Changing Days for Students and Teachers -- Part 3 of 4 On Time in Education and the Law

Reset your watches and consider these suggestions from the report on time and learning.

Establish an Academic Day

In order to “reclaim the academic day”, the Commission recommends that students should receive “at least 5.5 hours of core academic instructional time daily.” The Commission understood the implications of such a change: “Many worthwhile student programs—athletics, clubs, and other activities—will have to be sacrificed unless the school day is lengthened." They believed that “all student activities should be offered during a longer school day.”[1]

This recommendation should be tempered with findings from the recommendation to reinvent schools around learning, not time, and the recommendation to invest in technology. Having an academic day may mean different things for different students. And, as outlined by Dr. Shernoff, redesigned pedagogy may make these core academic classes appear more like the additional, “non-academic” classes, or blend them in a way that resolves any concerns about giving up one type of class or program for the other.

Keep Schools Open Longer to Meet the Needs of Children and Communities.

Geoffrey Canada, President and Chief Executive Officer of the Harlem Children’s Zone has often argued that students need more time in school to succeed. Especially, it seems, if we want them to have the right-brained skills that they will need to compete in the flat world (i.e., to be able to take architectural renderings and video game code and create a virtual tour of a library, as Zaki Tahiri, a high school student at the Washington International School did).

Many public charter schools have recognized that for their students, who often come from financially and educationally poor homes, more time at school is critical. One public charter school in Memphis, Tennessee, the Memphis Academy of Science and Engineering, has students attend each class twice a day. The first class meeting is for instruction. The second class meeting is essentially a study hall for students to complete work, but the teacher is there, available to work with students individually or in groups. In some cases, the public charter school leaders sense that students go home to environments that may not be conducive to further schoolwork, and so they extend the school day so all “homework” is actually done at school.

Give Teachers the Time They Need

Invest in Technology

One of the Commission’s concerns was that the practice of sending children home for teachers to have professional development days should be eliminated. “We will never have truly effective schools while teachers’ needs are met at the expense of students’ learning time.”[2] I address these two recommendations together because investing in technology is one way to allow schools to meet the learning needs of teachers and students simultaneously. If students can access electronic or online materials to facilitate their own learning, then students can still be in school and learning at the same time that instructors are in school, learning.

Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen predicts that by 2019 half of all high school course content will be delivered online. In the book, Disrupting Class, Christensen and his coauthors talk about how the demands on schools and teachers have dramatically increased. Teachers and principals have been asked to do more, and to do everything differently, but the lengths of the school day and year have remained the same.

Christensen notes that usually the efforts to improve the output of education production have focused on teachers. The use of technology to improve output has also focused on the “technology of teacher-instruction”:

What would you have the teacher do: Skip every other chapter? Talk twice as fast? If instead we focused on the “listener” and thought about connecting the student directly with information through digital electronic technology, would that necessarily degrade the quality of the learning experience? Or might that disintermediation, the shift of work to the student, actually enhance it?[3]

Christensen predicts that “user networks” of students and parents, and then teachers, will emerge with access to software tools so easy to use that the users will “pull” these technologies into classrooms. “These instructional tools will look more like tutorial products than courseware." The products will determine the shape of the organization, rather than the other way around. [4]

The potential exists for disruptive innovations to help us get back to the model of the one room school house to achieve the goal of eliminating poverty. And the goal to leave no child left bored. As teachers use innovative tools to facilitate student-led, differentiated instruction, students may become lifelong learners, ready for successful work, education and citizenship.

Develop Local Action Plans to Transform Schools

In 1994, the Commission explained, “School reform cannot work if it is imposed on the community top-down. Genuine, long-lasting reform grows from the grassroots.” The Commission explained—and many others have argued for similar changes—“that larger school districts can offer families a wide array of alternative school calendars by encouraging individual schools to adopt distinctive approaches. . . . Districts of any size, with a sense of vision, boldness, and entrepreneurship can experiment with block scheduling, team teaching, longer days and years, and extending time with new distance learning technologies.”[5]

For these action plans to work, however, real power must be delegated as far as possible. School districts must empower principals with authority over all the per-pupil funding for the students in those schools. If districts provide services to those schools, they can charge those individual schools. But, all decisions must be made as close as possible to the individual students. When a principal only has discretion over $90 of the $12,000 per pupil allocation of local, state and federal funding, that student is being disserved.

If principals have authority over funding, they can then delegate that authority to teams of teachers who work with students every day. They may decide that one class needs a teaching assistant full-time, while another class needs more computers. They may decide to save money previously spent on textbooks by creating their own textbooks and giving their teachers pay increases.

This delegation is critically important in this age of accountability.

School leaders and teachers cannot truly be held accountable for results if the methods are dictated to them and resources are controlled by others.[6] To empower others, leaders “[f]ocus talent on results, not methods.”[7] “[Y]ou cannot hold people responsible for results if you supervise their methods. You then become responsible for results and rules replace human judgment, creativity and responsibility.[8] Effective leaders “set up the conditions of empowerment and then . . . get out of people’s way, clear their path and become a source of help as requested.”[9]

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[1] Prisoners of Time, 32.

[2] Id. at 36.

[3] Clayton M. Christensen et al., Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns 116, note 18 (2008).

[4] Id. at 134.

[5] Prisoners of Time, 38.

[6] Paul T. Hill, Lawrence C. Pierce, James W. Guthrie, Reinventing Public Education: How Contracting Can Transform America’s Schools 67-68 (Univ. of Chicago Press 1997).

[7] Stephen Covey, The 8^th Habit: From Effectiveness to Greatness 114 (2004).

[8] Id. at 286.

[9] Id. at 264.