Education Reads to Start Your Week, June 22nd

Waste Fraud and Abuse, My Room is Infected By Jesus, Enrollment Roller Coaster, Eroding 5-day school week

Author

James Shanahan
June 22, 2026

Programming Note: Summertime begins officially in the Scholastic Alchemy household so posting will not follow its usual schedule. Eventually there will be camps and activities that let me stay on track but that’s not until a bit into July. Personal writing, like what I do here at Scholastic Alchemy, will have to take a necessary back seat. Apologies in advance.

-James

Waste, Fraud, and Abuse

Frequent readers of mine know that I think the broad and minimally regulated voucher programs we see popping up nationwide are ripe for abuse. The Have You Heard podcast takes a look at the federal voucher program about to kick off that was authorized last year in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. It turns out, this program could be larger than all current federal spending on K-12 education, create a huge tax liability, and has almost no strings attached to prevent misuse of the funds.

I don’t have a lot of my own commentary to add here. Just go listen to it. You can read more about it here.

My Room is Infected By Jesus

Matt Brady shares what is probably one of the best posts I’ve read all year anywhere. He walks us through his classroom’s culture and how he and his students meme and play all while doing physics and weathering the ups and downs of a school year. I’ve shared it widely with friends and everyone agrees it’s just an awesome post. I mean, how can you not enjoy hearing about a class where something like this is possible:

The ride was an extreme Ferris wheel attached to a giant cross. The wheel spun fast enough to launch riders into the air. During their flight, they’d pass through pearly gates and land safely in cloud-shaped padding.

Naturally, it was called Jesus Take the Wheel.

I gave everyone printed copies of their posters. They passed them around, showed them off, and laughed.

It was a good day.

Unfortunately, the project wasn’t over. They still had to build scale models.

Try doing that with iReady.

Enrollment Roller Coaster

This look is only possible because Washington takes a census every month whereas every other state counts kids once, at the beginning of the school year. Aldeman get the questions right:

The obvious question is what happens to these students. Given the rebound each fall, the graph likely reflects a combination of family mobility, transfers to private schools or homeschooling, and dropout and re-engagement patterns. States that rely on a single fall count may want to understand whether they experience similar within-year declines and how those patterns affect funding and staffing decisions.

I don’t think there’s much we can do about transfers or family mobility stuff but, having taught, I think the engagement patterns are probably a bigger picture here. As we’ve learned from stubbornly high chronic absenteeism nationwide, families’ relationships with schools are simply weaker than they used to be. In my experience, it’s way more common today for families not to know when school begins or ends or to have much interaction with schools. Instead of that one kid showing up a week or two after school started even though he’s not a transfer or whatever, it’s five or six kids. They just didn’t know the school year started. Sometimes they’ll say a parent tried to drop them off a few weeks earlier only to find the school was still closed for the summer. I’m not saying this to be harsh toward those families, but I do feel like it’s a trend that has increased, even as schools have more ways of getting in touch than ever.

Eroding 5-day school week

The policy debate over time in school has focused on the four-day school week. It is an arrangement formally adopted in approximately 850 districts, where schools operate for four slightly longer days per week instead of the traditional five, providing regular three-day weekends to students and teachers.

When a district makes the decision to shutter its school doors every Friday or Monday, everyone recognizes that a consequential choice has been made. Researchers study its effects. Parents debate its burdens. School boards are asked to justify the tradeoffs.

But there is another, quieter policy in play that is reducing students’ regular access to school. Districts keep the label of a traditional five-day calendar while repeatedly closing schools to students on otherwise ordinary weekdays. Districts use various terms to describe these closures, including teacher workdays, professional development days, and clerical days, among other terms of art. But they all mean the same thing for parents: a day their child won’t receive instruction and will instead need to be cared for outside of school.

Unlike the healthy debate that accompanies the switch to a four-day school week, this kind of school calendar fragmentation has received little national attention. It deserves more.

I’ve thought a bit about this in the past, but it was in terms of schools closing because of natural disasters. I wondered what it would mean if we thought of schools being “chronically closed” in the same way that we think of children being “chronically absent.” Egalite’s post includes reference to some calculations about what’s possible in schools that too routinely take days off from instruction.

Kraft and Novicoff document that the typical American public school is in session for about 179 days and 1,231 total hours each year. Yet students attending schools at the 90th percentile of annual time receive nearly 200 more hours of school per year than students at the 10th percentile—a difference equivalent to more than two additional years of school over the course of a child’s K–12 education (see “Time for School,” research, Winter 2025).

When put this way, the cumulative effects are possibly huge. An additional two years, even if spread over thirteen years, is a lot of instructional time. We spend so much effort fretting over learning loss but I’d love to know how differences in instructional time may impact kids over the long term. Egalite also touches on something that I think a lot of teachers have experienced and know to be true.

What exactly is accomplished on teacher workdays? How much is devoted to mandatory training, collaborative planning, grading, or parent communication? What evidence suggests that closing schools to students on 10 weekdays during the instructional term produces benefits sufficient to justify the lost continuity and family disruption? Why does Wake require substantially more such days than the five largest school systems in the country? These are the type of questions we routinely ask about other education policies that affect students’ opportunity to learn.

It’s practically a truism among teachers that professional development days, while a welcome reprieve, are almost useless in practice. Time for planning, collaborating, and grading are more practically useful, though. While I don’t totally disagree, I also wonder how much instructional time is spent on things that aren’t content or part of the curriculum. For example, test prep. Back in 2016, teachers were surveyed and reported an average of 14 days spent on test prep (those would be testing strategies, not content or curriculum) and another 12 days spent on taking district mandated exams. 26 days. Basically, a month of instructional time. Which means if we compare it over the same K-12 time-scale we’re talking about roughly a year of instructional time spend on test prep and test taking.

Now, that was a decade ago and changes in policy may mean there is less test prep happening. A recent survey of students included in the NAEP found that, for example, only about half of 8th graders reported that their teachers spent time preparing them for state reading tests “to a large extent.

source

So, maybe that average is only 20 days now spent on testing and test prep? Point is, we find lots of ways to spend time that is nominally part of the “school year” but is not spent teaching and learning. Maybe those are test prep days spent on dubious testing strategies and pep rallies. Maybe those are PD days where teachers tune out whoever is presenting the next big fad that gets abandoned a year later. They all deserve attention, but do they receive it?

Thanks for reading!

-James