Shrinking school year could be 2010 campaign issue

Editor’s Note: For more on the shortened school year, see the Center’s School Daze Report or read this week’s Detroit News editorial.

Perhaps the best you can say is that it seemed like a good idea at the time. Back in 2003, lawmakers decided to drop the old requirement that schools teach kids for no less than 180 days each.

Instead, they set a new standard: A yearly total of 1,098 hours of instruction. Schools promptly began to schedule fewer days of class time, while adding more minutes to the school day. The idea was to save money when it came time to negotiate labor contracts.

The tourism industry liked the idea of a shorter year too, and a couple years later, responding to lobbying, the legislature delayed the beginning of the school year until after Labor Day.

The idea was to encourage parents and kids to take advantage of the long weekend to travel and spend money in Michigan.

Well, now we have some hard data indicating how all this has turned out. The Center for Michigan has issued an analysis called “School Daze: Michigan’s Shrinking School Year” that shows that 98 percent of our schools don’t meet the 1,098 hour mandate, let alone the old 180 day standard. Bad weather, snow, mechanical problems and other cancellations put the high school average at 1,066 hours, just about a week less than the mandated standard.

The report touched off a furor in Lansing. “Trading a couple more minutes a day in school for fewer days is outrageous … unconscionable,” said State Superintendent of Instruction Mike Flanagan. Sen. Wayne Kuipers (R-Holland), the chair of the Senate Education Committee, told me he thinks school officials are gaming the system. “Schools are complaining about tough graduation requirements, but they’re cutting back on instruction hours. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see the disconnect.”

Suddenly, some legislative leaders are talking urgently about going back to the 180 day standard. But school officials claim they don’t have enough money to do that, let alone the 190 days favored by education experts. (Japan requires 220 days, Korea 225 and their kids score much higher than Americans on standardized tests.)

Kuipers said one of the reasons lawmakers decided to drop the 180 day requirement was to let schools experiment with all kinds of learning experiences – such as distance learning via computer – that do not involve rigid “seat time” as the measure of school outcome.

However, there is no indication that many districts actually did this. John Austin, vice chairman of the State Board of Education said, “I think the real answer will come when we move to performance-focused education – versus calendar-based.”

True enough. But changing from a system that is still based on the 19th century agricultural calendar, when kids needed to be out of school during the summer to help take care of the crops, could take a long time. The Center’s report is pushing Lansing to think –now — about what can be done to improve school performance.

One possibility is allowing school districts to raise money locally – from businesses looking for skilled workers, for example – to supplement school aid money from the state to allow a 190 or even 200 day school year. A number of better-endowed districts – think Bloomfield Hills, Traverse City, Ann Arbor – might jump at the idea.

Creating a special class of “exemplary” schools might help break the stranglehold of 180 day “seat time” as the measure of school performance. Indeed, it’s not beyond hope that creating exemplary schools could involve merit pay for teachers, this time based on the performance of an entire school rather than an individual teacher.

Site-based management – the idea that principals in a given school building would have power to move teachers around by performance rather than seniority – is another innovation that appears to have worked in other states.

There is also considerable evidence that a system of performance contracts between teacher, parents and kids can have an enormous impact on learning and achievement. This would include setting expectations for teaching, parental involvement, homework, and other relevant matters.

Kuipers told me that he can imagine a profound reform program that would involve mandating specific hours of instruction and encouraging exemplary school districts to adopt merit pay, site-based management and performance contracts. Sweetening the pot with local funding might help deal with the teacher unions.

And requiring state school officials to certify individual district plans would provide accountability. One possible opening: President Obama’s recent endorsement of merit pay for teachers and public charter schools may help overcome instinctive Democratic and teacher union resistance to such reforms.

Yet one big problem, Kuipers explained, is that this would require modifying Proposal A, which tried to get away from vast disparities in school funding by setting out uniform state foundation grants to districts. “I don’t know how we’d get around that,” he says, “but it’s become plain we have to do something pretty far-reaching.”

I agree with those who say a crisis is too valuable to waste. The Center’s report on the shrinking school year has focused attention on our schools in a way that touches every parent who worries about how much their child is going to learn in a rigid school system where powerful interest groups have long resisted change.

Flanagan, Kuipers, Gov. Jennifer Granholm and other leaders who care about our state’s future should move now to start setting out a serious school reform agenda, a reform that should be a central part of the debate in next year’s statewide elections.

Editor’s Note: Former newspaper publisher and University of Michigan Regent Phil Power is a longtime observer of Michigan politics and economics, and a former chairman of the Michigan chapter of the Nature Conservancy. He is also the founder and president of The Center for Michigan, a centrist think-and-do tank which publishes the Michigan Scorecard. The opinions expressed here are Power’s own and do not represent the official views of The Center. He welcomes your comments at ppower@thecenterformichigan.net.