Tag Archives: school year

Institutional Elasticity Stymies Growth

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As a child I was fascinated with elasticity.  First it was rubber bands.  Stretch them, twist them, tie and untie them, bunch them into a ball, and they always return to their essential shape.  Good old rubber bands.  Then it was Silly Putty.  Extract it from its container, shape it, tear it into bits, make it into anything you want, and then put it back in its container.  Voila!  Silly Putty melted and molded back to the internal shape of the container and was ready for more future silliness.

Public education, both in the pandemic and in the post-pandemic, has been exceedingly elastic.  And, required to be exceedingly elastic by our school communities.  All the accommodations schools made for the continuing instruction of children over two-plus fraught school years were stretches to meet the emergency.  And, just as soon as the various levels of emergency ended there was an immediate expectation that school would return to its pre-molded shapes of the past.  Public education is expected to be institutional silly putty in the face of change.  Any forward movement or change will be countermanded by an equal or greater snap back toward past practices.  Elasticity does not lead to permanent change.

This is not a put down or a slam, but an objective observation.

Test this hypothesis regarding educational elasticity.  What aspect of institutionalization was permanently changed by the pandemic?  School calendar and school day, curriculum, rules and regulations, school athletic and activity life, instruction of children with exceptional needs, and faculty and staff employments – all snapped back to the pre-pandemic norms just like a good old rubber band. 

The pandemic certainly added to the challenges of future public education.  Mental health and social-emotional welfare of children and school employees jumped to the forefront of many school conversations.  Gaps in student learning and achievement are evident.  Shortages in the candidate pool for every category of school employee arose during and continue after school closures.  These three may be our most significant post-pandemic challenges.  Yet, our elastic institution is required to meet all new challenges with old institutional thinking.  We are struggling to fit mental health and SEO programming into the old Silly Putty can of a school day and school year and already budgeted school revenues.  We are compromised – do we fill gaps in learning or teach this year’s curriculum?  It is difficult to do both with fidelity.  Even though there are real shortages in every category of classroom teacher, my work with the WI DPI finds few alternative pathways being approved even when the alternative meets the rigor of teacher license requirements.  Snap back personified.

Test the hypothesis of elasticity within schools.  What new options and pathways are being approved to meet these challenges?  Generally, nada.  The first and dominant impulse is to make the spring of 2022 look and feel like the spring of 2019.  We are trying to fix post-pandemic challenges with pre-pandemic tools.  Every news story about school districts across the nation trying new approaches to new as well as old challenges is quickly followed with stories about slap back and snap back. 

Heaven help the school board that makes remote education, simultaneous studio teaching, and Zooming a regular instructional delivery.

It is the nature of a true institution to be change resistant.  Institutions by definition have a constancy of predictable behavior.  Lack of predictability causes lack of confidence.  In general, our test of predictability is that today’s school must behave like the school adults attended when we were children.  That is the same definition our parents and grandparents used to assure predictive continuity – unchanged schools.

Without causing too much uproar, we need to reform one of the three underlying assumptions about public education. 

  • Parents and the economic community depend upon the school as predictable day care for all children of school age.
  • Children depend upon the school to educate them in preparation of continuing education after graduation or beginning steady employment.
  • Schools are institutional not dynamic agencies.

The first assumption is tied to the constancy of day and time.  As a generalization, the calendar is September 1 to June 1 and the clock resembles an adult workday, 8:00 am to 4:00 pm.  Without exception, adults schedule their adult world around the predictability of the school’s provision of day care.  This assumption is inviolate; the scope of educational reform is restricted by the need for all children to be in school on all scheduled school days.  If the calendar and clock are malleable, many more options are available for matching selected children with selected programs at selected times of the day.  Personalization and differentiation increase dramatically.  Day care is day and time based; education is outcome based.  Which will prevail?

