Summer School #5

Welcome to Scholastic Alchemy! This is mostly a blog where I mostly write about education. Usually, I post some links and commentary about them on Mondays and then later in the week I write something longer about a topic of my choosing. But, it’s summer and we all know that the rhythm and dance of educators’ lives shift in the summer months. Our time becomes more fungible but somehow still can’t fit everything in. Maybe it’s taking on more childcare duties as our own kids are out of school. Maybe it’s finally time to read all those articles and books that have been piling up or to pound out chapters of a long-neglected manuscript. Or, maybe, you’re teaching summer school. Summer school posts are going to be irregularly timed, more personal and reflective, and a bit more casual, befitting the vibes of summer.

My various feeds have been filled with back to school posts for the last six weeks or so which brings up one of my favorite complexities of schooling in the United States: regional variation. Even something as simple as “when does school begin?” is different from state to state and even within states in some cases. Here in New York City, school begins on Sept. 10th. I think that may be the latest start date in the country. My friends back in Georgia, as well as some in the Southwest started their return to school teacher workdays and trainings in July. One teacher I know had kids-in-seats on July 15th. Her district’s been “back to school” already for over a month and she was at school a week before that for pre-planning and PD.

Back in 2023, the Pew Research Center put together some data on school start times and showed that they are clustered by region.

They offer some potential explanations about why this is so do read the whole thing, but none of the explanations seems to cover everything. The late start date in NYC is the product of union negotiations, for example. The reason I’m bringing this up, though, is because start dates are a great way to exemplify just how different schools can be from place to place in the US. This also brings me to the topic of today’s summer school post: the random counterproductive stuff that schools make teachers do before the start of the school year.

Team building gone wrong

The big theme of these summer school posts is that you learn a lot outside of the regular school year and the mandatory “planning” week leading into my second year teaching was no different. Two years before he resigned for skimming money off the athletics budget, my school’s principal held a mandatory two-day athletic competition for all teachers and staff during the week that our district described as pre-semester planning. He had done something similar the previous year but this time it was organized, competitive, and mandatory. This year, Principal Dr. M explained, each department was competing for school supplies, some gift cards to local restaurants, and “my affection.” The way he saw it, our departments weren’t cohesive and supporting one another. What we needed was team-building and a competition between departments was going to provide it. There was an obstacle course, a sprint, knockout basketball (played in front of the entire staff), a football target practice challenge, and some kind of construction challenge in the engineering department that I never got to do.

Looking back, it’s almost funny to me that the team building activities were all actually individual challenges. None of it actually required us to collaborate and work together as a team, just perform as individuals. Then again, this was the age of merit-pay so teachers whose students performed better than their peer teachers and their students were rewarded. Collaboration was literally disincentivized. This was a school, by the way, that was still a strong performer academically and had just a few years earlier been one of the best high schools in the state.

Nobody was happy about this and one thing you have to understand about the staff of a large high school is that there are a lot of different ages and abilities represented. Some of these people are old. Some are sick. Some are just not in shape. A social studies teacher I knew complained because he had suffered a heart attack the previous fall and wasn’t suppose to exert himself. One of my direct coworkers was a recent cancer survivor and wasn’t really in any kind of condition to do anything athletic. Principal Dr. M. said he understood and that we should all just do our best to be there for our teams. Unexpectedly, the first person to go down was a young English teacher who was training for a triathlon. The first event, knockout basketball played in the gym in full view of the entire staff, proved to be a kind of ritual humiliation. We rotated through based on some numbering system to that members of each department were brought out on the court to take two shots from the free-throw line. You only had to make one to stay in and return to the line.

Anyway, you could tell Principal Dr. M hadn’t really thought about how long it would take to work through the 200-odd staff at our large suburban high school. At some point he knocked it down to only a single shot. I actually did pretty well considering I hadn’t shot a basketball for at least five years. I finally missed on the last round, ensuring our special education department would not win that team building exercise. On my way up into the bleachers to sit with my team, someone behind me on the court screamed out and the teachers in the stands went dead-silent. I turned to see an English teacher, my assigned team teacher for that year, writhing on the ground holding his leg. Like most of us, Mr. S. was dressed casually in jeans and regular shoes because none of us were given a heads-up about needing to wear more athletic clothing. When he took his shot from the free-throw line, his jeans got under his heel and he slipped, falling back and tearing his Achilles tendon. I didn’t know it then but my new team teacher would be out on disability for most of the fall semester.

Principal Dr. M. hopped on the mic and sent all of the teams out to compete in the remaining events while Mr. S. was taken to the hospital. Needless to say, participation in the remaining events was half-hearted and the whole thing was called off. We all went back to our rooms to do the things we actually wanted to do, which was unpack, organize, and plan for the kids who were showing up in a week.

That time I was volunteered to do PD

An email from Principal Dr. M. arrived a short time later announcing that instead of team building, tomorrow would be a professional development session — mandatory, of course — and that he’d be sending the details to our departments. A few minutes later, my department chair popped her head in and told me that I would be teaching the professional development the next day and that I had to get the title and summary of the presentation to Principal Dr. M. by 4pm. Apparently each department was required to create a PD for the next day and then teachers could choose which ones to go to.

