Complexity Makes Teaching Harder and Doesn't Save Money

We've made teaching too complicated and demanding a job.

And if we want to keep people in this profession, I think we've got to simplify it.

We've got to stop choosing complexity in the interests of saving money because it doesn't really save money.

For example, I've been talking with a lot of people about intervention and how a lot of schools have some sort of school-wide intervention time or win time.

And often in order to make it work, there's this incredibly complex system of like figuring out who goes to whom and when that intervention time is and what you do in that intervention time.

And often there's like no curriculum to use and it's just very ad hoc.

And ad hoc can...

be flexible, but it makes things incredibly complicated.

And my suggestion in this intervention discussion is hire an interventionist.

At the secondary level, make it a class.

At the elementary level, make it one person's full-time job to work with kids who are way below grade level.

Because if you divide that up among everybody, It's more complex.

It's more complex as a system, and it makes everybody's job more complex and more challenging.

It's just more things to think about.

And if you look at any other industry, they don't add complexity to people's existing jobs.

They hire new people when they want to do new things.

And in education, we don't do that.

We say, well, we need to do all these new things, and we're going to have the same people do even more things.

And these things are getting more and more complicated.

And often it's because we think we're saving money.

We think, okay, we can use the people we have and just have them do some more complicated stuff.

Or we think we can save money by adding complexity instead of doing the obvious thing that needs to be done.

Another example, the schedule when I became a principal in my school was like very, very complicated.

Every teacher needs a prep time, right?

So we had three classes that students would go to other than their homeroom teacher.

They would go to PE, library, and music, or multi-arts, I think, yeah, art, art library, and PE.

And none of those teachers were full-time.

So in order to accommodate the part-time schedules that were created, not because the teacher is one of them, but just to save a little bit of money, there were like 0.8 specialist teachers.

In order to accommodate that constraint, nobody had the same schedule five days a week.

Everybody had a slightly different schedule from day to day, and some days teachers didn't get any prep time at all just because the rotation didn't work.

And it was slightly cheaper to not have those three teachers be full-time.

And I looked at how much it would cost to just bump those teachers up to full-time and greatly simplify our schedule.

And it was a trivial amount of money in the scope of the whole school's budget.

So we increased those three teachers to full-time And the schedule became dramatically simpler.

You have the same prep time every day.

You have a prep time every day.

It's a three-day rotation of which specialist teacher your students go to see.

And people had for years tolerated this complexity to save a little bit of money.

And I think at the expense of their ability to do their jobs and for those jobs to be manageable.

So I think we've got to stop trying to cut corners with complexity.

Let me know what you think.