The Future of Schools: Supporting Families, Teachers, & Students

the future of schools SUPPORTING FAMILIES, TEACHERS, & STUDENTS RACHEL CANTER AND TOREN BALLARD October 2021

the future of schools

Walton Family Foundation. It was authored by Rachel Canter and Toren Ballard.

STAFF Rachel Canter, Executive Director Toren Ballard, Director of K-12 Policy MacKenzie Hines, Chief of Staff Brooke Williams, Policy and Communications Associate Board of Directors LeKesha Perry, Board Chair Catoria Martin, Board Treasurer

Over the last year and a half, the pandemic has brought into stark relief the ways in which our education system serves many students poorly— even as the pandemic has accelerated some positive shifts, such as the availability of a computer for every K-12 child in Mississippi. Mississippi First believes now is the moment for policymakers to begin thinking about new ideas for public schools as we—slowly—begin exiting the pandemic. This document outlines three new policy ideas for the future of schooling in Mississippi that we believe will support families, educators, and students while also improving education.

FAMILIES

First in October 2021 with support from the

Overview

Align and Extend the School Day and School Year

TEACHERS

This policy vision was published by Mississippi

RE-ENVISION THE DAY-TO-DAY ROLE OF A TEACHER

Juggling school and work schedules has long been overly difficult for most American families, and as children have returned to in-person school, we are more aware than ever that something needs to change.

Tim Abram, II, Board Member Kate Gluckman, Board Member 125 S. Congress Street, Suite 1510 Jackson, MS 39201 601.398.9008 mississippifirst.org

Students

Adam Smith, Board Member

In K-12 education, every teacher knows that shouldering the weight of instructional or policy change often falls squarely on them, without any new resources, technical assistance, or time to manage the shift.

Virtual COURSE CHOICE Finding great teachers for every higher-level or specialized course in every Mississippi district has proved difficult, especially for Mississippi’s small and rural districts.

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Supporting Families Align and Extend the School Day and School Year One of the most dramatic changes the pandemic wrought on public school families was a sudden crash course in parenting while working from home. In the most difficult moments of that experience, it was easy to long for the world as it was pre-pandemic, when our young children at least left the house for school. But the reality is that juggling school and work schedules has long been overly difficult for most American families, and as children have returned to in-person school, we are more aware than ever that something needs to change.

Let’s start with the practical problem: the school day in America has never aligned to standard business hours, generally between 8-5 Monday through Friday, when the largest number of parents are at work. This means that families have to find safe places for their children ages 5-12 for the time period between when school ends around 2 or 2:30 and when work concludes. Parents also have to worry what trouble their older children might get into while unsupervised, even if those children may be unattended from a legal standpoint. Because the school day typically starts earlier than the work day, nearly every public school family must start their day several hours before adults need to be at work. To accommodate transportation time, families of school bus riders may need to wake up two or more hours before children can arrive at school just to catch the bus. Finally, parents who work shift jobs may have the most difficult schedules, requiring a strain on both ends—they may have to be at work before school opens or the school bus arrives but cannot leave work until well after the school day concludes.

Managing the work/school scheduling mismatch requires families to cobble together solutions, the work and stress for which falls almost solely on the heads of working parents. Some parents leave work in the middle of the day to pick up kids and take them to another location; other parents scramble to put together a complicated schedule of afterschool activities, babysitters, family members with flexibility, or other paid childcare options. For families in rural areas or with children with disabilities, many of these options are simply unavailable. All of American society suffers as a result: parents may cut back their working hours, take lower paying but more flexible jobs, or spend a significant portion of their income on afterschool care and transportation. Employers also know that when one

part of these arrangements fail, a good employee may suddenly become inconsistent or quit entirely.

Not only is muddling through the school year challenging, but the traditional annual school calendar leaves parents to figure out what to do with their young children for eight or more weeks in the summer.

