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[upbeat music] Welcome to Charter School Insider: Lessons from the Nation's Top Charter School Operators, the only podcast dedicated to the behind-the-scenes business of running a successful charter school.
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Join us as we sit down with charter school leaders who share how they're overcoming the biggest operational hurdles facing their schools today. Matt, good to see you. Welcome to the show. Thanks for being here.
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Yeah, thanks for having me, Daniel. I'm excited to dig into this topic today.
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So I've gotten to know you a little bit, but for folks who do not know you or do not come from maybe the Philadelphia charter area, give us the quick background on who you are and what you're up to today.
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So I started in K twelve education in two thousand and three. I was a teacher in Philadelphia Public Schools, and then moved on in two thousand and seven to join Mastery Charter Schools.
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Uh, Mastery's based in Philadelphia and Camden, New Jersey. At that time, we had three schools.
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Now Mastery has twenty-four, and I'm gonna say we because I was with Mastery for eighteen years, and so it's still hard for me to break that habit of saying we.
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But I held a number of positions at Mastery, school-based leadership positions, but spent most of my career as the regional superintendent of Mastery's high schools.
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And most recently at Mastery, I was the, the chief operating officer. I left Mastery after eighteen great years back in February, did some consulting work for the last few months, and then I joined Timely.
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And Timely is an edtech company that has a master scheduling solution that pairs an AI optimizer with, uh, expert scheduling support to save time, money, and make sure more kids get the, the courses they need. Perfect.
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Well, that's-- you know, we're, we're pulling the curtain back immediately on the topic for today, which is master scheduling.
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And I'm excited to dive into this 'cause every once in a while, I'll sit down with a leader or bump into someone and say, "Hey, what's going on? Uh, what are you working on right now?"
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And they'll say, "Ugh, the master schedule. It's a disaster." Why do you think master schedules-- scheduling season is, like, the least favorite time of the year for some people? Or maybe for a lot of people.
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Why do you think that is? Yeah. Well, we're, we're on it. It is, it is here. If it's not here, it's coming up shortly. And look, I, I felt the same way for years. Here's the thing.
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We have professionalized almost every aspect of school operations over the past couple decades. We have CRMs for enrollment. We didn't have those fifteen, twenty years ago. We have better financial forecasting tools.
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We have project management platforms like Asana. All of it has become more sophisticated, but when it comes to master scheduling, most folks are still using tools that haven't evolved in fifteen or twenty years.
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Maybe Excel spreadsheets have become Google Sheets. For the most part, it's, it's a lot of spreadsheets. It's a lot of tiles on Magna-Tiles, on whiteboards, and sticky notes.
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Even the student information systems that have scheduling functions, most of that is so far downstream, it can't truly optimize for a school or a network's most important goals.
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And so that makes for a long, laborious, I would argue unfulfilling process, so we shouldn't be surprised that leaders dread it. Yep. Makes, makes a ton of sense. So where does the master scheduling
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function really begin?
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'Cause m-my understanding, which is extremely limited, is that this is one of those things that is really cross-functional for the leadership team, even though it doesn't always appear that way or maybe one person kinda gets tasked with, with project managing it.
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But, like, w-where does building a strong master schedule start before you jump into that Excel Google Sheets template?
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You know, whether you're a school or a network, it, it starts at the, uh, really this time of year establishing strategic priorities for, you know, the, the next school year.
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That's really breaking down what's your mission, what was our performance data last year against that mission, where are the strengths and weaknesses, and then using that information to define what's going to be most important in the coming year.
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Because those strategic priorities are gonna influence your instructional model. So it is, as you said, a real cross-functional endeavor to say, "At our school, at our charter network, what are we going to focus on?
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Where are we gonna push our resources to move closer to our, our, our mission?" And once that's established, it needs to translate into an instructional model. All the magic happens in the classroom.
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And so when I say instructional model, what I mean is that student and teacher experience. Like, what happens in a school each day?
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For an eighth-grader, how many periods of math do they get, or how many minutes of math do they get? What curricular materials are used? Is it every other day, or is it every single day? Are they blocks?
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Are we two semesters or three trimesters?
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All of those things kind of make up the instructional model should be informed by those strategic priorities, because when you have the instructional model and then what we would call instructional parameters, they're kind of part and parcel, those are the first and most important building blocks of a high-quality master schedule.
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The, the strategic priorities in the instructional model, then the conversation I think does shift more over towards maybe operations and finance, and it goes to enrollment projections.
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And I mean real enrollment projections, not, not wishful thinking. Uh, when I was- Right... when I was the COO at, at Mastery, we would take the trailing three years of enrollment data. We'd identify trends.
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We would then compare that against hyper-local market conditions. So are schools opening or closing in the area? What's happening with the school-age population in, in your section of the city?
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Whatever those things are, that started to shape what our enrollment projection would be for the upcoming year.
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And then finally, we have to look back and interrogate our enrollment strategy and execution from the previous year and find out what worked, what didn't, and then what we needed to adjust for the upcoming year.
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So only after that process of, you know, establishing strategic priorities, starting to, to build out a- and, and formalize that instructional model and parameters, and then going through that enrollment paces can you, can you really say, "All right, we have an achievable enrollment target, and we can move forward."
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And most of the listeners know that enrollment projections and enrollment drives revenue forecasts.
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So once you know that, your, your finance team and operations team, academic leads can come together and start to build a preliminary budget, adjusting for the expenses to align to those priorities a- and model.
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What happens if schools get that wrong? You mentioned, you know, having extremely realistic enrollment projections, really digging into the data that's local to your part of the city, your community.
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What's kind of, you know, the bear case if you're overly optimistic on the enrollment side? What's kind of the downstream effect for operationalizing the master schedule? It's more common than you'd think.
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Schools end up overshooting their enrollment projections, and suddenly they've budgeted for particularly staffing that they can't afford.
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And that's because oftentimes they're setting targets not based on data and reality but more often on growth plans. "Hey, we said by twenty twenty-seven we would be at this number, so we gotta get back on track to that."
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Sometimes it's board expectations.
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Boards of directors have a, a vision for where a network or a school is going, and you can feel that pressure all coming from a good place, but you can feel that pressure and wanna inflate that number a little bit.
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There's also these, I would call them, like, hall of fame years. "Well, back in twenty seventeen, we, we hit seven hundred, and, and we should be able to do that despite the last few years maybe being at six hundred.
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We should be able to hit that seven hundred number." Right.
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With ESSER funds gone and healthcare costs ballooning, there, there's no margin for error, and we've gotta get enrollment projections right or else there's really difficult choices and decisions to make on the back end.
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And so if you follow that thread through, you might not be able to afford certain staff.
