On many mornings, I think my state senator has the best policy idea in California.

The rest of the time, I think he’s missing the point.

The idea involves the sleep of schoolkids, and the state senator is Anthony Portantino, who represents me and nearly one million other residents of one of California’s nerdiest regions, the San Gabriel Valley.

Portantino has won plaudits for a bill that would require middle and high schools to start the school day later—no earlier than 8:30 a.m. The bill is grounded in research showing that additional sleep and a later start would reduce tardiness and absenteeism, which in turn should increase school funding (which is tied to attendance) and improve students’ academic performance.

My two older sons’ school starts at 8:10 a.m. So, at around 8:02 a.m., Portantino’s bill has such obvious appeal that I wonder why he doesn’t extend its protection to elementary schools.

Some days, just eight minutes before school starts, I must climb to the top bunk to wrestle my oldest son, a second grader, out of bed, and into his clothes. Sometimes I must dive deep into the lower bunk to pull out my middle son, a kindergartener. I’ve strained my back with both maneuvers and raised my heart rate while racing three blocks to their classrooms before the bell rings.

One could argue this is a failure of my parenting. I could wake them earlier—but this causes conflict, and doesn’t necessarily get them out of bed. I try my best to get them in bed at 8:30 p.m. so they’ll wake up earlier, but they resist, and stay up reading Harry Potter and Captain Underpants books. So another 20 minutes of wiggle room, courtesy of state law, sounds pretty good—even if it makes me arrive later to work.

But when my back stops throbbing and my pulse returns to normal, I remember that the real problem in California education is not how early the school day starts.

It’s how early the school day concludes.

Put simply, California’s idea of a full day of school is far less than a full day. The state requires only half-day kindergarten, which amounts to just three hours and 20 minutes, about the length of a pro football game. First through third graders are required to have only four hours and 40 minutes of instructional time per day. It’s five hours for grades four to eight, and six hours for high schoolers.

School districts are free to do more. But given funding challenges, they rarely can. The calendar at our local elementary school is thus typical. My kindergartener is with his teachers from only 8:10 a.m. to 11:35 a.m. My second grader is in class until 2:25 p.m. four days a week; on Friday, there’s often early dismissal at 1:05 p.m. These shorter school days happen in a California that, following American tradition, guarantees just 180 school days a year.

This has the feel of hypocrisy (our children are our future, but not our educational priority), of rationing, and of missed opportunity. Despite the low reputation of California education, our teachers and schools have made big gains in achievement over the past generation, especially when one considers our relatively low levels of funding and our challenging student populations. So many of the teachers I’ve encountered in California schools are nothing less than magicians. Why can’t we give our kids more time with them?

The biggest answer is money: More hours of school would cost more, and California’s rickety school funding regime struggles to pay for the instruction we currently have. Many educational interest groups—from teachers to school boards to parents—have pushed for more instructional time. But proposals have run up against concerns about inconveniencing certain parents, create scheduling hassles after school, or adding to traffic, since more kids would be transported during rush hour.

But extensive research shows we must find a way to fund and organize more instructional time. Dozens of studies of campuses with longer school days and years have found that such schools do better, especially in serving students considered to be at-risk.

Some schools in California have acted on such research, with strong results. Catholic schools in Southern California extended their school year to 200 days some six years ago. The chain of charter schools known as KIPP has become a national model by increasing learning time with a school day that extends more than eight hours, typically from 7:30 a.m. to 4:00 p.m.

Beyond educational needs, a longer school day would address other social problems. California politicians of both parties often talk about the need to offer more and better child care. Extending the school day would be a straightforward approach to that problem. It also might blunt the effects of inequality, since better-off parents can fill off-school hours with enriching activities.

Both my wife and I work more than full-time. We cope with short school days by enrolling our elementary school-age children in the after-school program offered on campus. That costs more than $700 a month, combined, for the two boys. (As a result, our 6-year-old typically spends twice as much time at school in day care as he does in his actual classroom.) We’re spending another $1,500 per semester on after-school enrichment classes in subjects like robotics and Mandarin, offered by our community’s educational foundation and by our city’s Chinese club. We’re lucky we can afford this. It’s unfair so many other parents can’t.

Up in Sacramento, there’s talk about legislation to exempt teachers from some taxes. Okay, give the tax breaks if you like, and pass Portantino’s bill right along with it. But there ought to be one condition: a huge increase in the length of the school day and the number of days in a school year.

What would that look like? Well, 9 to 5 was good enough for Dolly Parton. And if a longer day means the kids come home tired, so much the better. Maybe they’ll finally get to bed on time, and wake up early enough that I don’t have to wrestle anyone out of his bunk.

