School board adopts amended proposal for new school day and year

At the school board meeting tonight, many members of the public spoke about the administration’s proposal to change the school day and year. None of them were in favor of it. Most speakers—including at least one pediatrician and several high school students—focused on the harms of making teenagers start school at 7:45.

After hearing the community comment, several board members seemed reluctant to move forward with the change, especially given how little opportunity the community had had to learn about it. But the board was concerned about the collective bargaining implications of not going forward with the proposal, since the proposal was the basis of a tentative agreement with the teachers’ union about work hours. If the board did not go ahead with the change, it might then set negotiations back and have other bargaining consequences. The board went into a private session to discuss the bargaining implications with district administrators.

When they returned, the board members quickly approved a modified version of the administration’s proposal. The proposal was exactly the same, except that everything had been shifted fifteen minutes later. So elementary school will go from 8:45 - 3:45, while junior high and high school will go from 8:00 to 3:10. The school year will be 175 days long instead of 180; the summer break will be thirteen weeks long. As I understand it, time lost to weather cancellations will not be made up (unless it brings the total hours below 1080, which is unlikely).

Given the way events unfolded, I’m sticking with my initial hypothesis. My guess is that if the board had insisted on maintaining the current school day and the 180-day year, the union would likely have insisted on additional pay to compensate them for the longer year. That, in turn, might have forced the board to go through another round of budget cuts like those we experienced last year. Let’s hope that tonight’s discussion about cutting back the school year will be in lieu of a discussion about more program cuts.

I don’t blame the teachers’ union for negotiating the best deal it can get for its members, and I don’t blame the school board for facing reality if the options were limited. I appreciate that they were able to take some of the edge off the early start time. I do blame the Governor and the state legislature for preferring tax cuts and teacher leadership programs to general school funding.

The losers tonight? Teenagers, who will now start school at 8:00 instead of 8:05 or 8:10, though at least that’s not as bad as it might have been. Elementary schoolers, who will now have to add another half hour to the six hours they’re already cooped up in class, all in the name of “more time on task.” Working parents, who will have to line up three more weeks of child care over the summers (which probably means over $1000 per child per year). Members of the public, who learned about the proposal only a few days ago and never got the full story of what is driving the change. And, if my hypothesis is right, teachers, who might have preferred to work a longer year for commensurate pay, rather than three fewer weeks for presumably less pay.

Winners? I suppose the people and corporations who got the biggest tax cuts from the Branstad administration.
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Longer school day?

Updated below

I’m hearing rumors that the district is considering making its school day longer—the rumor is that junior high and high school would start twenty-five minutes earlier (at 7:45) and end ten minutes later (at 3:30). Caution: I have no idea whether there’s any truth to the rumors. When I asked the superintendent today if there were any proposals to lengthen the school day, he replied:

The District and the ICEA have been working through the collective bargaining process to create the necessary flexibility to move from a “days” calendar to an “hours” calendar. These discussions are continuing as there are several logistical hurdles to overcome. At the Board meeting last night we calendared a public hearing for May 12 so that we can discuss such a change, provided that we can overcome the logistical hurdles.

So it sounds like a change in the length of the day is at least a possibility.

As the parent of a teenager who already has a very full day because of school, I’d be very reluctant to make the school day any longer, and especially to start it any earlier. Teenagers aren’t known for being morning people. I also think there are diminishing educational returns from being cooped up in a school building all day, and that they start diminishing well before you get to 7.75 hours. I also wonder about the benefit of a longer school day when some kids at the junior high level are already being given multiple study halls because there aren’t enough classes to put them in.

I understand, though, that some parents might prefer a longer school day just for the child care coverage. That seems like a legitimate concern, though it may not be as much of an issue in the higher grades. Moreover, from the superintendent’s email, it sounds like a longer day would just result in a shorter school year, which would cause its own child care coverage issues. In general, if more child care coverage can be provided to people who want it without imposing it on people who don’t, I’d be in favor of that approach (which sounds less expensive, too). For what it’s worth, the superintendent has acknowledged that lengthening the school day has gotten “a universally negative reaction from parents” in the past.