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You had slotted that staff in to cover, you know, whatever your instructional model is, and then all of a sudden when your projections don't hit where you thought they would, you're sort of backpedaling and, and having to make really difficult decisions, I would imagine, about program staff, et cetera, how you're gonna survive.
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Yeah, and, and, and that, that ultimately ends up being on a principal's plate, and they're the ones kind of looking at their staff and making, again, impossible choices. They didn't plan for it- Right...
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and so now they're going through, and you're either closing a vacancy for a position you think you really need or you're cutting another program, and the last thing you wanna do is any sort of layoff or anything like that.
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But the, the decisions are, are difficult, and it makes it so important to go back and say, "Let's be very rigorous about how we set this enrollment target. Let's be real.
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Let me get all of the stakeholders in around the table so they can understand the complexity of this and the, the implications if we, if we don't get this right or we set some sort of aspirational goal."
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Not to mention, Daniel, you wanna, like, steal the momentum or joy from a director of operations or APO, hand them a, an enrollment target that they know they can't hit. Right. [laughs] Yeah.
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Yeah, certainly demoralizing. Okay, so we've got our vision and mission. We've got our strategic priorities. Then we've got realistic enrollment and revenue projections. What comes next?
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What's the next step in this process?
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I think once that preliminary budget is, is built, you're gonna kinda swing back likely in, in whatever role you're in, you're gonna swing back and start to engage with, uh, talent and HR and also, like, the, the academic team because at that point you're determining teacher allocation.
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You're taking this aggregate head count that you have, and you're starting to get really detailed about how many teachers you need in each content area. And here's what's critical.
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The allocation should be driven by strategic priorities and instructional model. I am gonna beat that drum today. What else might it be driven by?
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Like, what are some common ex- Give us the counter, like, the, you know, the reality. If it should be driven by those things, what are some of the negative things that sometimes drive it?
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Is it just, like, strongest personality in the room gets the most teachers? Or, or what are some of the, the negative drivers? More likely just status quo. Yeah. "We had this many.
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We've always had five ELA teachers," or, "We've al- we've always offered these art courses."
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And so it's typically there's efficiency and there's comfortability in just rolling over the model from the previous year regardless of whether you actually met your goals or moved closer, closer to your, your mission.
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But the, the, the task here and the way to make master scheduling a, a real leadership tool and strategic is to align those priorities and model to the-- or align the staffing allocation to those priorities and model.
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And, and, you know, let's just take an example to try to make this come to life. Let's say- Yeah, that'd be great... yeah, let's say that your network wants to improve literacy outcomes in sixth through eighth grade.
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If your instructional model has been well-defined and it's translated into those parameters we talked about, how many minutes, class size, all those things, curricular materials, all that You can now start to say not just, "Hey, we need more time for ELA," or, "We need five periods of ELA."
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You can start to be really specific about certain class sizes, about who the teachers are who are going in certain places, how many days a week, all of those things, and it's gonna allow y-you to, to just be more targeted and be real about, hey, if this thing matters to us, then we're gonna protect the amount of time we need.
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We're gonna get the right instructional materials. We're gonna get the right teachers in there for a right amount of minutes to align with what we say is, is most important.
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And that requires each year going back and saying, "All right, what do we need this year to be successful? It may be different from what we needed last year." Right.
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So the strategic priorities get kind of baked in first before i- as far as prioritization, allocation of staffing, before you get onto, you know, here's all the other things we did last year that need to fit in here somewhere.
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You're sort of starting with what's the top priority and let's, let's staff and allocate towards that, and then other things come, come after that. Exactly right.
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And, and there's no, you know, you're of course not gonna throw out what you've learned over the years, and y-you don't always have to go back to zero. We could, we could talk about that, maybe we will.
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But it, it is really about making sure that the most important thing stays the most important thing, and you're willing to make really difficult decisions to honor a priority that you know is true and know is necessary to, to get closer to the mission.
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So who's actually doing the, the puzzle piecing here?
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'Cause as you were outlining that one micro example around ELA specific goals, you know, it made me think of how many other goals there are or how many other subjects and teachers and, you know, students are at different levels and, you know, it's such a, it's such a puzzle, and there's so much complexity when you start to think about all the moving parts.
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What's the next step in this process? Who, who's actually tasked with tackling this, and, and what does that look like?
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Charter networks that do this really well end up with a sophisticated, data-driven, really interdepartmental, you know, piece of work, and then it gets handed down to, to school leaders.
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And in, in the best case scenarios, it's handed to an experienced leadership team with experienced schedulers, and they can create a pretty efficient sched- a pretty efficient schedule because they've done it before.
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Too often, principals and instructional leaders are playing outsized roles in that process. We'll, we'll, we'll get to that later in the conversation.
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But for many, that's the best case scenario, is what happens at the executive level or at the network level gets handed down to folks who are really equipped to say, "I know how to do this. I've done it before." Mm.
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At worst, it goes to a junior ops team member who's going to work their butt off, but they're under-resourced, they're under-trained, and they'll likely feel an unnecessary amount of stress and burnout trying to translate that budget a-and allocation into a master schedule that may or may n-not end up satisfying their, their school's leadership team.
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Let's pause on that idea, 'cause I, I sort of envision the archetype being, you know, an ops manager or director of ops up late at night, fifth cup of coffee, pulling their hair out, and, you know, they've got sticky notes and an Excel file and, you know, they're trying to put all the pieces together.
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Uh, you know, to me, that's sort of the, the archetype of peak master schedule craziness, and I'm guessing people who are listening to this have lived some version of that reality. What is the alternative?
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You mentioned when it, when it-- things get handed over to experienced leaders, you know, they, they know how to take it and run with it. What can this look like?
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And maybe talk us through, like, what are some of the right levers that, you know, experienced folks are pulling to make this work. What you described is real. I've lived it.
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Many folks have lived it with, with everything that you described, including the, the, the fifth cup of coffee.
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But I wanna go back to what I, I noted about instructional leaders because what, what I've found is that some of the best schedulers and scheduling teams, the principals and assistant principals of instruction or VPs of instruction are really involved in that, and for good reason.
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They understand the things we talked about best around strategic priorities, uh, instructional models, and, and instructional parameters.
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But I think there's an important question to frame this entire conversation around no matter who is the person who's actually manipulating the master schedule, building it from the beginning or getting it from the network and trying to piece it together in, in the middle of the night.
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We have to reflect, and we have to kind of stare down the most recent NAEP scores and how our country's children are, are performing against their peers around the globe and ask ourselves,
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is this really how we want middle and high school leaders to be spending their time, working with outdated tools, making impossible trade-offs?
