Questions and answers about possibly changing the bell schedule

[Update: The first version of the post misstated the times of the two listening posts on this issue. The corrected information is below.]

The school board is considering changing the district’s bell schedule. We have listening posts scheduled this week and next. This post is my attempt to answer some of the questions that people are likely to have about the issue. As usual, I am not speaking for the board or the district here, but only for myself as one board member.

What is the bell schedule?

By “bell schedule,” we mean the start and end times for the school day. The current bell schedule is:

Elementary school: Starts at 8:45, ends at 3:45
Junior high: Starts at 8:00, ends at 3:10
High school: Starts at 8:00, ends at 3:10

What’s so hard about setting a bell schedule?

If we were willing to pay any amount of money for buses, setting a bell schedule would be easy. But we have too many other competing priorities (such as keeping class sizes down) to spend limitlessly on school buses. So, to keep busing costs down, we double-route (“tier”) many of the buses: the same bus that drops kids off at high school then runs an elementary school route. This saves a lot of money.

To tier buses, though, there needs to be a sufficient gap between the start of elementary schools and the start of secondary schools (junior highs and high schools). That’s the only way one bus can have time to drop off one set of kids and then pick up and drop off another set of kids. That need for a gap is what complicates the setting of the bell schedule. As it turns out, that gap has to be pretty big unless we want to significantly increase what we spend on buses. (See below.)

There are also legal constraints at work. The district is legally required to offer busing to kids who live outside a particular distance from school (two miles for elementary and junior high; three miles for high school). The law also requires that no elementary schooler ride the bus for more than an hour (each way), and that no high school student ride the bus for more than 75 minutes (each way). On many routes, that limits how many kids one bus can serve.

Why is the board considering changing the bell schedule?

The main reason we are considering changing the bell schedule is that the buses simply can’t execute the current schedule within our current budget. Elementary kids get out of school at 3:45, which means that the buses should pick them at and be on the road by 3:50. Instead, at many schools, kids aren’t getting picked up until after 4:00, sometimes even after 4:10, which means they may be getting home after 5:00. This means we’ve got little kids waiting around idle (and requiring supervision) for as long as a half an hour after school. It also means a very long day for small children. This problem is affecting hundreds of elementary school kids. Many (including me) see this as an unacceptable option.

To make the current bell schedule work properly, we would have to significantly reduce our tiering of buses. According to the bus company, this would cost approximately $400,000 more every year than we’re currently spending. That’s an enormous figure, in context. I don’t see that as an acceptable option, either.

And even if we could get the buses to pick the kids up on time, we’ve had many reports that the young kids are not doing well with being in school until almost 4:00, as well as a lot of feedback that older kids and teenagers should be starting their days later.

How is this year’s bell schedule different from last year’s bell schedule?

Before this year, our bell schedule was:

Elementary school: started at 8:30, ended at 3:00
Junior high: started at 8:10, ended at 3:20
High school: started at 8:05, ended at 3:15

Notice that the secondary schools started before the elementary schools and ended after them. This was possible only because our elementary day was shorter than it is now—it was only 6.5 hours long. So a bus could bring kids to a high school in the morning and then run an elementary route, and vice versa at the end of the day.

Beginning this year, though, the board increased the length of the elementary day, making it seven hours long—just ten minutes shorter than the secondary day. That made it impossible to start elementary last and release it first, as we had been doing. So the board decided to start and end the secondary schools first, and to start and end the elementary schools second.

Our old bell schedule had its own flaws. To make it work, secondary students had to get dropped off earlier than ideal in the morning, and had to wait longer than ideal to get picked up in the afternoon. So instead of younger kids waiting around for buses, we had older kids waiting around for buses; arguably a lesser problem, but still not ideal.

Why can’t we just go back to last year’s bell schedule?

Again, when the board changed from last year’s bell schedule to this year’s, it made the elementary day longer—seven hours instead of six and a half. The length of the school day is subject to collective bargaining, so that change is now part of the district’s contracts with the teachers. That means the board can’t just unilaterally change it. Though it’s certainly possible for the district to seek that change in negotiations, the district wouldn’t control the outcome, and there’s just no good way to assess whether there would be a cost associated with seeking that change.