The second assumption questions the two traditional tracks of 4K-12 education.  Our traditional paradigm is all children are in a college track or they are in a world of work track.  A new paradigm may say – in 4K-5 children achieve foundational learning and in 6-12 children apply, extend, and enrich foundational learning.  Historically, the college track fed the future of professional careers, and the non-college track fed the future of business, trades, and labor.  The reality of college debt and its punitive effect upon twenty- through thirty-year olds is reducing college matriculation annually.  A local school that traditionally sent 95-97% of its graduates to college now sends 75-80%.  Additionally, the very productive options for personal, experience-based education that is not associated with higher education tells us to rethink tracking in favor of blended education and career exploration, apprenticeship, and internship for students in grades 6-14.  Will the snap back to traditional and institutional tracking define the future or will an extended and expanded secondary education provide innovative options for transitioning students into adulthood?

Finally, the third assumption is about fences.  Is the best provision of public education institutional or dynamic?  When a school board seeks a new district administrator, are they hiring leadership that assures continuity of past programming or innovative thinking for new opportunities?  It makes a difference.  Educators follow their leadership, and the nature of a school aligns to its leader.  Institutional thinking is about fencing that assures constancy and the predictable delivery of past outcomes.  Dynamic thinking looks beyond the fences to possibilities.  What kind of agency should our school be?

If 2019 can fix our needs for 2022-23, then let’s keep playing with Silly Putty.  If 2022-23 and beyond requires more than pre-2019 provided, let’s enjoy elasticity in our Spandex not our schools.

Hybrid School Year – A Rethought, Pandemic-informed School Calendar

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Every year school boards consider the school calendar for the next school year.  Setting the annual calendar is not only a statutory responsibility of a board but a very real statement of how the board views the provision of instruction to children.  The calendar sets the architectural structure of schooling.

Deep into the pandemic, the 2022-23 calendar also reflects what a school board has learned about its community and 21st century children.  Without argument, pandemic schooling will influence post-pandemic schooling for years to come.  Children, teachers, parents, and community are approaching 4K-12 education differently on the backside of their remote, virtual, and hybrid school experiences. 

A first question in this consideration should be “does a traditional calendar of 36 consecutive weeks of teaching and learning interspersed with traditional holidays provide the best teaching and learning calendar?”. 

The traditional calendar is derived from our agrarian/industrial history.  The agrarian context is that children are available for school between the fall harvest and spring farming seasons.  School began late in September and ended late in May.  Consequently, a school calendar is compacted to keep the summer months free of school.  In our state, tourism has replaced farming as the driver for a compact calendar.  Working-aged children provide the “grunt” labor for tourism.  The key element of the agrarian calendar is availability – children are available for schooling when they are not working.

The industrial context is the five-days a week assembly line of teaching and learning.  Get all of the age-eligible children in the schoolhouse, disperse them in a hierarchy of grade levels and academic courses and annually push them to the next level until the graduate.  Begin teaching the approved curriculum on day one, teach it in consecutive weeks and days  and finish learning nine months later.  The key element of the industrial calendar is daycare – children are in school so that adults are available for employment.

Public school shadowed the collegiate model of a two semester and four quarter block of 36 weeks of school or the amount of time required to teach one Carnegie unit of academic credit.  The test case in the early 1900s was a college course Biology – compacted into two semesters of 18 weeks each.  Voila! Our national educational leaders wanted high school to prep for college, so the college semesters because high school semesters and have been ever since.  The key element of the collegiate calendar is teaching time – a course can be taught (not necessarily learned) in semester blocks.

School boards have mandated a traditional, annual calendar based upon agrarian, industrial and collegiate models for more 100 years.  With such repetition this is the fallback calendar that most school boards first consider when they discuss a calendar for the next school year.  It also is the calendar that most adults in the community relate to, expect, and accept for the education of their children.

The most common rationale for why schools do what schools do is – that’s what school was like when I was a student.

The easiest action a board can take is to adjust the 180 days for interrupting holidays, place the first day of instruction on or after September 1, and vote to approve.  The most contentious discussion will be on the placement of spring break – when and how many days.  Finis.

But, does it provide the best teaching and learning architecture?  No.  Every school faculty, administration, and board has learned new things from our pandemic experience and a 1900s school calendar is archaic.

The second question in the board’s consideration of the next year’s calendar is “will we change the calendar using what we have learned?”.  It takes a lot of will power to move the status quo toward something new. 

What have we learned?

