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May 10, 2012

Bloomberg, Walcott join national coalition for more school time

by Jessica Campbell, at 4:27 pm

A study of New York City charter schools that found a strong link between the amount of instructional time students got and their achievement is being held up as an evidence for a national push for longer school days.

Roland Fryer, the Harvard University researcher who completed the study, found in a different investigation that student test scores inched up — by about .015 points per day of school — in years with few snow days.

Fryer spoke during a press call this morning announcing the debut of the Time to Succeed Coalition, which is calling for schools to expand their day and year — an often controversial proposition. It also calls on schools to redesign the way they use time in order to beef up the curriculum and ensure students get a well-rounded education.

The coalition’s chairs are Chris Gabrieli, the longtime extended-day advocate who chairs the National Center on Time & Learning, and Ford Foundation president Luis Ubiñas. They have attracted more than 100 coalition members from across state, sector, and political lines, ranging from the CEO of Netflix to the president of the NAACP. Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Chancellor Dennis Walcott, and State Education Commissioner John King have all signed on as well, committing to prioritize the expansion and redesign of school time in the coming years.

During the call, Ubiñas called the formation of the coalition a “seminal moment” and said that the proof  is in the performance of the thousands of schools across the country that have implemented longer school days. Over the next three years, the Ford Foundation will be investing at least $50 million to help schools add time, with a special emphasis on helping schools that serve low-income students.

The goal of the coalition is to raise awareness among decision-makers, by encouraging them to use the federal School Improvement Grants and the No Child Left Behind waiver process to expand and redesign school time. It also aims to build up a grassroots movement, rallying teachers, communities, and civil rights groups for the cause. Over the next two years, the hope is to double the number of schools across the country that offer more instructional time to their students.

Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers; Newark Mayor Cory Booker; and Jeff Smith, superintendent of Arizona’s Balsz school district all joined in on the call as well, touting the importance of more school.

In 2009, Smith took President Barack Obama’s call to rethink the school day to heart and upped the Balsz calendar to 200 days. In the last two years, his students have closed the test score gap between their district and the rest of the state by over two thirds.

While more time seems like it might equate to more money, Gabrieli said there are creative options like staggering teacher start time and leaning on community partners that could make extending the school day affordable.

Weingarten was president of the city’s teachers union in 2006, when the UFT agreed to extend the school day by 37.5 minutes four days a week in exchange for a pay increase. Today, she said she is confident teachers will support Time to Succeed, and that one of her roles as union president is also to ensure that teachers are compensated fairly for their additional time.

“There’s this crazy ideal if you work harder and longer you get better results,” Booker said. “But it actually proves true.”

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  • J.J.

    Randi is so out touch with classroom teachers it is not even funny anymore. “She is confident teachers will support Time to Succeed”. We are 3 years without a contract and without a raise. I don’t know a single teacher that will be willing to work more hours for more cash when we are still waiting for the pattern raise that was given to other NYC municipal unions. As for staggered schedules, good luck in finding teachers that will start teaching at 6:00am or ones that will start at 2pm in the afternoon and go till 8:00pm at night. How about the parents that will probably not be too excited about having their kids start school at different times. More deform nonsense if ya’ ask me.

  • Rory

    Bloomberg should not even be discussed along side education anymore.  It’s a waste of time as he has 1 goal – destroy the union.  We will never have longer days!  This guy should have been impeached after the Cathie Black fiasco, let alone now.  His little puppetboy Walnutt is a dope x-kindergarten teacher of 1 year.  Go work with the charters and have fun with a group of individuals who ignore special needs students, english language learners, and problem children.  What a bunch we got workin at the helm!!

  • http://perdidostreetschool.blogspot.com/ reality-based educator

    Hey, why not fund the time we have now?  How about, you know, smaller classes?  How about after school activities?  How about getting rid of the bed bugs?  Or the toxic mold?  Or the cancer-causing toxins?  How about some money for support staff – especially additional counselors and psychologists?  There’s a whole bunch of things you could do, RIGHT NOW, with the time we have, to make schools better, to improve education for children, and to actually make a difference in children’s lives.

    Nope – they’d rather start promoting the nine hour test prep school day instead.  

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Tommy-Calderon/100000263260717 Tommy Calderon

    OK, let’s formatively assess:  We can barely fund the schools with the existing length of day and length of calendar.  Schools have undergone drastic cuts to just keep functioning, losing art, music, after school programs and in some cases even cutting into the vaunted math and english class time due to lack of staff.
    So, the geniuses that be conclude that since we can barely support the school time that exists, let’s extend the day and calendar.
    Please take out your writing journals and evaluate the logic of this plan.
    Notice, I never mentioned the teachers’ contract once.