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When you have a, a whiteboard with sticky notes and a spreadsheet, there's little visibility into the impact of each choice along the way. Do we really want them to just be people putting a, a puzzle together?
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And I, I so appreciated-- I had great partners at, at Mastery and along the way in master scheduling, and two of them, Dan Bell, who's the deputy CFO, and Peter Li, who's the chief information officer at Mastery, deserve all the credit for this.
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They would talk about the idea that the master schedule is not the product. Mm. That the master schedule is a tool to support the product, which is great instruction.
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And that when middle and high school leaders spend excessive time building schedules, they're not in classrooms, they're not coaching teachers, they're not strategically planning for the upcoming le- year, and they're not spending enough time on instructional effectiveness.
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And I would say the same for ops leaders and school counselors, that there's higher impact work That they can be doing, but the antiquated nature and the weakness, frankly, of the tools on the market are leading to that middle-of-the-night assembly.
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Yep. It makes total sense. So the schedule is not the product, it's a tool. As, as you were just saying, the instruction is the product. You know, we want great teachers in every classroom.
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And as you mentioned, you know, spending hour, hours and hours and hours in the weeds here is, you know, is taking away from time better spent elsewhere. But at the same time, the schedule has to get built.
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The academic year has a way of churning on quickly, and before you know it, you're kinda like back in this process again.
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What are some of the approaches or things you've learned on how people can do this in a, in a manner that puts students first, but also, you know, doesn't take so much time off the, the leadership and prioritizes the right things?
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'Cause I think there's a delicate balance there, and obviously, you know, we'll, we'll talk a little bit more about the tooling side of this. But kinda like big picture, the schedule has to get built.
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Someone has to do it. How can folks approach this in a way that, that is maybe different? It really starts-- We talked a little bit about the process from the network level.
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So, so we'll anchor this conversation in what's happening at the school level and what those, whoever is assigned to it, whether it's a, a VP of instruction or someone on the operations side is building it.
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You know, the first is to make sure that you work with your leadership team or your network team to ensure that those instructional parameters are in place, and we're clear on priorities.
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Because if you start to go down the road of using other tools or following a timeline or process that will lead to the most efficient schedule, if you haven't clearly identified what the priorities for the year are in the instructional parameters, well, then you're, you're just trying to assemble chaos, and what you're gonna run into is a lot of conflicts, a lot of questions to be answered.
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Things like, "Hey, I know this is our teaching allocation, but you said you only wanted 25 students in a class. I can't make that work.
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It's either 25 students in a class, or we have to, you know, have, have more teachers." And some of these like, you know, things that present themselves as either/or are really kind of both/and problems.
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And you'll never get rid of those in scheduling. There's always choices to be made. Right.
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But when you start from that point of being very clear about what your priorities are and your instructional parameters are, there's fewer of them, and it makes it easier to answer those questions.
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It's like leaning on, on values or leaning on a mission. The hard decisions don't go away, but you have something that can help in-in-inform how to do that.
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So having, you know, the school-based leaders having that information so that they can start assembling that schedule or building it is really critical.
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But I would also say to make sure if we lift back out to like the network level, networks can support their, their APOs or whoever the schedulers are by having a, a process that lays out both kind of a kickoff and a way to get started on master scheduling that builds momentum and clarity, checkpoints along the way to make sure that they're on track, and then embedding support.
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We always prioritized at Mastery, at least in the last five years, having a kickoff where we brought all school leadership teams together, principals all the way through. There were counselors.
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Everybody was there from a s- a broader school leadership team. And we used it as an opportunity to say, "Hey, scheduling season's starting.
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Here's what matters most this year, priorities, parameters, the why behind those things." And then we gave schools dedicated time to start to plan out what do our next three to five months look like?
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Think roles, responsibilities, deliverables, things like that.
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And then they walked out of that room feeling more empowered to kind of tackle because they knew what was most important, they knew what the model was, and then they went off and built it.
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But when they go off and build it, one certain-- uh, certainly a lesson learned for me was you need to install quality control checks along the way, and these are opportunities for network leaders to ensure that as the schedule builds, the priorities stay the priorities and are reflected in each evolving version of the schedule.
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And w- because when you're building a master schedule, and you start to layer in constraints, the schedule starts to calcify, and there's fewer and fewer pathways, and that leads to those either/or decisions that are made.
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And the problem is those either/or decisions are made with little visibility into the impact of that decision. And then you wake up one day, and the master schedule looks nothing like you intended it to.
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So those quality control checks and then support at each step of that along the way are, are pretty critical.
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And during those quality control checks or, or, you know, sort of checkpoints along this process, you mentioned there's these different constraints that sort of force the schedule to kinda calcify at a certain point.
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Could you talk us through, you know, for those who haven't done this themselves but maybe are getting pulled into master scheduling for the first time or know it's [chuckles] gonna be put on their plate in the upcoming year, like what are some of the s- the constraints that schools should be thinking about that are drivers here of doing this work well?
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'Cause I would imagine there's student-centric constraints, and then there's staff-centric constraints, and there may be other constraints, facilities, and, you know, there's all sorts of other, other factors.
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But just looking at sort of the student side and then the staffing side, what are the variables that- As a network, you all are either highlighting for your, your actual schools or sort of saying like, "Look, guys, these are the windows that we're operating in because these are our priorities, and, and here's what you need to work with, and here's some thoughts on how to get started."
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Yeah, that's a great way to segment them into kind of student-centric constraints. A teacher who doesn't wanna teach first period or, "Hey, I've always been in this classroom, and I'd like to be in this classroom again."
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I, I get it. I totally understand. Teachers are human beings with preferences and needs. I was a teacher, and adult constraints are a reality i-in any workplace. But here's the tension:
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every time we negotiate an adult-centric constraint, we potentially take away from what students need, and that means we're diluting the potency of getting the right student with the right teacher in the right class at the right time.
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And when a scheduler, the person who's responsible of this, has all of these preferences swirling and all this context for their school, "Miss Johnson is going through a tough time.
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I really wanna get her first period free.
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The department chair always wants all teachers in, in the same wing," they start making accommodations, and before they know it, the schedule is optimized more for adult convenience than student outcomes.
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And that's an unfair burden to put on the scheduler or school leader to make those judgment calls, especially when they don't have the tools to elevate the cost of those decisions as they're making them.
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And when you say evaluate the cost of those decisions, are you talking about kind of modeling this out in a way that leverages technology?
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'Cause I would imagine one of the challenges is particularly if you're doing this i-you know, in Excel or the whiteboard, you know, with strings and, and sticky tape, is kind of drawing those through lines of if I make this decision, what's the cascading effect on everything else?
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Like, that, that seems very challenging to me. Is that where the technology is going?
