Education Week, February 25, 2020, by Matt Lieberman

A growing body of research provides evidence that schools can benefit from rethinking their schedules, whether by pushing the start time to later in the day, eliminating one day a week, or otherwise reshuffling how students and teachers spend their time together.

Before districts and schools can pull the trigger on a massive change, though, they’re likely to face a wide variety of obstacles and barriers. Some of them are merely a byproduct of well-established norms and traditions around schooling, including an outdated agrarian calendar. Others reflect deeper insecurities among groups of people with a stake in the success of a school’s approach.

Education Week talked to school leaders who have attempted with varying degrees of success to rethink schedules, and to advocates and organizations that work with schools on facilitating significant change. Barriers to those changes tend to fall in the following six categories:

Staff and support staff

Teachers approach planning their lessons by filling the available time they have. If that amount of time changes, teachers might balk at having to come up with a new approach to covering the material. A schedule change can be even stickier if it substantially changes teachers’ hours or responsibilities, which could mean a lengthy renegotiation of a teachers’ union contract and a testy battle over a wide range of specifics.

Meanwhile, support staff, from sanitation and culinary workers to bus drivers and crossing guards, can feel the effects of a schedule change—and if those workers aren’t full-time employees, a small shift in their hours and duties can make a major difference in their well-being.

Though teacher objections are an obstacle, the conditions in which most teachers work are inherently hostile to innovation, argues Bryan Hassel, the co-president of Public Impact, a nonprofit working with school districts to help them make better use of time. He advocates more collaboration to cut down on waste d time and redundancy during the school day.

“If the teachers on the team see themselves as a team working together with these 100 kids, … there’s much more of a chance to say, ‘I can specialize in what I do best; together we’ll do better than we would at each time by ourselves,’ ” Hassel said. Read the full article…

Education NC, November 19, 2019, by Emily Ayscue Hassel and Bryan C. Hassel

Digital learning has gotten a bad rap, in some cases reasonably so, especially for the lack of results with disadvantaged learners. Meanwhile, alarms are sounding about the rise of online screen time co-timed with surges in anxiety, depression, suicide and insomnia among teens and young adults, here and abroad. While providers entice students with more game-like digital learning — possibly an extra blow to students’ mental health — parents are paying consultants substantial sums to reverse screen addiction.

Yet investment continues in online learning and digital tools. (Note: Neither Public Impact nor the authors invest in or provide digital learning tools.) That’s partly because there’s potential profit to be made, but there’s also a potential benefit for students: Digital tools can help meet each student’s learning needs, especially important for those whose needs are poorly met in traditional, one-size-fits-all classrooms and those who need non-traditional hours for learning.  Read the full column…

Chalkbeat, November 1, 2019, by Stephanie Wang

When Indianapolis Public Schools “restarted” chronically struggling schools, students who stayed under the new management sometimes made smaller gains on tests compared to their classmates who left, a new study finds.

Over time, however, students at the restarted schools closed some of the gaps.

The study by Public Impact, an education consulting group based in North Carolina, honed in on four elementary schools where IPS contracts with outside or charter operators as a turnaround strategy. It compared students who stayed through the overhauls to those who transferred to other schools. Read the full article…

Education Next, October 22, 2019, by Emily Ayscue Hassel and Bryan Hassel

A charismatic charter network leader reminded us recently of his high-poverty schools’ laudable learning results. His secret sauce? Wooing the best teachers and principals away from surrounding districts.

We call this a “Talent Hog” strategy, and its prevalence explains, in part, why reforms that succeed in some schools fail at scale—leaving cities, states, and their children, back where they started. There is a better way, but it requires a policy solution.

For the record, this leader isn’t alone; many districts boast of the same strategy. Sometimes, we’ve even helped them plan and execute it. After all, teacher and principal quality are the top two factors within schools’ control that affect learning outcomes. New reforms—curricula, teaching methods, professional development, technology, governance, and so on—succeed or fail based on how well educators actually use them. Read the full column…

Education Week, October, 14, 2019, by Rick Hess

One of the more frustrating education debates of the past quarter century has been the debate about, as Gary Burtless’s Brookings volume put it back in 1996, Does Money Matter? I mean, it’s tough to think of anywhere else in American life where we’d even have that discussion. If we’re talking about buying a house, choosing a cell phone plan, or paying for preschool, folks on the left and the right sensibly assume that more money makes it easier to afford better options. Of course, money matters.

This is why it’s been so strange to see this strawman hijack the discussion of school spending. In fact, in my experience, school spending skeptics don’t argue that money can’t help—their fear, rather, is that money will be spent on things (like administrative staff and retiree benefits) that they don’t think will make a difference for students. Meanwhile, I’ve found that those calling for more spending will readily (if quietly) concede that of course it matters how those funds are spent. In other words, we’ve spent a lot of time abstractly debating whether money matters, even though everyone agrees that the answer is “yes, but”—and that the “but” turns on whether those funds are spent wisely and well.

The hyperbole has tended to drown out more useful discussion of how to get more bang for the buck. And that’s a question that’s taken on a newfound timeliness thanks to teacher strikes, “Red for Ed,” new ESSA requirements for financial transparency, the costs of teacher health care and pension systems, and the policy demands of a graying population. With that as a backdrop, along with the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, I hosted an AEI conference the other day on “How to Get More Bang for the Education Buck” (you can find the event video and the papers here). I won’t try to summarize it all (that’ll be in the Teachers College Press book due out next year) but I thought it worth sharing a few points of interest.

For one, big increases in after-inflation per-pupil spending in recent decades have translated only into minuscule real increases in teacher pay. Indeed, Bryan Hassel, the co-president of Public Impact, pointed out that the share of school spending that funded teacher pay has declined by nearly half, from 50.8 percent in 1969-70 to 30.9 percent in 2015-16. And, of course, teachers need to leave the classroom for administration to see a big salary boost. Hassel argued that the key to addressing this has to be about more than changing the dollar flow and has to include altering the way teaching works. As one possibility, he pointed to Public Impact’s “Opportunity Culture” model, in which teachers can earn much more (with pay raises of 20 percent to 50 percent) by leading teams, reaching more students, and taking on new authority within schools. Read more…

Ahead of the Heard, August 14, 2019, by Chad Aldeman

How should we train teachers? How do we ensure that all students have access to great teaching?

Those questions are at the heart of many education policy debates. While it may be difficult to “raise the bar” on the teaching profession by erecting barriers to entry, recent studies show that teacher coaching and teamwork offer more promise as ways to help young teachers improve their practice and to create a real career ladder within the teaching profession.

In order to find out more about how this work is going in schools, I reached out to Stephanie Dean, the vice president of strategic policy advising and a senior consulting manager at Public Impact. In that role, Dean is working with schools and districts to implement what they call “Opportunity Culture,” a way to re-organize schools into collaborative leadership teams. Read the full interview…