Q: When are 180 days of instruction not 180 days?
A: When it’s the state school system doing the counting.
As News Tribune’s Kris Sherman reported Sunday, the call for higher standards is having a shrinking effect on the school calendar.
Teachers being asked to stand and deliver have in turn demanded that they be paid for honing their teaching skills.
Cash-strapped school districts can’t pay for more hours in teachers’ contracts. (Just an extra hour a week would cost the Peninsula School District in Gig Harbor $1 million a year). So districts borrow from classroom time.
The result is growth in the number of waivers the state is granting to school districts asking to cut some student instruction days.
Last year, more than a fourth of the state’s school districts received state waivers. Eighty-three districts had them in the last school year, compared with 64 in 2003-2004.
But many times the waivered days aren’t just lopped off the school calendar. A popular option among school districts is to use late starts or early dismissals to parcel out the teacher planning and collaboration time throughout the year.
Even in Tacoma, where school officials are trying to consolidate time off so that students have as much uninterrupted time in the classroom as possible, keeping the school schedule straight can be a challenge.
Such fits and starts do more than mess with families’ attempts to plan child care and work schedules, they also can hurt the very thing the schedule changes were meant to improve: student achievement.
Research has shown that what really counts is not necessarily the sum of the hours a student spends in school but how much time he spends actively engaged in learning. A succession of short days or an on-again, off-again calendar tends to mess with such concentration.
Education officials point out that the extra time dedicated to teacher collaboration and training is working as test scores inch higher. But professional development alone won’t get the state over the next hurdle as student achievement begins to stall out in some areas.
The state must continue to find ways to keep investing in instructional time. And in an era when teacher unions loom large, more classroom hours don’t come cheap.
Reconciling teachers’ bargaining power against the obligation to provide students a better education is the challenge facing state and school district budget writers. It’s only going to get more challenging as public school enrollment spikes between now and 2025.
The state will have to eventually call a halt to the slide in school schedules. There’s a point at which the juggling act begins to shortchange students, and some school districts are approaching that brink.
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