- D.C. Chancellor Kaya Henderson’s effort to lengthen school day faces union resistance
- Washington Teachers' Union demonstrates it is all about the adults
- How to end homework for moms
D.C. Chancellor Kaya Henderson’s effort to lengthen school day faces union resistance
The Washington Post
By Emma Brown
June 29, 2014
D.C. Chancellor Kaya Henderson has championed lengthening school days as one of her top priorities for improving schools and lifting student achievement, but her effort to expand the number of schools with longer days has been met with stiff resistance from the teachers union.
Eight D.C. traditional schools have experimented with longer days, and most have seen gains on standardized math and reading tests. Henderson set aside $5.1 million to add an hour of instruction at 42 more schools for the 2014-15 school year, but at almost all of those schools, teachers either voted against adopting the longer day or union members prevented the issue from coming up for a vote.
Only two schools — Amidon-Bowen Elementary in Southwest and Whittier Education Campus in Brightwood — voted to implement the longer day schoolwide in the fall.
An additional 16 did not have enough support to adopt the longer day schoolwide, but will move forward in part, using only those teachers who agree to work longer hours. Two dozen schools will not adopt a longer day in any form. Union officials had urged teachers not to agree to the change, arguing that it is a violation of their contract.
The Washington Teachers’ Union urged members to push back against a longer day, saying that the union contract calls for the issue to be taken up at the collective-bargaining table and not negotiated school by school.
Henderson, who has said that charter schools have demonstrated that extra instructional time can lift achievement among poor children, said she was disappointed that “the union took a stance that they wouldn’t allow the votes.”
“I think it’s shortsighted and I think that it robs young people, especially our struggling young people, of the opportunity to get more instructional time,” Henderson said. “I actually think when those teachers see huge gains and consequently get huge bonuses, I think the following year there might be more people who are apt to elect for extended day.”
Martin Welles, PTA president at Amidon-Bowen, said the extra hour each day will allow his school to partner with Navy Yard employees to offer a Lego robotics program, in addition to other instruction.
“Amidon-Bowen is a low-performing school on the rise. The extra hour of instruction, regardless of what is taught, is going to be beneficial to children,” he said. “This is the type of event that sends a signal . . . that Amidon-Bowen is one of these schools that’s trying hard to turn around and is going to do what it takes.”
Welles said it’s also a move that keeps the traditional school system competitive with the city’s fast-growing charter schools, many of which offer longer school days or an extended school year. “This is the type of thing DCPS needs to do in order to remain relevant,” he said.
Under the current teachers union contract, a school advisory committee composed of union members must consider and recommend any proposal for “nontraditional scheduling,” and then at least two-thirds of the school’s teachers must vote in favor of that proposal, before such scheduling can be implemented. And teachers must be paid an administrative premium — or about $34 per hour — for their additional time.
Union officials say that the nontraditional-scheduling provision allows for flexibility within the traditional 7.5-hour workday, not for longer workdays. Discussions about a longer workday must take place at the negotiating table as the two sides work on a new contract, union President Elizabeth Davis said.
“If you are asked to vote on an extended day, please VOTE ‘NO,’ ” Davis wrote in a message to union members in May. “To abstain from the vote could result in you being forced in extending your work hours without negotiation through your union. Vote No.”
Davis said in an interview last week that the union is “being cautious not to be roadblocks to reform, that is not even the issue. The issue is that we should both, DCPS and the WTU, respect the process.”
The union contract expired in September 2012, and by spring 2013 the school system and the union were close to reaching a deal that reportedly included longer school days. But negotiations had to start from scratch when then-union President Nathan Saunders lost his reelection bid to Davis in June 2013.
Negotiations have been stalled for months, with both sides blaming the other for delays.
Davis said that an extended day will be a top priority in the contract negotiations, but she isn’t sold on the idea that a longer day alone will produce achievement gains. Schools need a “better day” — with the resources that teachers and students need to succeed — before they need a longer day, she said.
School system officials said they anticipate using about $1.1 million of the $5.1 million budgeted for longer school days, but more schools could decide to adopt the longer days, at least partially, between now and August.
Most of the dozen principals The Washington Post contacted for this story did not return requests for comment about why their schools voted against implementing longer school days.
Mary Louise Jones, principal of McKinley Tech Middle School, said that a school advisory committee composed of union members did not allow a faculty-wide vote because of the union’s concerns. She said that when she polled teachers about implementing an extended-day program with certain grade levels or ability levels, teachers did not want to commit to a formal initiative even though they would have been paid extra, and even though many of them already volunteer to tutor after school.
“I also suspect that when we asked, it was the end of the year and teachers were experiencing school fatigue and this did not lend itself to asking them to consider doing even more,” Jones wrote in an e-mail. “Our teachers are great about providing extra help after school and I know that they will continue to do so next year.”