In any event, if there’s going to be any change to the school day, we should hear the details well in advance of any scheduled public hearing on it.

And if the school day does become longer, maybe it’s time for the district to develop a homework policy? Here’s an example of one (from a district with a less-than-6.5-hour day and a 55-minute lunch period!).

UPDATE 4/30/15: Am now hearing some more details, though all still unconfirmed. One person tells me that the plan is to lengthen the elementary school day by having it go from 8:30 - 3:30, but to shift the high school and junior high day earlier without lengthening them (so school would go from 7:45 to 2:55). It remains unclear to me why anyone would want the older kids’ day to start earlier and end earlier than the younger kids’ day.

I’ve been unable to get any satisfactory explanation of how the state’s shift from counting days to counting hours requires any adjustment at all in our current bell schedules (as opposed to simply adjusting the number of days kids are in school). So far, it sounds more like this is just an opportunity for the administration to push its longstanding desire to lengthen the elementary school day, and that it’s not “prompted” by the switch to counting hours in any meaningful sense.

I’ll keep posting as I hear more about it.
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Costs? What costs?

An illustrator I am not, but you get the idea.

I’ve written before about how mystifying it is that the president of Iowa’s teachers’ union, Tammy Wawro, who has continually advocated for a 4% or 6% increase in state school funding, would nonetheless support the proposal to adopt the Smarter Balanced standardized tests, which are so costly that they will gut state school aid increases for years to come. Now it turns out that Wawro will be one of the three presenters of the proposal to the legislature tomorrow. Does Wawro feel any responsibility for the school budget cuts that will occur as a result of adopting Smarter Balanced, or is she just in complete denial? How is she serving the interests of the state’s teachers or students by advocating for very expensive tests that can only be funded by diverting money from staffing and school programming?

Another presenter will be the superintendent of the Waterloo schools, Jane Lindaman. Lindaman, too, claims to support higher increases in state school aid. Will she identify the tax increases that should occur to enable the state to increase school aid while also buying these expensive tests? Will she discuss what cuts she expects to make in her own district to pay the bill for Smarter Balanced? Or are we all just going to pretend that adopting Smarter Balanced has nothing to do with future supplemental aid?
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Do the Democrats mean what they say about increasing school aid?

I’m still mystified by the decision of the state teachers’ union president, Tammy Wawro, to support the task force’s recommendation that Iowa adopt the very expensive Smarter Balanced standardized tests. Judging from her Twitter feed, Wawro is an enthusiastic advocate of a 6% increase in supplemental school aid. Is she in complete denial about cause and effect? Adopt Smarter Balanced and you’ll kill any chance of decent supplemental aid for years. Does her left hand have any idea what her right hand is doing?

I’m beginning to worry that the state Democratic Party may be just as obtuse. Democratic legislators are united about the need for more supplemental aid. Yet how many have come out against Smarter Balanced?

At least eleven House Republicans are publicly against Smarter Balanced, which means it cannot pass without Democratic support. The single best thing the Democrats could do for future school aid is to vote this turkey down. If they don’t, all their noise about wanting a 6% increase is empty lip service.

My bad dream is that the Democrats declare a “win” by caving on Smarter Balanced in exchange for a slightly higher increase in aid for next year. They can’t be that lame, can they? Can they?
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Labor movement, R.I.P.

