School Calendar, continued..

A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned the idea of year-round schooling. I thought I ought to elaborate on that a bit.

It is widely recognized that the traditional 9½ month school calendar is a throw-back to an agricultural society that hasn’t existed for several generations, One consequence is that the United States, where 180 instructional days is typical, has one of the shortest academic calendars in the industrialized world. (State College has 185 days.)

Said calendar continues nationwide with no reasonable justification, educational or otherwise, except inertia. What a waste of time, effort and resources to spend a month or more every year catching students up to where they were back in June!

It is also generally recognized – although not as often stated publicly – that the current school year seems interminable to many, perhaps most, students and teachers. Some ambitious doctoral student should research how much actual learning occurs in May, as opposed to say, October.

This is what I envision – please note: this is not a proposal! - as a potential calendar: four, ten-week sessions, separated by two-week breaks, a longer four-week break in August and perhaps a week each for Christmas and other holidays.

This will seem familiar to Penn State alumni old enough to remember the four, ten-week term calendar; I have yet to meet an alum who did not consider that to be superior to the current "traditional" semester calendar. (For one thing, there was always light at the end of the tunnel.) But that’s another discussion.

A couple of years ago I attended a presentation by a school district that did some very creative things with those two-week breaks. They allowed their teachers to teach a mini-course on any subject in which they had a personal interest. These optional courses were offered to students on a tuition basis. Both teachers and the students were invigorated as a result.   

The establishment of a year-round school calendar would require a lot of planning, and may well be decades away, but it strikes me as inevitable.

Meanwhile, back to our calendar: I hope that not only do we approve the school calendar for next year, but that we establish parameters that would provide a basis for calendars in future years. It would be a service to the community to eliminate the annual tradition of the calendar debate.

Now, what?

I think the public should be more concerned about Governor Rendell's recent proposal to consolidate Pennsylvania’s 501 public school districts down to one hundred, not only for of the flaws in the idea, but also for how he’s going about it.

In terms of local impact, you may be interested to know that by the governor’s calculation, the State College Area school District is not nearly big enough.

In order to get to the projected average of 18,000 students per district, we would have to annex Bellefonte, Bald Eagle, Penns Valley, Clearfield, and Philippsburg - encompassing an area of well over 1000 square miles. Needless to say, this would be a massive, and expensive, undertaking - which, it should be noted, undermines the very justification for doing this in the first place.

Certain economies of scale can be achieved when small districts either pool resources or combine functions – something many districts are already doing. All of this should be encouraged and supported by the state.

But the idea that consolidation should be mandated state-wide makes so little sense that it leads one to speculate as to the governor’s true motive. Could it possibly be that the governor resents the fact the school boards across the Commonwealth resisted first, his Act 1 proposal, and more recently, the GCAs, and therefore he is looking for a way to restrict their power?

Nah, that’s ridiculous. On the other hand, let’s look a little closer at what he’s proposed. The task for the committee that he has authorized is not to examine whether consolidation will save money, or even if it is feasible; it’s to come up with two options for how to actually eliminate 400 school districts. (Clearly, the governor has already decided that this is a good idea.) These two options would be presented to the legislature, which would have to pick one. If the legislature decided that it didn’t like either one, the governor would pick one!

I’m trying hard not to be guilty of hyperbole, but this strikes me as a rather dictatorial view of what the governor’s role in state government is supposed to be; a pattern that was established when he proceeded with the implementation of his GCA proposal, in spite of overwhelming rebukes by both houses of the legislature. Is the Governor unaware of the concept of “checks and balances?”  

Although it’s more the result of luck than planning, I've long had the sense that State College is just about the right size for a school district: large enough to take advantage of some economies of scale (the high school Career and Technical Center being a great example), but small enough to allow for a reasonably flat organization. I can't imagine how one superintendent oversees a system of 700,000 students (as happens in Los Angeles). In fact, I suspect that some of the problems of city schools are a result of being simply too large to be managed effectively. 

Perhaps the governor should begin with trying to break up the School District of Philadelphia, currently the eighth largest school district in the country.