Opportunities to exercise flexibility sometimes giveth and sometimes taketh away.

The winter of 2014 grabbed Wisconsin and the upper Midwest and refused to let go. Deep snow falls and severe cold caused many school districts to cancel classes for children on an unprecedented number of school days. Current state law requires Wisconsin Boards of Education to schedule a school year of 180 instructional days. There is an allowance for up to five days of instruction that may be scheduled for parent conferences or cancelled due to emergencies such as inclement weather. Most school districts schedule at least two of the 180 days for parent conferences. The statutory instructional school year is 180 days and the real instructional year is 178 days. That leaves up to three days that may be sacrificed to Mother Nature.

When weather emergencies take more than three days of instruction, school administrators hustle to arrange a “make-up” instruction by adding days to the school year or adding minutes to remaining school days. Making up instructional days so in order to comply with the 180 rule is a requirement of law. With extreme fickleness, the superintendent who was a good and sensitive person in sparing children from walking to school or standing at bus stops in way-below-zero winter becomes a community pariah when replacing spring break days with school days or extending the school year several days in June or using Saturday mornings for making up missed instruction. Parents who have scheduled family trips on spring break or during the first days of summer don’t like their superintendent very much. Local pastors who hold catechism classes on Saturday and traditionally schedule summer Bible schools during the first week of an anticipated summer vacation declare that school is violating local traditions. Animosity to instructional make-up time of course includes children who understand Saturday mornings, a 3:00 dismissal from school, and spring and summer vacations as time that school owes them as compensation for their attending school in the first place. No one, including teachers, likes make-up days.

The Wisconsin legislature recently turned sympathetic ears to the problem of rescheduling weather-cancelled instructional time. Senate Bill 589 proposed striking the requirement of 180 days from the description of a mandated school year. The Bill retains a required minimum number of hours of elementary and secondary instruction and provides Boards of Education with flexibility in how they might arrange these hours. Without a required number of days, Boards may meet the required number of hours of instruction by lengthening remaining school days without tampering with Saturdays, spring break or summer vacation or using any combination of these compensatory measures.

http://docs.legis.wi.gov/2013/related/proposals/sb589

For example, the 1137 hours of instruction required for secondary schools can be accommodated in a 175 day instructional year comprised of 6.5 hours of instruction plus thirty minute lunch. Or, a school year could be 163 day instructional days comprised of seven hours of instruction. Or, any combination of instruction and lunch is possible as long as the total number of hours of direct instruction equals 1137.. The conceptual flexibility says that Boards are allowed to use fewer than 180 days as long as they meet the number of required direct instruction hours.

(WI DPI Standard (f)(121.02) requires 437 hours of instruction in Kindergarten, 1,105 hours of direct instruction in grades 1 to 6, and at least 1,137 hours of direct instruction in grades 7 to 12. Most school districts generalize a school calendar for the entire school district and base that generalization on the required hours of secondary instruction. Elementary schools may have a different clock schedule, but almost always share a district school calendar. The length of a school day typically is long enough so that the number of daily hours times 180 equals 1137 or 1010 or 437.)

http://cal.dpi.wi.gov/cal_daysover

Interestingly, two additions to SB 589 match flexible calendaring with state funding. The bill allows Boards to receive state funding for interim and laboratory sessions are that organized for direct instruction. Currently, many zero-hour classes and interim classes, for example classes held over a winter or spring break, do not qualify for state aid. If local schools valued these opportunities, they funded the costs outside of the district’s revenue limit calculations. SB 589 will fund these as regular education. In addition, the costs of online summer classes for any student in grades seven through twelve also will qualify for state aid.

This is good news for Wisconsin school boards. It would be better news if

1. the required number of instructional hours was a minimum and not a maximum. Now, these two, minimum and maximum, will become synonymous. This is how it may work. Current law requires 180 days of instruction, so most school calendars are 180 with an understanding that five days may be forgiven for conferencing or weather emergencies. Employee contracts are 180 instructional days plus a locally adopted number of professional development days. Wisconsin Act 10 and reduced state funding caused many Boards to trim collectively bargained professional development days from their annual school calendar. Many employee contracts became 180 or 182 day agreements.