The pandemic taught us the prioritized value of school in our community is this:  school = day care.  Parents and employers are going ballistic when children are quarantined at home due to covid.  Remote education did not necessarily fail as an instructional delivery system.  It failed because adults at home were not able to support learning at home.  A child at home interrupts work routines.  Our economy accepts the agrarian/industrial model of nine months of school and three months of summer of children available for seasonal employment.  Employed parents have learned to work with the traditional calendar and do not like/want changes in the calendar the school publishes at the start of the school year.

We learned that parents and the community want their school to publicize an annual calendar parents and the community can count on.  Cancelling any calendared school day is problematic.

The pandemic is teaching us that the social-emotional or mental health development of children is a new priority.  The acculturation of children requires them to be in personal contact with each other.  Without daily school attendance, children become unruly, self-centered, and asocial.  Checking the school discipline reports after children returned to daily attendance is confirming these three characteristics. 

Parents want their schools to fix the pandemic-bred social-emotional problems children are exhibiting. 

The problem is in the arithmetic.  If it takes 36 weeks to teach a standardized curriculum in our 4K-12 instructional ladders, when will schools address social-emotional and mental health issues?  If we keep to the traditional calendar, some things will have to give.

Third, despite all optimistic reports, pandemic children are displaying gaps of missed and incomplete learning.  Early reading proficiencies require the personal attention of trained teachers.  Mathematical thinking, especially in the transitional years of fractions into Algebra requires constant conversation between teacher and child to assure accurate understanding and application of algebraic foundations.  On-line foreign language instruction is exceptionally difficult with the consistent and constant modeling of a teacher.  A child may have learned to blow into a trumpet while at home, but without the careful and constant modeling of a teacher in how to modulate breath, sound does not become music.

The pandemic caused missed and incomplete student learning.  It will take several years to make pandemic children complete in their curricular education. 

The sorting out of individual student needs as we work to make all children complete in their learning takes time for assessment and planning as well as more time for individual and small group work.  The same remedial plan is not needed nor appropriate for grade levels of children.  Some children suffer more missed and incomplete learning than others.  Children with exceptionalities, children in poverty without reliable Internet, and children without strong home learning supports for remote learning missed more essential learning and have more incomplete learning.  Individual attention is required to understand the wide variety of learning needs, planning and delivery of individual learning is required, and these take time.  Time is what the school calendar delivers. 

We require a hybrid calendar that meets our community’s traditional demands and completes our children’s educational needs.

The first step in creating a hybrid calendar is to address the length of the teacher’s annual contract.  The traditional contract shadowed the school calendar – 180 days plus paid vacation/holidays plus clerical/preparation days – made the contracted year 185+ days.  A contract of 185 – 190 days is not enough time for teachers to do the work we now require for the complete education of all children.

The contract must be expanded to encompass the work required in the new calendar.

Teachers need adequate time in front of the school year to evaluate the learning needs of each of the children in their assignment.  Generalizations about readiness for the next grade level or course not longer hold true.  The new generalization is – each child needs to be evaluated for readiness to learn and an individual learning plan needs to be devised for each child.  For example, most children promoted to second grade in SY 22-23 will have learned more than half of their first grade curriculum, but second grade will need to make all children secure in their first grade learning before or while teaching all children their second grade curriculum.  If not, children will need to return to first grade.  And, that is not going to fly with children or parents.

The social-emotional and mental health issues need to be melded into start of the school year routines and implemented throughout the school year.

Best teaching practices provide initial instruction, assess the success of initial learning, evaluate the need to adjust instruction for clarification, correction and extension, followed by continuing instruction informed by adjustments, and completion of the instructional unit with final assessments of learning.  This is the model the WI DPI is insisting upon in its re-certification of teacher preparation programs in our state.  The model requires time for careful assessment, evaluation of assessment data, and planning for instructional adjustments.  This model should be in the hybrid calendar.  And repeated several time during the school year.

Children in the post-pandemic need a school calendar that is based upon what we have learned from the pandemic experience and the best instructional practices we know for completing their ongoing education.  This calendar will move the status quo for future school calendaring.

A hybrid calendar based upon our pandemic learning and best practices looks like this.