Never mind that more money for buying hugely expensive tests can only mean less money available for hiring and paying teachers. In what universe does a teachers’ union president sign on to a statement that the future of teaching and learning is online?
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Take it to the Seattle school board

Teachers in Seattle’s Garfield High School have unanimously decided to refuse to administer their district’s required standardized test (the “MAP”), saying it “corrupts teaching and learning.” If there was ever a standardized test that deserved to be boycotted, it’s this one. Teachers say that it is not aligned with the district’s curriculum, sometimes testing topics that the students wouldn’t study until later grades, and that students don’t take it seriously because they know their scores don’t affect their grades or graduation status. Other concerns include:

(1) that the test was sold to the district while the sitting superintendent of schools, Maria Goodloe-Johnson, was on the board of the company that sold the test, which she did not divulge at the time, and (2) that the gains students are expected to make on the tests—at least at the high school level—are actually within the margin of error of the test grading, which makes the MAP appear pretty much statistically useless.

The superintendent has threatened disciplinary action against the teachers, and today is a “National Day of Action” to support the teachers. Supporters of the boycott are urging people to write to the superintendent or sign a petition addressed to him. (I signed the petition.)

I don’t understand why more people aren’t focusing their attention on Seattle’s elected school board, rather than its employee, the superintendent. The superintendent is just carrying out a requirement of the board, and his threat to discipline the teachers is based entirely upon a district policy enacted by the board. The board is in a much better position to solve this problem than the superintendent: Simply stop requiring the tests, and enact a policy protecting the teachers from being disciplined for the boycott. Maybe the board members won’t do that, but at least they can be held accountable at the polls. I would love to see a school board election focused on the issue of standardized testing.

In any event, I now have one of my questions for this year’s school board candidates: If our teachers decided as a group that certain standardized tests were harmful and refused to administer them, would you support a policy protecting them from disciplinary action for doing so?
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Cracks in the wall?

From Gov. Jerry Brown’s State of the State speech yesterday in California:

The laws that are in fashion demand tightly constrained curricula and reams of accountability data. All the better if it requires quiz-bits of information, regurgitated at regular intervals and stored in vast computers. Performance metrics, of course, are invoked like talismans. Distant authorities crack the whip, demanding quantitative measures and a stark, single number to encapsulate the precise achievement level of every child.

We seem to think that education is a thing—like a vaccine—that can be designed from afar and simply injected into our children. But as the Irish poet, William Butler Yeats said, “Education is not the filling of a pail but the lighting of a fire.”

This year, as you consider new education laws, I ask you to consider the principle of Subsidiarity. Subsidiarity is the idea that a central authority should only perform those tasks which cannot be performed at a more immediate or local level. In other words, higher or more remote levels of government, like the state, should render assistance to local school districts, but always respect their primary jurisdiction and the dignity and freedom of teachers and students.

Subsidiarity is offended when distant authorities prescribe in minute detail what is taught, how it is taught and how it is to be measured. I would prefer to trust our teachers who are in the classroom each day, doing the real work – lighting fires in young minds.

My 2013 Budget Summary lays out the case for cutting categorical programs and putting maximum authority and discretion back at the local level—with school boards.

I don’t know how much Brown can back those words up; there’s a limit to how much local control you can allow if you don’t opt out of No Child Left Behind. But it will be interesting to see how it plays out.

I think the bipartisan consensus favoring centrally-driven school “reform” is finally starting to break down. It is increasingly associated with polarizing right-wing governors like Scott Walker and Rick Snyder. Reformer-in-chief Michelle Rhee is increasingly identified as a “right-wing” figure. (Charles Pierce, a blogger revered on the left, takes on Rhee here.) The Democratic Party activists who populate DailyKos see school reform (accurately) as an attack on unionism. I’d love to see the approval ratings of the standardized testing industry. And now the governor of the largest state in the union is declining to follow the crowd.

It’s got a ways to go. (Blogger Atrios recently tweeted “a liberal member of congress spoke to me about michelle rhee as if she was jesus.”) But if large parts of one party’s base start turning against the top-down “reform” project, how long before “local control” becomes the safest, most people-pleasing position?

Previous post on Jerry Brown here.
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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.

