COLUMN ONE : New Math: Dividing School Day Differently : More high schools are dropping the six-period format. Fewer, smaller classes stimulate learning and help erase discipline problems, backers say.

By ELAINE WOO

Sept. 29, 1995 12 AM PT

TIMES EDUCATION WRITER

At the end of the sixth day of school, when many teachers were already worn out by red tape and bloated class rolls, University High math teacher Karen Crowley was uncharacteristically upbeat.

“I’m leaving here with energy--and smiling,” she said, pausing outside her classroom recently. And most of her colleagues on a faculty described by one teacher as “not normally enthusiastic about anything” seemed just as buoyant.

The reason is that Uni has taken an exasperating but deeply entrenched feature of the American high school--the six- or seven-period day--and tossed it out the window, replacing it with a radically scaled-down schedule of three or four classes a day.

Students will still take the same number of courses each year, but in longer, 90-minute blocks, and new classes will begin every nine weeks instead of every 18. Teachers will teach two additional courses each year, but the new timetable cuts their daily student load in half and reduces class size.

By chucking the traditional schedule, Uni has joined the growing ranks of high schools nationwide that are experimenting with alternatives to a day usually broken into 50-minute chunks--an artifact of the old factory-based society and a contributor, reformers say, to high school’s anonymity and superficiality.

The switch at Uni was approved by a school governing council six months ago, making the Westside campus the first in the city to adopt such a streamlined concept of school time. Uni’s schedule is one of dozens of variations of “block scheduling” that are cropping up from Indio to East Harlem.

But the new schedule has alarmed some parents who worry that it was launched with insufficient planning and no guarantees that educational quality will rise.

Most students are being asked to learn the same material in slightly less time, fanning fears that teachers will sacrifice important concepts as they rush through the curriculum. Scheduling snafus have upset college-bound students, who worry that they may not be able to squeeze in all the classes they need in time to prepare for college entrance exams.

Although some students say they like taking fewer courses at a time, others complain that their instructors remain stuck in the traditional lecture-discussion mode, making classes that were tedious doubly so now.

School officials say they are working to resolve the problems. And they hope to convince detractors that the potential payoffs make the new schedule too compelling to ignore.

But like so much that sizzles and then is forgotten in the world of education reform, block scheduling has yet to withstand the rigors of scholarly scrutiny. What research exists shows it can produce smaller classes and reduce the number of subjects a student must study and classes a teacher must teach each day. That in turn, the theory goes, should lead to more individualized instruction, deeper mastery of subjects, fewer discipline problems and better grades and test scores. Block scheduling, proponents like to say, exemplifies the philosophy that less is more.

For Crowley, the new schedule has meant 100 students to get to know this term, instead of the 200-plus she taught each day last year. And with an hour and a half instead of last year’s 53-minute periods, “I’m not in the middle of a sentence when the bell rings,” Crowley said. “I can see all my students and answer questions.”

Now the breaks between classes, when discipline problems often arise, have been reduced to three a day. That means less time wasted running to the next class, taking attendance and settling down, and more time to teach and learn.

The traditional school day, says University of Virginia education professor Robert Lynn Canady, is illogical, even inhumane, an antiquated model of education born early this century. It metes out learning as if from an assembly line, with bells clanging every hour to keep youngsters moving.

Canady and other school reform experts contend that that mode of education has made teachers and students prisoners of time, fostering lecture-centered instruction that often doesn’t stick, and leaving little opportunity for teachers to discover their students’ intellectual and emotional needs.

“Suppose as an adult every day you had to work in eight different offices and have eight different bosses and the temperature was different in every office and you couldn’t change it,” said Canady. “That’s what we do to high school kids in this country. If you cut that in half, it’s got to help some.”

Canady, co-author of a new book called “Block Scheduling: A Catalyst for Change in High Schools,” estimates that 50% of U.S. high schools are considering or experimenting with block scheduling.

Some schools are alternating subjects every day, teaching math, science and social studies in longer blocks one day, and English, a foreign language and physical education the next.

Another model has students taking four courses in long time blocks the first semester and another four the next semester. Canady said the latter schedule is very popular, adopted by about 1,000 high schools in states including North Carolina, Texas, Colorado and Virginia.

Uni’s schedule is based on a model called the Copernican Plan, developed by former school Supt. Joseph M. Carroll. It divides the year into four terms of nine weeks each, instead of two 18-week semesters. Each day consists of four 90-minute periods, although students are required to take only three classes per term.

The plan crams a year of course work into half a year. So, a student could take a year of math and English in the first two terms, and a year of social studies and science in the second two.

Teachers’ daily student load has been reduced about 50% because they are teaching only three courses at a time. In exchange, teachers have agreed to teach two extra classes a year. That expands course options and reduces class size.

The plan was proposed by teachers and approved last spring by Uni’s school-based management council, which includes parents and administrators. So far, teachers are the schedule’s biggest boosters. “The bottom line was lower class sizes and fewer kids,” said English teacher Lynne Culp, an avid supporter.

Before launching the plan, Uni teachers and administrators visited San Marcos High School in Santa Barbara, which started the block schedule a year ago.

The average freshman grade point average, which had remained at about 2.6 for five years, rose almost half a point to 3.0 by the end of the year, San Marcos Principal Robert Ferguson said. The number of excused absences dropped 400%. The average class size shrank 15%, to about 29 students.

An overwhelming majority of San Marcos teachers said they liked block scheduling, were able to spend more time helping students and were varying their teaching methods more.