Though the length of school day is subject to negotiation, the start times are not. So the board is free to start that seven-hour elementary day earlier or later than it currently starts.

If it didn’t have to go through negotiations, returning to our previous school day would probably be my first preference. It’s something people were used to, and I don’t think elementary-age kids benefit from adding an extra half hour to their school day. But the fact that it would have to be negotiated means we just don’t know whether it could be achieved and whether it would be cost-neutral. Logistically, it would also be difficult, because it could mean waiting months to determine the issue. For those reasons, we focused the bell schedule task force on options that did not involve changing the negotiated length of the school day.

(For what it’s worth: if it were up to me, that extra half hour in the elementary day would be devoted entirely to more recess and down time for the kids. Seven hours is a very long day for small children.)

What are the options?

Given that we need to tier buses, there are two main ways we can structure the bell schedule: Secondary starts first, or elementary starts first.

Secondary starts first

Right now, secondary starts first. This means the older kids and teenagers are starting earlier (8:00 or 8:05), while the younger kids start later (8:45). Many people are convinced by empirical research (or personal experience!) that teenagers are better off starting later, not earlier. If we were to stick with starting secondary first, though, we would (in my view, at least) need to adjust the schedule to enable the buses to pick kids up on time. There are basically two ways to do that.

First, we could spend more money on buses. We currently spend about $2.1 million annually on buses. If we wanted to keep our current bell schedule but have the buses pick kids up on time, we would have to spend about $400,000 more. Given our fiscal constraints, I don’t see that as a feasible option.

Second, we could increase the gap between the start times for secondary schools and the start times for elementary. To make it work without spending more on buses, elementary school would have to start an hour after the secondary schools start. That means either (1) starting the older kids even earlier, (2) pushing the younger kids even later, or (3) a little of both. An example would be:

Secondary starting at 7:50, ending at 3:00
Elementary starting at 8:50, ending at 3:50

That option isn’t very appealing. So the task force looked at starting elementary schools first.

Elementary starts first

There was a lot of sentiment for starting elementary schools first. I think people felt that younger kids are better in the early morning and more likely to get tired by late afternoon. Older kids, meanwhile, not only sleep later, but are more independent and better able to get themselves to school or to the bus even if their parents have already left for work.

So the question is: how much of a gap do we need between the start of elementary school and the start of secondary schools? A large gap is not ideal, but the smaller the gap, the more the buses cost (because you can’t tier as many of them). Again, we currently spend about $2.1 million on buses. Here’s how that would differ under different scenarios:

Secondary starts 30 minutes after elementary: $749,294 more
Secondary starts 40 minutes after elementary: $684,378 more
Secondary starts 50 minutes after elementary: $ 78,493 more
Secondary starts 55 minutes after elementary: $116,256 less

In other words, if we want to stay roughly within our current bus budget, we need at least a 50-minute gap. And a 55-minute gap is about $195,000 cheaper than a 50-minute gap.

(The dollar figures, and the gaps between them, are approximations provided by the bus company. They’re something of a moving target. But it’s easy to see why the bigger gaps reduce costs, since they mean we can tier more buses, and thus run fewer buses overall.)

So here are some examples of what the bell schedule could look like if elementary starts first:

Elementary schools: start at 7:45, end at 2:45
Secondary schools: start at 8:35, end at 3:45

or

Elementary schools: start at 8:00, end at 3:00
Secondary schools: start at 8:50, end at 4:00

or, if we want to save that extra roughly $195,000 annually that comes with a five-minute longer gap, we could do something like this:

Elementary schools: start at 7:50, end at 2:50
Secondary schools: start at 8:45, end at 3:55

Keep in mind that if elementary school starts at 7:45, that means that some little kid, somewhere, is getting on a bus at 6:30 a.m. Conversely, if high school ends at 4:00, that means that some high-schooler is getting off a bus at 5:25 p.m. It’s a small number of kids who ride the bus for the maximum permissible time, but it’s not zero. In any event, you can see why it’s really a very narrow range of feasible start times.

Why can’t we just spend more money on buses?

