Education Sector released a new report on school design last week titled Teachers at Work: Improving Teacher Quality Through School Design (free pdf download). The report focuses on a new type of school design getting some traction in NYC, the Generation Schools. These schools are focusing specifically on improving instruction by giving teachers more time to focus and prepare their lessons. It seems like a great model (I’m still partial to the Rhee plan for teacher effectiveness though).
Another model highlighted in the article was a lot more exciting. Why? Because it basically outsourced all non-critical, non-instructional tasks to other NPOs in the area. The school is the Gardner Pilot Academy outside of Boston, MA. This is what the report had to say about it.
The Gardner Pilot Academy, an elementary school serving the mostly low-income Latino community of Allston, Mass., just outside of Boston, is teeming with adults. The leadership of Gardner includes and extended services director, whose job is to coordinate the work of all the various people and programs serving students and families. The school has more than 15 community partners, including Young Audiences, which offers arts and enrichment; Sports4Kids, which rounds out the physical education program run by the school’s part-time teacher; and a local branch of the YMCA, which serves as the fiscal agent for Gardner’s after-school program. In all, there are more than 40 additional people who play a variety of roles and work a variety of schedules to support core teaching staff inside and outside of the classroom. This kind of support, where aides and interns are assigned to oversee recess, lunch, and before- and after-school programs, means that teachers’ work at Gardner can be designed almost entirely around improving instruction.
Eureka! You mean if we let teachers focus only on improving their instruction (by removing/outsourcing the other “school” distractions) they might help students achieve more? I love this model for two reasons.
- it readjusts a teacher’s role to instruction (and not a hodge podge of other duties as assigned). In web app building I call that “feature creep”, which is to say that the teacher job descriptions has been continuously added to (including recess duty, managing after-school projects, lunch duty, arts, etc.)
- it takes a comparative advantage point of view of educational services and embraces the idea that a school may not be best equipped to provide all common services. By outsourcing them to partners in education you can help lighten work loads, consolidate services and improve overall efficiency in the system. A YMCA already running after-school programs may be better able to offer services to a student body than if the school went about it independently (and therefore would incur less expenses by relying on an organization already with the management and means in place to offer quality programs.
The main objection to this, as far as I can see would be that a school’s overall budget may shrink (because of the outsourced services), but I don’t necessarily see that as a negative if it brings down per pupil costs while increasing quality instruction. On another note, this might be harder (but not impossible) to achieve in rural areas where such services are dispersed over large areas.