With SB 589, 1137 hours of secondary instruction will define both the instructional year and the employment year. With little concession, a school year/employment year calendar can be accomplished in 163 to 175 days. Each day that is subtracted from the traditional number of 180 represents significant savings in salary/benefit and overhead costs for a School Board. For example, a 163-day school year is ten percent less than a 180-day school year and a district with a $10,000,000 personnel budget may save $1,000,000 with a reduced school year/employment calendar. Some Boards will not reduce their traditional calendar to a minimal calendar, but most will move in that direction due to financial reasons.

2. required learning by all children could be accomplished within a minimal number of instructional days. Sadly, very few Wisconsin schools have been able to cause a full year of academic learning within a 180-day school year. A school year with fewer days will not advance the level of child learning; it will widen the gap between what children should learn and what they really do learn.

Even with flawed assessments like the Wisconsin Knowledge and Concepts Examination, only 36.1% of children in grades 3 thru 8 plus 10th grade achieved a proficient score in reading in the 2012-13 school year. In mathematics, 48.1% achieved proficiency.

http://wisedash.dpi.wi.gov/Dashboard/Page/Home/Topic%20Area/Academic%20Performance/WSAS%20%28WKCE%20and%20WAA-SwD%29

These levels of proficiency or non-proficiency were accomplished within a 180-day school year, or its remains after conferences and weather cancellations in 2012-13. Are there new reasons to believe that reading and math achievements will improve with fewer days of instruction? And, if a more rigorous assessment was used, like the SmarterBalanced Assessments, will the academic achievements of children in reading and math even match their best days on the WKCE? Probably not.

The old adage of “be careful in what you ask for” applies to the application of SB 189. Flexible relief from rescheduling instruction that is missed due to weather emergencies will be accomplished. Using a required number of direct instructional hours without a number of required days will result in shorter school calendars and shorter employment contracts. And, increased difficulty to cause children to meet academic achievement goals will follow.

How interesting it would have been if the Senate Bill required Boards of Education to schedule enough days of instruction to cause 80% of the children in grades 3 thru 8 plus grade 10 to achieve proficiency on the WKCE in reading and math in order to receive 100% of their funding using the revenue limit calculations. The percent of state aid would be diminished corresponding to levels of proficiency below the 80% requirement. Conversely, if schools can achieve 80% proficiency in less than 1137 hours of instruction, the school calendar may be shortened appropriately. This requirement does not care about bad weather or parent conferencing or school vacations. This requirement connects the school calendar and state funding to learning achievement. Boards, of course, could settle for a lower percentage of proficiency with a lower level of state funding and a shorter school calendar. It is all about priorities.

We live in a representative democracy. We elect governmental leaders and empower our leaders to represent our best interests in the making of laws and policies that will sustain our commonwealth and future prosperity and assure the balance of our freedoms and responsibilities as citizens of our nation, states and communities. This is a great thing and we cherish the ideals of democracy.

Does it work? Most of the time, but not always. In regard to public education, representative democracy has created an oligarchy of partisan politics in which the issues of educational public policy are not formulated for the education of children. Instead, the educational policies and practices of partisan oligarchs are designed to coalesce a constituency of voters who will use the electoral process to legitimate and maintain the political dominance of their chosen party.

Examine the educational platforms of the Republican, Democratic and Libertarian parties. The planks of these platforms represent the consensus of representative party leaders.

The Republican Party controls the US House of Representatives, hence the purse of our nation. The Republican Party controls twenty-four state governments by virtue of an elected governor and a majority of state legislators. The education of children is not addressed in the US Constitution but is the responsibility of the states. From the perspective of decision-making, the Republican Party is what President G. W. Bush self-described as himself: the Decider. The Republican Party has the power to decide the major issues of our nation.

The role of a minority party is to present an alternative perspective of significant issues. The Democratic Party and the Libertarian Party pose alternatives to the Republican’s power-based policy decisions.