The teachers’ union on the school board election

When I sent out my questions for school board candidates, I mentioned how most such questionnaires tend to focus on “budgets, buildings, and boundaries,” with little, if any, attention to the district’s educational philosophies, approaches, and goals. The Iowa City Education Association (i.e., the local teachers’ union) has its own questionnaire -- the responses to it are here, and their summary of the candidates’ pros and cons is here -- which I think demonstrates my point. Eleven questions, and not one that invites any discussion of what the district’s educational mission should be, or even acknowledges that there might be more than one way to think about educating people. (Number 7 arguably qualifies, but is pretty narrowly focused on accommodating socioeconomic diversity.)

Don’t get me wrong: I think the ICEA is asking about important issues, and I’m happy to link to them here. But as a parent, what I most want to know is: Why is the district treating my children this way? Why does it seem to be striving so hard to teach my kids that learning is an unpleasant chore? Why is it so bent on turning my kids into quiet, obedient little worker bees who will score high on standardized tests and fear authority, instead of skeptical, questioning citizens who will speak up and think for themselves? Why does the district have such a blinkered idea of how people learn, and such an impoverished conception of what it means to be well-educated?

As I’ve made clear before, I don’t mean this as a criticism of the teachers. This approach to education is being imposed on the teachers partly by the district and partly by individual principals. We have no way of knowing how the teachers really feel about it, and I think many of them strive to keep as much joy in the learning process as they can, under the circumstances.

Deborah Meier frequently talks about how schools should be striving to create a “feisty, democratically savvy citizenry.” Our district, though, seems to want to stamp out all traces of anything resembling feistiness from the kids. For the kids who are deemed “disruptive,” we’ve adopted million-dollar programs and entire curricula to train them -- and all the kids -- not just to obey the rules, but to internalize and agree with them. For the kids who are too people-pleasing, too quiet and docile, too unquestioningly obedient, too happy to be told what to think, too fearful of authority -- nothing. The district doesn’t see those kids as a problem. In fact, they appear to represent the district’s ideal student.

Why?
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Market-oblivious “conservatism”

Do conservatives believe in the free market? Yes. Do they understand how markets work? Sometimes I wonder. Judging from the news coming out of Wisconsin and Michigan, they seem to think that the key to improving public education is to make teaching as unappealing a job as possible. I don’t doubt that they can cut costs by breaking teachers’ unions, and that they can take away teachers’ job security, and that they can micromanage the classroom from the top down to the point where teachers are simply script-readers. (Example here.) But one stubborn fact remains: they can’t make people become teachers. Because teaching is bought and sold on a market. If you cut compensation and job security and make working conditions miserable, talented people will simply choose to do something else, and we will end up with teachers who are worse at what they do.

I think that doesn’t bother these “reformers” because, deep down, they don’t think of teaching as skilled labor. Their natural authoritarian bent leads them to think in terms of top-down models, where all the hard thinking gets done by high-level administrators, who then give teachers their marching orders. How hard is it to read from a script? No reason to treat that as a profession. It doesn’t matter if talented people go elsewhere, because teaching doesn’t take talent. So we can cut compensation without lowering quality at all!

These aren’t Free Market Conservatives; they’re Free Lunch Conservatives. They just can’t admit one of the basic principles of the free market: you only get what you pay for.

Of course, the reformers are just treating teachers the way they treat kids. It’s all about dictating, never about negotiating. Giving people autonomy is just a sign of weakness. The little people shouldn’t expect to have input into how they are treated; their job is just to obey. That the little people might react to this approach -- teachers by leaving the profession, kids by rebelling against the entire enterprise of learning -- is simply wished away, or used as an excuse for an even firmer crackdown.
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Scapegoats and red herrings

Given how critical I can be of the school system, I think some people expect me to be more critical of teachers as a group, or specifically, of teachers’ unions. I think teachers’ unions are self-interested and can’t be counted on to do what’s best for the kids, so I certainly wouldn’t write them a blank check. But I’m not on board for union-bashing, or union-busting. Unions are one of the few things protecting the poor and the middle class from becoming even worse off than they already are. And making the poor and the middle class worse off is the worst possible thing you could do for education in America.