Teachers have two weeks prior to September 1 to assess student readiness and needs and plan a first unit of instruction built around individual student plans.  Teachers have the full array of student assessment data and time to make data-informed instructional plans for the children they will teach.

School starts on September 1 or first day after if the first is a weekend day.

The first unit of instruction plus social-emotional and mental health inclusions will be completed in five weeks.  Add to the time required for the first unit the time needed for the school’s annual fall assessments.  At the end of the sixth week of school insert a week of no school for children.  During this week, schedule

  1. time for teachers to assess student learning of the first unit and make informed adjustments in their planning for second and subsequent units of instruction,
  2. parent teacher conferences to share teacher observations about student learning and plans for addressed learning needs in the next months of school, and
  3. mental health/school stress relief for children, teachers, and families.

The A, B, and Cs of the hybrid calendar are essential.  The repetition of past instructional practices will not on their own remedy the dilemma of missed and incomplete pandemic student learning.  A more clinical approach is required.  The A, B, Cs are that clinical approach.

A) makes “plan your work and work your plan” specific in scope and exact outcomes.  Success in the first unit of learning sets a child’s pattern for the year.  Success begets success; why would we do it any other way?  Well, we do in the traditional calendar that moves from one unit to the next without examination.  “She will do better in the next unit” and “If he didn’t learn it in that unit, we’ll circle back in the next units and he will do better” are recognition of failure.  We need to stop that traditional approach.

B) ensures time for a clinical review of student learning and examination of successes and needs.  The traditional expectation that teachers do this kind of review of a unit’s instruction in the evening after school or on a weekend in the traditional school calendar was fully unrealistic and a generalized failure.  The second part of B) is a very detailed parent conferencing on student successes and needs.  The conference includes the assessment of the first unit and reports from the fall assessments.  Parent conferencing here is not the showtime of an open house, but the sharing of clinical data.  This work takes time and time must be provided.

C)is the assurance that school deliberately puts stress relief into the school calendar.  For some parents, this time off from school is the time for medical and dental visits.  For some, it is the time children to be friends outside of the school day and restraints of adult-driven weekends. 

The hybrid calendar will remove all the single days of no school that range through the school calendar for teacher PD, clerical, and conferencing, and will eliminate two- and three-day weeks around the holidays. 

All weeks will be five school-day weeks, excepting Memorial Day week.  The entire week of Thanksgiving will be no school days, the odd days preceding Christmas and after New Years will he rounded into complete weeks of vacation, and spring break will be one week scheduled between instructional units.

The hybrid calendar will require more days to complete than the traditional calendar.  As September 1 is non-negotiable as a start date, the last day of a hybrid school calendar will be in the third or fourth week of June.  For the community needing child labor in the summer, working age children will be available for the heart of the season – July 4 to September 1.

This is a pandemic-informed and best practices-based school calendar.  The education of all children is the priority not the time available for their schooling or daycare.  Teachers are given the time needed to plan, teach, adjust, and clarify/correct learning at the time of learning instead of at the end of a semester or school year.  It is a repeatable calendar. 

School boards must learn that school calendaring based upon the agrarian, industrial, collegiate models does not meet our contemporary post-pandemic and teaching and learning requirements.  New thinking about school calendaring is required.

A School Year Is Long Enough To …

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I have not yet met a person who does not have an opinion on the length of a school year.  By and large, most people who are not students, parents of students, in the business of school or reliant upon child labor don’t care and “I don’t care” is an opinion.  The remainder, a minority of our community – parents, grandparents, employers and others whose daily life is touched by school – form their opinion from their personal experience, their self-interest, and an uninformed concept of schooling.  Normally, this blog sets a proposition, examines what we know and think about the topic, and creates an action or To Do with a rationale.  Today, I will start with the conclusion.

The Big Duh

A school year must be the length of time necessary to teach and cause children to become competent in an annual curriculum.  It need not be longer nor shorter than that, but it must be long enough to teach an annual curriculum. 

What Do We Know?

