Opportunities to exercise flexibility sometimes giveth and sometimes taketh away.
The winter of 2014 grabbed Wisconsin and the upper Midwest and refused to let go. Deep snow falls and severe cold caused many school districts to cancel classes for children on an unprecedented number of school days. Current state law requires Wisconsin Boards of Education to schedule a school year of 180 instructional days. There is an allowance for up to five days of instruction that may be scheduled for parent conferences or cancelled due to emergencies such as inclement weather. Most school districts schedule at least two of the 180 days for parent conferences. The statutory instructional school year is 180 days and the real instructional year is 178 days. That leaves up to three days that may be sacrificed to Mother Nature.
When weather emergencies take more than three days of instruction, school administrators hustle to arrange a “make-up” instruction by adding days to the school year or adding minutes to remaining school days. Making up instructional days so in order to comply with the 180 rule is a requirement of law. With extreme fickleness, the superintendent who was a good and sensitive person in sparing children from walking to school or standing at bus stops in way-below-zero winter becomes a community pariah when replacing spring break days with school days or extending the school year several days in June or using Saturday mornings for making up missed instruction. Parents who have scheduled family trips on spring break or during the first days of summer don’t like their superintendent very much. Local pastors who hold catechism classes on Saturday and traditionally schedule summer Bible schools during the first week of an anticipated summer vacation declare that school is violating local traditions. Animosity to instructional make-up time of course includes children who understand Saturday mornings, a 3:00 dismissal from school, and spring and summer vacations as time that school owes them as compensation for their attending school in the first place. No one, including teachers, likes make-up days.
The Wisconsin legislature recently turned sympathetic ears to the problem of rescheduling weather-cancelled instructional time. Senate Bill 589 proposed striking the requirement of 180 days from the description of a mandated school year. The Bill retains a required minimum number of hours of elementary and secondary instruction and provides Boards of Education with flexibility in how they might arrange these hours. Without a required number of days, Boards may meet the required number of hours of instruction by lengthening remaining school days without tampering with Saturdays, spring break or summer vacation or using any combination of these compensatory measures.
http://docs.legis.wi.gov/2013/related/proposals/sb589
For example, the 1137 hours of instruction required for secondary schools can be accommodated in a 175 day instructional year comprised of 6.5 hours of instruction plus thirty minute lunch. Or, a school year could be 163 day instructional days comprised of seven hours of instruction. Or, any combination of instruction and lunch is possible as long as the total number of hours of direct instruction equals 1137.. The conceptual flexibility says that Boards are allowed to use fewer than 180 days as long as they meet the number of required direct instruction hours.
(WI DPI Standard (f)(121.02) requires 437 hours of instruction in Kindergarten, 1,105 hours of direct instruction in grades 1 to 6, and at least 1,137 hours of direct instruction in grades 7 to 12. Most school districts generalize a school calendar for the entire school district and base that generalization on the required hours of secondary instruction. Elementary schools may have a different clock schedule, but almost always share a district school calendar. The length of a school day typically is long enough so that the number of daily hours times 180 equals 1137 or 1010 or 437.)
http://cal.dpi.wi.gov/cal_daysover
Interestingly, two additions to SB 589 match flexible calendaring with state funding. The bill allows Boards to receive state funding for interim and laboratory sessions are that organized for direct instruction. Currently, many zero-hour classes and interim classes, for example classes held over a winter or spring break, do not qualify for state aid. If local schools valued these opportunities, they funded the costs outside of the district’s revenue limit calculations. SB 589 will fund these as regular education. In addition, the costs of online summer classes for any student in grades seven through twelve also will qualify for state aid.
This is good news for Wisconsin school boards. It would be better news if
1. the required number of instructional hours was a minimum and not a maximum. Now, these two, minimum and maximum, will become synonymous. This is how it may work. Current law requires 180 days of instruction, so most school calendars are 180 with an understanding that five days may be forgiven for conferencing or weather emergencies. Employee contracts are 180 instructional days plus a locally adopted number of professional development days. Wisconsin Act 10 and reduced state funding caused many Boards to trim collectively bargained professional development days from their annual school calendar. Many employee contracts became 180 or 182 day agreements.
With SB 589, 1137 hours of secondary instruction will define both the instructional year and the employment year. With little concession, a school year/employment year calendar can be accomplished in 163 to 175 days. Each day that is subtracted from the traditional number of 180 represents significant savings in salary/benefit and overhead costs for a School Board. For example, a 163-day school year is ten percent less than a 180-day school year and a district with a $10,000,000 personnel budget may save $1,000,000 with a reduced school year/employment calendar. Some Boards will not reduce their traditional calendar to a minimal calendar, but most will move in that direction due to financial reasons.
2. required learning by all children could be accomplished within a minimal number of instructional days. Sadly, very few Wisconsin schools have been able to cause a full year of academic learning within a 180-day school year. A school year with fewer days will not advance the level of child learning; it will widen the gap between what children should learn and what they really do learn.
Even with flawed assessments like the Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Examination, only 36.1% of children in grades 3 thru 8 plus 10th grade achieved a proficient score in reading in the 2012-13 school year. In mathematics, 48.1% achieved proficiency.
These levels of proficiency or non-proficiency were accomplished within a 180-day school year, or its remains after conferences and weather cancellations in 2012-13. Are there new reasons to believe that reading and math achievements will improve with fewer days of instruction? And, if a more rigorous assessment was used, like the SmarterBalanced Assessments, will the academic achievements of children in reading and math even match their best days on the WKCE? Probably not.
The old adage of “be careful in what you ask for” applies to the application of SB 189. Flexible relief from rescheduling instruction that is missed due to weather emergencies will be accomplished. Using a required number of direct instructional hours without a number of required days will result in shorter school calendars and shorter employment contracts. And, increased difficulty to cause children to meet academic achievement goals will follow.
How interesting it would have been if the Senate Bill required Boards of Education to schedule enough days of instruction to cause 80% of the children in grades 3 thru 8 plus grade 10 to achieve proficiency on the WKCE in reading and math in order to receive 100% of their funding using the revenue limit calculations. The percent of state aid would be diminished corresponding to levels of proficiency below the 80% requirement. Conversely, if schools can achieve 80% proficiency in less than 1137 hours of instruction, the school calendar may be shortened appropriately. This requirement does not care about bad weather or parent conferencing or school vacations. This requirement connects the school calendar and state funding to learning achievement. Boards, of course, could settle for a lower percentage of proficiency with a lower level of state funding and a shorter school calendar. It is all about priorities.