Sunday’s edition of the Boston Globe Magazine had a great cover story about Massachusetts’ first-in-the-nation Extended Learning Time (ELT) program, which is designed to allow public schools that opt in to receive state funds for the development and implementation of plans to lengthen their school days. The article details the promise and problems associated with such a radical innovation in the education reform movement and interviews administrators, teachers, and students for their perspectives on ELT.
Following up on the article, Chris Gabrieli participated in a chat on Boston.com to further discuss the issues surrounding the ELT initiative in Massachusetts, which enjoys the strong support of one-time primary rival Governor Deval Patrick and Senator Ted Kennedy, who is chairman of the Senate’s education committee. It was Gabrieli’s Massachusetts 2020 that spearheaded the legislation to create the ELT pilot program, which is now expanding to include even more schools, thanks to increased funding.
It’s inspiring, as a life-long resident of Massachusetts, to have our commonwealth take the lead on yet another major issue and to serve again as a potential model for the nation. I encourage you all to read the article and the transcript.
I haven’t read it yet but I know we kept it around. My wife’s school is switching to ELT next year. We both supported the concept in theory, but what she seeing a lot of resistance and no longer seems to think its a good idea. I think the main thing going on is the administration is being like “We’re doing this” but then not explaining to the teachers how it’s going to work.
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Logisticly, it is gonna be tough: the current 6 hour day means a 8 to 10 hour day for the teachers; make the students all there for 8 hours, and your pushing that up to probably 10 hour days every day. My wife’s at the end of her second year and has three years left to get her masters: the education courses she’s starting this summer, but the chemistry courses in the program are only offered during the semester. Say the school day ends at 4 now, she has to finish out the day and plan for the next and probably gets out at 5, and then somehow gets from Framingham to Boston for a 5:30 class?
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I think ELT is a good idea and makes sense to do, but the changeover (a) has to be done right, and (b) is going to be difficult regardless.
You’re right in that the transition has to be done right. All stakeholders have to be brought in on the process, including parents and teachers, in order to get necessary insight as to how to make ELT work and to ensure that all parties “buy in”.
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Your concern about professional development is interesting. I imagine that school systems and higher ed will need to work something out in order to allow ELT educators access to courses, be it through more weekend, summer, or online courses.
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As to planning, does that school provide planning time during the day? That’s supposed to be one of the key selling points for teachers: more work done at school means less work to do after school or at home.
Thanks. I read the Q&A with Gabrieli and it was terrific — he is a great thinker. He’s been at this a long time via Mass 2020, his nonprofit.
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Gabrieli also thanks Governor Patrick for embracing the idea, instead of pushing him away as a political rival.
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Next year, several Boston teachers who work in ELT schools will break the $100,000 per year barrier. That may be interesting from a psychological perspective.
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Our charter public school in Boston has a mega-extended day. All kids and teachers go until 5pm. The struggling kids go til 7.30pm.
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Alas, the state doesn’t pay our teachers the extra $15,000 per year extra to work more hours like in the ELT schools, but it’s okay, our teachers signed up for the longer work day. In the more traditional schools, it’s a hard enough sell (as Alex points out above) as is; it would be impossible without extra pay.
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Parents love it. These kids mostly live in Mattapan, Dorchester, Hyde Park, and Roxbury. The last Boston police chief told me the most dangerous hours in these neighborhoods are 2pm to 5pm, because teens from most schools are out with nothing to do, and few adults are around. So ELT can help urban communities stay safe, too.
Part of me feels that this is the halfway step to the point where DYS, DSS, and the DOE are all rolled into one agency, maybe the Department of Children. Given the amount of health, psychological, and financial support given to children and families through schools, I wouldn’t be surprised that in 20 years most schools look like this, with even more non-instructional staff and set-up.
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The idea of more time is a great opportunity, and allows lots of room open to more engaging ideas that bring the lessons home. It also leaves a vulnerability to replacing the spontaniety and creativity that mark American culture and entrepeneurship with fact-throttling and memorization.
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One quibble with the article, however — am I to believe that the author couldn’t find a single staff or child who disagreed with the longer day? Or simply that giving that section a voice would ruin the article?
So far, the focus has been on getting ELT set up in schools in socioeconomically distressed areas. While the positive impact of having children do their schoolwork at school and have access to after-school programs onsite are big plusses, I do hope that schools don’t turn into a clearinghouse for social services. Should that happen, it could stigmatize the initiative and establishing ELT programs in school districts that don’t share the same challenges but would still benefit from it from a purely educational perspective.
I don’t mean to say that ELT is a stalking horse for something else, but it is sold and provided as a way to deal with social problems. Even the Globe article spends as much time on how the cops police don’t have to deal kids them on the street as on grade improvement.
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It just seems that the government is increasingly taking over the role of de facto parenting in so many cases, particularly in economically depressed areas. Since schools are the main point of governmental contact with children, I fully anticipating things morphing in the direction given current trends. I’m not saying soon, but in our lifetimes.
…nobody is willing to admit that proposals such as these are nothing more than taxpayer-funded day care.