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And I don't wanna jump too far ahead to kind of future state, but i-is that one of the use cases that you feel like technology is able to solve for?
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Well, yeah, e-exactly right because all of those constraints do have to be attended to, and every school who's building a sche- build a schedule, and I was just building schedules this past spring and summer for a group of, of charter schools in Florida.
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You list out all of your constraints, a-and, and I don't mean to cast a dark cloud on, on adult constraints. They're a reality. They need to be in there. Yeah. They serve a purpose.
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But when you line up all of those constraints, and then you start to try to build the schedule, it's very difficult to pursue what I, I would hope is everyone's goal with a master schedule, which is you're getting one hundred percent of students one hundred percent of their core course requests.
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That's the job, is to get as many-- If you-- If we assume that the courses that are there, all the things that we talked about earlier i-in, in the conversation are true about strategy and instructional parameters and all those things, once this starts to get built, the job is to get one hundred percent of kids one hundred percent of their core course requests and build the most efficient schedule for kids first and again, then some of those needs are in there.
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The problem is that when you don't have technology, you, you make choices, and you don't see the consequences of them. When you use technology, you can do things like model different scenarios quickly.
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"Hey, what happens if we layer in this adult constraint? Does it impact class sizes? Does it create scheduling conflicts?"
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You can start to see the trade-offs in real time and take different models of a schedule, compare them, and say, "Hey, which one actually do- is gonna serve our mission the best?
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Which one is gonna align most with our strategic priorities for the upcoming year?" Right.
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So for schedules that do get built, let's-- I, I wanna put a pin in the technology conversation 'cause I think it's super interesting, and I wanna come back to it.
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But let's get into, like, once the schedule's actually built, there's thousands of charter schools across the country. Everyone's doing this process.
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I would imagine there's certain things that come to fruition that maybe weren't planned for. Somehow you missed it that they may be reflecting on as they go into this next round of, of master scheduling.
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A couple things come to mind around inefficiencies in the schedule.
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Sometimes schools, and, and we can really look into course offerings, which I would say sometimes schools offer too much, an overwhelming number of electives, again, all for the right reasons.
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Uh, they wanna be competitive. We talked a little bit, I mentioned enrollment earlier. Enrollment is more competitive than it has ever been in the charter space.
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You have to draw families and students in, and oftentimes, especially as we get into the middle and high school grades, families and students are drawn in by electives and specialized program.
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There's almost an assumption that they're gonna get quality core instruction, but hey, what else can you offer my kid to have them really engaged, excited about learning, and prepared for their post-secondary path?
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And so some schools end up offering too much and too many electives, and it doesn't necessarily match up with their staffing allocation. So that's one.
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I would say the second is there's the right courses are being offered, but they're offered in an inefficient way.
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So you start to look at your schedule, and you say, "Hey, we have five sections of Spanish 2, and there's 20 students in each section."
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You could consolidate that down to four sections of Spanish with 25 students each and redeploy that teaching capacity elsewhere.
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Heck, you could have your back against the wall and say, we actually need to get that down to 33 students a class and three sections.
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And so you can go in and see efficiency, but there always has to be that, that backstop or that, that checkpoint against how far are we willing to stretch it.
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And when you have a clear instructional model and priorities, you really know what your boundaries are. But those are the kind of the, the type of efficiencies
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Something that's interesting that I've, I've started calling zero-based scheduling, and you would know this, Daniel- Yep... similar to zero-based budgeting.
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Instead of starting by saying, "Hey, we've always offered these 47 electives," you, you ask instead, "If we were to build our course catalog from scratch, knowing what we know about our priorities, student and family needs and wants, then what would be-- what would we offer?"
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And it forces you to justify every course based on current data and not tradition, and that's a hard thing to do because, you know, maybe you've offered Ceramics Three for the last decade, but if there's only 12 students who have requested Ceramics Three, and you have another, you know, section of, let's say, Modern Art, where we have 28 students trying to get into that course, it makes the conversation more objective and data-driven and makes resolving those inefficiencies a, a little bit easier.
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Yeah, I think that's such a good point because a lot of times you'll see, you know, a new leader will come into an organization, and then there's just, you know, uh, they become a catalyst for change, and the organization's in a totally different place two to three years later.
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And a lot of times, if you dig into that story of, like, what really happened, like, yes, the person's an amazing leader, and they brought in, you know, maybe additional staff and things like that.
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But a lot of times, it's the same people in the same organization and, and the school or business or nonprofit looks totally different.
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And a lot of times it's 'cause that leader comes in, and they just don't have the same kind of, "We've always done it this way."
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They're not worried about, you know, this relationship and this political issue on the board.
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And so they're able to take that kind of zero-based approach to, to everything and kind of ask first principles questions, which is what it sounds like you're really encouraging folks to, to think about.
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And it allows you to make the right decision that might be harder but has better lasting outcomes for the students as opposed to the decision that's gonna keep, you know, one specific staff member happy.
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It kind of gets us back to that adult-centric versus student-centric when thinking about the constraints and the drivers.
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So I think that's a really interesting framing for folks to consider as they're, they're kicking this process off.
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What do you think the biggest-- On that topic of change, like I, I wanna jump us into the future here a little bit.
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What do you think the biggest, and I'm [chuckles] I'm sure you've actually heard this in your, your current role, pushback is to changing the way scheduling is viewed and approached? Like, what's the pushback to this?
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'Cause when I sit here and think about the operational complexity, like, I would think leaders would always be chomping at the bit, like, "Please tell me there's a better and easier way to do this."
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But, you know, what's the case against change? I would say the most common one is our school is unique, and a standardized model or tool won't, won't work for us. Hmm. And you know what? They're partly right.
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Every school does have unique characteristics, but that doesn't mean you can't work from a common instructional model, a strategic foundation, and a really thoughtful scheduling process from, from beginning the e- to end.
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Because the goal isn't to make every schedule identical. It's to ensure every schedule is aligned with your priorities and built efficiently.
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On the technology point, though, the other pushback can sometimes be against bringing in a tool because some people feel like, "Hey, I've been doing this for fifteen years, and I'm good at it. I don't- Right.
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[chuckles]... need a tool." And I get it. There is pride in craftsmanship.
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But having led the adoption of Timely when I was the COO at Mastery, I would say, you know, w- would you rather be good at manually building a master schedule, or would you rather be excellent at leading the strategic implementation of a master schedule?
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Technology doesn't replace human judgment in this scenario. It amplifies it and helps take the computational heavy lifting off so that our directors of operations and our APOs can engage in strategic leadership.
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And I made this a, a big point of my time in the COO role when at Mastery. Too often, our DOOs and APOs are considered doers by their colleagues, by central offices, by whatever else. They can do that strategic work.
