Traditional schools have it all wrong. They believe that time should be the constant and the amount of learning should be variable. Instead, they should turn that around. Learning should be the constant and time should be variable.
Witness the school day that begins at 7:55 A.M. and ends at 3:10 P.M. – everyday.
Witness the school year that begins August 26th – not August 21st – and ends May 29th.
To make matters worse, young learners who demonstrate reading, writing, and problem-solving improvement during times outside of the school day or the school year often are not acknowledged by the traditional system since that learning happened outside of the school day or school year.
So you can understand my interest in learning organizations that use time differently than traditional K-12 schools.
A few weeks ago, The 74 reported on a KIPP charter school that used time differently to keep kids learning during the dark days of COVID-19:
“Rachel Hodge worked as a housekeeper at a hospital and was earning an online degree in social work when schools shut their doors due to COVID. Spending hours in front of a laptop with a 5-year-old just didn’t fit into the picture.”
“But in the fall of 2020, her daughter Vanessa was set to start kindergarten at KIPP Upper Roseville Academy in Newark, New Jersey. With Hodge working and school remote, Vanessa spent her days with a babysitter, who care for multiple kids and struggled to manage the technology for virtual learning.”
“By November, Vanessa was one of 24 kindergartners in Newark’s KIPP charter network listed as missing from remote school.”
“That’s when KIPP staff created the Evening Learning Program, a condensed school day that accommodated parents’ upended schedules. The program, which ran weeknights from 5:30 to 8 P.M., remained in place until the end of the school year.”
…
“As Hodge worked on her own assignments from Rutgers University, kindergarten teacher Meredith Eger led Vanessa and classmates in songs and games, and through the reading and math they’d missed since August.”
“’It was fun and it was kind of weird,’ Vanessa, now 9, recalls. ‘When class was over, I didn’t have to pack up, because all my stuff was at home.’”
“The program is a rare example of a school that moved quickly to keep children from missing out on their first year of school – a critical transition period in which they typically start developing academic and social skills. At a time when hundreds of thousands of parents struggled to balance work and Zoom, or held their children out of school until first grade, KIPP’s after-hours program offered families some consistency in the midst of turmoil.”
“But nationally, many students who missed out on a normal kindergarten are still feeling the lingering effects of that lost year. Research released this month documented how the pandemic’s youngest learners experienced significant declines in general knowledge, cognitive development, and language and social skills compared with their peers before COVID. Academically, these students are still performing below pre-pandemic math and reading levels.”
“Five years later, Vanessa is one of 11 night-school kindergartners who still attends KIPP Newark schools. She ‘writes up a storm.’ Eger said, and often draws during lunch. Others prefer math. Parents notice their kids sometimes keep to themselves at home – a preference they blame on a shortage of playtime with peers during lockdowns. The educators who ran the program, which served students up to third grade, enjoy a special bond with the kids they nurtured through that trying period, grabbing hugs in the hallway or cafeteria when they can.”
“They were falling drastically behind,’ said Rebecca Fletcher, the charter network’s director of school operations. ‘It was a bright spot in such a dark time.’”
“Thomas Dee, an education professor at Stanford University who tracked the sharp decline in kindergarten enrollment during school closures called KIPP’s night school ‘a creative way to meet the needs of parents during the crisis and one that wasn’t common in traditional public schools.’ Such flexibility may have also kept families from pursuing options, like pods or private schools that were in-person, he said.”
“KIPP leaders didn’t compare the performance of the evening kindergartners to students who logged in during the day, making it difficult to measure student outcomes. But the program was born of necessity, Fletcher said: The abbreviated school day was better than no kindergarten at all.”
“’They weren’t coming to school,’ she said. ‘It was about meeting families where they were.’”
…
Meeting families where they were – and are. Something our current traditional K-12 system does not do well, especially when it comes to black, brown, and poor learners and their families.
Negotiation around learning time is a missing piece to a successful traditional school. That’s why, if the traditional system is unwilling to do more of what KIPP Upper Roseville Academy did with their COVID kindergartners, then we must explore other learning organizations and their commitment to use time differently.
Time should be the variable. Learning should be the constant.
Til tomorrow. SVB
A Better Path to Learning 
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