Republican Party on education

• Shift to community colleges and technical institutions. (Aug 2012)

• No federal college loans; just insure private loans. (Aug 2012)

• Promote school choice and home-schooling. (Sep 2004)

• Support voluntary student-initiated prayer in school. (Sep 2004)

• Limit role of federal government in education. (Aug 2000)

• Increase access to higher education with savings accounts. (Aug 2000)

• Strongly support voluntary student-initiated prayer. (Aug 2000)

• Achievement is basis for access to college. (Aug 2000)

http://www.ontheissues.org/Republican_Party.htm#Education

Democratic Party on education

• OpEd: anti-school choice policy alienates Hispanics. (Mar 2013)

• Turn around struggling public schools; expand public options. (Sep 2012)

• Double investment in Pell Grants & more tax credits. (Sep 2012)

• Make college tuition tax deductible. (Nov 2006)

• Standardized tests to advance learning, not bureaucracy. (Jul 2004)

• Charter schools OK, vouchers not. (Jul 2004)

• Support lifelong learning and Distance Learning. (Jul 2004)

• Bush broke promise of NCLB by not funding it. (Jul 2004)

• Democrats are the party of public education. (Oct 2003)

• Education is top priority in Democrat presidency. (Aug 2000)

• Character education is an important aspect of education. (Aug 2000)

• Accountability is a key to public school success. (Aug 2000)

• Reduce class size, modernize facilities, hire new teachers. (Aug 2000)

• Enact new tax programs to enable more life-long learning. (Aug 2000)

• U.S. needs public school accountability, not vouchers. (Aug 2000)

http://www.ontheissues.org/Democratic_Party.htm#Education

Libertarian Party on education

• Let parents control all educational funding. (May 2008)

• Poor kids end up at worst schools in current system. (Nov 2000)

• Separation of education and State. (Jul 2000)

• End compulsory busing & compulsory education. (Jul 2000)

• Support a market in education to provide more choices. (Nov 2000)

• The state should stay out of education. (Jul 2000)

• Treat private school funding the same as public schools. (Jul 2000)

http://www.ontheissues.org/Libertarian_Party.htm#Education

These positions represent the educational priorities of the politicians who drive education in the United States and our fifty statehouses. How is the Republican platform interpreted into my state’s priorities? How does my Governor interpret the educational interests of the people of Wisconsin.

“We trust teachers, counselors and administrators to provide our children world-class instruction, to motivate them and to keep them safe. In the vast majority of cases, education professionals are succeeding, but allowing some schools to fail means too many students being left behind. By ensuring students are learning a year’s worth of knowledge during each school year and giving schools the freedom to succeed, Wisconsin will once again become a model for the nation.” — Scott Walker

For years, Wisconsin had the distinction of being a national leader in educational reform. From the groundbreaking Milwaukee Parental Choice Program to policies aimed at expanding the role of charter schools in communities across the state, Wisconsin was viewed as a pioneer in educational innovation and creativity.

Wisconsin used to rank 3rd in fourth grade reading, now we’re in the middle of the pack at best with some of the worst achievement gaps in the nation.

Fortunately, Wisconsin has turned a corner and is once again becoming a leader in educational excellence by refocusing on success in the classroom. This has been done by pinpointing the following simple but effective reforms:

• Improving transparency

• Improving accountability

• Creating choice

We are working to restore Wisconsin’s rightful place as an education leader. Our students, our teachers, and our state’s future depend on our continued implementation of reform.

http://www.scottwalker.com/issues/education

What is missing? Some would say, “If I have to tell you, you won’t understand,” but here goes. I select parts of “The Purpose of Education” by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

“It seems to me that education has a two-fold function to perform in the life of man and in society: the one is utility and the other is culture. Education must enable a man to become more efficient, to achieve with increasing facility the legitimate goals of his life.

Education must also train one for quick, resolute and effective thinking. To think incisively and to think for one’s self is very difficult. We are prone to let our mental life become invaded by legions of half truths, prejudices, and propaganda. At this point, I often wonder whether or not education is fulfilling its purpose. A great majority of the so-called educated people do not think logically and scientifically. Even the press, the classroom, the platform, and the pulpit in many instances do not give us objective and unbiased truths. To save man from the morass of propaganda, in my opinion, is one of the chief aims of education. Education must enable one to sift and weigh evidence, to discern the true from the false, the real from the unreal, and the facts from the fiction.