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They need to be given the tools to do that strategic work.
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So tell us a little bit more about where the tool development is coming, and you can speak to Timely and, and if there's other tools out there or, or innovation happening in this space, whether it be on the SIS side or, or otherwise.
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Tell us a little bit about, like, what is the tech-enabled version of this, and how is it supporting-- Let's maybe talk about the different layers of the cake we've, we've been hitting on here.
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Like the network level, I would imagine, you know, providing visibility and kind of oversight and modeling.
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For the schools, you know, they're actually doing the direct puzzle moving for, for their, you know, local community.
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How is tech helping organizations do this more efficiently, and, and what are some of the things you guys are building at Timely?
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So as I, I've kind of hinted at a couple times, I joined Timely, uh, for many reasons, but one of them was I was, I was an early adopter. We were looking for a solution at Mastery.
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Our former CEO, Scott Gordon, had identified some inefficiencies in our, our scheduling, both on the resource allocation side but also on the how aligned we were to our instructional model.
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And I think we already did it really well at the time, but there was an opportunity to be even better.
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We, we were trying to improve our results, and we were thinking like, "How can we make sure that every teacher that we invest in is in front of," I don't wanna say the always the most number of kids, but can be in front of students in a really strategic way, that that's where they're spending their time, and that all of the courses we're offering, the minutes, the curricular materials, class sizes, all of those instructional parameters are all working towards, uh, towards the same end.
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And so this challenge was in front of me around resource allocation but also instructional parameters.
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Eventually becoming schedules and not letting that kind of weed grow that I talked about before, where you start with the best of intentions for what your schedule is gonna look like, and you wake up in August and it looks nothing like it because of how schedules just naturally calcify.
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You make those kind of either/or choices, impossible choices with no visibility, and you're a little bummed out at the end, but at that point, you just wanna get to the finish line. Right.
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So Paymon Rouhanifard, who's the founder of Timely, he and I had a relationship. He was the superintendent of Camden City Schools.
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We-- he came into Mastery and showed us Timely, and this was three years ago, and I thought, "Wow, this, this thing's gonna, gonna really be a game changer for us." And there's two parts to it.
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It, it's a, a web-based platform that has AI optimization. And what it does is it takes all those constraints that we are talking about, it takes all of the student course requests, and it starts building the models.
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And it said, you know, thousands and thousands and thousands of different iterations to say, "If these constraints have to be true, then how can I get the most number of students the most number of courses?"
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And ultimately, what it spits out is the most efficient schedule because it's just following those, those rules.
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And the thing that really tipped me over the edge was not necessarily the technology, but the hands-on support.
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So there's a dedicated school success manager who's someone who's done scheduling in the way we [chuckles] we've talked about it, maybe more sophisticated too, but has done it in the old way that we've talked about it, and they're able to sit side by side with schools to make sure they not only understand the platform and can maximize it, but also that all of the kind of technical stuff gets through and, and can be a thought partner on the scheduling side of things.
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When we think about, you know, technology in general, there's things about Timely but, you know, any other technology that I think have to be true for any network or school to say, "Hey, I want this as a, as a solution, and it's actually gonna move me forward."
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And it's some of the things I've talked about.
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You, you have to be able to layer in those constraints, and the, the technology should do the heavy lifting of building the most efficient master schedule and concurrently optimizing for all of those student pathways.
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It, it has to be able to do that.
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It should also allow the visibility that you just talked about because that's gonna allow for better support when network leaders can start to see what different models look like without, "Hey, send me that spreadsheet.
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Can you give me access to that spreadsheet? [chuckles] Hey, is that the, is that the first version or the second version?" And then there's even the issue of, you know, comparing one tab to another on, on spreadsheets.
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The process of master scheduling is so fraught with human error and, and I still consider myself a scheduler, but technology does not get tired. The optimizer doesn't make mistakes. [laughs] Right.
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It doesn't make those errors. And so again, to the point of let the technology do the heavy lifting, DOOs, APOs, networks, so that you can ask the right strategic questions about that, about that schedule.
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And then lastly, on any sort of technology tool, it should save time. If the tool doesn't meaningfully reduce the hours and hours, days, weeks that are spent on master scheduling, then, then what's the point?
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And at Timely, we're seeing schools cut their scheduling time not by days, but, but by weeks.
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So in five to 10 years from now, as the technology gets better, as AI continues to improve [chuckles] almost daily, this process gets, you know, it gets compressed, thousands of different variations are run in minutes.
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School leaders can ask really strategic questions like, "What's the long-term impact? Like, what's the downstream effect of the technology getting really good here?"
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I think you're probably g- just gonna see more dynamic and efficient scheduling.
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So instead of building one schedule or building a schedule once in the spring and kind of living with it all year, the implementation of technology should allow schools to adapt and adjust more fluently.
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There may be enrollment shifts, which are a reality. Student needs are evolving. We have far more students with IEP, with, uh, IEPs, with multi-language learners.
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Like, all of those things are, are le- leading to more complexity in schools, and therefore, master schedules need to both respond to that when they're first built but also adapt along the way.
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So I think you're gonna see technology that's gonna allow for adaptation both on the front end of the process and then in the middle of the process.
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I also think that we're gonna see more transparency and accountability around scheduling.
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We talked about visibility a little bit at the network level, and that's gonna be important to make sure that all those resources and all that intentionality around student outcomes is being delivered on in the instructional model and master schedule.
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But boards and authorizers might start asking more sophisticated questions about how resources are allocated through the master schedule as they look to turn over every stone around how to improve student achievement.
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Yeah, I wondered about that.
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Some of the other-- The people who are invested in the success of the school, like, it, it seems like this is a logical conclusion that others would wanna be able to kind of see the through line between budget, you know, strategic vision, budget priorities, how-- what's the actual output into how we're structuring the, the day-to-day.
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So I, I think that certainly feels like a logical conclusion. One other note on that.
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On the kind of, you know, board and authorizer side of things, like, if you're on a charter school board And you're approving multimillion-dollar budgets each year.
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You should understand how that budget comes to life in a master schedule. Right. And I don't think boards and authorizers are often getting to that level of granularity.
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Are the strategic priorities that you're approving reflected in how time and people are allocated? That's a, a governance question as much as it is a, a mission or an operational one.
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That's probably also the perfect question to kinda come to a close here on.
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I was gonna ask you, you know, for anyone who's in the thick of this or about to kick off their master schedule process, you know, any final advice.
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I think what you just said [chuckles] there is probably a perfect kinda fundamental question. Anything else you would offer a- as final advice as we come to a close? Yeah.
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It's scheduling season, Daniel, so I'm full of ideas. [laughs] Uh, I'm excited about it 'cause I, I, I do love this time of year.
