Making Schools Sacred Orland author says extracurricular activities cut into learning time

Etta Kralovec is no stranger to controversy. From her home nestled above Orland’s Narramissic River, she has issued two books about American education that could shake the very roots of the system. The first, “The End of Homework,” written with Southwest Harbor resident John Buell and published by Beacon Press in 2000, advocates eliminating homework. No school after school. Now comes “Schools That Do Too Much: Wasting Time and Money in Schools and What We Can All Do About It,” published by Beacon in 2003.

This book takes a logical step into even more controversy: Use school only for school. Schools have gotten so loaded with other agendas, from drug prevention to soccer, with classes so easily interrupted for announcements, celebrations and information about the next school fund-raiser, that the educational time of each class period boils down to a matter of minutes, says Kralovec.

Meanwhile, she claims, the expenses of such extras are so buried within inscrutable school budgets that it is next to impossible to estimate their cost. “American schools have evolved ways of spending time and money that systematically undermine learning.”

Kralovec, currently vice president for learning at the Training and Development Corp. in Bucksport, put in 10 years as a teaching principal in Laguna Beach, Calif., before coming east to run the teacher education program at College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor. Always ready to question assumptions, she says she surprised even herself with the direction her latest book took, that schools need to return to the basics. Take athletics out of the school day and the school budget, she says, along with dental education, birthday celebrations and musicals. Let school be about the education program communities already have established, the Learning Results the state spent years creating. If a community wants sports, band or theater, fine. It can even use school facilities. But this should happen after school, separate from the educational program and funded by the community, not the school.

“I think Jonesport will have a basketball team, but I don’t think the school should be asked to manage and run it,” Kralovec says. “Why should the principal of a high school run a sports complex? Or an orchestra? We expect our principals to be highly trained, we hire him or her as an educational leader – then we ask that person to manage a sports team?”

Though Kralovec writes for a national audience and sees her ideas debated in publications as diverse as Forbes and Teacher Magazine, her spate of school research began in Maine, with a study she conducted for the state Department of Education in the early 1990s, while teaching at COA. “It was a study of alternative schools designed to retrieve high school dropouts,” she says. “Just about every one of those kids said that homework was an important factor in dropping out.” Six years later, she published “The End of Homework.”

The questions that launched her second book came directly from the conversations she had about homework. Everywhere she went, Kralovec found parents blaming the dizzying amount of work their children were bringing home on the inefficiency of the school itself.

What was going on inside schools that made children lug so much work home? To find out, Kralovec took a stopwatch and went to school. Working with a research associate, she measured what actually happened, minute by minute, in a few classrooms around the country. She discovered that settling into classes, finding books, taking attendance and listening to announcements cut deeply into actual learning time.

In “Schools that Do Too Much,” Kralovec offers a typical school day of nine hours and 15 minutes as experienced by a typical high school junior on a soccer team. “She has seven periods, each 42 minutes, so she has four hours and 54 minutes of allocated time,” writes Kralovec. But engaged time devoted to academic learning, not warming up for soccer practice, not being distracted by announcements, “had to be something significantly less than four hours and 12 minutes; it is likely, given the evidence of research, that her academic learning time was even just half of that time, or roughly two hours.” Only one period went without interruptions: soccer practice.

Putting her stopwatch aside, Kralovec then took out her calculator to look at a few school budgets, including that of Mount Desert Island High School, her children’s alma mater. At first glance, it looked like 5 percent of the budget was allocated to extracurricular activities. With the help of a school board member, she found that costs such as maintenance of the field and gym, insurance for athletic teams, transportation to away games and extra salary for teachers who double as coaches were embedded into other budgetary categories, adding another 5 percent to the budget. Extracurricular activities, she discovered, cost the school nearly half a million dollars.

Robert Liebow, principal of MDIHS, doesn’t find this to be a problem, as long as nothing is cut in deference to the extracurricular budget. He believes the critical thinking and problem solving students learn on the field of play and drama stage are essential to education. “If you don’t have balance in life, you don’t have anything,” he says. He also knows that some students live for these activities. “Some kids wouldn’t come to school if not for the extracurricular activities,” he adds.

While Kralovec doesn’t necessarily disagree, she is concerned that such activities, along with feel-good programs such as AIDS awareness or refugee aid, crowd the school day, taking away from its core mission. She would like to see schools start at ground zero with budgeting and time allocation for all programs, asking of each addition whether it fulfills the school’s mission as outlined in the Learning Results.

Schools today still correspond to the factory model instituted decades ago, she says, with bells signaling the start and end of work periods, preparing children to be part of an industrial work force. Recognizing that such metaphors affect how schools become, Kralovec would like to reconfigure schools into nourishing environments. She’d like them to become sacred spaces devoted to learning. Let them start as late as 9 a.m., when “kids are actually awake.” Let them use digital technology to eliminate interruptions, placing computers in hallways to list announcements and changes and giving students cards to swipe to register their attendance at each class. Let them have longer class periods – as MDI already does – to allow for an extensive focus and eliminate the time wasted in moving from class to class. Let sports and band happen after school, or beforehand, but separate them from the school program so it doesn’t take over the focus needed for education. “When the door to a classroom is closed, no one should interrupt,” she says. “This is sacred space.”