Schools That Do Too Much: Wasting Time and Money in Schools and What We Can All Do About It

A sharp critique of radically misplaced priorities in schools

Etta Kralovec, whose acclaimed and controversial book The End of Homework showed the damage done by a culture of excessive homework, widens her lens and shows us vividly the fragmented, almost irrational shape of a typical school day, carefully, accessibly opening up the complex set of issues that lie behind it.

Schools That Do Too Much argues that American schools systematically misspend their two most precious resources: time and money. From class schedules that fragment students’ time, to budgets that sink money into dozens of activities —especially sports—that distract from learning, schools over and over try to do too much and end up delivering too little by way of real teaching and learning.

Kralovec argues that budgets and schedules are the crucial pivot points of school reform. All the new curricula in the world will be ineffective, she argues, if coupled with traditional school schedules and spending patterns. She argues for radical rethinking of the flow of time in a school day and for “zero-based” budgeting —an approach that starts with basic priorities first. Examples from schools and communities around the country illustrate the power of reorganizing these basic categories of school life.

At a time when the desire for change is opening up the possibility of experiments in public education, The Overburdened School is a guide to how best to take advantage of that opportunity. Etta Kralovec was a teacher and professor of education for more than twenty years and is the author of The End of Homework (Beacon / 4219-6 / $11.00 pb). She is currently vice president for learning with Training and Development Corporation, in Maine. She lives in Orland, Maine.

"The two dearest assets a school has are money and faculty time. Etta Kralovec shows how academic performance is sacrificed again and again as money and time are used for things that have little to do with how much or how well our children learn. She has done us all a great service."

--Marc Tucker, President, National Center on Education and the Economy

"If we want innovative, successful schools that break the dominant mold, we need exactly the kind of flexibility in changing traditional schedules and budgets that Etta Kralovec argues so well for here. Time and money are at the heart of what schools need to rethink, because thinking about them gets at the most important questions: 'To what end are we sending our children to school? What is it for?'"

--Deborah Meier, founder of the Central Park East Schools, and author of In Schools We Trust