Over time educators have packaged learning into grade levels and content courses and courses of study and each package is an annual curriculum.  Elementary school is parsed into 4K or pre-kindergarten, Kindergarten, and 1st grade through the last grade of your school’s organization, typically 5th or 6th grade.  Each grade level is a step on a curricular scaffold building a child’s knowledge, skills and dispositions about learning school year by school year.  Secondary school is parsed into content courses of English/language arts, math, science and socials studies and perhaps a world language.  These are stacked or sequenced, as in English 7 through English 12 and Algebra through Calculus.  Some content courses seem to be stand alone courses, like Marketing or Personal Finance, but have underlying content and skill structure in English, social studies, and math.  Also, secondary school instruction provides continuous courses of study in music, the arts, and technical education.  Year after year of instruction in choir, band and orchestra or in painting and ceramics or technical training refines and improves student performance.

The packaging in terms of time began when our communities were agriculture-based and children could attend school when not needed during the planting, growing, and harvesting seasons.  Packaging was reconsidered when child labor laws were implemented and regular schooling replaced daily work.  A school day mirrored a work day and a school week mirrored a world week and school calendaring filled the community need for day care for millions of children nationwide.

Curricular packaging has been refined and fit into grade level and course competencies.  A child’s progress through the 3 R’s was a pathway up the scaffold of reading, writing and arithmetic.  At one time, a 6th grade education or the ability to read, write and cipher at the 6th grade level was an adequate adult competency.  Later, the level of competency advanced to 8th grade and children could stop attending school after completion of 8th grade or the age of 16.  That was good enough.  Today, high school is the completion of 13 or 14 years of schooling and a generalized competency of 10th grade or better.

Our contemporary school scaffold is a child’s annual demonstrated competence on annual curricula that validates promotion to the next annual curricula and eventually graduation.  The time required to complete each step of the scaffold or each packaged curriculum is approximately 180 school days or 36 weeks of school.

There are no prizes or awards for schools that have shorter or longer school years.  There is no economic incentive to add days to a school year.  School revenues and contracts for all school employees are a set amount in a school’s annual budget and decreasing or extending a school year does not alter these major expenses.

Why Is This Thus?

Why is 180 days the seemingly standard for a school year?  The question was asked and answered more than 100 years ago.  The world’s richest man of his time, Andrew Carnegie, was committed to the role of education as the essential strategy for improving life in the early 1900s.  In 1906, he funded the Carnegie Foundation led by Harvard President Charles Elliot to study and recommend standards for a college education.  At the time, the national college graduation rate was less than 10% and the quality of a college education was dependent upon the college.  There were no national standards for education.  The Carnegie Foundation literally defined college and university education in the United States for the next century. 

The Foundation also recommended changes in public education.  For our purposes, the Foundation defined a high school Carnegie Unit as a (one) credit awarded for completion of 120 hours of instruction over the length of a school year.  A school year, then, is the length of time to required to achieve 120 hours of instruction plus assessments plus other school requirements.  According to the Carnegie plan, a high school student could earn six to seven credits per year and 24 to 28 credits over four years and high school graduation became the completion of 24-28 credits. 

Using the 120 hours of instruction as the standard for an annual curriculum and allowing for reteaching and make-up lessons for students absent from school and for the additional legislative mandates that must be accomplished in a school year, 180 days became the normal length of a school year in US public schools.  Ninety days was a semester and 45 days was a quarter or grading period.

Since 1906, much as changed in the field of teaching and learning, yet the basics of a Carnegie Unit and the standards for a school year have remained largely unchanged.  A discussion of a school year begins with 180 days.

We must always be aware of the influences of money and politics in public, as these are constantly at play in public education.  By rule of the US Constitution, the responsibility for public education is delegated to the states.  Hence, the funding and rules related to public education are legislated by state government.

It is honest to state that state funding for public education is allocated according to money available not by money needed.  This basic understanding tells us that legislatures with a need to fund many state programs that compete for a limited annual state budget are always looking for ways to reduce or contain costs.  Public education, prisons and highways are the three largest expenses in state budgets.

The school year is an example of such manipulation.  For decades, a school year was 180 days of instruction.  First, start with this as the number of interest:  180 times the salaries and benefits of school employees is the largest cost of a school year.  More than 80% of school costs are paid in salary and benefits to employees.  If school funding is considered on a per day basis not a per year basis and a school year is defined by hours instead of days, then the total sum of money spent for salaries and benefits can be changed.  Second, change the number of interest to:  hours of instruction times the salaries and benefits of school employees is the cost of a school year.  The total remains the same as long as the hours of instruction equal 180 days of instruction. 