Programs that provide full-day, full-week, full-summer care for schoolaged children are hard to come by. Instead, many parents Tetris together care from available summer camps, babysitters, work vacation days, relatives, or older siblings and pray nothing falls through.

Why do we still live this way?

If there has been one positive realization by broader segments of the American public during the pandemic, it is that childcare is an essential pre-condition to work in 21st century America. Parents of very young children—from infancy to pre-school—absolutely need and deserve access to high-quality early childhood care and education. However, this fact is no less true for parents of school-aged children still too young to look after themselves.

The benefits of resetting the school day or the school year are not purely about relieving family stress from juggling incompatible work and school schedules. Repeated studies show that more time in school—through a longer school day and school year—can have positive academic effects, if the extra time is used wisely.1 Shorter summers alone, for example, do not improve academic achievement, but adding more days of quality instruction to the calendar, as opposed to simply evening out the school year, can lead to better student performance.2 The lowest-performing students are most likely to benefit academically, and programs need quality curriculum and effective teachers to make the extra time worthwhile. Conversely, we already know that in Mississippi our most vulnerable students may be the least likely to even get a typical year’s worth of instruction. In our seminal testing report, we found that lowperforming schools may be dedicating the entire fourth quarter to test prep, leaving less than three-quarters of the school year to teach a year’s

Figlio, David, Kristian L. Holden, and Umut Ozek. 2018. Do Students Benefit from Longer School Days? Regression Discontinuity Evidence from Florida’s Additional Hour of Literacy Instruction (Working Paper 201-0818-1). Working Paper, Washington, D.C.: National Center for Analysis of Longitudinal Data in Education Research. Accessed October 14, 2021. https://caldercenter.org/sites/default/files/CALDER%20WP%20201-0818-1.pdf.

Yael Kidron and Jim Lindsay. 2014. The Effects of Increased Learning Time on Student Academic and Nonacademic Outcomes: Findings from a Meta-Analytic Review (REL 2014-015). Research Report, Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences, National Center for Education Evaluation and Regional Assistance, Regional Education Laboratory Appalachia. Accessed October 14, 2021. https://ies.ed.gov/ncee/edlabs/regions/appalachia/pdf/rel_2014015.pdf.

2 Von Hippel, Paul T. “Is Summer Learning Loss Real?” Education Next 19, no. 4. Accessed October 14, 2021. https://www.educationnext.org/is-summer-learning-loss-real-how-i-lost-faith-education-research-results/.

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worth of content.3 With a longer school year, even schools that find it hard to move away from this practice would have more time to teach gradelevel content and remediate as necessary prior to the fourth quarter.

Moving to a more aligned school day and school year is in part a logistical challenge that requires dedicated professionals to rearrange longstanding practices, like the timing of school bus routes and the scheduling of sports seasons. There are more substantive concerns to changing the school day and year, however, such as how to make the shift without asking more of teachers, a policy red flag for us as we describe in our teacher workday section below. Fortunately, there are already models in Mississippi for extended school years that educators strongly support.

Three of Mississippi’s most successful school districts—Corinth, Gulfport, and Lamar County—have each recently moved to a shorter summer and longer school year that features longer breaks throughout the year.

The breaks allow the districts to implement targeted remediation and enrichment programs so that all students can get what they need in the course of the regular school year. Although this new schedule does not increase required instructional days for all students, it does provide more time in school for kids who need it most and offers other families the option to participate in extended school year programs focused on enrichment. The districts also coordinate with local childcare providers to make sure they can offer programs independently of what the district offers. Longer, more consistent breaks also help childcare providers plan for increased demand, a greater challenge when breaks are shorter and more sporadic throughout the year. Corinth, which made the shift prepandemic, has reported early academic success (Lamar’s and Gulfport’s shift is too recent),4 and all districts also report strong parent support.5