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But first I would just start by asking yourself, is your current approach to master scheduling aligned with your aspirations for instructional excellence?
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If you're a network leader who deeply cares about data-driven instruction, multiple pathways to and through post-secondary, a- and about overall student outcomes, but you're asking school leaders to build the schedules with y- 15-year-old tools and fuzzy parameters, there's a disconnect.
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So invest in defining those, those model and parameters. It's foundational. It's gonna make everything else easier. You can't optimize a schedule if you don't know what you're, what you're optimizing for.
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And then finally, be willing to rethink the process, whether it's zero-based scheduling or whatever it is. You know, just because you've always have done it one way doesn't mean it's the best way.
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The challenges our schools are facing with enrollment volatility, staffing shorta- shortages, increasing student needs are different than they were a decade ago. Our tools and our processes need to evolve, too. Perfect.
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Where can people learn more about Timely or connect with you, Matt? You can reach out to me directly. I think we're gonna share my information.
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I am happy to talk through their current scheduling process, share what we've learned, ex- explore whether, uh, Timely may be a, a fit.
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Even if they're not ready to, to change tools, I'm always glad to connect with fellow charter leaders and talk about this work. We're all trying to do right by kids.
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We have to do something about those NAEP scores, and if I can share my insights from, from 20 years in this sector that'll help somebody else, then that's, that's time well spent. Awesome.
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Well, I appreciate you coming on. Thanks again for sharing your expertise. Thanks, Daniel. Appreciate it. [upbeat music] Thanks for listening to Charter School Insider.
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Thanks, and we hope you'll tune in for the next one.
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[upbeat music] Welcome to Charter School Insider: Lessons from the Nation's Top Charter School Operators, the only podcast dedicated to the behind-the-scenes business of running a successful charter school.
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Join us as we sit down with charter school leaders who share how they're overcoming the biggest operational hurdles facing their schools today. Matt, good to see you. Welcome to the show. Thanks for being here.
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Yeah, thanks for having me, Daniel. I'm excited to dig into this topic today.
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So I've gotten to know you a little bit, but for folks who do not know you or do not come from maybe the Philadelphia charter area, give us the quick background on who you are and what you're up to today.
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So I started in K twelve education in two thousand and three. I was a teacher in Philadelphia Public Schools, and then moved on in two thousand and seven to join Mastery Charter Schools.
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Uh, Mastery's based in Philadelphia and Camden, New Jersey. At that time, we had three schools.
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Now Mastery has twenty-four, and I'm gonna say we because I was with Mastery for eighteen years, and so it's still hard for me to break that habit of saying we.
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But I held a number of positions at Mastery, school-based leadership positions, but spent most of my career as the regional superintendent of Mastery's high schools.
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And most recently at Mastery, I was the, the chief operating officer. I left Mastery after eighteen great years back in February, did some consulting work for the last few months, and then I joined Timely.
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And Timely is an edtech company that has a master scheduling solution that pairs an AI optimizer with, uh, expert scheduling support to save time, money, and make sure more kids get the, the courses they need. Perfect.
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Well, that's-- you know, we're, we're pulling the curtain back immediately on the topic for today, which is master scheduling.
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And I'm excited to dive into this 'cause every once in a while, I'll sit down with a leader or bump into someone and say, "Hey, what's going on? Uh, what are you working on right now?"
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And they'll say, "Ugh, the master schedule. It's a disaster." Why do you think master schedules-- scheduling season is, like, the least favorite time of the year for some people? Or maybe for a lot of people.
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Why do you think that is? Yeah. Well, we're, we're on it. It is, it is here. If it's not here, it's coming up shortly. And look, I, I felt the same way for years. Here's the thing.
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We have professionalized almost every aspect of school operations over the past couple decades. We have CRMs for enrollment. We didn't have those fifteen, twenty years ago. We have better financial forecasting tools.
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We have project management platforms like Asana. All of it has become more sophisticated, but when it comes to master scheduling, most folks are still using tools that haven't evolved in fifteen or twenty years.
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Maybe Excel spreadsheets have become Google Sheets. For the most part, it's, it's a lot of spreadsheets. It's a lot of tiles on Magna-Tiles, on whiteboards, and sticky notes.
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Even the student information systems that have scheduling functions, most of that is so far downstream, it can't truly optimize for a school or a network's most important goals.
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And so that makes for a long, laborious, I would argue unfulfilling process, so we shouldn't be surprised that leaders dread it. Yep. Makes, makes a ton of sense. So where does the master scheduling
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function really begin?
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'Cause m-my understanding, which is extremely limited, is that this is one of those things that is really cross-functional for the leadership team, even though it doesn't always appear that way or maybe one person kinda gets tasked with, with project managing it.
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But, like, w-where does building a strong master schedule start before you jump into that Excel Google Sheets template?
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You know, whether you're a school or a network, it, it starts at the, uh, really this time of year establishing strategic priorities for, you know, the, the next school year.
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That's really breaking down what's your mission, what was our performance data last year against that mission, where are the strengths and weaknesses, and then using that information to define what's going to be most important in the coming year.
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Because those strategic priorities are gonna influence your instructional model. So it is, as you said, a real cross-functional endeavor to say, "At our school, at our charter network, what are we going to focus on?
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Where are we gonna push our resources to move closer to our, our, our mission?" And once that's established, it needs to translate into an instructional model. All the magic happens in the classroom.
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And so when I say instructional model, what I mean is that student and teacher experience. Like, what happens in a school each day?
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For an eighth-grader, how many periods of math do they get, or how many minutes of math do they get? What curricular materials are used? Is it every other day, or is it every single day? Are they blocks?
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Are we two semesters or three trimesters?
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All of those things kind of make up the instructional model should be informed by those strategic priorities, because when you have the instructional model and then what we would call instructional parameters, they're kind of part and parcel, those are the first and most important building blocks of a high-quality master schedule.
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The, the strategic priorities in the instructional model, then the conversation I think does shift more over towards maybe operations and finance, and it goes to enrollment projections.
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And I mean real enrollment projections, not, not wishful thinking. Uh, when I was- Right... when I was the COO at, at Mastery, we would take the trailing three years of enrollment data. We'd identify trends.
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We would then compare that against hyper-local market conditions. So are schools opening or closing in the area? What's happening with the school-age population in, in your section of the city?
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Whatever those things are, that started to shape what our enrollment projection would be for the upcoming year.
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And then finally, we have to look back and interrogate our enrollment strategy and execution from the previous year and find out what worked, what didn't, and then what we needed to adjust for the upcoming year.
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So only after that process of, you know, establishing strategic priorities, starting to, to build out a- and, and formalize that instructional model and parameters, and then going through that enrollment paces can you, can you really say, "All right, we have an achievable enrollment target, and we can move forward."
