"When you look at the pressures brought to bear with making AYP, adding more time for math and language arts is paramount," Chris Truffer, a schools performance director, said at a recent board meeting. "We have a finite [amount of] time that we have to cut into a lot of pieces and when you do that, some things have to give."
Over the past month, parents have sent dozens of letters and e-mails to central office administrators and school board members and spoken at school board meetings, taking Maxwell to task for making the decision quietly in February. Starting this fall, science and social studies will be offered every day for 86 minutes in alternating semesters, reviving an unpopular schedule in the suburban county two years ago.
Anne Arundel County has spent seven years bending and stretching its middle school schedule to offer students access to rich electives even as it doubled the time spent on math and reading to survive mounting education accountability measures at the state and eventually, federal, levels.
In a desperate search for a workable schedule that would help schools satisfy federal and state performance benchmarks, but still give parents and students the array of subjects they want, the district has waffled between offering block periods, four-, six- and seven-period school days, semester-long and alternate-day classes.
A long-term solution has stumped four superintendents, disgruntled thousands of parents along the way and even spurred State Board of Education intervention in 2001, when state officials discovered as much as a third of the system's 17,800 middle school pupils weren't taking gym classes and fine arts so they could squeeze in enough time for reading and math.
"We're in the process of redoing, rethinking the whole middle school program. ... There's no easy fix on what's going on with the middle school program and how to fix it. ... We just don't have consensus on that yet," Maxwell told school board members recently. "I don't know that you can say for sure if you spend more time on content you'll get better outcomes. It's how you deliver the subject that matters. Just doing the same thing for a longer time doesn't help."
Maynard, the social studies teacher, has experienced the effects of heightened education accountability in her classroom. Her job has increasingly become to prepare students for the ninth-grade U.S. government state test. As a result, she has been asked to ratchet up the number of days she spends teaching the Constitution to 30 and cut the time spent on the American Revolution from 20 to 12 days because the government state test doesn't focus as heavily on colonial America.
