Time Is Money
You’ve heard it before: time is money. When it comes to school reform efforts this can quite literally be the case. For example, your school or district may wish to add instructional time to the school day; however, it seems prohibitively expensive and given the current economic environment, new infusions of funding are not likely. Yet, some schools are managing to add instructional time without any additional money. The upcoming 2012 From Structure to Instruction institute on high school design and improvement may provide you with some ideas about how they have done it. Effective use of resources—time, people, and money is one strand that will give you the chance to learn from the real-world experiences of your fellow practitioners.
Here’s a sneak preview of what you might hear:
First, it may reassure you to know that some schools have looked at the problem of adding instructional time without adding money and have come to this conclusion: We can’t. Instead, they have looked for cost-neutral methods for maximizing their existing learning time. Not a bad thing, as it turns out.
It beats the alternative, which might be titled “take the money and run.” Schools with School Improvement Grant (SIG) funds may be able to make the large investments in staff salary needed to extend school time, but then they have to hope they can find an alternative funding source when the grant ends. In fact, schools that exercise the “turnaround” or “transformation” school improvement model specified under the SIG program are actually required to redesign the school day to allow for increased learning and teacher collaboration time. Finding new funds after the three-year grant period ends is an iffy proposition at best, however.
An additional problem is that increased learning time affords no quick wins, according to a recent report, Off the Clock: What More Time Can (and Can’t) Do for School Turnarounds (Silva, 2012). The authors found that adding more time is only helpful to the extent that it is closely aligned with a powerful strategy for improving instruction. And improving instruction, as we know, takes time. Call it the SIG-22: Just when the school staff begins to see a payoff in terms of improved instruction and student achievement, the grant ends.
Even if you have a SIG grant, therefore, this may lead you back to the cost-neutral approach: making the most of your existing learning time. We’ve featured Jefferson County Public Schools (JCPS) in Louisville, Kentucky, before in our newsletter, and it is appropriate to do so again, given that they won an Investment in Innovation (i3) grant titled Making Time for What Matters Most. Despite that infusion of funds, the district has chosen to implement strategies that maximize existing time. To be sure, some of these strategies have cost a large amount of money to launch successfully, but not nearly as much as teacher salaries for increased time would have required on an ongoing basis. And most important, they’re sustainable. What follows is a description of a few of the strategies the district has used in six of its lowest-performing high schools. Each strategy is designed to provide long-term maintenance.
3 x 5 Trimester Schedule
After systematic comparison of different master class schedules (Burks, Munoz, & Shields, 2009), the district chose to implement a 3 x 5 trimester schedule to maximize the effectiveness of instructional time. Three, 12-week trimesters offer five, 70-minute periods a day. There are three advantages for increased instructional effectiveness:
- Students can concentrate on a manageable number of courses.
- Teachers instruct only four courses and no more than 120 students at any one time, with 70 minutes each day for professional collaboration or individual preparation. Under these conditions, teachers can provide much more individualized feedback to students.
- A 70-minute period accommodates independent student work—such as labs and projects that are often learning rich but take time to carry out—without creating a need for busywork to fill up the time.
These features appear to pay clear dividends to instructional effectiveness, but what about the cost of a trimester schedule? Many district leaders opt for a 7-period schedule as a cost-saving measure, which typically requires teachers to instruct six periods and up to 180 students per day. In JCPS, teachers may not instruct more than 150 students per day under their contract, so district leaders did not view the 7-period day as an option. The argument for the 5-period day won out, however, as district leaders recognized that fewer class periods represent fewer class switches and less time lost to students’ transitions. When calculation of “actual” instructional time subtracts just four minutes per class period for these activities, the 5-period day delivers the same number of instructional minutes as the 7-period day.
Three-Trimester Courses in High-Stakes Subjects
Typically, students complete courses in two trimesters. However, it’s possible to design three-trimester courses to increase instructional time by 50 percent in high-stakes subject areas. Unlike double-dosing, a research-based practice that has been widely adopted but at significant cost to electives, three-trimester courses increase instructional time by a substantial amount but not at the cost of a full-course credit in another subject area. In Louisville the most frequent candidates for three-trimester courses are core academic courses leading to state end-of-course tests (English, algebra, history, and biology), Advanced Placement courses, and remedial reading. If students were to take all four tested courses as three-trimester courses, it would only reduce the number of electives that students can take by two. Since the trimester schedule allows students to earn 30 credits over four years—eight more than required—students have adequate opportunities to earn required credits even if they take several three-trimester courses.
Alignment of Academic and CTE Courses
Creating three-trimester courses is a cost-neutral but by no means popular way to extend learning time in critical subject areas. In JCPS, as in other districts, the matter of trading-off elective offerings stirs controversy. It doesn’t have to be an either/or situation, however. Learning time can be maximized by more frequent opportunities to apply concepts across the curriculum. JCPS leaders pair teachers of core and career and technology education (CTE) courses to align their curriculum and instruction with content standards that they have in common. The aligned coursework provides an opportunity to reinforce student learning across two different contexts, as well as to deepen learning through assignments that require students to apply academic knowledge and skills in authentic contexts (Oxley, 2008). The overlap in coursework may represent anywhere from a few to several weeks of instruction, or it may be a thread that runs through the entire length of each course.