  • reality try it

    So now you have one of the real reasons for canceling after school, Beacon, programs. Create a reason to keep kids in school. Eliminate daycare, aftercare etc because no money but then expand the school time with plenty of money.

  • reality try it

    They also can afford $120,000/year for new small school Principals to serve 100 kids($1200/child)–until they can’t and start reconsolidating and firing administrators as soon as next5 admin comes in

  • Mr. Flerporillo

    Your salary has been the same for the last three years? 

  • J.J.

    Flep. A step increase is not a raise. And by the way, my step increase was nothing compared to what the cost of living is in NYC these days. This city is on the cusp of falling back to the “bad old days” with massive crime, burning buildings, and record high school drop outs, all due to the fact that the NYC government is trying to erode middle class civil service jobs. I know of many teachers and other civil service workers who have had it with the basing and destruction of what is left of once great professions. Who is going to be there to pick up the pieces? TFA folks who will be gone in a year? Private security guards to patrol dangerous neighborhoods? An all volunteer firefighting force? You can bet your bottom dollar that that is what the “reformers” dream of.

  • Mr. Flerporillo

    Thanks, that’s a longer answer than I expected. So your salary goes up automatically every year, but those aren’t raises. It’s confusing for people in the private sector. We don’t get a raise, I mean a step increase, automatically every year. Our salaries go up only if we get promoted or if we go ask or boss for a raise. A lot of the time they say no, even when they’ve given a raise to one of our co-workers, which is not fair.

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Leonie-Haimson/1094324158 Leonie Haimson

    There is little or no research to back this up.  Other cities like Boston and Miami that have spent millions to extend the school day have shown null results.  See http://goo.gl/lDGIE & http://goo.gl/Pkowb
    As Gene Glass has written, “”Within
    reason, the productivity of the schools is not a matter of the time
    allocated to them. Rather it is a matter of how they use the time they
    already have.”

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Tommy-Calderon/100000263260717 Tommy Calderon

    As usual, Flerp, you have no need of facts.  There are not salary steps for every year.  You can ask for a raise, we cannot.  It is very rare that those with the equivalent education of a teacher (minimum of a Master’s degree) do not get some sort of raise every year and many are allowed to do their own evaluations.  It has also been repeatedly shown that teachers’ salary scale is lower in the beginning of their career than equivalent private sector workers.  It catches up later in the career about the 15-18 year mark.  That would be about the time the Bloomberg administration tries to force you out.
    Your feigned ignorance of the facts is getting tiresome.
    Oh, and getting back to the issue, how will they pay for more hours of school time.  All school employees deserve to get paid for every extra minute of work like any other empolyee.

  • 13 years

    I’m in my 13th year of teaching. My salary hasn’t gone up in the past 3 years. I’m at my highest step & I can’t afford to go to college for more credits.

  • Mr. Flerporillo

    You have a keen understanding of the kind of job that most people have, Tommy C. Yes, when the whistle blows, we all go home immediately, and if we stay one minute longer, our salaries kick into overdrive.

  • guest

    “There are not salary steps for every year”  Tommy Calderon
    “So, your salary goes up every year, but those aren’t raises” – Mr. Flerporillo.  Did you not comprehend what Tommy Calderon said?
    Between years 8 and 9, there is no step increase.
    Between years 10 and 13 there is no step increase.
    Between years 13 and 15 there is no step increase.
    Between years 15 and 18 there is no step increase.
    Between years 18 and 20 there is no step increase.
    Between years 20 and 22 there is no step increase.
    It takes 22 years for a person with a BA and two MA to get to maximum salary, no increase ever again (plus hundreds of hours of professional development every 5 years to renew NYS license requirements).  One teacher in my school has been teaching for 42 years, he has not seen a step increase for 20 years.  In the mid-70s, max. salaries were achieved at year 8.  Compare Tier 1 with the new Tier 6.  Tell us again how we get raises every year and our benefits packages are overly generous.  More than half of new teachers leave teaching in NYC before their 5th year, obviously because it is so easy anyone can do it and it is so lucrative.  It is so wonderful how Barack Obama, Arne Duncan, John King, Mike Bloomberg, Merryl Tisch, Bill Gates, Michelle Rhee et al have celebrated and supported these educators as well; that is just the cherry on the sundae.  How could anyone not want to go into teaching now?  Oh, I almost forgot, you get a special job you do pro bono, trying to keep your job when the Mayor decides to close your school because your students are poor, just moved to the US, have special needs that DOE denies services to, happen to be in a large traditional HS, or a well connected charter school operator wants in.

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