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When educators speak of the "culture" of schools, they are speaking in part of the cyclical time of schools. The rhythm and tempo of school life shape the activities and the meaning of school: Certain activities take up certain measured units of time in clearly delineated sequences. Class periods repeat until they become days, which become weeks, semesters, and years. The most grand cycles are those that mark the end of elementary school, middle, and high school. The public school cycle is, for most children, a twelve year cycle embedded in a larger set of social cycles. Twelve cohorts of children are involved at different stages of their school cycles during each year. Each of those cycles is tied to other aspects of the epicycles that each teacher, student, administrator, and parent lives out within their school experience.
The culture of a given school can be felt in how well the cycles of people and institution are synchronized to work in smoothly overlapping ways. In schools where there are striking dis continuities in the cycles - where false fire alarms happen frequently and intercom interruptions are just expected, where students skip classes frequently, or where not enough teachers are assigned, or absenteeism desiccates the teaching force and disrupts the cycle of classes - school culture is decidedly different than at schools where the opposite is true (Kozol, 1991). To maintain a culture that tips toward the positive, schools must be scheduled in regular, overlapping, interwoven, and highly predictable ways. It is not surprising that efforts to change those cycles - by lengthening teaching periods, instituting schools within schools, having teachers teach fewer classes, building in collaboration periods where there were none before - are met with difficulty. As one teacher said, "I think that it's very difficult to reform an institution that has been virtually the same for a hundred years" (Cambone et al., 1992).
When educators seek time to meet for restructuring activities, they are pushing at the multiple rhythms that school people already keep, and are forcing the existing cycle of schools into slightly more disarray. We can see this difficulty arise in any number of examples:
At the Stephen Day School in the NCREST study, the committee for restructuring strove to keep membership open so as to include as many people as possible in the process. They felt this was the true spirit of shared decision making. But as the membership swelled, so too did the problems for finding time when everyone could be together. More members meant more schedules to match. But there was no common time to be found for a large group of people living out different epicycles of school life (Lieberman et al., 1991b).
Finding team time to collaborate in the weekly schedule of schools created a rippling effect throughout some of the schools in the Mastery In Learning project. Each effort teachers made for finding time had implications for changing the cycle of another person's time: Specialist's time was used to free up classroom teachers; non-core classes were scheduled at the same time so core teachers could meet. Or, the changes invoked adjustments in the actual cycle of the whole day: Time was banked every day by extending the schedule in the afternoon, and used for meeting when enough was saved; school was delayed in the morning so teachers could meet. But, shifting the daily schedule has implications for transportation time and the cycles of bus schedules or car- pools; there are implications for the cycles of family life, as parents must change their morning routines to accommodate the different school schedule.
Problems emerge when schools decide to extend the year and the cycles of the school bump up against the external cycles of the community. Schools are sometimes met with opposition from seasonal businesses in the community that rely on students for workers, and vacationing families for revenue. One man who testified before the NCT&L claimed that the effect of year round schools on the amusement park industry would be substantial (NCT&L Summary, 1992). Extended year plans also meet with resistance from teachers who find the idea entirely too disruptive to their lives as they are currently constructed. One union leader claimed that the teachers in his district would "riot" if the year was extended. Other opponents cite the negative effects of year round schooling on keeping school buildings in shape, because maintenance and repair usually take place in the summertime (NCT&L Summary, 1992). The concerns in each critique center around the effects of school cycles rubbing up against existing sociological cycles, and underline the fact that schools do not operate in isolation of the larger culture and society.
Political time
Wherever an alternative program is begun and time or other resources are allocated to its institution, issues of equity and favoritism emerge among faculty. Time and energy devoted to a new project by a principal, or any powerful team within the school, is shot through with political meaning. Of the eight original Coalition schools in the SEP project, only three remained substantially affiliated after five years. The difficulty that each withdrawn program encountered is partly attributable to the divisiveness caused among staff because Coalition members received what many considered preferential time, duties, and power.
This is also true of programs begun in one of the NCEL schools (NCEL data are a particu larly rich source for political issues of time). In Colorado, a principal threw her weight behind a group of young teachers who wanted to begin an alternative program for delinquent and absent students - not a particularly popular group of students with the vast majority of teachers. The program they created was looser than the rest of the school, and students could sometimes be heard in the halls when others were in class. Senior faculty skeptics concluded that the special program teachers were not using their time well to do their jobs. What irked some particularly was that the coordinator of the new program had her teaching time reduced, and had been given an office and a phone. The politics of time and preferential treatment doomed the effort. As a senior teacher said:
The politics of time are present in discussions over how comprehensive high schools are going to manage their limited resources. Which specialty will grow, and which will shrink or be eliminated? A high school in the NCREST study had a large vocationally-based program in printing as a magnet. With the advent of computerized publishing, the draw of such a program diminished. As the school team tried to move forward with their reform agenda, it was the politics of this issue that needed to be addressed. How would resources of time and money be allocated, they wondered, now that a preparation for the printing trades was no longer a draw? A Washington teacher in the NCEL project summed up this type of political dilemma well:
Politics of time are not played out among teachers only, but between teachers and policymakers or administrators. In another NCEL anecdote, a Virginia teacher complained bitterly regarding the amount of bureaucratic interference and time consuming paperwork he had to deal with from the state legislature which required documentation of what was being done in schools on a number of reform related issues. "I wish that legislators would come down and teach a day...," he said. "And then go back and legislate. Because until they've worked a day, they have no idea what they're expecting [from us]" (Cambone et al., 1992; p. 20).
Experienced time
Anecdotes regarding how teachers experience time have been woven throughout these discussions of different aspects of time for teachers. It would be redundant to rechart too much territory. But it is important to underline that the subjective experience of time - how quickly or slowly it seems to flow, its polychronic or monochronic nature, and its public and private qualities - plays a most important role in every aspect of a teacher's understanding of time.
It is particularly important to underline a worrisome quality of the comments teachers make in this sample of studies. Throughout, there are the voices of teachers who are joyful and stimulated in ways they have never been before; but even those teachers who have considerable enthusiasm for the restructuring process sound exhausted. The demands on their time simply feel too great. One very enthusiastic teacher wonders whether teacher "empowerment" isn't going to lead to teacher "expirement." As her days are becoming more packed than ever, she worries that she is not giving adequate time to her teaching, her students, and her own family (School Renewal Network, 1992). Her comment may foreshadow her own withdrawal from the restructuring effort, when she can no longer sustain the energy to engage. Indeed, the experience of expirement may cause many able reformer- teachers to withdraw from the process. Weiss (1993) points out that many of the SDM efforts at schools in the NCEL study were exhausted after 2 years of work, and that the SDM efforts and results were rendered "puny".
The experience of guilt that teachers have over their use of time for restructuring cannot be ignored, either. Many teachers in this sample talk about guilt over shortchanging students and their private life alike. In the first instance, they may well be feeling pain over separating from an old and unhealthy experience of teacher isolation, as one man quoted above has said. But guilt is not an inherently unhealthy emotion, as pop psychologists would have us believe. Guilt is often an indicator that we are not being true to ourselves, our beliefs, or our goals. In the context of restructuring, teachers are often being asked to choose between two equally important activities, teaching and school revitalization, without being given the time to do either adequately. It is an unfair choice to put to teachers, and one that could bring down the whole restructuring enterprise. In the final analysis, how teachers experience their time should be of primary concern to reformers, for any substantive change in schools hinges on teachers and their willingness to engage in that change (Sarason, 1971, 1993)
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[Conclusions]