“I think it has improved my teaching after 29 years,” said Malcolm Parker, chairman of the San Marcos foreign languages department. The compressed schedule has forced him to rethink what he teaches, cut out textbook drills that were mainly busywork and “go right into the meat” of the subject.

But a student might have as much as a six-month gap between the end of first-year Spanish and the start of the next level. That concerns critics who worry that students will not retain what they learn during the time they are away from a subject. Teachers of foreign languages and math in particular believe that their subjects need to be studied daily over the school year.

But Parker said his teachers discovered that those fears were unfounded. Students seemed not to forget any more of what they learned during those gaps than they do over summer vacation.

Many parents also expressed alarm about lags between the end of Advanced Placement courses and the AP exams in May. Uni has responded by scheduling some AP courses over three terms to eliminate the gap, and has promised to offer review sessions for students.

That remains a worrisome issue at San Marcos, however. Peter Gillespie, chairman of the science department, said AP chemistry students who took the exam while they were in the course had better pass rates than those who didn’t. Overall, the percentage attaining passing scores increased slightly, from 52% in 1993-94 to 55% in 1994-95.

In a survey, a majority of San Marcos students said they liked the block schedule and would not want to return to the six-period day. They also said they were learning more and grades and attendance had improved.

With school in session barely a month, it is too early to tell whether block scheduling will transform Uni. By next spring, district officials expect to have some preliminary results of their evaluation examining its impact on grades, test scores, attendance and dropout rates. If significant benefits are found, the district may encourage other schools to adopt similar schedules, said Dick Browning, district director of high school instruction.

But Uni Principal Cynthia Ann Petty said her staff is already seeing some positive effects. Classes are smaller, averaging about 30 to 34 students. “We have no classes of 40 at all,” she said, a marked change from previous years.

School security officers say fewer students are being sent to detention. Custodians report that the campus is cleaner, possibly because the shorter lunch period and fewer passing times cut chances to litter.

Teachers report that the longer but smaller classes allow them to develop closer bonds with students and personalize instruction more.

“I know by name almost every student in my class, which usually doesn’t happen until the eighth or ninth week of school,” said Bonnie Williams, who has taught history at Uni for 11 years. “I’ve had personal conversations with students I never had before.”

Other teachers say they are finding it easier to carry out activities that were too difficult to cram into the 50-minute period.

English teacher Culp runs Socratic seminars, which develop analytical skills through group discussions of a text. “I did it before in 50 minutes and it was hell,” Culp said. “Just as they were getting into the conversation it would be time for class to end. But in 90 minutes the class can have the discussion and still have time to digest it, write about it.”

To some skeptics, block scheduling sounds too good to be true. And, indeed, experts who believe in its potential are quick to caution that by itself it is no magic pill.

“It is just a tool,” said Judith Warren Little, a UC Berkeley education professor who is studying California schools that have changed schedules as part of broader restructuring programs. “You can introduce block scheduling and find nothing changes . . . if you haven’t changed the nature of the intellectual work you’re asking kids to do, or the social relationships among kids or between kids and teachers.”

At Uni, only about a third of the faculty attended an optional summer training session on classroom strategies to keep students engaged over the longer periods. But schools such as San Marcos switched to block schedules only after a year or two of planning and mandatory retraining. “At Uni, they haven’t had time to do that,” said one parent, who is critical of the schedule. “I really feel they did this in haste.”

Most of the complaints have revolved around scheduling conflicts--students unable to get the courses they need at the proper time. Administrators blame the lack of a computer program capable of handling a block schedule. That created a nightmare for counselors, who had to work out schedules by hand.

Students still do not know what their programs will be in the spring, an uncertainty that has particularly unnerved parents whose children will begin applying to college next fall.

“My daughter was told there was no math class for her at all, and Spanish conflicted with English,” said Elizabeth Van Ness, who decided to take her 11th-grader out of Uni and enroll her at Santa Monica High School. “Kids are having to make real hard choices.”

In Terry Henderson’s 11th-grade honors English class, students disagreed about the value of the new schedule.

Sanjana Rao said she enjoys being able to focus more keenly on fewer subjects at a time, and Benjamin Zuboff said he feels he is learning subjects more fully, not “just to get through the test.”

The longer periods have given some students an incentive not to cut class, said Rodney Emrani. “Now if you ditch,” he said, “you feel like you are missing two lessons instead of just one.”

But other students groused about extra heavy homework assignments and the impact on extracurricular activities, or said the block schedule is too intense. “Teachers are going twice as fast,” said one 10th-grader. “I feel rushed.”

A few students said their teachers have not changed their teaching styles to accommodate the extended periods. Some teach for about an hour, then allow students to use the rest of class to do homework. Others spend the entire period much as they did before, lecturing, questioning and scribbling on the blackboard.

“It depends on the teacher,” senior Oscar Lorenzana said at the end of his creative writing class, where Culp had broken students into small groups. “This class has lots of interaction, so 1 1/2 hours goes by real fast. Others just drag. Then it’s twice as much hell.”

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Reinventing the School Day

Forsaking the traditional six-period day, University High School now has students on a “block schedule” that teachers and administrators hope will foster improved teaching and deepen learning. The main feature; longer but fewer classes a day--three 90-minute blocks of instruction. Students study the same number of courses over the school year, which now consists of four nine-week terms.

Old Schedule

53-minute classes:

English: Fall and Spring semester

Math: Fall and Spring semester

P.E.: Fall and Spring semester

Social Studies: Fall and Spring semester

Science: Fall and Spring semester

Elective: Fall and Spring semester

New Schedule

90-minute classes:

English: Term 1 and 2

Math: Term 1 and 2