More Money for More Time with Professional Development

Time is an ongoing challenge in 21st Century education. Despite all that has changed in schools, we remain tied to a 19th Century agrarian calendar. As as a result, time becomes an opponent in our quest to improve education.

Time may be at its most precious in relation to modern teacher professional development. Our school calendars, established generations ago, often provide scant time for teacher training, sometimes only four or five days.

Yet teacher professional development has never been more crucial as schools seek ways to alter and improve classroom instruction. In pursuit of more time for this activity, we shorten school days, having late starts, early dismissals, sometimes even entire days with no students. However, we do so with extreme reservations because we know one of the Correlates of the Effective Schools Research is to carefully guard student time on task (Lezotte, 1991).

As our local economies and our state tax bases slowly improve in the wake of the devastating recession of 2008 to 2015, we may be on the verge of an opportunity to improve education by creating more time for professional development. Most schools in the United States have been cash-strapped for nine years. As a result, teacher salaries have fallen behind, teachers have suffered, and the teacher shortage has approached critical levels in many instructional areas.

Now is the time to put more money toward teacher pay and include additional days as part of the package. This can be done at a local level by re-prioritizing our budgets, but it should also be a state initiative.

Some state legislators believe that fully funding their state's education formula does little to attract attention to themselves, advance their political clout, or garner votes in the next election. However, tying new dollars for teachers to additional time for professional development could be a stirring idea. We know teacher training has the potential to enhance student achievement. This would be using tax money directly for the purpose of  improving classroom instruction.

This will be an idea most teachers will support. Most teachers have never been afraid to put in additional time, and many are actively seeking ways to improve. Linking additional pay to time for school improvement could be a winning combination.

I urge us all to talk to our legislators about putting more money into education with the intent of purchasing additional days and ultimately improving education in the United States.

Image Credit: The Persistence of Memory by Salvador Dalí, 1931, Museum of Modern Art, New York City

Tech Leadership Needed from our Next Ed Director

In the 21st Century (and obviously we're already a decade into it), the school year needs to change to fit the changing nature of education and the changing needs of society.

Iowa law defines a day of school as a day when students are under the supervision and instruction of teachers. And the state of Iowa requires 180 such days. The traditional assumption has always been that to be under "the supervision and instruction" of teachers, the students must be in the immediate presence of the teachers.

This has been a silly hoop to jump through on snow days when the buses are already in motion but the oncoming storm has forced school to close. Some schools have actually pulled a single kid off a bus and brought him into the building near a teacher so the school could claim students (at least one) were working with teachers.

I contacted some legislators this fall and asked them to consider revising the law. But what Iowa schools really need is a new interpretation by the Iowa Department of Education, and more specifically the new Director of the D.E., who as of this writing has yet to be named. Does our workforce now employ people who never leave home, i.e., telecommuters? Has not this trend been predicted to increase? Should not our schools be adapted to this change in our work force?

Americas colleges are increasing their on-line offerings. On-line universities are exploding with cyber-matriculants. It is a new type of teaching and learning that our schools would be wise to offer to our students. A couple of states have now with foresight begun requiring students complete at least one on-line class in four years to graduate from high school.

For Iowa to keep pace, we need to reconsider what the school day truly needs to be. I would suggest that the "supervision and instruction" of students can take place in an on-line classroom anywhere, anytime via computers and internet.