Extending the school day and realigning it with parent schedules is still unexplored territory in Mississippi. With the extra funding provided by Congress during the pandemic, the state’s only urban district, Jackson Public Schools (JPS), has invested in a large-scale, free afterschool program three days a week for elementary school students that extends educational opportunities to 5:30 each day and provides free transportation. The program, which the district announced after the start of school, quickly filled up. Efforts like this preserve the traditional school day but help parents by shifting the burden of arranging afterschool care to the district. Parents only need to opt in. However, this method is expensive, which is why JPS’s program is not a full-week program.6 Other districts have long offered paid or sliding scale tuition afterschool programs, sometimes through the federal 21st Century Community Learning Centers grant program, but these programs frequently cannot serve all children in the district who may want to participate and, if they are paid for through 21st Century funds, run the risk of closing after the grant concludes.

Another problem with many afterschool models is that there is often no real connection between the instruction in the regular school day and what is offered in afterschool, outside of “homework help.” These programs may also be less likely to be staffed with regular classroom teachers using formal instruction, important components of effective extended time programs.7 Currently, we are unaware of any Mississippi efforts to extend and realign the school day by staggering school instructional staff schedules or otherwise innovating with staffing to shift the regular school day to end closer to the parent work day at 5 or 5:30. We believe an extended school day model is ripe for a local pilot, especially with the additional pandemic funds now available.

Supporting TEACHERS

Re-envision the Day-to-Day Role of a Teacher In times of crisis, the weaknesses of our systems always become more visible. In K-12 education, every teacher knows that shouldering the weight of instructional or policy change often falls squarely on them, without any new resources, technical assistance, or time to manage the shift. This reality was readily apparent at the beginning of the pandemic when teachers were suddenly expected to teach remotely. As children began to return to school, they were then asked to enforce new COVID policies like masking, distancing, cleaning, and even no hugging.

With COVID upending so many established practices, some of the extra

work expected of teachers was inevitable—after all, everyone was bending to the point of breaking. However, for teachers, the COVID work has been merely the newest layer of a long-established pattern of handing them new policies, practices, programs, or expectations and asking them to make it work.

What results is a day-to-day teacher role that makes almost no sense, despite the large number of additional non-classroom personnel schools have added in the last three decades. Among other various and sundry tasks, teachers are asked to be the following:

Canter, Rachel and Angela Bass. 2018. Understanding District and State Testing. Research Report, Jackson, MS: Mississippi First.

Mississippi Senate Education Hearing (November 9, 2020) (statement of Lee Childress, Corinth School District Superintendent). See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J4cQbn5dt7E. 5 Ibid. Also, Dr. Stephen Hampton, Lamar County School District Superintendent, conversation with Rachel Canter, April 8, 2021.

6 Dr. Phelton Moss (Executive Director of Innovative Strategy, Jackson Public Schools), email correspondence with Rachel Canter, October 14, 2021.

7 See Figlio, et al., and Kidron and Lindsay in Footnote 1. See also Fryer, Roland, and Will Dobbie. 2013. “Getting Beneath the Veil of Effective Schools: Evidence from New York City.” American Economic Journal: Applied Economics 5, no. 4: 28-60. Accessed October 14, 2021. https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/fryer/files/dobbie_fryer_revision_final.pdf.

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• curriculum developers, curators, and implementers; • diagnosticians, psychometricians, assessment developers, proctors, and graders; • behavioral experts, family engagement specialists, and the primary messenger to families; and • paperwork and filing experts for all required documentation.

On top of these things, teachers must somehow find the time to do all of this, and if they cannot find it within their school work day, they are simply expected to work nights and weekends.

Even a superwoman could not juggle all of these tasks simultaneously and sufficiently. We do not mean to argue that all of these tasks are not important to the enterprise of education in today’s world. Instead, we believe expecting the same person to assume all of these duties is part of what makes the teaching profession unattractive. Separating some of these responsibilities into different roles is the only sustainable path forward.