The function of education, therefore, is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. But education which stops with efficiency may prove the greatest menace to society. The most dangerous criminal may be the man gifted with reason, but with no morals.

We must remember that intelligence is not enough. Intelligence plus character–that is the goal of true education. The complete education gives one not only power of concentration, but worthy objectives upon which to concentrate. The broad education will, therefore, transmit to one not only the accumulated knowledge of the race but also the accumulated experience of social living.”

http://www.drmartinlutherkingjr.com/thepurposeofeducation.htm

What if Dr. King’s two-fold purposes of education were the clear public policy for education?

Education must:

• Enable a man to efficiently achieve with increasing facility the goals of his life.

• Train one for quick, resolute and effective thinking.

• Enable one to sift and weigh evidence, discern the true from the false, the real from the unreal, and the facts from fiction.

• Give one not only power of concentration, but worthy objectives upon which to concentrate.

• Transmit the accumulated experience of social living.

These “planks” contribute to the common good of everyone regardless of party affiliation. And, these planks provide an overarching focus for public education that assist the education of children now and for years to come.

Public education is not and will not be well served by a partisan oligarchy until we demand better of our leaders. When Robert Michels enunciated the “iron law of oligarchy” he pointed to the reality that democratic principles must inevitably devolve into oligarchies in order to sustain the organization of government. Michels also said that revolt at the ballot box may be the only peaceful way for citizens to throw off the existing oligarchs.

http://socserv.mcmaster.ca/econ/ugcm/3ll3/michels/polipart.pdf

“A little rebellion now and then is a good thing,” wrote Thomas Jefferson, 1787, in a letter to James Madison. Now and then is now.

Farce! This is not about improving K-12 education in Wisconsin. It is all about gaining support from Tea Party conservatives and the uninformed by a governor who is promoting his national standing as a presidential nominee.

As reported in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel on February 21, 2014, “A bill that could halt the implementation of more rigorous and nationally aligned reading and math academic standards in Wisconsin’s public schools was written for state lawmakers by Gov. Scott Walker’s staff, new documents show.

Drafting notes for the academic standards bill that’s been hotly contested this week reveal that the governor’s office initiated the proposal and tweaked it for weeks before forwarding it to senators such as Leah Vukmir (R-Wauwatosa) to introduce.

That the governor supported the bill was already known; that his office created it was not. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel received the drafts through an open records request.

If passed, the legislation would be one of the most aggressive measures taken nationally to slow or stop the Common Core State Standards.

The set of nationwide academic standards have broad support from educators and the business community in Wisconsin, though there have been some implementation challenges.

But the strongest opponents have been mostly tea party Republicans who believe the standards amount to federal intrusion in local education matters. Education experts dispute that, noting the standards were developed by state superintendents, governors and curriculum experts.

The bill introduced in the Senate this week, and a companion measure that was pulled from a vote in the Assembly Education Committee Thursday, calls for the creation of a state academic standards board that would have authority to recommend new standards for public schools in academic subjects such as math, reading and science.

The state board would be mostly made up of political appointees, and lawmakers could adopt standards the board recommended, even if the state superintendent disagreed.”

Read more from Journal Sentinel: http://www.jsonline.com/news/education/standards21-b99209908z1-246343221.html#ixzz2u02zBMKG

The terrible irony is that this same politicized process was used by the Wisconsin legislature in the 1990s to write and edit the Wisconsin Model Academic Standards. Those “model” standards were graded as D- and F by the Fordham Institute. These “failed” standards would become the default standards for all Wisconsin schools until the legislature issues new “Wisconsinized” standards.

When winter weather causes the cancellation of school days, the education of every child suffers. No compensatory make-up of school days or minutes of instruction redeems the loss of planned, continuous learning. We know this to be true. It is time for the leaders of school districts in areas that annually face school closure to due to snow and cold to give their school children a break – a winter break in the school calendar.

On January 28, 2014, WKOW, an ABC affiliate in Madison, WI, ran these data regarding Madison area school cancellations.

