Block Scheduling – Is More of Less Cheating Students?

 In search of a quick fix to your school’s dropout problem? This spring I visited a low performing high school AKA “dropout factory” that had recently made a lot of progress in improving its graduation rate. I wanted to know what it had been doing to improve. It turns out the biggest factor seemed to be their transition to a block schedule. I have not figured out if this is just a fad or is a trend, but I have since come across more and more high schools serving at risk students that have also recently made this transition. I had always thought that block scheduling was about providing more time for students in core subjects so that they could learn the material at a slower more in depth pass. It turns out that I was wrong and that in many cases the opposite might be happening. 

 Here is how it works. By redesigning the same number of instructional minutes in the school year, these high schools are able to move from offering students 6 courses a year to offering 8 courses a year. Now my initial assumption was that the school must adjust the total number of classes that a student needs to pass during his or her high school career in order to graduate. Not so. With the new block schedule, a student can simply fail more classes, and still graduate.

 A leading indicator of risk of dropping out is falling behind on the number of units that a student earns in a year. For student earning only 4 or 5 class credits in a year at the start of high school, the dropout rates start to skyrocket. By offering more courses per year, there is a higher chance that a student will be able to pass 6 of the 8 courses and be on track to graduation. There is a catch of course. Each class has less hours of instruction to cover the same amount of material. That seems like a tough trade-off to me, and caught me as simply wrong. The impact of this change really hit home was when I talked to a student about her course takings. The student was a 10^th grader, and I asked what courses she was taking. I could not understand how she could have neither a math nor an English class, and still be on a college track. It turns out she was. She had taken both her math and English class in a block the first half of the year. Her schedule for the second half of the year looked a little fluffy. (As a side note, I am sure that it does not help a school’s test scores when students are tested in the spring and they don’t have a math or English course). If she was in the second half of here senior year and already accepted to college that would have been one thing, but she was not. Other students had taken the same approach of using the extra room in their schedule to add fluff courses.

Now, I am the first to admit that seat time is a horrible proxy for educational attainment. But, potentially reducing seat time for a course when students are already struggling seems like a step in the wrong direction. At this school that I visited, it was clear that they were not getting the basics that they needed –  10^th graders scored 13% percent proficient in English, 0% geometry (class most 10^th graders took), 1% in Algebra I and 3% in Algebra II.  So, while the block scheduling was jacking up their graduation rate, it seems that it was doing so by lowering the expectation of what it required to graduate.

Since this particular school was located in California, I decided to find out how the powerful University of California felt about this block scheduling reducing the instructional time in core courses. UC requires students to take a certain number of courses in core academic subjects in order for students to be eligible for UC. According to UC, all that matters is that a student take enough core courses, and the length of those courses do not matter. UC assumes that the course is still covering all of the material that should be covered – even though in this case the school was doing it in half the number of days with 3/4^th of the time. And, since this school is in California, students will have 5 fewer days in this next school year further reducing the instructional time that these students receive. 

Given that tendency for school districts to seek quick fixes, especially in the accountability era, policymakers should keep a close eye on the use of block scheduling as the cure all for our graduation crisis. Instead of allowing for more in depth study, students may end up with even less instructional time in core courses than before.

Tagged as: block schedule, School Time