Write 100 Times: I Won’t Innovate : L.A. district cuts funds of an exemplary school

There’s no educational reason why most American children, including those here in California, go to school only 180 days a year. Most U.S. schools are stuck in an outmoded system that dates to when children were needed at home to help with farm chores.

Among the most bookish European nations, the standard is 200 days or more. In Asian nations such as South Korea, Taiwan and Japan, the total rises to as high as 240 days.

We’re sure that some still cling to the notion that somehow students in the United States are able to accomplish more in 180 days than youngsters who spend as much as 33% more time in school. That is arrogance. As economist Lester Thurow once wrote, “Americans think that they can learn in 180 days what the rest of the world takes 220 to 240 days to learn. [That argument] also forgets that the rest of the world is trying to use its 220 to 240 days more efficiently.”

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MORE SCHOOL DAYS: So, what happens when an enterprising San Fernando Valley principal figures out a way to give her students 200 teaching days, in effect allowing them to finally grasp the bottom of the ladder of the world’s scholastic leaders?

We’re talking here about a school in the Los Angeles Unified School District, which removed $166,000 from the principal’s budget because the school will no longer have the calendar the district wants. If you’d like to scream now, go ahead. This is the kind of bureaucratic idiocy that can make a straight line between two points feel like a maze.

The principal is Yvonne Chan. Her school is the Vaughn Street 21st Century Learning Center in Pacoima. Vaughn Street, like many other LAUSD schools, has been very overcrowded. The district’s solution for the overcrowding was, in part, to choose a school calendar and then offer grants to encourage schools to adopt that calendar. For Vaughn, the grant was $166,000.

But Vaughn is one of the district’s charter schools, which gives its administrators great independence in terms of the way it is run. Chan took that independence and $1 million in grant money and budget savings to acquire adjacent space for 14 new classrooms. This has eliminated the overcrowding, and it has allowed Chan to have all of her 1,150 students in school at the same time. It meant she could give up the year-round, multitrack calendar, which is generally despised by parents and teachers alike.

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$166,000 LOST: To the school district, it meant that Chan should be punished by losing the $166,000 grant, rather than applauded and allowed to keep the money as a reward for innovative thinking. We should add here that Vaughn teachers support the added instructional days, and that parents voted unanimously in favor of it, too.

The district says Chan must be treated like every other principal. That philosophy conveys no incentive for educational reform or innovation. As a matter of fact, it sounds like a powerful incentive for stagnation and mediocrity. We know the district says it wants reform. Now, what do its actions say?