Extended Learning Time - The End of Afterschool?

Friday November 5th was the Extended Learning Time Summit, a rather lavish affair of color brochures, video screens, "A list" guests and hotel amenities at a time when budgets are constricting for youth development and resources for community-based programs are being increasingly strained.

As Paul Reville, Secratary of Education for the Commonwealth said, the point of the summit was to achieve the simple goal of extending the school day until 4 PM - or 90 minutes per day assuming the existing school calendar and move beyond an "America's agrarian past, one that made sense when students had to plant and harvest crops but that is ill-suited for the demands of the 21st century" forgetting the creation of high school (c. 1890) junior high school (c. 1910) middle school (c. 1950), and of course centralization of schools that started about 1900 and continued well into the 1950s already broke down the regional system and mechanized schooling for the good of factory life and the wars of the last century. Nevertheless, this flaw in rhetoric, bundled into this push for "more time" was a host of other educational reforms such as examining the structure of teacher planning time as well as how subjects are taught. These school reforms under the guise of "time" are perhaps a reaction to what may people see as a failure of the entire system of public education, but when hasn't "school reform" been a rallying cry. At least since Plato uttered "...compulsory learning never sticks in the mind." up to and blowing past Ronald Regan's A Nation At Risk and crashing in a bundle at NCLB and our current state of education where we are asking our children of today to quickly invent us a valid economy.

Whether ELT is a valid "reform" is a discussion for another venue. Time and again, the speakers at the ELT Summit called out "naysayers" and "traditional thinkers" reminiscent of Spiro Agnew's rally against "nattering nabobs of negativity" - and we all know how that turned out... So, the matter is not to dissuade the school establishment on what reforms to take, but what reforms take into account the needs of various communities and the good work of over an hundred years of youth development organizations and institutions. Will ELT create that bridge to learning that can be a collaboration between the sanctioned educational system and that of informal learning, exploration, and the unique developmental setting of Out-of-School programs?

In the current manifestation of ELT, there is no clear opportunities for community-based programs. In the presentation The Power of Partnership: A Strategic Approach to engaging Multiple Partners in and ELT School, there was a very clear understanding as how a school extends its day 90 minutes - engage the union, the teachers, the community, etc. There was much said about how to talk to providers and "include them" however, they for the most part had to bring their own funding to the table while the school receives funding from secure and relatively stable channels - the state and federal government.

So, what kind of partnership is this when one party is relying on soft money, is seen as not being "as competent in group management as teachers" or needs to reorder itself according to the "rules of the school" because OST providers "need to closely align school objectives with what they do"? Perhaps here "partnership" is not the "traditional thinkers" sort of that of equals but rather a "civil union" of lessor equals.

ELT demands of its partners a "seamless day." Yet there is not seamless funding. The school gets ELT money for the extended day. The district could use the money for partnerships. However, from what was said at the session, the school will "provide financial support only when [the district] can." Does "when I can" make sense for the survival of community programs and the competencies they bring to working with children and youth? Is this a sustainable aspect of an ELT plan that has "community partnerships" as a highlight of the strategy yet appears to leave their existence to the chances of the capriciousness of private support? Have we not seen enough of what wisdom an entirely private market brings to bear?

It may also be that the effects of this relationship take a few cycles to play out. The partners examined in the session were all coming to work with the school in question with their own private support. One organization said this partnership saved $35K by removing fees of operating within the school building but did not answer the question as to how the organization made up for the extra staff time to extend into the school day or what other ways the budget was impacted on a yearly basis. The other represented organization appeared more solvent, with a 2 millions dollar operating budget - however, many in the philanthropy community say that there will be a "seismic shift" for organizations with operational budgets under 5 millions and the staff are majority volunteers which may either be impacted by more people having to return to work or any certain instabilities built into the reliance of volunteers to provide consistent youth development. So, does the district's "aggressive grant writing" make up for this need or does the district move on to another set of community partners when the resources of the first set have been exhausted?

Finally, will ELT burn itself out as so many "reforms" have in the past thirty years? It is an expensive solution to extend the school day 90 minutes. It does not seem to have really involved community partners in the funding streams that exist nor the channels intended to ensure that "enrichment time" is used for actual enrichment rather than further traditional academics. It is interesting that 90 minutes per day (assuming a 180 day school year) adds on only 270 hours of extended time while an afterschool program adds 540 hours with the potential of a strong community-based provider to offer summer (180 hours est.) and weekend programs (192 hours est.)in addition to this work totaling a potential 912 hours of contact time in one year - a full 642 more hours than ELT. That is 10,944 potential hours of contact assuming a full 12 year engagement a full 7704 hours more than the proposed ELT solution.

Out-of-School providers also add a voice of the community they serve. They can employ local talent and even generate interest in education and teaching among under represented populations. These community-based providers can be small engines of local economy, offering a bridge between school and the community that can not always fall into closely "aligned school objectives." One vestige of 19th century school systems and "agrarian past" Messrs Reville and Gabrieli speak about is seeing a single institution as the only solution - and this current solution very much looks like that. We talk a great deal about diversity these days, yet with more of our institutionalization, standardization, and alignment we are preventing a diverse landscape of services, solutions, and innovation that are not only the fundamentals of 21st century learning skills, are the foundational values of this nation.