There will always be people who want to scare you into thinking that we all need to work harder for less money if we ever hope to compete with the Chinese (or whoever this week's bogeyman is).  I don't buy it.  This country can afford to become a very different place than the one it is becoming. It’s not teachers’ unions that are standing in the way.

The same idea, in joke form, here.
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Scott Walker, the latest product of our bipartisan education consensus

E.D. Kain has an interesting new blog on school policy over at Forbes magazine, of all places. His post today discusses Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker’s threat to cut one billion dollars in aid to schools and local governments.

[T]he hallmark of the modern education reformer is a policy of top-down, authoritarian reform. Scott Walker is taking the same exact approach that various school reformers have taken across the country, from Michelle Rhee to Chris Christie. The difference is that Walker is presiding over a united state government, whereas Rhee was only a chancellor of the D.C. schools and Christie has a divided state government.

In another post, he discusses how prominent Democrats paved the way for Walker.

[Michelle] Rhee didn’t bother trying to work with teachers, unions, or parent groups. Her approach to school reform was top-down and authoritarian. In 2008 Rhee said that “Cooperation, collaboration, and consensus-building are way overrated.” . . .

Education Secretary Arne Duncan, a Democrat appointed by a Democratic president, is a fierce advocate of school choice, Teach for America, merit pay, and other fashionable reforms. His program, Race to the Top, rewards reformers like Bersin, Rhee, and others who make radical changes to the system. Like No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top is a program aimed at accountability. But advocates of accountability have never specified what they’d like to hold schools, teachers, and students accountable to – insisting instead that test scores are a good enough metric by which to gauge the success or failure of schools and American students. There are deep flaws with these assumptions and with their prescribed remedies. . . .

Democrats, the media, and these large foundations have all played a roll in the fight against teachers’ unions and the place of traditional public school in society. This has played nicely into the hands of Republicans like Scott Walker and Chris Christie and other GOP politicians at the state and national level who have long gunned for teachers’ unions and for a break-up of the public school ‘monopoly’. Indeed, the demonization of teachers plays a central part in the modern school-reform movement. . . .

The accountability movement has shifted the focus away from American ingenuity and creativity in favor of strict testing regimes in an attempt to compete with Japan and Finland. This is the wrong approach. . . . If anything, we should be looking for ways to make education more creative and diverse, and to make American students more well-rounded and independent. The current reforms achieve just the opposite.

Kain is a former conservative/libertarian, trending leftward, who seems to be genuinely wrestling with the difficult issues posed by educational policy. I’m looking forward to seeing where his thinking goes.
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Oscar round-up

Just kidding. But the Answer Sheet has a good post by Kevin Weiner about why last night’s Oscar winner for best documentary, Inside Job, tells us more about the problems of education reform than the much-discussed Waiting for Superman. Weiner notes that Inside Job focused on “(1) the advocacy of deregulation in order to free up innovation, (2) hubris and general belief among hedge fund titans that they are infallible, and (3) increased wealth inequality.”

If Superman had explored these issues instead of bashing unions and promoting charters, moviegoers might have walked away understanding a great deal about why the families it profiled and so many similar families across America face a bleak educational future.

The movie certainly showed scenes of poverty, but its implications and the structural inequalities underlying that poverty were largely ignored. Devastating urban poverty was just there -- as if that were somehow the natural order of things but if we could only ‘fix’ schools it would disappear.

While you’re reading it, keep this chart in mind (from Alex Knapp at Outside the Beltway):

I’ve complained before about our schools’ obsession with behavior management at the expense of thought and inquiry. But I can see why the people in the blue slice above might be more interested in teaching the kids in the yellow slice to behave than in teaching them to question things.

(h/t Balloon Juice)
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