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And most of the listeners know that enrollment projections and enrollment drives revenue forecasts.
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So once you know that, your, your finance team and operations team, academic leads can come together and start to build a preliminary budget, adjusting for the expenses to align to those priorities a- and model.
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What happens if schools get that wrong? You mentioned, you know, having extremely realistic enrollment projections, really digging into the data that's local to your part of the city, your community.
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What's kind of, you know, the bear case if you're overly optimistic on the enrollment side? What's kind of the downstream effect for operationalizing the master schedule? It's more common than you'd think.
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Schools end up overshooting their enrollment projections, and suddenly they've budgeted for particularly staffing that they can't afford.
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And that's because oftentimes they're setting targets not based on data and reality but more often on growth plans. "Hey, we said by twenty twenty-seven we would be at this number, so we gotta get back on track to that."
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Sometimes it's board expectations.
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Boards of directors have a, a vision for where a network or a school is going, and you can feel that pressure all coming from a good place, but you can feel that pressure and wanna inflate that number a little bit.
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There's also these, I would call them, like, hall of fame years. "Well, back in twenty seventeen, we, we hit seven hundred, and, and we should be able to do that despite the last few years maybe being at six hundred.
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We should be able to hit that seven hundred number." Right.
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With ESSER funds gone and healthcare costs ballooning, there, there's no margin for error, and we've gotta get enrollment projections right or else there's really difficult choices and decisions to make on the back end.
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And so if you follow that thread through, you might not be able to afford certain staff.
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You had slotted that staff in to cover, you know, whatever your instructional model is, and then all of a sudden when your projections don't hit where you thought they would, you're sort of backpedaling and, and having to make really difficult decisions, I would imagine, about program staff, et cetera, how you're gonna survive.
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Yeah, and, and, and that, that ultimately ends up being on a principal's plate, and they're the ones kind of looking at their staff and making, again, impossible choices. They didn't plan for it- Right...
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and so now they're going through, and you're either closing a vacancy for a position you think you really need or you're cutting another program, and the last thing you wanna do is any sort of layoff or anything like that.
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But the, the decisions are, are difficult, and it makes it so important to go back and say, "Let's be very rigorous about how we set this enrollment target. Let's be real.
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Let me get all of the stakeholders in around the table so they can understand the complexity of this and the, the implications if we, if we don't get this right or we set some sort of aspirational goal."
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Not to mention, Daniel, you wanna, like, steal the momentum or joy from a director of operations or APO, hand them a, an enrollment target that they know they can't hit. Right. [laughs] Yeah.
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Yeah, certainly demoralizing. Okay, so we've got our vision and mission. We've got our strategic priorities. Then we've got realistic enrollment and revenue projections. What comes next?
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What's the next step in this process?
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I think once that preliminary budget is, is built, you're gonna kinda swing back likely in, in whatever role you're in, you're gonna swing back and start to engage with, uh, talent and HR and also, like, the, the academic team because at that point you're determining teacher allocation.
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You're taking this aggregate head count that you have, and you're starting to get really detailed about how many teachers you need in each content area. And here's what's critical.
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The allocation should be driven by strategic priorities and instructional model. I am gonna beat that drum today. What else might it be driven by?
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Like, what are some common ex- Give us the counter, like, the, you know, the reality. If it should be driven by those things, what are some of the negative things that sometimes drive it?
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Is it just, like, strongest personality in the room gets the most teachers? Or, or what are some of the, the negative drivers? More likely just status quo. Yeah. "We had this many.
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We've always had five ELA teachers," or, "We've al- we've always offered these art courses."
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And so it's typically there's efficiency and there's comfortability in just rolling over the model from the previous year regardless of whether you actually met your goals or moved closer, closer to your, your mission.
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But the, the, the task here and the way to make master scheduling a, a real leadership tool and strategic is to align those priorities and model to the-- or align the staffing allocation to those priorities and model.
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And, and, you know, let's just take an example to try to make this come to life. Let's say- Yeah, that'd be great... yeah, let's say that your network wants to improve literacy outcomes in sixth through eighth grade.
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If your instructional model has been well-defined and it's translated into those parameters we talked about, how many minutes, class size, all those things, curricular materials, all that You can now start to say not just, "Hey, we need more time for ELA," or, "We need five periods of ELA."
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You can start to be really specific about certain class sizes, about who the teachers are who are going in certain places, how many days a week, all of those things, and it's gonna allow y-you to, to just be more targeted and be real about, hey, if this thing matters to us, then we're gonna protect the amount of time we need.
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We're gonna get the right instructional materials. We're gonna get the right teachers in there for a right amount of minutes to align with what we say is, is most important.
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And that requires each year going back and saying, "All right, what do we need this year to be successful? It may be different from what we needed last year." Right.
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So the strategic priorities get kind of baked in first before i- as far as prioritization, allocation of staffing, before you get onto, you know, here's all the other things we did last year that need to fit in here somewhere.
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You're sort of starting with what's the top priority and let's, let's staff and allocate towards that, and then other things come, come after that. Exactly right.
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And, and there's no, you know, you're of course not gonna throw out what you've learned over the years, and y-you don't always have to go back to zero. We could, we could talk about that, maybe we will.
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But it, it is really about making sure that the most important thing stays the most important thing, and you're willing to make really difficult decisions to honor a priority that you know is true and know is necessary to, to get closer to the mission.
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So who's actually doing the, the puzzle piecing here?
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'Cause as you were outlining that one micro example around ELA specific goals, you know, it made me think of how many other goals there are or how many other subjects and teachers and, you know, students are at different levels and, you know, it's such a, it's such a puzzle, and there's so much complexity when you start to think about all the moving parts.
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What's the next step in this process? Who, who's actually tasked with tackling this, and, and what does that look like?
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Charter networks that do this really well end up with a sophisticated, data-driven, really interdepartmental, you know, piece of work, and then it gets handed down to, to school leaders.
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And in, in the best case scenarios, it's handed to an experienced leadership team with experienced schedulers, and they can create a pretty efficient sched- a pretty efficient schedule because they've done it before.
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Too often, principals and instructional leaders are playing outsized roles in that process. We'll, we'll, we'll get to that later in the conversation.
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But for many, that's the best case scenario, is what happens at the executive level or at the network level gets handed down to folks who are really equipped to say, "I know how to do this. I've done it before." Mm.
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At worst, it goes to a junior ops team member who's going to work their butt off, but they're under-resourced, they're under-trained, and they'll likely feel an unnecessary amount of stress and burnout trying to translate that budget a-and allocation into a master schedule that may or may n-not end up satisfying their, their school's leadership team.