The idea of redesigning the job of a teacher is not new. Over ten years ago, for example, the National Center for Education and the Economy put out a large think piece advocating for this idea, among others, primarily as a way to introduce a “career ladder” for teachers that did not require leaving the classroom for administrative roles in order to advance and earn more money.8 NCEE’s work was based on studying how other countries— particularly those at the top of international achievement tests—design their workforce. Despite the interest generated by this report (and the many that have followed), the idea was not widely adopted.

There have been some notable efforts to restructure the job of a teacher.

Public Impact’s Opportunity Culture project has been working for years to restructure schools so that great teachers reach more students.9 A recent taskforce convened by the Mississippi governor also recommended a system of progressive licenses for teachers that represent a career ladder, though changes to the everyday work of a teacher is less clear in that report.10 Teachers have long asked for better work conditions, and stress from poor conditions is actually the top reason teachers leave a particular school or the profession, even prior to the pandemic.11 In redesigning the teacher work day, teachers should be at the center of discussions and planning, especially in what tasks to reassign and to whom. Differentiated roles should also come with differentiated pay allowing those who take on more responsibilities to be compensated more.

Unless the state is willing to pay to expand the number of school personnel, creating new and different roles for educators will require rethinking how schools are staffed. Like the Opportunity Culture model, students may need to be assigned to teams of teachers, each with different responsibilities, rather than a single individual tasked with all jobs. To facilitate learning in this type of system, a common curriculum and assessment system, implemented with fidelity, is tantamount, as is making time in the regular school day for structured teacher collaboration, a promise that is far easier to keep with a longer school day.

Supporting STUDENTS Virtual Course Choice

Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, only a handful of Mississippi school districts had a one-to-one technology initiative—a program featuring a personal computing device for every student as well as established digital infrastructure, educational technology policies and procedures, and a dedicated budget for technology purchases.12 This proved a secondary disaster when schools were forced to shut their doors in spring 2020.

Students’ and teachers’ lack of devices and home connectivity as well as districts’ inexperience in delivering virtual content meant that few

students received any real instruction in the fourth quarter of 2019-2020.

In the absence of an established virtual program, many districts had few options aside from handing out paper learning packets and hoping for the best. It is no surprise, then, that several districts did not count grades for the fourth quarter of 2019-2020 and some even ended the year early.

Thankfully, though, the paucity of technology did not last long: by the end of the 2020 calendar year, every student in a public school in Mississippi had access to a one-to-one device.

Tucker, Marc. S. 2011. Standing on the Shoulders of Giants: An American Agenda for Education Reform. White Paper, Washington, D.C.: National Center on Education and the Economy. Accessed October 14, 2021. http://ncee.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/Standing-on-the-Shoulders-of-Giants-An-American-Agenda-for-Education-Reform.pdf.

9 See Public Impact’s Opportunity Culture model: https://www.opportunityculture.org/.

10 Mississippi Governor’s Education Human Capital Task Force. 2021. Addressing Mississippi’s Teacher Shortage: A Collaborative Action Plan. Taskforce Report, Jackson, MS: Southern Regional Education Board.

Accessed October 14, 2021. https://www.sreb.org/sites/main/files/file-attachments/2021_ms_teacher_report.pdf?1631116771.

11 Diliberti, Melissa Kay, Heather L. Schwartz, and David Grant. 2021. Stress Topped the Reasons Why Public School Teachers Quit, Even Before COVID-19. Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation. Accessed October 14, 2021. https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA1121-2.html.