In Wisconsin, 437 hours of instruction are required for Kindergarten students, 1,050 hours for grades 1 through 6, and 1,137 for grades 7 through 12. 

Third, allow schools to determine the length of class periods and the number of hours in a school day so that each grade level meets the legislated number of instruction hours.  Now, a school year can be less than 180 days.  More importantly, the cost of school is reduced by each day of salary and benefit that is removed from the annual school calendar. 

Politics and economics not student learning drive the contemporary defining of a school year.  Today, a school year can be reduced to the bare minimum of days required to complete mandated hours of instruction, a number in the 170s.

Yes but!  If we add the concept of educational accountability to the definition of a school year, how much teaching and learning is required for a child to competently complete an annual grade level, a content course or a course of study?  There is no magic in the Carnegie Unit.  Critics of the Unit have harped for decades on its arbitrariness.  Yet, the idea that the completion of a rigorous course of instruction should be the basis of how we “package” a year of school keeps us returning to the idea of the Unit.  A school year must be accountable for learning not just time in class.

To Do

Accountability for learning matters and competency is the metric of measure.  The number of hours in a school day or in a school year is just the vehicle for achieving competent learning.  School Boards approve and adopt annual curricula for all children in all grade levels and courses with the intention that children will successfully and competently complete each.  We must honor this element of local school control of public education. 

We have a national problem with proficiency.  A majority of children do not meet proficiency standards on local, state and national assessments.  This is an instructional challenge.  We must improve the instructional tool box used by all teachers to more effectively cause every child to learn.  This is a commitment challenge.  We must hold to the goals of annual student achievement and invoke what we know about the science and art of explicit teaching and the necessity for instructional interventions when initial instruction is not successful.  Proficiency is created when a child is competent in each curricular unit of instruction so that at the end of a school year there is a sequence of proficient learning.  We must intervene at the point of mislearning or non-learning not at the end of school year.  And, to point, reducing the number of days in a school year contradicts what we know about student proficiency.  Teachers need all the time they can have with children not less.

Take Away

As a School Board member, I hear from parents who want to reduce the length of our school year.  I return to the first paragraph.  Most who have an opinion about the length of a school year base their opinion upon personal experience, self-interest, and an uninformed concept of schooling.  A Board member’s responsibility includes educating the public about education and local education, in particular.  As an educator who is a Board member, my first accountability is to causing every child to become a proficient learner and to learn.  In the business of causing learning, instructional time is our most valuable resource.  We can improve teaching skills and refine curriculum.  However, without adequate time for all of the layers of instruction, initial through necessary interventions, to be successfully deployed, teacher skill and engaging curricula will not cause the educational outcomes children need.  A school year may be an arbitrary number of hours and days, yet there is a substantial rationale connecting instructional time with learning accountability.  At the end of conversation, we get what we settle for and less time will result in less learning.

A School Year Is Not a Year of Instruction

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One afternoon within the next month, millions of school-age children will spill out of schoolhouse doors at the end of their last day in the 2018-19 school year. June will be a time for celebration and reflection. Another school year has been completed by all children. Another year of schooling has been achieved, by some children. Reflection will indicate that less than half the children in the United States gained a year’s growth in reading or in math. However, 90%+ of students will be either graduated or promoted to the next grade level for another school year in the fall.

In reflection, what is a school year or, put differently, what is a year of schooling?

Take Away

Instructional time is the numeric that defines a school year. Each state mandates a minimum amount of time schools are required to provide instruction for Kindergarten, elementary, and secondary school children. The number is different for each age level, recognizing that children may be required to be in Kindergarten for half days, an elementary school day includes recesses, and the high school day is still influenced by Carnegie Units, a standard that parallels a high school course to a college course.