• School District of Beloit – 4 days cancelled, will extend year by 4 days.
• School District of Beloit-Turner – 4 days cancelled, 2 days built into calendar, considering extending half days or eliminating teacher work days.
• Cassville School District – 6 days cancelled, will make half-days full days, eliminate teacher work days, school on Good Friday, extend the school year.
• DeForest Area School District – 4 days cancelled, 3 days built into calendar, will make-up 1 day.
• Evansville Community School District – 5 days cancelled, 3 days and additional hours built into calendar, will make-up 1.5 days.
• New Lisbon School District – 5 days cancelled, 2 days will not be made up, 1 day taken from spring break, extend the school year by 2 days.
• Oregon School District – 5 days cancelled, need to make-up some days, still considering options, will make final decision in the spring.

http://m.wkow.com/w/main/story/108269442/

Since the WKOW report, each school district has cancelled school between two and four additional days.

The problem of school cancellation is not confined to Wisconsin. All northern tier states, including New England and the eastern seaboard face harsh winter weather. A Michigan report indicated that 140 of 755 school districts cancelled school more than ten days and a dozen districts cancelled school more than twenty days.

http://bridgemi.com/2014/02/snow-wars/

From the get go, it is apparent that the instructional year that some districts place on the annual school calendar contains “throw away days.” If no days of school are cancelled, children will have school on a full calendar of days, usually 180. But if school is cancelled, there are days that can be missed without the need for make-up. 178 days will do. And, there almost always are more hours of instruction scheduled within 180 days than are required. Hence, days when the start of school is delayed and/or children are dismissed early do not count as school cancellations. Actually, starts and early dismissals may be as frequent as cancelled school days.

If a school district does not have “throw away days” in its calendar, then it uses strategies for compensatory time. The easy pickings for making-up instruction are teacher work days. These are days when teachers are scheduled to do professional work at school but children are not in attendance. If teacher work days are used for make-up, children attend school on those days and the planned professional work is forfeited.

Extending school into planned vacation periods or after the planned end of school year date is the next strategy often used by school leaders. It also is the strategy most disdained by parents who have planned and often deposited money for family vacations during spring and Easter vacations and immediately after the last day of the school calendar. Student attendance on make-up days is never as great as attendance on a regularly scheduled days of school. Families that have pre-committed to vacation plans seldom renege on those plans. Regular weekend activities make Saturdays a difficult draw back to school. And, when children know that some to many of their classmates will not attend school on a make-up day, parental statements of “you should go” become less compelling.

Interestingly, holding school on days with severe inclement weather also has a downside for instruction. “My son said (his) teacher could not do plans with seven students in his period one class – so they just say for the entire block.”

http://wavy.com/2014/02/15/debate-rages-about-saturday-school-days/

A final compensatory action is to add minutes to subsequent days of school in the spring in order to meet state mandates for required hours of instruction by grade level or in subject areas. Adding minutes to the school day is an option only if the school will meet number of mandated days of instruction, usually between 170 and 180 depending upon each state’s requirements.

No matter what an observer of snow days thinks, nothing in school is simple when school is cancelled. Many instructional plans are postponed for a day or two, or three or four if a weekend connects to the cancellation. Some instructional plans cannot be reassembled – the speaker or interactive media connection cannot be rescheduled, the field trip option is lost, the school will be on vacation (ironic, eh?), or there are other school demands that take priority over the planned instruction. At a minimum, the continuity of learning is broken. And, it is this break in instruction that is the most damaging.

“Dave Marcotte and Steven Hemelt (2008) collected data on school closures from all but one school district in Maryland to estimate the impact on achievement. The percentage of students passing math assessments fell by about one-third to one-half a percentage point for each day school was closed, with the effect largest for students in lower grades. Hansen (2008) found effects in Maryland that are nearly identical to those reported by Marcotte and Hemelt, and larger, though statistically insignificant, results in Colorado. Hansen also took advantage of a different source of variation in instructional time in Minnesota. Utilizing the fact that the Minnesota Department of Education moved the date for its assessments each year for six years, Hansen estimated that the percentage of 3rd- and 5th-grade students with proficient scores on the math assessment increased by one-third to one-half of a percentage point for each additional day of schooling.