We can if we want to. But school funding is very tight, and we have a lot of other priorities that we can spend that money on. Money for busing comes out of the district’s general fund, which is the same money we use to hire teachers (and thus keep class sizes as manageable as possible). We’re also trying to direct resources toward reducing the proficiency gaps that you can see here. We’re also planning to open two new elementary schools and a new high school, which will put a strain on our operating expenses. And it was only two years ago that we went through a painful round of budget cuts, including cuts to our music and foreign language offerings. I’m not happy with any of the bell schedule options, and I don’t mean to minimize the disruption a new schedule could cause for some families. But if we’ve got additional money to spend, I’d rather put it into the classroom than spend it on school buses.

What did the task force think?

The board created a task force to examine the bell schedule issue. In choosing members of the task force, the district tried to make sure that lots of viewpoints were represented: students, parents, teachers, staff, union representatives, administrators, athletic directors, before-and-after-school-program directors, and so on. The task force met several times to hash out the various options as we learned more about them.

At our final meeting last night, we asked the task force to break into discussion groups to consider a handful of the most feasible options. The groups then reported back their preferences. Most of the groups favored starting elementary school before secondary. The first choice of most of the groups was to have a 50-minute gap between elementary and secondary start times, though some groups listed a 55-minute gap as their second choice. The most common choice for start times was 7:45 for elementary and 8:35 for secondary.

Again, these “preferences” were constrained by the choices they were given to consider. Some task force members may well have preferred a different option that wasn’t explicitly on the table. Also, the task force membership was not intended to be a random sample of the broader population, so I don’t mean to suggest that it’s a substitute for feedback from the larger community. But the task force’s responses nonetheless give you some idea of where a large group that closely considered the issue ended up.

Task force members: Thank you for your time and efforts on this project!

How can I express my preferences on the bell schedule?

You can let the board know your thoughts about the bell schedule in any of several ways:

• by email to board@iowacityschools.org (this will go to all seven board members),

• by attending one of the two scheduled listening posts on the topic:

Wednesday, January 27, 6:00 - 7:30 pm, Grant Wood Elementary School
Thursday, February 4, 6:00 - 7:30, Northwest Junior High, or

• by coming to speak at community comment before a board meeting.

(You should also feel free to leave a comment on this post, but I can’t guarantee that anyone but me will see it.)

At the listening posts, the three questions we’ll focus on are:

• Should we start elementary schoolers before secondary schoolers?

• If so, should secondary start 50 minutes after elementary, or should we save the extra $195,000 annually by having a 55-minute gap?

• If we start elementary first, what time should it start?

The most helpful feedback, in my view, would be comments that help us foresee specific advantages and disadvantages with the different options and different possible start times. None of the options are problem-free—they’re all pretty lousy, really—but we want to choose the least bad set of problems, and if we know about problems in advance, we might be able to plan in ways that will mitigate them.

When will the board make a decision?

The board’s goal is to make a decision about the bell schedule by the end of February, and to put it into effect at the beginning of the next school year in August 2016.

Editorial aside

Keep in mind that Iowa is now in the bottom half of states when it comes to per-pupil state funding. If the Governor and the legislature were directing more money to the districts, there would be fewer occasions when we had to choose between a bunch of lousy options like these.

School board agenda for January 26

Sorry to be posting this so late; I was distracted by drafting a longer post about the options for changing the bell schedule, which I hope to post within the next couple of days.

Some of the items on the agenda for tonight’s board meeting:

Discretionary busing. The district has to provide busing to K-8 students who live more than two miles from school and to high school students who live more than three miles from school. The district can choose to provide buses to kids who wouldn’t qualify for them based on distance from school; that’s known as “discretionary busing.” We have done that for some neighborhoods, sometimes on the theory that there were particular safety concerns. Director Chris Lynch has proposed that we change our criteria for providing discretionary busing to focus exclusively on areas with lots of kids who are “at risk” of not getting to school, rather than on safety. You can read his full proposal here. More information here.

