One of the things that makes a place welcoming is stability - having some expectation that you know how things work. One of those expectations is having a regular schedule where Mondays are Mondays, Tuesdays are Tuesdays, and so on. Unfortunately, it is currently the case that almost every week is somehow different, and there is very little stability in the weekly schedule at school. Each week one must check the calendar to see how the particular week is different. Is it not the clean place rather than a cluttered one that people prefer? The calendar is one of these, too. Ten years ago, it was mostly clutter free whereas now it is pockmarked with each week being different. I think this is not in the student's best interest. On the teacher side, this can be a problem, too, because summer vacation has been reduced by 2 weeks, and yet we have no educational gains to show for it. In addition, some teachers rely on that time in order to work a summer job and those two weeks could be important. The solution is to look at the type of schedule that worked in the past and take a lesson from it.

Sometimes a student signs up for a class that is not a good fit for him or her. There can be many reasons such as too many other challenging classes, not having sufficient background knowledge, or having personal circumstances arise. Sometimes it takes a few weeks for this to become apparent, when it is too late to switch to another class. In this situation one possibility is for the student to drop the class - but this process can take a month, even when the student, the teacher, and the parent all agree that it is not in the best interest of the student to continue! This makes no sense to me. A prior student services administrator told me that he was concerned that the student might be trying to game the system. This does not seem like a reasonable assessment, however, when teacher, student, and parent are all aligned. It also cannot but help to create needless angst and potential mental health problems for the student who for over a month will be wondering whether they will remain in the class. It also creates extra work for the teacher and student who must demonstrate that they are working with each other so that the student won't have to drop the class. The simple fix is to trust the professionalism of the teacher, especially when it is aligned with the student and parent, and this will save time and angst for all.

Until this year, when a teacher wanted to print some papers for their class, they would select a printer that could handle it, often a larger printer in a department office. This year, FCPS changed the system so that teachers wanting to print to the largest printers first print to the cloud, and then subsequently they can go to any of the printers and tell it to carry out the actual printing. It sounds good because if there is a problem with a printer, the teacher can just move to another one. However, in the majority of cases, teachers know what they want to print and where they want it printed (usually the printer that is closest to them), which means that this new printing regime costs teachers more time since they have to go to the printer to initiate the printing, in addition to staying with the printer until the printing is finished (or returning to pick it up). This is horrible if the printing need arises during the class itself. What I see as a reasonable possibility is to allow the teacher to designate which printer the printing should take place at to avoid a time-consuming intermediate step.

In the last several years, FCPS has done substantial tinkering with the grading system. This went into overdrive when an article appeared a few months into the first school year (2020-21) that started during the pandemic, wherein it was found that the failure rate in FCPS was now higher. Nobody should have been surprised, but this was bad press. The solution was obvious - FCPS should not allow so many failures. A simple way was to mandate that regardless of what was turned in, the student should receive at least 50% on the assignment. Even if nothing was turned in. Even if it was a test where the student was there and demonstrated that they did not get to 50%. Even if the student cheated. I think it makes a lot of sense to reexamine these. In the latest iteration, FCPS has said that for rolling gradebooks, the student should be able to go back to certain tasks from the prior quarter to show that they now have the knowledge, and thus improve their grade. Certainly, there are some interesting aspects to this philosophically speaking. However, the administration of it represents a significant hit on the time of a teacher, because going back to regrade past assignments can easily be a time-consuming task, especially when one is no longer "in the moment".

One of the things that teachers have now that was not the norm 10 years ago is they now have significantly more duties that lie outside their expertise and certification. In essence, teachers now are being used as warm bodies to perform administrative tasks. This includes conducting SEL classes, administering surveys, administering exams (such as the SAT or SOL), and conducting homeroom. This is not a suggestion that these are inappropriate activities. What I am suggesting is that what these tasks accomplish should be tallied against their cost such as what is no longer taught due to lack of time.

For some classes, there are multiple follow-on possibilities, such as two different versions of Calculus after Precalculus (which is the prerequisite for either version). Currently, teachers recommend which follow-on class they think is the best fit for the student. FCPS students are not obligated to follow this recommendation. They may ignore it and choose any class whose prerequisite they have met. I have heard that FCPS is doing away with this recommendation system with the argument being that some students who might have done well in the more challenging class would not take it because they assume the teacher is correct, despite having the option to take both. Therefore, it is better not to have recommendations at all to preclude the possibility that a student feels tracked. I don't wish to dimmish tracking as it is a real phenomenon. However, in our data driven society, we can gain some insights into how effective it is for individual classes and even teachers before curtailing all of it. In particular, there is a cost to doing away with the recommendation system which is that many students will sign up for a class they will not do well at, and this incurs student angst and mental turmoil and teacher time in dealing with remediation and parent contact issues.

Although each of these things may be small, when added up, they are significantly more costly in time than 10 years ago. I am not saying that we should do away with all of these things costing more time. But I am saying that I would be bringing up these types of considerations at the time of policy planning to reduce unintended consequences.