Washington Teachers' Union demonstrates it is all about the adults
The Examiner
By Mark Lerner
June 30, 2014
Today, the Washington Post's Emma Brown has a terribly sad article describing efforts by the Washington Teachers' Union to block attempts by DCPS Chancellor Henderson to bring a longer school day to 42 of her schools. The reporter states that an extended school day has been shown to mostly result in higher standardized test scores in the eight facilities were it has already been tried.
The union has told its members to vote "no" on a ballot that must take place among teachers at a school before increased time in the classroom for kids can go forward at that site. The head of the union, Elizabeth Davis, is insisting that an extended school day must be part of the negotiations over a new teachers' contract. Ms. Brown indicates that the previous contract expired in 2012 and that a new one is no where close to being agreed upon.
It should now be abundantly clear to everyone that is watching this story unfold the reason Ms. Henderson has floated the idea that she be allowed to charter her own schools. Charters have complete control over the length of the school day and year. This type of autonomy is crucially important. As I pointed out in a previous column:
"District public charter schools’ on time high-school graduation rate is 21 percentage points higher than the D.C. public schools’ average. D.C. charter students also outperform their DCPS peers on the city’s standardized math and reading tests in all Wards except Ward 3, where there are no charters. Charters’ superior academic performance is even more pronounced in wards seven and eight, where charter students score on average 19 percentage points higher in reading and 25 points higher in math on D.C.’s standardized test."
Ms. Brown goes on to explain that 16 traditional schools will implement some portion of a longer school day utilizing those teachers who have volunteered to work longer hours. These individuals are heroes for our children and shine a bright light on the fact that the teachers' union is all about the needs of adults instead of the kids.
How to end homework for moms
The Washington Post
By Jay Mathews
June 29, 2014
My worst memory of homework was the Tootsie Roll log cabin project our daughter did for what otherwise seemed a well-run elementary school in Scarsdale, N.Y. All parents have had such moments. They reappear in nightmares long after the kid has gotten a job and a health plan and doesn’t need our help with anything anymore.
Mel Riddile knows this and wants to prevent such occurrences. Riddile is a former national high school principal of the year. He led both J.E.B. Stuart High School in Fairfax County and T.C. Williams High School in Alexandria and has much to say about the homework complaints that pour into me from readers.
“I had a particular pet peeve regarding poster board projects, which I referred to as more work for middle-class moms,” Riddile said. “Working in a high-poverty school, it was easy to see how students, who either could not afford or could not get parental help to construct elaborate poster board projects, were penalized both emotionally and academically for what amounted to glorified busywork.”
“I promised our teachers that, if I saw a student entering the building carrying poster board, I would follow that student to the classroom” for a conversation with the teacher, he said.
Riddile objects to the uselessness of such exercises. They don’t seem to have a point. They do not encourage students to practice with or reflect upon what they have learned in class. They just fill time. They might seem fun or enriching to some teachers, but they are not. Those Tootsie Rolls were sticky. I don’t think Katie learned anything about American history as a result.
Riddile has a solution parents can use the next time they see their school principal. As an executive with the National Association of Secondary School Principals, he takes his message to school administrators around the country. He tells them that “while they work diligently to build quality relationships and favorable perceptions with their parents, homework discussions are making huge withdrawals from the emotional bank accounts.”
One academic subject predominates. Riddile proposes this scenario to principals: “You walk into your house after work, and your wife and son are sitting at the kitchen table arguing over homework. The son says, ‘That’s not the way the teacher wants it done.’ The wife responds, ‘If you know how the teacher wants it done, then do it.’ ” What homework is that? Ninety-nine percent of his listeners say math.
Its linear, sequential nature brings pain.
“Forget one step in a 15-step process, and you are stuck,” Riddile said. “Math teachers assign homework because they correctly believe that practice is critical to building math fluency.” But it is often so long and frustrating it doesn’t get done.
His two rules when he started at Stuart were:
1. Homework should be considered independent practice and should not be assigned until teachers have conducted guided practice in class of the concepts and skills being learned.
2. Homework has to apply key learned concepts that already have been taught and practiced in class and should not be so overwhelming that it won’t be done. He presented research that indicated the ideal number of math problems in a homework assignment is just five.
At Stuart, Riddile said, the number of homework assignments declined by 50 percent. More were completed and grades improved.
There is much more to fixing homework than paring down the number of questions, but it is a start. Many teachers, as well as parents and some students, worry that lighter homework will leave them ill-prepared for the tests they fear: not just teacher and state tests, but the SAT and ACT.
In the United States, we have a hate-love relationship with homework, with many people on both sides. Anybody have any other ideas for making it less annoying and more engrossing? Send them to me, I’d love to hear about them.