An Unpopular Position

I'm going to take an unpopular position today...at least for someone in my career...

Friday the Kentucky House and Senate leaders held a joint news conference in which they discussed the House's first draft of the state budget. It includes reducing the instructional days in public schools in Kentucky from 177 days to 175 days. Educators throughout the state have decried the move (You can read about it here and here), stating that Kentucky is behind the nation and the world in total instructional days now, and that we should be INCREASING the number of instructional days, not decreasing them.

Saturday I attended a legislative caucus in Florence that was designed to give any citizen a chance to speak to all Northern Kentucky legislators. About 2/3 of the people in attendance were educators (as evidenced by the fact that all of us wore red as a sign of solidarity), and more than half of the people who actually went to the microphone and spoke to the legislators were educators or students or parents of students, and they all had the same message: don't decrease our days of instruction.

Once the meeting was over, a friend from another district came up to me and asked me why I didn't speak. "You're eloquent," she said to me. "Didn't you have something to say?" I told her what I'm going to tell you now. I kept quiet because I couldn't tow the party line.

I don't think the loss of these two days is that big of a deal.

I understand that cutting instructional days means cutting contract days for teachers, which means basically a pay cut for educators (including me!) of a little more than 1 percent. And symbolically, yes, I understand that cutting education looks bad. Practically, though, I don't think that losing two days of instruction is going to make a big difference. And don't think I'm going to get on the "Teachers waste all their time watching movies anyway!" bandwagon because I don't believe that's true. Sure, there are teachers out there that probably aren't the best teachers and that DO perhaps show films that aren't particularly relevant. I KNOW those people are out there because back when I was in the classroom my students used to tell me which teachers in my building were doing so. I never did, though. I remember telling my students at 2:50 on the last day of school, when they were whining for me to stop teaching, that "Your parents are paying me to teach you for a certain number of days until 3 o'clock on each of those days, and it would be wrong for me not to give them their money's worth." That's not to say that I never had a down moment in my classes--I had plenty. But I never had a throwaway day, not even when I was sick and a substitute was in my class.

No, it's not that I think that teachers waste time. It's just that--in the grand scheme of things--two days each year isn't going to make that much difference. If legislators were talking about cutting FIVE instructional days, that might be a bigger deal. A teacher can teach a lot of concepts in a week. But I don't see where two days is going to change much.

That's just my opinion, though. Fellow educators, please don't pummel me.