Fort Worth mayor wants to extend school year to help students catch up. Would it work?
With weeks left before the end of the school year, academic leaders in Fort Worth and nationwide are considering ways to use the summer months to help students who fell behind make up the ground they lost.
Fort Worth Mayor Betsy Price has proposed one idea: lengthen the school year and use the extra time to help struggling students catch up.
But some teachers and parents question how useful an extended school year would be. And with classes already scheduled to continue into June, more classroom time could be a tough sell to teachers and students who are ready to be done with a difficult year.
“Just to say that, in a year when everyone’s already exhausted, ‘let’s go a few more weeks,’ might be tough,” said Stephen Waddell, a visiting professor in the University of North Texas’ College of Education.
Fort Worth school leaders plan tailored recovery
During her final State of the City address in February, Price said school districts should extend their calendars to help students recover from the academic effects of the pandemic, even if it meant keeping students and teachers in classrooms well into the summer.
Fort Worth school officials haven’t announced a plan to address pandemic learning loss. But in a statement, district officials said Superintendent Kent Scribner agreed with Price’s proposal and had been working toward lengthening the school day and extending the school calendar. District officials have said they plan to work with teachers to tailor recovery efforts to individual students’ needs rather than a one-size-fits-all program.
“We know that our students who are in greatest need benefit most when they receive high quality instruction from our best teachers,” the district said.
The Fort Worth school district is scheduled to wrap up its school year weeks later than usual because of the district’s delayed start date. The district’s last day of school is scheduled for June 18.
Balanced calendar offers possible solution
Waddell said there’s no question that schools need to find ways to help students who have fallen behind. But Waddell, a former superintendent of the Lewisville school district, said school leaders need to consider whether they’d be able to make up enough ground during an extended semester to make it worthwhile. He has his doubts.
“I don’t think just doing an at-large summer school, the way summer schools are usually done, is the answer,” he said.
Even if the district doesn’t extend the school calendar, teachers and students will be exhausted by the time the school year ends in June, Waddell said. As concerned as parents may be about their kids losing ground academically, many won’t want them in school for three or four extra weeks, he said, and parents of virtual students may not be willing or able to help them through a few extra weeks of online classes at the end of the year. Extending the year could affect teacher and student morale and undo some of the good the district is trying to do, he said.
An alternative solution could be to start school earlier in the fall and move the district from the traditional school calendar to a continuous learning calendar, Waddell said. Also known as a balanced calendar, the model includes shorter summer breaks offset by longer breaks during the year. Supporters say a shorter summer break leaves less time for summer learning loss. And Waddell said the district could use breaks for targeted tutoring and other programs to help low-performing students catch up.
Waddell saw how continuous learning calendars worked while he served as the superintendent of the Tuloso-Midway school district in Corpus Christi. Teachers and students weren’t as burned out at the end of the school year, and there were fewer discipline problems, he said. There’s often some pushback when districts try the model, but it eases over time, he said.
“I’ve found that once people get used to that, they really like it,” Waddell said.
District leaders should also consider how important it is that students make up the ground they’ve lost as soon as possible, Waddell said. For younger students, it might make more sense to think about academic recovery as a developmental process that lasts two to three years rather than something that should be accomplished all at once, he said.
Whatever solution the district comes up with, officials would do well to talk to teachers and staff before making a decision, he said. Administrators could offer two or three options and allow faculty and staff to vote, he said. By giving district employees a say in the matter, officials could get greater buy-in for whatever plan they eventually pick, he said.
Extending school year ‘dumb idea,’ says Fort Worth teacher
Some Fort Worth teachers are already registering their displeasure with the idea of extending the school year.
“That is a dumb idea,” said Ale Checka, a seventh grade English teacher at Applied Learning Academy.
Adding two or three weeks to the school year could work as a supplement to what happens during the rest of the year, Checka said. But it doesn’t do anything to help students who have barely participated in school since the beginning of the pandemic, she said. Those students are the ones at greatest risk of long-term damage, she said, and two or three extra weeks isn’t enough time to make up the ground they’ve lost.
The idea of extending the school year comes out of a basic misunderstanding of how schools and learning work, Checka said. Policymakers want fast and cheap solutions for education, she said. The problem, she said, is that those solutions don’t work very well.
Students learn best when they learn slowly, Checka said. Exposing students to skills and concepts repeatedly over long periods of time may not look like the most efficient option, she said, but it’s the best way to help students master those skills and concepts. Checka compared it to a parent trying to help a toddler put on shoes before leaving home. It would be much would and more efficient for the parent to scoop up the toddler, put the shoes on and walk out the door. But the toddler will never learn to put on shoes that way, she said.