Redistricting. We’ll discuss our process for deciding how to redistrict elementary attendance zones as we plan to open two new elementary schools in 2019, and in particular our process for gathering community input. At our work session, a neighborhood “caucus” system was proposed, under which people would gather input from their neighborhood (however they define it) and submit that group feedback to the board. The proposed form for that feedback is here. Some board members (including me) raised concerns about whether that process would be sufficiently inclusive. We’ll discuss that issue again tonight. More information here.

An update on the bell schedule task force. I’ll post more on this topic soon. Information here.

Magnet school. We’ll discuss the results of the district’s survey about the possibility of starting a magnet school. Information here.

We’ll vote on the proposed 2016-17 school calendar. The proposal is here.

We’ll discuss our preliminary budget assumptions for 2016-17.

And more! The full agenda is here. Feel free to leave a comment below about anything that catches your attention.

Agenda for January 12 school board meeting

At tonight’s meeting, the school board will review the district’s Annual Progress Report. (Related links here.) If nothing else, the report will give you an idea of just how much time and money the district puts into data collection. Yet, for all the data, how much do we know about cause and effect—and in particular about the long-term effects of our school practices on kids’ adult lives?

We will also have a work session in which we begin discussion of the process of drawing new elementary school attendance areas in anticipation of the opening of two new elementary schools in 2019. This will include a review of the rationale for the previous board’s decision on secondary boundaries, including the decision to send kids from the Alexander Elementary School attendance area, on Iowa City’s far south side, to Northwest Junior High and West High. Full information here and here.

The full board agendas are here and here; chime in if anything catches your attention.

ESSA and Iowa Schools: Meet the New Boss (Guest Post)

[I’ve been putting off the task of posting about the Every Student Succeeds Act, which is the successor to (and in some ways a departure from) No Child Left Behind. I tend to react to changes in federal and state education laws the same way I react to severe weather: I just hunker down and prepare for the worst. Fortunately, Karen W. from Education in Iowa offered this great summary of how the new Act will affect school districts here in Iowa. —CL]

The big education news last week was that the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) era has officially ended with the passage of the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA). There are a number of articles and websites summarizing various aspects of ESSA:

• EdWeek, ESEA* Reauthorization: The Every Student Succeeds Act Explained

• EdWeek, No Child Left Behind Rewrite Spells Out Assessment Details

• EdWeek (commentary), ESSA Cements the K-12 Obama-Duncan Legacy

• EdWeek, ESEA Reauthorization: Four Ways a New Law Would Differ From NCLB Waivers

• EdWeek, ESEA Rewrite Passes Senate, Heads to President’s Desk

• EdWeek, ESEA Reauthorization: A Look at a Draft of the Bill

• Vox, How schools will be different without No Child Left Behind

• US Department of Education, ESSA page (includes a comparison chart with NCLB and waivers plus ESSA highlights and links to other documents)

• Alliance for Excellent Education, ESSA page (includes links to one-page fact sheets and short videos on accountability, assessments, high schools, and teachers and school leaders)

• Press-Citizen (USA Today), The Every Student Succeeds Act vs. No Child Left Behind: What’s changed?

• Education Reform Now (HT: Joanne Jacobs), INFOGRAPHIC: Everything You Need to Know about the Every Student Succeeds Act
  

Any of these links can get you started. However, a key change in ESSA is a shift in responsibility for the details of policies from the federal government to the states. This means that understanding--or predicting--what ESSA might mean for Iowa schools requires looking not just at the language of ESSA, but also looking at current Iowa law, the Iowa Department of Education (DE), and the Iowa State Board of Education (State Board).

For this post, I have looked at parts of the ESSA and tried to link to related Iowa state law and statewide education policies. Note that this post isn’t a comprehensive look at ESSA.

Why I voted against ThoughtExchange

At our last meeting, the board voted 4-3 to enter into a three-year contract with ThoughtExchange, an online platform to solicit ideas and opinions from district residents. The contract cost $106,462. I voted against it, for several reasons.

The cost alone was not my primary objection. I can imagine issues on which a well-done survey of community opinion would be worth paying for. My concerns about ThoughtExchange were:

1. Although ThoughtExchange was presented as a way to “take the temperature of the community”—the vendor even referred to it as “polling”—it was not at all vetted for that purpose and is very clearly not up to the task.