Teacher Collaboration in Course-Alike PLCs
The SIG program stipulates increasing time for teacher collaboration as well as instruction. The 70 minutes per day for preparation is more time than stipulated under the teachers’ contract, so allocating one or two of these periods each week to teamwork has not been problematic. School administrators scheduled common planning periods for teachers of the same core subject-area course. Most meetings take place during the school day, but the contract provides for one hour of after school meetings per week. No additional funding was needed to accomplish this level of collaboration.
District leaders did use additional funding to expand school administrators’ capacity to support effective teacher collaboration. They hired Education Northwest technical assistance providers to guide a district-level design team that consisted of leads from each school. Typically, these schools had meaningful strategies in play but did not have an adequate strategy for ensuring strong implementation. The team used rapid prototyping to design tools and procedures to support effective teacher collaboration. In most cases, the tools and procedures they developed represented a refinement of existing ones or an effort to extend promising practices being used in one school to a districtwide implementation.
The district utilized an essentially sound but weakly implemented lesson plan template, which the team reshaped to provide teachers more guidance for facilitating students’ use of higher order thinking skills—previously a major gap in practice in mainstream classes. The use of a common structured lesson plan template that supports teachers’ development of sound and detailed plans holds much promise. Time Well Spent, a report by the National Center on Time and Learning (Kaplan & Chan, 2011), spotlighted North Star Academy, a school that maximized learning time in just this way and went on to achieve a 100 percent college-acceptance rate among its high-poverty student body.
Another promising practice, collegial learning walks, was used in just a few JCPS high schools in order to help teachers improve their instruction through peer observation of classes. Design team members tweaked the procedure to ensure that teachers looked for students’ use of higher order thinking skills in order to learn how to facilitate it. The design team now plans to adopt the procedure in all high schools and to study its implementation in keeping with rapid prototyping routines.
The study/design/implement cycle of rapid prototyping did require significant resources to launch. Once the routines and habits of continuous improvement were established, however, district leaders were able to continue to support effective implementation of desired practices without using additional funds. These are a few key ways that JCPS has managed to significantly increase instructional time without breaking the bank. Time, after all, is money.
Sobering Research on Resource Allocation
The Center on Reinventing Public Education in Seattle, Washington, is an institute partner and the source of one of the studies of SIG schools that is included in this newsletter. The center’s research on the equitable use of resources has achieved national prominence, and the upcoming institute will feature recent findings by Marguerite Roza and her graduate students. Past research was sobering in that it repeatedly found that resources were inequitably allocated within and across schools and were likely to contribute to unequal student outcomes (Roza, 2009). Consider this finding: Schools tend to spend more per pupil for electives than for core academic subjects. Schools spent the least amount on math. In one district this amounted to spending on math that was almost two-thirds less than on electives, including almost 75 percent less than on world languages. These differences were often due to the higher salaries paid to teachers of electives.
Increasing student achievement in math is one of the stiffest challenges educators face in school improvement, yet resources are seldom aligned to meet that challenge. For example, the spending of schools in the study varied even more markedly across course levels: per pupil spending for remedial and regular classes averaged about 50 percent less than for honors and Advanced Placement classes. Again, differences owed to the higher salaries of teachers of higher-level classes, usually a product of those teachers’ seniority. However, the smaller class size of these more challenging classes (an average 14 students) in comparison to remedial (19) and regular (22) classes, also contributed to the higher cost.
The inequity in these spending patterns seems obvious, but Roza points out that it becomes even starker when spending is calculated for groups of students who take different pathways through school. For example, some students take as many as five Advanced Placement courses during high school, while others take none. That fact compounds spending differences between these groups of students.
Other research by Roza and her colleagues examines innovative ways that schools have found to save money while still enhancing student learning. For example, one school used a proficiency-based education model, extending the Monday through Thursday school day to 8:30 a.m.–4:30 p.m. On Fridays, the school opened only to students who had not demonstrated proficiency on the week’s standards. In this way, the school incentivized achieving proficiency, as evidenced by an increase in the intensity of students’ efforts on Wednesdays and Thursdays! This approach accommodated the needs of struggling students while still lowering the overall cost of operations.
References
Burks, J., Muñoz, M., & Shields, K. (2009). High school scheduling in JCPS: Credits, time, flexibility, and financial considerations. Louisville, KY: Jefferson County Public Schools.
Kaplan, C., & Chan, R. (2011). Time well spent: Eight powerful practices of successful, expanded-time schools. Boston, MA: National Center on Time and Learning.
Oxley, D. (2008). Creating instructional program coherence. Principal’s Research Review, 3(5), 1–7.
Roza, M. (2009). Breaking down school budgets. Education Next, 9(3), 28–33.
Silva, E. (2012). Off the clock: What more time can (and can’t) do for school turnarounds. Washington, DC: Education Sector.
Institute Offering Grad Credit
We’ve always known that what you learn at the institute is valuable. Now, for the first time, we are offering two CEU or graduate credits through Portland State University’s Continuing Education (CEED) Graduate School of Education for an additional fee of $110 ($55 per credit). See the CEED website for additional information about earning these credits!