While our studies use data from different states and years, and employ somewhat different statistical methods, they yield very similar results on the value of additional instructional days for student performance. We estimate that an additional 10 days of instruction results in an increase in student performance on state math assessments of just under 0.2 standard deviations. To put that in perspective, the percentage of students passing math assessments falls by about one-third to one-half a percentage point for each day school is closed.

Other researchers have examined impacts of instructional time on learning outcomes in other states, with similar results. For example, University of Virginia researcher Sarah Hastedt has shown that closures that eliminated 10 school days reduced math and reading performance on the Virginia Standards of Learning exams by 0.2 standard deviations, the same magnitude we estimate for the neighboring state of Maryland. Economist David Sims of Brigham Young University in 2008 took advantage of a 2001 law change in Wisconsin that required all school districts in that state to start after September 1. Because some districts were affected while others were not, he was also able to provide unusually convincing evidence on the effect of changes in the number of instructional days. He found additional instruction days to be associated with increased scores in math for 4th-grade students, though not in reading.”

http://ftp.iza.org/dp2923.pdf

So, why do school continue to build traditional school calendars in the face of this annual dilemma? Does Einstein’s definition of insanity come to mind?

Give us all a break. Schedule a winter break in the school year and avoid the harshest of winter weather. What would this look like?

Begin school on the third Monday in August, typically fourteen days prior to September 1. This will allow the school calendar to complete a first semester, typically 90 school days, prior to Christmas. Too early? Many observers of US schools link the flagging performance of our children on competitive international tests to the fact that schools in the US have one of the shortest school calendars among tested nations. Assuring that children use all of the days scheduled in their school year would be a significant step in improving international test scores if up to five percent of a school year may be lost every year to school cancellations.

Schedule a winter vacation from the third Friday in December to the fourth Monday in January. This break will include traditional Christmas vacations, often one to two weeks in length.

Begin the second semester on the fourth Monday in January. The second semester will include 90 days of instruction and will conclude around the second Friday in June, depending upon the school district’s treatment of spring and Easter vacations.

This alternative will not avoid every winter storm, but it will avoid the days of the year that are typically

• the coldest – check the wind chill temps for the month of January. How many days presented wind chills of -20 degrees or colder?
• the darkest – check the research on ASD, Affective Seasonal Disorder. On how days in January did children go to school and return home from school in the dark?
• most likely to be snow days – on how many days in January did snow fall and create hazardous driving and walking conditions?
• the most expensive days of school operations – check with your local school to determine the operational costs (heating, electricity, snow plowing) of a day of school in January. Compare these costs to a day in August or a day in June. How much overtime was spent in January to make school ready for students given falling and blowing snow?
• the most difficult days of school life to reschedule – check with your local athletic director, school play and musical directors, and instrumental and choral directors. Ask them about the difficulties of rescheduling events that are postponed when school is cancelled.

Even though the data and studies indicate that academic achievement suffers as a result of cancelled days of school in January, that make-up days are poorly supported by many school parents and are poorly attended by children, and that adding minutes of instruction to subsequent school days is a numbers game not an instructional compensation, most school districts will continue to use these ineffective fixes to solve the problems caused by school cancellation.

Opponents to a winter break will complain that winter sports and arts programs will be devastated if children are not in school in January. Not so. Schools have successful histories of beginning fall sports seasons in August and continuing spring sports seasons into June and early July when school is not in session. It is very reasonable to consider winter sports seasons operating successfully in January without children in school. Schools also have successful histories of supporting drama and music programs during the summer when children are not in school.

Opponents will complain that parents will have difficulty finding child care for young children in January. But, probably not any more difficulty than they have in the summer months when children traditionally are on vacation.

Regardless of the evidence, a winter break is not the traditional way in which schools deal with winter weather. Why not? If academic achievement suffers when children experience school cancellations and school leaders use make-up days and additional instructional time to accommodate state mandates knowing that neither of these compensations is as good as continuous, planned instruction, why shouldn’t schools adopt a school calendar with a winter break. It only makes sense to stop doing what doesn’t work and begin a new practice that can work.

