In both the 2009/10 and 2010/11 school years, the Board of Education has debated whether we should continue to deviate from the standard provincial school calendar and give our students a two-week rather than one-week Spring Break. Any such deviation requires a survey of parents. Both times, the results were overwhelmingly in favour of two weeks--over 90% of respondents.

Yet a majority of trustees both years were in favour of reverting to one week, parental preference to the contrary notwithstanding. My colleague Preet Rai and I felt that if families were ultimately responsible for their children's education, that such a response required that we support two weeks. Eventually two trustees caved in to public pressure and reluctantly voted for the longer break.

After the initial debate in 2010, I wrote a guest column in the Abbotsford News outlining my views on the subject. That column follows:
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Being a school trustee is a bit like playing professional hockey in Columbus or Miami--no matter how well you’re doing, few notice. Even the people who deliver the goods in the classroom, our teachers, often don’t know the trustees’ names much less what they actually do besides run for office every three years.

But that all changed in April when four trustees decided that our students would be better served if instead of receiving a few minutes of extra instruction per day, that they would spend an extra full week in class in lieu of having a longer spring break. I stopped counting the email messages I received when they passed one hundred and gave up trying to answer them at about seventy-five.

As one of the minority who voted for the two-week break in April, I was motivated to test the assumption that the potential for student achievement would be better realized via a full week in class rather than extra minutes per school day. While a decided amateur in the field of education research, I did take a dive into the educational literature to see if the allegations being used to justify the return to one week had actually been studied.

Regrettably, no such study seems to have been done. However, I did find a host of material on what does affect student achievement. Perhaps most relevant to the issue of days versus extra minutes are the studies on “time on task.”

There is a strong correlation between educational achievement and the time spent on the education itself. But this can occur in any arrangement of hours and minutes per day. In fact, researchers found that the mere length of a school day or class period at the secondary level was not related to student academic achievement at all. Student learning depends upon the way in which the available time is used.

Researchers have also linked student achievement to class size, the amount of homework assigned (more being better than less), stringent grading standards, style of teaching, and the length of the school day (longer is better).

I bounced all of this off of some veteran educators for their comment. One quote sums up the consensus rather nicely: “My years of professional experience have led me to conclude that it is the quality of instruction and the quality of the student teacher relationship that are the ultimate determiners of student success. In the hands of a poor instructor or an uncaring teacher, all the time in the world makes little difference. 200 days of bad instruction pales in effect compared to 100 days of good!”

This suggests to me that what my trustee colleagues and senior leaders should be now studying is how our district is doing in the areas that we know with certainty affect student achievement--time on task, quality of the teacher-student relationship, high expectations--rather than the one that remains unstudied and is based only on assumptions--minutes per day versus a full week.

In the meantime, I’ve asked for that invitation to the Florida Panthers training camp. No matter how bad we do, it doesn’t really matter and no one cares. And the pay’s better!