In Wisconsin, “Each school district board shall annually schedule and hold at least 437 hours of direct pupil instruction in kindergarten, at least 1,050 hour of direct pupil instruction in grades 1 through 6, and at least 1,137 hours of direct pupil instruction in grades 7 through 12.”

https://dpi.wi.gov/cal/days-hours

Oops, short on meeting the required number of instructional hours because of winter weather! Then additional school time will be scheduled to make certain the mandated number is met. No one goes home until the magic number is reached. Even though make-up time counts as instructional time, no administrative action is taken when a student skips school on a make-up day in June. Every hour counts, but some hours are more important than others. A school year calendar is time spent in school.

An instructional year is not the same as a school year. The school year will end whether or not teaching and learning are successfully completed. Units, chapters, and lessons not yet taught due to a variety of valid reasons will not be learned. No one protests on the last day of school saying “I’m not done teaching or learning!” An instructional year is the planned scope of knowledge, skills and learner dispositions assigned to an annual grade level or subject area course. It is quality not quantity.

What Do We Know?

We want to say that student learning is what really matters. Did the children successfully learn the knowledge, skills and dispositions of their annual grade level or course curriculum? Maybe and maybe not. Instructional time is a finite number; learning is a variable fit into time.

From start to finish, a school year is comprised of the number of school days that meets the state mandate for hours of instruction, parent-teacher conferencing days, professional development days for school staff, and the sum of holidays that lie between the first and last days on the school calendar. Traditionally, schools calendared 180 days for student instruction, several days for teacher’s professional development, and a couple of days for parent-teacher meetings. If the first day is September 1, the last day is in or after the first week of June. When school districts publish their school calendars, school families and communities arrange their annual schedules around the school calendar. There is an expectation, if not a promise, that school will be in session on the days of the school calendar, not more.

An instructional year is a different beast. It is not a quantitative measure. It is a qualitative achievement. Some children achieve their planned learning outcomes quickly and some children require more instruction and time. There is an expectation, if not a promise, that all children will be successful students.

The substance of an instructional calendar is found in Wisconsin Statute 118.01 which outlines the educational goals and expectations that meet the state’s responsibility for public education. A decade ago, this statute described course subjects required to be taught. A list of subjects was delineated. Today, the statute describes curricular expectations that are left to local school boards to define and implement.

https://docs.legis.wisconsin.gov/statutes/statutes/118/01

The Wisconsin legislature adopted the Common Core State Standards in English/Language Arts and Mathematics. The Wisconsin Model Academic Standards are in place for all other subjects and grade levels. These standards are the foundation for the creation of school district curricula in Wisconsin schools.

Using the Common Core State Standards (CCSS), school districts start with the scope of standards assigned to a chronological grade level and band standards into units of instruction. CCSS units are complex and complicated with scaffolds of sequenced and leveled standards that build upon one another. Student mastery of early units develops a competency for instruction in subsequent units. CSS units are organized into four to eight weeks of teaching and learning. In the aggregate, a standards-based year of instruction contains six to nine units of instruction.

An inarguable rule in education is that “Time lost is never found”. When we pack 180 days of school with six to nine units of instruction, there is little time to spare, yet life and weather happen and every school year experiences days of school that are cancelled due to weather and facilities or safety emergencies. Add in other interruptions of instructional time, unplanned school assemblies and celebrations, school visitors, and special events and more instructional time is lost. Instructional time is decreased and never increased. Very few instructional years are completed within the realities of a finite and interrupted school year.

Structurally, it is difficult to impossible to complete all the prescribed units of grade level or course instruction in a school year that shrinks. Each school year, CCSS standards that have been adopted by school boards as requirements are not taught due to “time ran out”.

Additionally, for reasons too numerous and complex to elaborate here, many children are not successful learners after their initial instruction. They require second and third tiers of instructional support. Each reteaching or newly conceived teaching and learning response takes time. One of the reasons so many children are not proficient in reading and math is that they require time more instruction each year than a finite school year provides. Instructionally, it is not only difficult – it is impossible – to cause all children to successfully learn their prescribed units of grade level or course instruction because children learn at different rates of time and when time is finite those who take longer to learn are stopped from learning because of the school calendar.

Why Is This Thus

The length of a school year is defined by economic and political constraints. It started with the agrarian calendar. Children could attend school after the fall harvest but needed to be available for spring planting. October through April. The Industrial Age did not change the school calendar much; children were part of the labor force making school attendance optional for most. The introduction of child labor laws and the need for immigrant children to be integrated into the national economy committed schools to day care and literacy education. These factors moved the school calendar toward September through May.