A better option would have been to suspend exams that aren’t mandated by state or federal law, Checka said. Those tests took away valuable, productive class time, she said. Suspending them and giving teachers more time to teach would have been a better option than tacking more time onto the end of the school year, she said.
“I’m not getting the month back that they already took from me,” she said. “That time is gone. That is a book that I could have read with students.”
There are also practical issues around making sure teachers are available to teach extra days. Teachers’ contracts are based on a defined number of days. If district officials wanted to extend the school year, they would need to modify contracts for every teacher between now and mid-June. Checka doubts that’s feasible.
Checka said she thinks some of the concerns about students falling behind are overblown. The pandemic has affected students in nearly every country in the world, she said. In the United States, students who were in school during COVID-19 will compete for college admissions and jobs against other students who were also affected by the pandemic, she said, so many of those effects will even out. Many of her students will finish seventh grade behind where students in previous years were, she said. But if policymakers are worried about that trend, she thinks they should get out of teachers’ way and let them do their jobs.
This year has been emotionally difficult for every student, she said. Some students have lost parents to COVID-19. Many more have lost grandparents. Adding days to the calendar wouldn’t do anything to fix those challenges, she said. It also wouldn’t account for the fact that the pandemic has affected students in drastically different ways, she said. Those students who have barely participated will need intensive, targeted help that will take more than two or three weeks to deliver, she said. Other students may not need any interventions at all, she said.
“There are plenty of kids who need a summer break way, way, way more than they need more class time,” Checka said.
Federal dollars could support recovery plan
School districts’ efforts to recover from the pandemic could get a boost from a new round of federal stimulus spending. The American Rescue Plan, which President Joe Biden signed into law on March 11, provides nearly $130 billion to school districts nationwide. The Fort Worth school district can expect to receive about $283 million, according to estimates from the education advocacy nonprofit Raise Your Hand Texas.
Districts are required to spend at least 20% of the money they receive on “evidence-based interventions” to address learning loss. The law mentions extended school year programs, along with summer learning, extended school days and after-school programs as possible options. A growing number of researchers point to another option — frequent, intensive, small-group tutoring programs — as a more effective way to help students make up the ground they’ve lost.
But in order for stimulus dollars to support students, they first must make their way to local school districts. State lawmakers withheld previous rounds of stimulus money intended for schools to offset anticipated budget cuts. The current stimulus package includes a provision requiring states to maintain support for K-12 and higher education as a condition of receiving education funding. U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona may grant waivers to that requirement.
Bob Popinski, director of policy for Raise Your Hand Texas, said the group is calling on lawmakers to move money from the stimulus package along to local school districts. He said he was “fairly optimistic” that at least some portion of that money would make it to school districts.
“This was meant for public education,” Popinski said. “It should flow to public education.”
Parents question extended school year
Corey Bearden has a son at Paschal High School and a daughter at McLean Middle School. They are back at school in person. This year has been challenging for them, he said, but their grades are good. He doesn’t think it makes sense to extend the school year for every student, whether they have ground to make up or not.
“I think it’s a horrible idea, to be honest,” Bearden said. “We’ve already extended the school year to the middle of June.”
Bearden said he recognizes that there are students who need extra help this year. As COVID-19 case counts continue to decline and more people receive the vaccine, he’d prefer to see the district get struggling students back into the classroom.
Lizzie Maldonado’s 7-year-old son is in Teaching to Academic Potential, a special program for autistic students in the Fort Worth school district. Maldonado’s son is nonverbal, and remote learning has been a challenge, Maldonado said. When he’s at school in person, his teacher doesn’t expect him to be able to sit still and focus on a single thing for long periods — something that’s difficult for most children, and even more so for autistic children, Maldonado said. But his remote classes mostly consist of his teacher and other students talking back and forth to each other through Google Classroom. That format, combined with anything else that might be going on at home, make it hard for him to stay engaged, she said.
Despite those challenges, Maldonado and her husband decided to keep their son at home through the end of the year. The sensory issues that often come with autism make it difficult for him to keep a mask on, she said. She also wants to wait until a larger percentage of people, including most teachers, are fully vaccinated before sending him back to school in person.
But Maldonado said she doesn’t think the district should extend the school year into the summer. District leaders need to understand how the trauma students experienced over the past year has affected their mental health, she said. She thinks extending the school year would only add more pressure to what has already been a stressful year. She thinks it’s unreasonable to hold students to normal academic standards at a time when everyone — both children and adults — is dealing with a global catastrophe.
“The whole planet is experiencing a crisis at the same time,” Maldonado said. “It’s a collective crisis.”