There is a difference between tech expertise and statistical expertise; the vendor provided no information about the statistical capability of ThoughtExchange to measure the opinions of the community as a whole. He probably couldn’t, even if he tried. Participation is not random; some users might make one quick visit while others might visit repeatedly and participate for long stretches; it’s fairly easy for people to have multiple accounts; and the total number of participants on any given issue is likely to be a small fraction of the total community population. As a result, the margin of error, if it could even be calculated, is likely to be so enormous that the results would tell us very little about community sentiment.

That problem is compounded by the fact that a significant chunk of our community (estimated at about six percent of households) does not have regular internet access, and that’s probably not a random chunk, but skewed toward low-income residents.

2. I’m concerned that the motivation to use ThoughtExchange is more about putting on a show of community engagement than actually engaging in a meaningful way. (I had these same concerns about ThoughtExchange’s predecessor, MindMixer.) There’s no point in asking the public for input if we’re not willing to adjust our decisions accordingly once we get it, but it often seems like the district wants to do the former and not the latter. In those instances, people just feel worse than if their input was never solicited at all.

The district’s likely strategy is not to ask any questions that it doesn’t want to hear the answers to, and to word the questions in ways designed to push participants in certain ways. Three years ago, I made fun of the district for using MindMixer to ask, “What are the school district’s biggest strengths?” Then, when the ThoughtExchange vendor made his presentation, one of his examples of a question that could be asked was, “What are some things you appreciate about your school this year?”

Unfortunately, my (1) and (2) correspond to the two things we’re actually paying for (that we wouldn’t get from engagement through, say, the district’s Facebook page): (1) the “data” analysis (which is of little value if the data is not representative of the community as a whole), and (2) the manipulability and control that comes from being able to decide what questions to ask and how to ask them. We should not pay for either of those things.

It’s hard not to see ThoughtExchange as primarily a public relations campaign posing as a concern for community input. The board should consider whether that might put off as many people as it attracts. As commenter Amy Charles wrote, “No, do not tax me in order to build a case for more taxes. Spend the money on the frigging schools, and do it sensibly.”

Pay no attention to the “AP Honor Roll”

On a pretty regular basis we see reports like this—this one apparently prompted by a College Board press release. I wish we saw fewer of them.

If there were a metric that could accurately show that our educational policy choices were enabling more kids to succeed at challenging coursework, that would be worth celebrating. But the number of students taking AP courses, and the number of students getting a 3 or above on an AP exam, are absolutely awful, utterly useless proxies for anything worth measuring.

First, whether AP courses—courses geared entirely toward preparing for tests created by the College Board—are the most valuable type of advanced coursework is entirely debatable. That debate is less likely to happen if people take “honors” like these at face value.

Second, there are ways to raise AP participation and score numbers that are academically unsound—but become incentivized when people start valuing this kind of “honor.” For example, a district can simply open the doors to AP courses regardless of whether the students are ready for the course. The district can then encourage only the most successful students to take the AP test in that subject. Many students might be poorly served by that kind of course, but the College Board gets more business and the district gets an “honor”!

Our district has celebrated this kind of accolade in the past (examples here, here, and here). In our district, some students—more than just the rare outlier—are invited to take AP courses in the first semester of their freshman year in high school. Are those really “college-level” courses? If so, are they really right for high school freshmen? The answer might well be “no” to both questions.

The fact is: we don’t know what the “right” amount of AP participation is. The last thing we should do is start chasing isolated numerical indicators, which is just a recipe for unintended consequences. That’s all the more true when those indicators are in service of thinly disguised advertising for companies like the College Board.

Some thoughts on the superintendent’s visit to Hoover

Our superintendent visited Hoover School last week to talk with parents about the planned closure of the school. There wasn’t much new in terms of rationales for the closure, but he did make three interesting statements:

1. Hoover parents have repeatedly been told that the loss of Hoover won’t be so bad because there are other nearby schools that Hoover students will end up attending. Longfellow is frequently given as the example; it would be the closest alternative for a big chunk of Hoover’s attendance area. Some of Longfellow’s attendance area is an “island” out in the easternmost part of town, whose students would almost certainly be redistricted into the new East elementary school. The idea has always been that the departure of those students from Longfellow would create room for kids who are displaced from Hoover.

