a look at, is something really that needs some attention. Thank you.

Sarah Swisher: Thank you so much, Tom. Did you find that it was sort of district-wide in the elementaries that it was sort of –

Yates: Well, every – yeah, and everybody’s got some, some issues. In fact, we’ve already agreed, [Human Resources Director] Chace [Ramey] and I have already agreed to take a look at specials, and how those are implemented across the district, and why we’ve had some of the kinds of, of even basic scheduling problems that we’ve had this year so far, and what can we do to pull in the people who know, and take a look at it as a committee and try to get some consistency and standardization about how some of this stuff can be done, to make it smoother for everybody from the principals down to the kindergartners.

Swisher: Are you satisfied with the line of communication on this?

Yates: So far. So far, but we’re, this is still early in the year. And again, it’s not my purview how anything changes in the realm of how the education day is structured for the elementary schools, but this all plays into it as well, as does busing, ultimately, too. So, something you have to keep an eye on and an ongoing long-term view, I think..