12 https://www.mississippifirst.org/one-to-one/ 8

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This transformation is one of Mississippi’s few runaway success stories of the pandemic. It began with the legislature’s passage of the Equity in Distance Learning Act (SB 3044), which provided funding for Mississippi school districts to purchase one-to-one devices with just a 20% copay.13 The Mississippi Department of Education (MDE) then established the Mississippi Connects program to centralize ordering and increase purchasing power as well as streamline the process of distributing devices.14 On the district level, educators worked to ensure students had access to the internet to attend virtual classes, if necessary, and purchased new instructional materials and programs that would take advantage of the new devices. Though the effectiveness of these efforts varied by district, the fact is that, over the course of the 2020-2021 school year, district and state leaders set up—practically from scratch—the essential infrastructure for supporting virtual learning on a statewide scale.

try to use technology to fill the void with varying success. Two of these initiatives—the Global Teaching Project15 and the Digital Education Network16—work by connecting a classroom of students in one physical location to a certified teacher in another. A facilitator on site with the students provides supervision and support. This design means there must be enough interest within a school for a course to be offered because the on-site classroom must be staffed. Similarly, the Mississippi Online Course Approval process operated by MDE requires that school districts seek online course vendors and then apply for approval to offer the course to students.17 This model again places decision-making authority for access to courses in the hands of districts, which may not find offering an inperson or virtual course necessary for a variety of reasons.

We believe that what is missing is a true, statewide virtual course program, especially for higher-level and specialized courses. There has been a previous iteration of this idea in Mississippi. In 2006, the Mississippi The new devices are invaluable not only for schools providing only legislature established the Mississippi Virtual Public School (MVPS), but virtual learning but also in the event of temporary school closures due enrollment was limited to a very small number of students who could to outbreaks or inclement weather. Moving forward, we believe school districts will more routinely switch between in-person and virtual learning only take up to two courses per school year. The legislature directly funded the program, so the number of students was determined by the size of if schools must temporarily close for situations such as snow days or low the appropriation. Districts could also choose not to allow students to water pressure at school buildings. Schools will likely also become better at integrating technology within the regular classroom, and computerized participate. Today, this effort appears defunct.18 With much wider access to technology as well as broader interest in virtual courses than in 2006, testing will take less time now that students can test simultaneously we believe the time is right to relaunch a statewide virtual course program rather than by rotating through a small number of computer labs. In that allows students direct access to courses, even if their district does addition to these uses, access to a one-to-one device can serve another key purpose for an important group of students: allowing every Mississippi not want to participate. A re-established virtual course program should high school student to access higher-level or specialized coursework that is include dedicated staff, high-quality curriculum, and a clear framework for identifying the highest-need programming for Mississippi students. By currently unavailable to them. leveraging the digital infrastructure that stakeholders have painstakingly Finding great teachers for every higher-level or specialized course in every constructed over the last year and a half, we may be able to take an Mississippi district has proven difficult, especially for Mississippi’s small important step towards providing all Mississippi children equal access to and rural districts. Mississippi has had several initiatives in the past to advanced coursework.

Conclusion As the world reaches its new post-COVID normal, Mississippi has an opportunity to move public education forward before old patterns re-emerge. Adopting the three big ideas in this vision document would be a solid first step in developing the schools of tomorrow in ways that make education better for families, teachers, and students. Mississippi First looks forward to working with policymakers, educators, and families to make these ideas a reality.

Miss. Code Ann. § 37-68-1, et seq.

Mississippi Department of Education. “Mississippi Connects: Information for Districts.” Accessed October 14, 2021. https://www.mdek12.org/MSConnectsTech.

15 Global Teaching Project. “What We Do.” Accessed October 14, 2021. https://www.globalteachingproject.com/what-we-do/#model.

16 Mississippi Public Broadcasting. “Digital Education Network.” Accessed October 14, 2021. https://education.mpbonline.org/digital-learning/den/.

17 Mississippi Department of Education. “Mississippi Online Course Approval (MOCA).” Accessed October 14, 2021. https://www.mdek12.org/ESE/OCA. 18 MDE still includes MVPS in their digital course policy; however, the program does not appear to have accepted students in several years and is no longer listed on the MDE website. See MDE’s policy: https://www.mdek12.org/sites/default/files/documents/MBE/State%20Board%20Policy/Chapter%2056/rules_56.1.pdf.

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