But the superintendent recently informed me that there are currently 79 Longfellow students who live in that “island” out by the new school. Longfellow’s enrollment, however, is currently 80 students over its capacity. So I asked the superintendent how there would be any room at Longfellow for Hoover students when the school closes. He said that it is unlikely that there would be many seats at Longfellow for Hoover kids.

That fact has big implications for current Hoover families, as well as for families at Lucas and Lemme (the two other likely destinations for Hoover kids). It means many Hoover kids would end up at schools much farther from their homes. The redistricting of Lucas and Lemme will also be that much more difficult if those two schools have to accommodate almost the entire population of Hoover.

2. One parent asked the superintendent what would be the worst consequences of leaving Hoover open, and how big a role City High’s needs play. The superintendent said that City High’s needs would not even be in his top three reasons for the closure. Instead, he emphasized the operational cost efficiencies that could be achieved by having one less elementary school to run.

I found that response to be significant for two reasons. First, it seemed to be an admission that the “City High needs the land” argument is not particularly persuasive, especially since the district is still unable (unwilling?) to tell the public what will actually appear on Hoover’s land.

Second, the operational cost efficiency argument is the argument that is most transferable to other schools, several of which (Lincoln, Hills, Horace Mann, Longfellow, and Shimek) are significantly smaller than Hoover. In my view, the argument that This One Additional School Is Breaking the Bank is simply inconsistent with saying But Schools That Are Smaller Than Hoover Have Nothing To Worry About. (It is also arguably inconsistent with the district’s simultaneous exploration of starting a magnet school, which would almost certainly be more costly than the average school to operate.)

3. One parent asked whether enrollment will still be over capacity when all the projects in the facilities plan are completed. One major goal of the facilities plan, after all, was to alleviate overcrowding. The superintendent said that under current projections we would be right at capacity, but that we’re a growing district and thus will probably have to start talking about building new schools as soon as the facilities plan is done. I don’t disagree with this statement, but it certainly drives home the point that destroying over 300 seats of elementary capacity has a serious price tag. What’s incredible is that over two years after the board voted to close the school, the district has still not put a number on the cost of replacing 300+ seats of elementary capacity and how much it will increase the district’s future bond request.

The Hoover closure is a big topic, and it’s impossible to discuss all aspects of it in one post. Right now, it’s clear that there are not four (out of seven) votes on the school board to reconsider the closure. The next logical moment to consider the issue will be when the board starts drawing the attendance zones that will apply to the east side when the new East elementary school opens. The board is planning to draw those zones this coming Spring (even though they will not go into effect until 2019). I anticipate that it will be harder than expected to draw workable attendance zones without using Hoover’s capacity, so that will be a good moment to stop and rethink whether the closure is worth the associated costs.

Topics on the December 8 board meeting agenda

Some of the topics we’ll be discussing at this Tuesday’s school board meeting:

We’ll hear a review of the district’s progress in addressing disproportionate referral of African-American students to special education services. Info here.

We’ll be revisiting the topic of the Smarter Balanced Assessments. After having failed to persuade the legislature to require these very expensive standardized tests, the State Board of Education decided it had the power to impose them without legislative approval, and did so via an administrative rule (over the formal objection of our board). Info here. What’s the next step?

We’ll discuss the possibility of exploring a year-round school alternative. There are no details about this topic included in the agenda.

We’ll hear the district’s annual financial audit report. Info here.

We’ll hear from the committee that examined the issue of discretionary busing. To be entitled to a school bus under state law, a student needs to live a certain distance from his or her school — over two miles for elementary and junior high, and over three miles for high school. We’re free, though, to provide buses for kids who live closer if we choose to. We can’t afford to do much of that “discretionary busing,” however. A committee has been considering what our standards should be for offering discretionary busing.

We’ll hear a proposal for how to handle athletics as part of the transition to opening Liberty High. When Liberty opens in 2017, students who are juniors and seniors at West will have the option of staying on at West. That will pose some challenges for fielding sports teams during Liberty’s initial couple of years. The administration will discuss its recommendation for how to handle those challenges. Info here.