State legislatures counted the days between September 1 and June 1 and centered on 180 days as a school year. This number held from the 1930s through 2000. 180 was easily carved into two 90-day semesters and four 45-day quarters. Nine weeks per quarter, 18 weeks per semester and 36 weeks make a school school year. 180 days became the status quo school year.

The economics of a 180-day school year created a funding status quo. State allocations to school districts plus local tax collections were predicated on the amount of money required to fund school for 180 days. Politically, all state allocations in the state budget are competitive with all other state funded obligations. More school days require an increase in state of local taxes and increasing taxes is politically unpopular. Thus, the economic status quo of a 180-day school calendar.

A second economic and cultural hurdle to adding days to the school calendar is that working-age children represent seasonal labor for tourist-based state economies. Tourist and associated businesses make their money between Memorial Day and Labor Day. State legislators are lobbied to restrict school from starting prior to September 1 and to be completed as soon after Memorial Day as possible. These lobbies also oppose year-round school proposals.

Adding days is a no, but subtracting days is a yes. In Wisconsin, legislators deleted all statutory reference to a 180-day school year. School boards, required to meet the mandated hours of instruction, can add several minutes to each school day thereby meeting the requirement in less than 180 days. Seven minutes added to the school day or one minute added to each period in an eight-period school day allows the 1137 hours of instruction to be completed in 177 days.

This manipulation saves money. It does not provide an equivalent amount of real teaching and learning time. An additional minute to a class period is meaningless if not insulting.

Economics and politics define both the school and instructional years.

To Do

Look at alternatives to the status quo.

Stop accepting the unacceptable. The current economics and politics of education not only creates but accepts the reality that some children never complete an instructional year of teaching and learning. Our economy accepts that 10%+ of each class entering Kindergarten will not graduate from high school. Our politics accepts that 50%+ of children every year are not proficient in their grade level reading or math. And, we know that children who are not academically proficient by the end of sixth grade are more likely to drop out of school. And, we know that adults without a high school diploma experience limited economic prosperity. And, we know the correlation between low academic proficiency, dropping out of high school and crime. The “and, we knows” list is long, yet we accept them all as the status quo. Stop accepting.

Change the concept of instruction from yearly segments to a continuous progress line from first enrollment in 4K or Kindergarten to the completion of an elementary education. Consider middle school not as two or three years between elementary school and high school, but as a continuous learning model transitioning from elementary school to the course rigor of high school and including all the requisites of blooming adolescence. Consider high school not four years but a readiness for college and career that must be completed not encapsulated in time.

I am enthused by proficiency-based learning (PBL) and competency-based education (CBE). The concepts are not not new, but dissatisfaction with the status quo of student learning achievement has caused several states to renew their interest in PBL and CBE. The Vermont legislator moved all public schools in that state to PBL and CBE.

https://education.vermont.gov/student-learning/proficiency-based-learning

PBL and CBE do not change the limitation of the finite school year. They allows us to change the concept of instruction from yearly to continuous. A Vermont student beginning Kindergarten starts a continuous record of learning progress ending with graduation not June of 12th grade.

I am enthused by continuous progress reporting rather than annual performance reporting. We currently use annual performance reporting as a public accountability tool. In Wisconsin, public accountability is directed at school choice options. This was born out of the No Child Left Behind penalties placed upon underperforming schools.

Stop using school report cards to affirm or denigrate school districts and schools. We have learned that penalizing schools whose underperformance on normed instructional measures to be achieved within the finite school year is whistling in the wind. We know that children with learning disadvantages and challenges are more than unlikely to accomplish an instructional calendar that requires more than a school year of time. Begin using continuous progress measures of learning that depict positive learning growth not arbitrary deficiency.

The Big Duh

A school year is not a year of teaching and learning. The first is a need to comply with finite time and the second is a matter of using time for teaching and learning to achieve required educational outcomes.

School is what it is because that is the way it always has been. School leaders annually try to achieve greater accomplishments within antiquated and faulted constraints. As national and state communities of educators, we know better.

When you know the right things to do, do them.