200 day pilots - the messy data that will be used to declare success...and push through more

(from: Does a longer school year or longer school day improve student achievement scores?)

ELet's get two facts out of the way immediately: 

1. We ALL want children’s outcomes to improve (although increasingly I question some peoples' motives.

and,

2. Extending the school year is a bogus way to do this.

Every teacher gets this. I would wager 95 percent of teachers get this, and over 80 percent would be willing to express this. Every teacher I have spoken with, to a person, has rolled their eyes at the notion of extending the school year. Teachers know that our students need more quality, not more quantity.

Every teacher wants RPS to fix what's broken first. Do we build a fancy addition on a house that is crumbling? No - we fix the foundation(al) issues first.

Most teachers look aghast at the notion of extending the school year when we have to go begging for the basic supplies to function for 180 days.

We don't have what we need to deliver high quality instruction for a normal school year!

But we're not the experts, right?

Well, everyone I’ve spoken to in leadership positions in high-performing school systems have told me that while extending the school year has not been proven to substantively impact children’s academic outcomes, there are interventions that are proven to work. 

One person I spoke to told me that if we’re going to spend 1 million, 2 million, 3 million dollars of "found" money, it would be much more impactful to hire tutors for the students. But what do they know? They are only the chair of a school board in one of the best school systems - by any and every measure - in the United States.

It would be much more impactful to make sure that a given school is staffed with fully certified, highly qualified, master teachers with years, if not decades, of experience.

It would be more impactful to make sure that children are learning in facilities that enhance and not detract from instructional delivery.

It’s critically important that we make sure that money is being spent in a way that has a meaningful impact on children, and not a theatrical impact, or a meretricious impact.

***

So, here are some of the ways that RPS will muddy (or already has muddied) the data:

1. Using attendance as a metric

2. Anecdotal, narrative data

3. Cherry-picked data 

4. Incentivized data

5. Meaningless, or worse, misleading "controls" - (ex. failing to account for the difference in teacher quality year over year)

6. Claiming that staff are on board

7. Redirecting resources that were not in place years prior

8. Failing to utilize the resources of our local universities to independently scrutinize the data and the data collection.

9. Refusing to make this a safe school system in which staff can report what is actually happening in the trenches at these locations

And there's another issue, but I will not include it in "muddying the data." I will call this category "eroding the community's trust in the data.” This has happened and is happening in a few ways:

1. Premature proclamations of success 

2. Involving politicians

3. Involving outside money

4. Misleading staff, misreporting employees' feedback, and, lack of transparency, clarity, and quite frankly, truthfulness.

***

Do the people pushing for the extended school year have mal intent? No. 

But there are fundamental fissures in this school system between those who believe we must fix the foundational conditions for learning and those that want to experiment with unproven educational reform schemes that have already been tried and abandoned, again, and again.

I keep coming back to this question Why do we refuse to give our students what they need for success, what has been proven over and over again in countless school systems to work?

Elaboration to follow.