And more! The full agenda is here; please chime in if anything attracts your attention.

Agenda topics for November 24 meeting

Some of the topics we’ll be discussing at this Tuesday’s board meeting:

Superintendent discretionary leave. Info here. Our superintendent’s contract provides that he can take up to ten paid personal leave days each year for personal business, consulting, and other activities “that will contribute to the betterment of the district.” His use of these days must be mutually agreed upon between him and the board president. Do we need to change this practice going forward?

The Open Meetings Act. Info here. I believe we may have the board’s legal counsel present to take questions about it from the board.

The district’s facilities master plan. Info here.

ThoughtExchange. Info here. See this post for previous discussion.

“Administrator attrition.” We have recently had significant turnover in our central administrative positions, so I assume this topic is to discuss transition plans and the possibility of changes to our organizational structure that might be part of that process. Info here.

And more! The full agenda is here; chime in if anything attracts your attention.

On not leaping to conclusions

It’s no secret that I’ve had my disagreements with our superintendent. I hope that gives me particular standing to urge people to be fair—not to be quiet, not to be uncritical, but to be fair—in their reaction to the articles this week about the superintendent’s work outside the district. I don’t see any accusations of wrongdoing in those articles or any showing that the superintendent did anything that was not permitted by his contract or by law. Whether the board should have negotiated different contract terms, whether the superintendent should have made different judgments, whether more questions should be asked and more information made available, whether we should have different practices going forward—those all seem like very reasonable questions (many of which probably have two sides to them). But I hope people will recognize that working for a company where other people are later accused of wrongdoing is not the same as wrongdoing. Guilt by association is not only unfair, but also a logical fallacy.

Agenda topics for Tuesday, November 10

This coming Tuesday, there will be a regular board meeting followed by a work session. Both agendas are now available (here and here). Some of the topics we’ll be discussing:

1. The certified enrollment report for 2015-16 is now available.

2. We’ll be doing our annual review of the facilities master plan. Info here.

3. We’ll be discussing plans to create attendance zones for Grant Elementary and the new east-side elementary school (“Hoover East”). Info here.

4. We’ll be discussing the bell schedule. The board already voted to create a task force to re-examine the bell schedule, so this may just end up being an update on that process.

5. We’ll be hearing about the transition planning for Liberty High and the new east-side elementary. Info here and here.

6. We’ll be discussing discretionary busing. Info here.

7. We’ll be discussing whether to add a representative of our before-and-after-school programs to the district committee (“CEDAC”) that supervises those programs. Info here.

And more! Prepare to settle in for a while if you’re watching this one. I am swamped with work at the moment, so will probably not be able to reply to comments, but I will certainly read them, so please chime in on any of the above.

Notice: The only opportunity for community comment at either of these meetings will be at the beginning of the regular board meeting, which starts at 6:00. There is no comment period at the work session, though you can address those topics (or any school-related topic) at the community comment for the regular board meeting.

What kind of help does the school board need?

School board members in Iowa—unpaid volunteers who often serve while holding down full-time jobs and trying to raise kids—inevitably have to depend to some extent on information provided to them by others. That’s part of what our paid administrators do: gather information and make recommendations to the board about school issues. The board also sometimes creates committees or task forces to make proposals on particular issues; at our last meeting, for example, we voted to create a task force that would look into possible changes in the district’s bell schedule.

Nonetheless, the final decision on many matters is the board’s. How can administrators and task forces best help the board make its decisions? I’m worried that our board’s approach to that question sometimes delegates too much of its role to these other groups.

The problem is that the help the board gets is often in the form of advocacy for a particular conclusion. I would rather hear a more objective analysis of the advantages and disadvantages of a particular course of action, including discussion of possible alternatives. A bottom-line recommendation can be helpful, but, on issues where there is a potential for differing value judgments, the best thing the administration can do for the board is to give the board enough information that it can reach its own independent conclusion.

An example is the discussion at our last meeting of the ThoughtExchange proposal. The central administration recommended that we adopt the proposal—and again, I appreciate receiving a recommendation. The administration, though, apparently saw its role more as advocating for its recommendation than as providing an objective assessment of the pros and cons. The only material it provided, other than the $170,000 price quote, was . . . promotional material created by ThoughtExchange. Then, at our meeting, the ThoughtExchange vendor was given the floor for over forty minutes to make a video presentation advocating for the proposal and to take questions from the board.

