Wavering on waivers

Yesterday's news of the Massachusetts Commissioner of Education's refusal to consider waivers for the communities who lost a large number of days of school due to December's ice storm didn't come as a real surprise, considering the remarkable lack of understanding shown by his office since the storm hit. This certainly give the impression of being a classic "inside 128/outside 128" problem. One wonders if the Commissioner has ventured out to the communities hardest hit.

Massachusetts has two requirements for time in school: the well-known 180 day rule (which also requires districts to schedule 185 days, including an automatic 5 snow days), and the lesser known 900/990 hour rule, which came in under Ed Reform in 1993. This requires that schools spend 900 hours in elementary and middle school, and 990 hours in high school in "time in learning." That leaves out lunch, passing time, recess, etc. etc. (If you've wondered why recess time seems to be getting shorter and shorter, there's your answer, incidentally.)

The motivation of this is undoubtably a good one: the idea that one should spend a certain amount of time in education to get maximum benefit is reasonable.

Unfortunately, this is another one that runs pretty hard into the facts on the ground. There are always going to be kids who just "get it" right away; does the time requirement apply to them as well? Well, yes, if you're educating millions of children. Likewise, there are kids who in some subjects could use more time. The relative fairness of that is debatable, which is always true of an institutional system processing lots of people.

Any teacher who has taught on a nice day in May or June can also tell you that how much education is actually going on in her classroom is debatable in those circumstances as well. You can certainly force the kids to sit there; whether or not anyone is learning anything at all is questionable. With the advent of the MCAS in May, which exhausts kids in grades 3-8 and grade 10 a month before the current end of school, we have already compounded that problem. To further compound it by extending the school year into July (contractually not allowed in some communities) would be a mistake.