Michigan, where school is part-time and sports are king

The calendar for the 2012-13 school year began on Aug. 6 and stretches all the way to June 15.

Has Michigan finally and dramatically expanded the number of days that students will spend in public school classrooms? And therefore ended an era when a post-Labor Day start and varying degrees of snowfall could result in an academic year of fewer than 160 days? Nah. That calendar is for sports.

Per the Michigan High School Athletic Association, boys football practice began a month before the official Sept. 4 school start. By the end of the second week of school on Friday, the regular season will be nearly half over. The finals for boys baseball is scheduled for June 15.

The culture of sports is alive and well in a state where there are few complaints that prized school activities operate on a near year-round basis.

The culture of education in Michigan? Judging from the academic calendar alone, not so much, if that culture is defined as one that promotes student growth across all classes of income in every corner of the state. And which recognizes that the state's economic future just might depend on it.

Implicit in all the attention paid to the legislative hot spots of school employee benefit costs and the genuine crisis of chronic failure in the bottom rank of students is an acceptance that most school districts in Michigan are doing a reasonably acceptable job. Outside of tougher high school content standards, policy-makers in Lansing have a bipartisan view that broad-based education reform is unnecessary. Unfortunately, the testing that now accompanies those higher standards reveals that many school districts with middle-class enrollments aren't as good as they think they are.

Backers of teacher tenure reform designed to identify poor performing teachers acknowledge that the vast majority of teachers in Michigan in fact perform pretty well. Expansion of school choice through charters or cyber schools will affect a small fraction of the state’s more than 1.5 million K-12 students. The new Education Achievement Authority addresses only the worst-performing schools through the installation of new building management armed with the power to hire the best instructors.

But school reform restricted to choice and reclamation efforts offers little to parents who like their present district just fine. That's one of the reasons they bought a house there. But ask parents in those districts what more they want from their schools and they'll likely say that school reform for all means more classroom time with fewer students in each class. That sentiment reflects the nagging concern that their children should be doing better.

Too bad that a Legislature that has opened the door to cyber K-12 education unimaginable a decade ago still sanctions a school year designed for the agrarian demands of a century ago. Or that the 210-day school year planned in the Educational Authority's initial effort in Detroit is being applauded even as lawmakers have decided that 170 days is sufficient for everyone else.

Parents who would like their children out of the house and back in school by mid-August have to wonder why the start of school is delayed until after Labor Day for the benefit of the tourism industry, when athletic contests are scheduled for the Labor Day weekend. For high school students in volleyball or the band, school started weeks ago. And how many parents, after paying for three full months of summer day care for their elementary age children, can afford both back-to-school expenses and a late summer vacation?

Those 170 days of classroom instruction for the current academic year is up from 165. But subtract six school closure days for "severe storms, fires, epidemics," etc. and you can see how little progress is being made. The new funding bill, moreover, leaves intact the same minimum number of instructional hours: 1,098. Districts that will be adding days to the school calendar are now free to shave minutes off of each school day.

That increase from 165 to 170 in the 2012-2013 school year, by the way, was approved back in 2009. As the fiscal 2013 budget contains no such preparatory language that puts district on notice that 190 instructional days, say, will be in place come 2016, Gov. Rick Snyder and lawmakers appear to be comfortable with a policy that 170 days will be sufficient for years to come.

How that squares with "value for money" budgeting is unclear as Michigan spends $15 billion on public education pretty much regardless of how many instructional days are mandated. Of the $14.6 billion spent on public education in FY 2011, according to state data, $11.6 billion -- or 79.6 percent -- was allocated for salaries and benefits. Wouldn't taxpayers receive greater value if the academic calendar matched the one for athletics?

Just because not every school in Michigan is failing, doesn't mean that most schools are succeeding in real-world terms. At the high school level, the content is more rigorous, the testing more accurate and yet the school year remains pretty much the same length. It makes no sense.

The latest statewide average composite ACT score reported this summer by the Michigan Department of Education was 19.6 out of a possible 36. Just 17.7 percent of students who took the test met the testing group’s rigorous standards that assess ability to succeed in college.

Some two dozen public high school semi-finalists in last year's multi-divisional football playoffs represent a cross-section of the state. And while their gridiron prowess was anything but average, their ACT scores were: an average of 20 with 19.5 percent considered college ready.

If only the time spent in the classroom preparing for life was deemed as valuable as time spent on the practice field preparing for Friday night.

Peter Luke was a Lansing correspondent for Booth Newspapers for nearly 25 years, writing a weekly column for most of that time with a concentration on budget, tax and economic development policy issues. He is a graduate of Central Michigan University.