The post California’s Idea of a Full School Day Doesn’t Make the Grade appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Nope. The line, which extended out a brick building for about a block, was just another group of California parents forced to prove, in this age of hyper-regulated childhood, that we actually live where we’re trying to send our kids to school.

With a new school year comes a new season of student enrollment, and registering kids has never been more fraught. After years of hearing all the talk about the centrality of educational access to California’s civic life, I’ve been surprised—and annoyed—to discover, as a father, all the hurdles to performing the simple act of putting your kid in a public school.

And so I found myself standing in that long line—just one step in the process of making sure my six-year-old had a seat in first grade. I wasn’t signing up for a charter school or a magnet school or any special program, but merely seeking to re-enroll him in the same neighborhood school, two blocks from our house, where he completed kindergarten in June.

To do that, I first had to renew my login to the online student system of our small school district in the San Gabriel Valley. Then, it took me two different Internet sessions, each about half an hour, to complete the online process of “student verification,” which includes checking information I provided last year (contact information, demographic data, etc.) and reviewing 17 different legal and regulatory documents, totaling 54 pages.

Those documents covered, among many other subjects: student record privacy; complaint procedures; lunch options; health rules; a notification that if I didn’t want my kid to show up in media reports on the school that I’d have to file an opt-out form; and my responsibility to help with homework and regulate my son’s TV watching. I had to read 32 pages of “California educational code parent notification requirements,” which included the obligation of “any pupil with a moral objection to dissecting or otherwise harming or destroying an animal, or any part thereof” to “inform his or her teacher of the objection.”

Once the online work was done, I then had to dig into closets and file cabinets to find a motley array of paper documents that must be presented in person. In all, I had to show one document from each of the following three categories:

Category A

Current car registration—dated within the past year
Car insurance statement—dated within the past 6 months to 1 year
Health insurance statement—dated within the past month
Bank statement (or signed letter on bank letterhead with address)—dated within the past month
Pay stub showing current address—dated within the past month
Current federal or state tax forms—dated within the past year

I have covered gubernatorial candidates who didn’t disclose this much. And there were significant caveats. No online telephone or cell-phone bills would be accepted. If you wanted to bring a pay stub, direct deposit forms wouldn’t be approved.

Not wanting to run afoul of the rules—and be forced to the back of the line—I took every document I could find, with the idea that if one was disqualified, I’d have a back-up. The district offered hours on three weekdays in August to do this at its central office. Fortunately, I had taken off the week in question, knowing that I’d have to deal not only with my 6-year-old’s enrollment, but also with hundreds of other pages of forms to cover pre-school and child care arrangements for my two younger sons.

While navigating these requirements is time-consuming and frustrating, figuring out whom to blame is even harder.

At first, I wondered if my district, prosperous and top-notch academically, might be trying to keep out riff-raff. But it turns out that school districts of every kind across the state have similar rules. (They tend to follow a 2011 state law laying out “reasonable” standards for such verification). Indeed, my district’s rules are parent-friendly and simple compared to districts that offer families various charter school and other non-traditional choices.

Given the recent history of California school finance, it’s hard to blame local districts for making sure they don’t allow people who live elsewhere to slip into their schools. During the budget crisis, the state routinely sent IOUs instead of cash to districts, and, in a bitter irony, the most recent state rainy-day fund expressly limited the ability of districts to save money. Local districts, including mine, have convinced voters to raise parcel taxes to fill state funding gaps, and must assure taxpayers that only local families are benefiting.

Even so, the zeal to make sure we all live within the right district lines is a form of statewide madness. Despite recent reforms, California’s educational system remains so profoundly centralized in Sacramento—basic funding, curriculum, and most major regulations come from there—that all 38 million of us live, effectively, in one statewide school district. And that makes it particularly frustrating that, even as parents are required to produce so much data to enroll their students, the state has shirked its own responsibilities to collect school data and make it available in useful ways.

Specifically, the state has been slow to build and fund its system for K-12 data. And Gov. Brown has resisted efforts to enhance the system; last year he vetoed Attorney General Kamala Harris’s attempts to add attendance data on students statewide, as a way of combating California’s serious problem with truancy. More crucially, California has failed to follow other states in building a longitudinal database to link individual data from preschool, community college, universities, and employment.

Brown has portrayed the collection of such data as an excess of school reform and as a state imposition on local communities. But such a database provides the best chance for scholars and policymakers to judge how the state is preparing tomorrow’s workers, and for teachers to identify ways to improve. And a comprehensive database potentially could relieve school districts, and parents, of some of the hassles of asking, over and over, for the same information on students.