Whatever you think of the merits of the proposal, hearing only from advocates on one side of an issue is never the best way to make a decision. As every law student quickly learns, a good brief is usually very convincing until you read the opposing brief.

One of the things I liked about Director Lori Roetlin’s proposal to create a task force on the bell schedule is that the task force will generate multiple options and that there will be a period of public comment on those options. In other words, the model is less focused on advocacy and more on providing the board with multiple perspectives.

What board members need is good information. What they shouldn’t delegate is important value judgments. A system that relies too heavily on one-sided advocacy makes it hard to draw that line.

The costs of accountability

Not much time to post this week, so I thought I’d link to Jerry Muller’s great survey of how “the virtues of accountability metrics have been oversold and their costs are underappreciated.” A few quick excerpts:

The characteristic feature of the culture of accountability is the aspiration to replace judgment with standardized measurement. Judgment is understood as personal, subjective, and self-interested; metrics are supposed to provide information that is hard and objective.

. . .

But, in many cases, the extension of standardized measurement may suffer diminished utility and even become counterproductive if sensible pragmatism gives way to metric madness. Measurement can readily become counterproductive when it tries to measure the unmeasurable and quantify the unquantifiable, whether to determine rewards or for other purposes.

. . .

Accountability by metrics imposes a simplification not only of goals but of knowledge. In [James C.] Scott’s insightful formulation, metrics and performance indicators, like many forms of cost-benefit analysis, “manage, through heroic assumptions and an implausible metric for comparing incommensurate variables, to produce a quantitative answer to thorny questions. They achieve impartiality, precision, and replicability at the cost of accuracy.”

. . .

Many matters of great importance are too subject to judgment and interpretation to be solved by standardized metrics. In recent decades, too many politicians, business leaders, policymakers, and academic officials have lost sight of that distinction.

A lot to recognize in this article. On this topic, more to come.

October 27 board agenda

I’d love to use this blog as a way to hear some thoughts about issues that appear on our board agenda. The agenda for this coming week’s meeting is here. Among other things, we will be discussing:

The bell schedule. The district changed the bell schedule this year, extending the elementary school day and adjusting the daily start and end times for all students. I was against the change and, especially given some of the unintended consequences we have experienced (for example, with bus schedules), am strongly inclined to revisit it. My fellow director Lori Roetlin, who also wants to revisit the issue, has written a letter explaining her thoughts about how we should move forward with the issue. What are your thoughts?

The possibility of buying into ThoughtExchange, an online platform for gathering and aggregating public input on school issues. I have some initial thoughts about this issue that I’ll try to post separately. You can read about ThoughtExchange (or at least see advertisements for it) by clicking on the links and PDFs here. The service would cost $170,000 over five years. Your thoughts on ThoughtExchange?

The preliminary report about this year’s class sizes. You can read the report here. I’ve heard a lot of concern about our class sizes this year. Chime in if you have thoughts on the issue.

You may find something else in the agenda that catches your eye. Feel free to post a comment.

UPDATE, 10-29:  Thanks, everyone, for the terrific comments.  I’ve had less time the past couple of days to respond individually—as will inevitably happen here—but I always read the comments and I really value the input.  At our Tuesday night meeting, we voted unanimously to adopt Director Lori Roetlin’s proposal to set up a task force to examine the bell schedule and make recommendations.  The proposal is designed to get the process going soon there will be plenty of time to get input from the community before any decision gets made.

We also heard a presentation from the ThoughtExchange vendor and discussed the service at some length, but we did not vote on it.  Some of my fellow board members are very supportive of the proposal, while others want more information about alternatives, while others (including me) are pretty skeptical, so the discussion will continue at a future meeting.

The board president summarized our clarification of the threat protocol that occurred at last week’s work session, and the issue will go to board committees for further discussion.  The class size report focused (as I would have expected) on the shortage of supplemental state aid and on the district’s choices about how to put available funding to the best use.