How long is the PD supposed to be? We weren’t told. How many people would attend? We didn’t know. Where would I be teaching it? This mattered because my “self-contained” special education classroom would only seat about 12. Nobody knew anything other than that a title and summary had to be sent to Principal Dr. M. so he could put a flyer and schedule together. Remember, too, I was a new teacher. This was the start of my second year. What accumulated wisdom did I have for my veteran colleagues? Not much. I ended up doing a lesson about affixes and using kids understanding of the nature of words to diagnose their capabilities in reading and writing.

The day turned out to be four 45-minute sessions with 15 minutes breaks in between and a hour for lunch in the middle. Again, nobody was happy with this arrangement because the only thing teachers want to do prior to the beginning of the school year is set up their rooms and plan for the school year. Everybody knows that professional development is always a waste of time and it was even more of a waste this time because people like me were being thrown into the role to provide PD to fulfill some mandate that was itself a panic-response to a totally different bad idea that had resulted in a workplace injury. Even so, I was also kind of mad that I would not get to attend any sessions because I was required to deliver my PD session all day. If anyone could have learned something from colleagues, it would have been the new, inexperienced teacher who had no business running a PD session.

The two morning sessions went fine. My first session was actually really great because the whole foreign language department showed up and we had a fun time talking about students’ concepts of language and how those impact their learning. At lunch we learned that Principal Dr. M. wasn’t even in the building that day because he was down at the district’s central office explaining to the district’s lawyers why one of his staff members was now a massive potential lawsuit. While not officially cancelled, nobody attended either of my afternoon sessions and I had a chance to get a little work done.

Regional Variation

I’d like to say that this was a unique experience of professional development for me but it wasn’t. While teaching (or even student teaching) in Georgia, I never attended a professional development session that wasn’t taught by a teacher at that school. They were always internal and always seemed to be forced upon that teacher. You could depend on everyone’s time being wasted like this during teacher workdays and pre-planning days before the fall and spring semesters. In fact, the only time I remember this not being the case was when the state rolled out their merit pay system and we all gathered in the auditorium one summer to listen to someone from the DOE explain how it would work. I simply assumed this was the case everywhere because I’d never seen any different and nobody I worked with seemed to think anything else was possible.

It turns out, though, this may be the product of regional differences. When I moved to New York in 2016, I was shocked to find an entire infrastructure of coaches, staff developers, and many options for PD. Universities ran whole institutes on reading and writing, for example. My first explanation for this was simply that some states spend a lot more money on education and this allows them to pay for these kids of services. That is, I think, at least partly true. Certainly money was always tight back in Georgia in a way that forced schools and teachers to do a lot of DIY curriculum, professional development, and even policy analysis.

Still, that may not explain everything. Something I’ve noticed recently is that there is now a large cohort of consultants and PD providers operating in the South that wasn’t there ~15 years ago. I’m not totally sure why this is the case but I do have some speculation. I think it descends from legal reforms. Whether it was NCLB or Common Core or some of the more recent laws around reading and phonics instruction, I think that these changes precipitated the need for a specialized class of consultants, coaches, and developers to come and show districts and their teachers how to comply. This is expensive! Instead of using money, public money, for curriculum materials, physical improvements, or to pay staff, a district is sending it to some consultancy company and I’m not sure if districts have any recourse should a consultant or company’s work be shoddy or counterproductive. After all, teachers receiving external PD also sometimes complain that it’s useless and that they’d rather have that time to do their actual jobs. Standardization and the broad adoption of reading laws may have flattened the difference in PD between regions.

You also have to add in the now-expiring COVID relief money from the feds. Districts used that money to staff up, buy tech, buy interventions like tutoring, and to buy PD. Districts were a bit more flush than usual for about three years and some of that money probably created demand for more PD and more consultants. It’ll be interesting to see if that business becomes a bit harder now that those funds are all gone and districts nationwide are in the hard position of cutting staff. The loss of federal funds may see a reemergence of regional differences and finding differences reemerge. Given the above, maybe it all remains ambiguous?

I think back to that second summer’s failed team building and teaching my first PD session often. I learned some important lessons about school leadership in just two days and it’s left me with a bad view of school leaders ever since. That’s probably not fair and I’ve met some lovely principals since that time but I always instinctively begin from a place of suspicion and skepticism. I’ve facilitated and taught plenty of PD over the years but don’t really believe in that modality any more today than I did back then. I think the best version of PD is one that happens in a place away from school, not during the school year or during pre-planning, and is attended voluntarily by teachers who are interested in being there and growing their practice. If a teacher doesn’t want to attend a PD session, don’t make them. If they aren’t interested in changing their practice, then it’s not of use. Let them get back to the work they want to be doing. If they need to change their practice and refuse, then you need a different intervention anyway. And, if you want people to work together as a team then give them something to collaborate and work on as a team.