In line at the district office, I waited nearly an hour before reaching the room for residency verification. First, I had to produce a driver’s license. Then I was directed to a second table where, after a few more minutes, my documents were reviewed, and I was told my child was enrolled.

But three afternoons later, I got an email and robo-call from the district saying my child wasn’t enrolled. I raced to the district office, but no one could help me. So I went to the elementary school. The door was locked. I knocked, and an administrator answered and let me in when I explained the situation. She checked her computer, and said everything was in order.

The email and phone call had been just another glitch in a system that doesn’t make much sense at all.

The post Why Is It So Hard to Enroll a Kid in Public School? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

As a kid, I never understood why, regardless of our individual talents or interests, we all had to learn at the same pace. Or why watching a documentary on river dams in school counted as class but building one in my backyard did not. Or why filling in bubbles on a Scantron test measured progress but reading books I loved didn’t.

Today much sound and fury is being spent on the new Common Core standards—detailed expectations for what every student must learn at every step of their public school career—and Governor Jerry Brown’s new funding formula for local schools. Those are steps in the right direction.

Yet by themselves those policy shifts do nothing to change the basic factory-like structure that sucks the life out of public school. In the early 20th century, influential author Ellwood Cubberley argued: “Our schools are, in a sense, factories in which the raw products (children) are to be shaped and fashioned into products to meet the various demands of life.”

We still batch students by age in 2014—as if their most important attribute is their date of manufacture. We notify students that they should go to their next class by ringing bells, the same signal used for shift changes in 19th-century factories. We continuously measure student achievement with standardized tests.

Public schools are run with the logic of mass production and the goal of optimizing the outcomes of average students. As Tyler Cowen points out in his book Average is Over, the world economy increasingly rewards rare and exceptional talents. The huge demand for semi-skilled, high school-educated workers that defined the mid-20th century has dried up.

Why, then, is it considered radical to question basic structures like bell schedules, grade levels, and standardized curricula? How come the status quo is not seen as a radical departure from common sense?

Education reformers talk about how Common Core will move us toward more open-ended inquiry—and away from standardization. But the new standards still assume that students should learn at exactly the same rate and in the same order, step-by-step as if they were climbing stairs. I remember tons of kids in Glendale Unified who could grasp some concepts way above grade-level but struggled with other basics.

Why then do we build our standards and our curricula on linear scaffolding? Is geometry following algebra supposed to be some sort of metaphysic? What if high school sophomores watch the film A Beautiful Mind and are inspired to start playing around with game theory? Why not let them?

Under the logic of the current public school system, the proper response is another question: How can we put a game theory teacher in every high school? Standardization is the natural reflex.

The better question is: Why do we need a teacher for game theory at all? Why not let precocious students learn from the wealth of knowledge in their communities and around the world? Technology makes it easier to open those doors. We don’t need to push iPads into classrooms. We need the will to reimagine what constitutes a classroom in a world where every student can go online.

I remember all the things I learned outside the classroom. After school, and free of adults, our little gang of kids in La Crescenta would play games on the streets and venture into the nearby canyon in the foothills of L.A., where we learned important lessons in autonomy and self-directed inquiry. When we needed to resolve a freeze tag rule dispute, we gained sound experience in problem solving. And if we tried to build a dam on the canyon stream and needed information on dam construction, we’d figure out the right people or books to consult.

Why not allow more of that go-explore-the-world mindset into our schools? That’s not actually a new idea—it was just as applicable during Plato’s Academy as it is today. What’s new is the Internet, which has the potential to scale that sort of open-ended inquiry by connecting people who might never otherwise have met.

Some people say the public schools won’t change until we spend enough money on education or vaporize the teachers’ unions or something. The real barrier, though, is an ingrained industrial paradigm that says school must be limited to a predetermined curriculum taught by a few specialized teachers.

Why can’t students connect with a person who has experience that aligns with their professional, intellectual, or other educational interests? Why can’t class happen in a co-working space or a canyon? That would certainly beat watching dull documentaries in 45-minute chunks.

Common Core isn’t a problem in itself. A baseline is absolutely useful. The problem is that, all too often, we let a floor become a ceiling. We need to look at unconventional models tailored to the individual needs of students.

The definition of a classroom, according to Dictionary.com, is “any place where one learns or gains experience.” Maybe one day we’ll look at how students actually learn and build an education system founded on that human need rather than the demands of mass production.

Now that’d be a revolution.

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