The Case of the Silent Loudspeaker

By Jay Mathews
Washington Post Staff Writer Tuesday, March 6, 2007;

If D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty and other big city leaders want to know what is missing from their plans to remake their schools, they might ask Colleen Dippel why she popped open a ceiling tile and cut the wires to her classroom loudspeaker while trying to teach low-income Houston fifth-graders 10 years ago. She didn't tell anyone what she had done. When asked why she had not responded to some broadcast instruction, she looked puzzled and said her loudspeaker seemed to be broken. It was an urban school, so no one bothered to fix it. She used the extra bits of uninterrupted learning time to focus on math word problems and reading novels and several other techniques that captured her students' interest, and raised their achievement levels significantly. The amount of time taken up by loudspeaker announcements each day is small, but it adds up. It also reinforces the notion that classroom time is not so important that it can't be interrupted for trivialities and sugary entertainment.
A new study by Elena Silva of the D.C.-based think tank Education Sector says although the movement to increase the length of the school day may help raise student achievement, particularly in urban districts like D.C., it is at least as important to focus on how we use each minute of the current standard school day -- six and a half precious hours. This is the view of people like Dippel, who as an educational consultant has told her loudspeaker story many times. Thousands of teachers across the country like Dippel are gathering the courage to say "I needed that time to teach" when scolded for disabling or ignoring the most irritating administrative distractions.
It would be nice to hear these important people say that the best administrators are the ones we never hear about, the ones who do most of their work in classrooms rather than at press conferences, and who might actually help their teachers remove those loudspeakers so their students would have more time for Harper Lee and quadratic equations and the life of Martin Luther King Jr..