For more than a decade, my mother cut my hair. I give her credit for looking at the heads of other children at school and at church and in Look and Life. She wanted me to look like other children. I sat on a tall youth chair in the basement with an old bed sheet around my shoulders and she went at my hair with an electric trimmer and scissors. At the end, she always said with a smile, “That doesn’t look too bad.”

When I was thirteen and earning steady seasonal money with lawn mowing, leaf raking and snow shoveling jobs, I went to a barber shop and learned a life lesson that carried through my career is education. John, my first and usual barber until I went to college, was an artist with his trimmers and scissors. Interestingly, there was the same amount of cut hair on the floor around my mother’s youth chair as there was around John’s barber chair. But, there was a difference in the cuts. From where I sat watching my mother and John, the big difference was that my mother held her lips tightly together as she worked and looked at my head straight on with both eyes. However, she squinted a lot. John was not so tightly wound. As he cut and trimmed, the tip of his tongue appeared in the right corner of his mouth and he began to tilt his head to the right so that he was looking at me as if he was looking around a corner.

It took several years before I had the courage to ask John why he finished cutting my hair with his tongue tip out and head slightly cocked. He said, “I start looking at your head from the front seeing both sides and the top. The closer I get to being finished, the more I need to change the way I look at you. When I can see you in at least two different ways and like the way your hair has been cut, I know I have done a good job.” His answer was more satisfying than my mother’s double negative – “not too bad.”

As a teacher, it was important to look at children and their school work in at least two different ways. When I could do this, I knew that I would be able to cause them to become better learners and to learn better.

First, I needed to look at the child. From straight on, each child is as he or she presents herself or himself. Age appropriate for this classroom and grade appropriate in school promotion. Relatively healthy and alert. Seemingly ready to learn. It is easy to stop looking, because everything looks good or “not too bad.”

With a little twist of perspective, it surprising what one can see. Is this a first child in the family in your class or second or third – it can make a difference in how they feel about you as a teacher. Even though the child is on grade level in reading, was she an early reader or has she been improving each year? Is the child introverted or extroverted? Knowing a child’s proclivity for volunteering with a first answer or preference to hold back, listen and revise an answer based upon more information is an important thing to know. In general, how does the child see herself – does she smile a lot or frown?

Like John, I wanted to look at children as if I was looking around the corner and try to see them differently. Unlike John who was done as soon as I left his chair, my work just began and I needed to keep look differently. Children change over the course of a school year and how they look to you in September can be very different than how they look in January and April. And, every look demands that you form a renewed perception.

Second, and John taught me this, if he didn’t like what he saw in the cut of my hair, he kept on working until he liked what he saw. I learned to listen and look more carefully at what children said when asked a question or what they wrote when given an assignment or their thinking as they talked through a problem. With a generalized and pedestrian look, much of the student work I was presented was fair to good. Almost all of it was passing, for sure. But, was it good enough. How often is a child asked to refine an answer, revise a paragraph, correct mistakes no matter how many or few, or rethink the manner in which they reached a solution? Not often enough. Too often, first draft is a final draft. A good enough answer is a last answer. And, just a few mistakes is close enough. With a different look at student work and my responsibility for causing each child to improve in both their learning and as a learner, I needed to ask for more. “Not too bad” was not good enough.

This is not always easy to do. There are many social norms that make just good enough good enough. You will hear children say that “other teachers don’t make kids do rewrites.” You will hear “I don’t have time tonight to do this over.” Students will say, “I’ll take the B grade; that’s good enough.” And, certainly some will say, “I passed, didn’t I?” Staying the course of “we’re not done just yet” can be difficult. But, I always remembered, whether I was in my mother’s or John’s chair that, “I cannot see my head and I have no idea what they are seeing.” Knowing that children as students do not see the end of the job of learning is essential if you want to push children past good enough. That is how I responded to children who were more than willing to jump out of their desk with my first response to their work. “At this time, you are not able to see what I want to see in your school work.” After a while, they sat a bit longer to see if I was satisfied or if I needed to take second look.

Actually, the way John looked at my head created a very good lesson for life. Do a good job, then look at it differently to see if your first perception remains an accurate appraisal. If not, keep working until it is better than good.