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Let's pause on that idea, 'cause I, I sort of envision the archetype being, you know, an ops manager or director of ops up late at night, fifth cup of coffee, pulling their hair out, and, you know, they've got sticky notes and an Excel file and, you know, they're trying to put all the pieces together.
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Uh, you know, to me, that's sort of the, the archetype of peak master schedule craziness, and I'm guessing people who are listening to this have lived some version of that reality. What is the alternative?
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You mentioned when it, when it-- things get handed over to experienced leaders, you know, they, they know how to take it and run with it. What can this look like?
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And maybe talk us through, like, what are some of the right levers that, you know, experienced folks are pulling to make this work. What you described is real. I've lived it.
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Many folks have lived it with, with everything that you described, including the, the, the fifth cup of coffee.
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But I wanna go back to what I, I noted about instructional leaders because what, what I've found is that some of the best schedulers and scheduling teams, the principals and assistant principals of instruction or VPs of instruction are really involved in that, and for good reason.
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They understand the things we talked about best around strategic priorities, uh, instructional models, and, and instructional parameters.
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But I think there's an important question to frame this entire conversation around no matter who is the person who's actually manipulating the master schedule, building it from the beginning or getting it from the network and trying to piece it together in, in the middle of the night.
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We have to reflect, and we have to kind of stare down the most recent NAEP scores and how our country's children are, are performing against their peers around the globe and ask ourselves,
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is this really how we want middle and high school leaders to be spending their time, working with outdated tools, making impossible trade-offs?
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When you have a, a whiteboard with sticky notes and a spreadsheet, there's little visibility into the impact of each choice along the way. Do we really want them to just be people putting a, a puzzle together?
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And I, I so appreciated-- I had great partners at, at Mastery and along the way in master scheduling, and two of them, Dan Bell, who's the deputy CFO, and Peter Li, who's the chief information officer at Mastery, deserve all the credit for this.
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They would talk about the idea that the master schedule is not the product. Mm. That the master schedule is a tool to support the product, which is great instruction.
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And that when middle and high school leaders spend excessive time building schedules, they're not in classrooms, they're not coaching teachers, they're not strategically planning for the upcoming le- year, and they're not spending enough time on instructional effectiveness.
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And I would say the same for ops leaders and school counselors, that there's higher impact work That they can be doing, but the antiquated nature and the weakness, frankly, of the tools on the market are leading to that middle-of-the-night assembly.
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Yep. It makes total sense. So the schedule is not the product, it's a tool. As, as you were just saying, the instruction is the product. You know, we want great teachers in every classroom.
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And as you mentioned, you know, spending hour, hours and hours and hours in the weeds here is, you know, is taking away from time better spent elsewhere. But at the same time, the schedule has to get built.
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The academic year has a way of churning on quickly, and before you know it, you're kinda like back in this process again.
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What are some of the approaches or things you've learned on how people can do this in a, in a manner that puts students first, but also, you know, doesn't take so much time off the, the leadership and prioritizes the right things?
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'Cause I think there's a delicate balance there, and obviously, you know, we'll, we'll talk a little bit more about the tooling side of this. But kinda like big picture, the schedule has to get built.
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Someone has to do it. How can folks approach this in a way that, that is maybe different? It really starts-- We talked a little bit about the process from the network level.
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So, so we'll anchor this conversation in what's happening at the school level and what those, whoever is assigned to it, whether it's a, a VP of instruction or someone on the operations side is building it.
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You know, the first is to make sure that you work with your leadership team or your network team to ensure that those instructional parameters are in place, and we're clear on priorities.
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Because if you start to go down the road of using other tools or following a timeline or process that will lead to the most efficient schedule, if you haven't clearly identified what the priorities for the year are in the instructional parameters, well, then you're, you're just trying to assemble chaos, and what you're gonna run into is a lot of conflicts, a lot of questions to be answered.
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Things like, "Hey, I know this is our teaching allocation, but you said you only wanted 25 students in a class. I can't make that work.
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It's either 25 students in a class, or we have to, you know, have, have more teachers." And some of these like, you know, things that present themselves as either/or are really kind of both/and problems.
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And you'll never get rid of those in scheduling. There's always choices to be made. Right.
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But when you start from that point of being very clear about what your priorities are and your instructional parameters are, there's fewer of them, and it makes it easier to answer those questions.
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It's like leaning on, on values or leaning on a mission. The hard decisions don't go away, but you have something that can help in-in-inform how to do that.
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So having, you know, the school-based leaders having that information so that they can start assembling that schedule or building it is really critical.
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But I would also say to make sure if we lift back out to like the network level, networks can support their, their APOs or whoever the schedulers are by having a, a process that lays out both kind of a kickoff and a way to get started on master scheduling that builds momentum and clarity, checkpoints along the way to make sure that they're on track, and then embedding support.
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We always prioritized at Mastery, at least in the last five years, having a kickoff where we brought all school leadership teams together, principals all the way through. There were counselors.
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Everybody was there from a s- a broader school leadership team. And we used it as an opportunity to say, "Hey, scheduling season's starting.
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Here's what matters most this year, priorities, parameters, the why behind those things." And then we gave schools dedicated time to start to plan out what do our next three to five months look like?
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Think roles, responsibilities, deliverables, things like that.
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And then they walked out of that room feeling more empowered to kind of tackle because they knew what was most important, they knew what the model was, and then they went off and built it.
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But when they go off and build it, one certain-- uh, certainly a lesson learned for me was you need to install quality control checks along the way, and these are opportunities for network leaders to ensure that as the schedule builds, the priorities stay the priorities and are reflected in each evolving version of the schedule.
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And w- because when you're building a master schedule, and you start to layer in constraints, the schedule starts to calcify, and there's fewer and fewer pathways, and that leads to those either/or decisions that are made.
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And the problem is those either/or decisions are made with little visibility into the impact of that decision. And then you wake up one day, and the master schedule looks nothing like you intended it to.
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So those quality control checks and then support at each step of that along the way are, are pretty critical.
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And during those quality control checks or, or, you know, sort of checkpoints along this process, you mentioned there's these different constraints that sort of force the schedule to kinda calcify at a certain point.
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Could you talk us through, you know, for those who haven't done this themselves but maybe are getting pulled into master scheduling for the first time or know it's [chuckles] gonna be put on their plate in the upcoming year, like what are some of the s- the constraints that schools should be thinking about that are drivers here of doing this work well?
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'Cause I would imagine there's student-centric constraints, and then there's staff-centric constraints, and there may be other constraints, facilities, and, you know, there's all sorts of other, other factors.
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But just looking at sort of the student side and then the staffing side, what are the variables that- As a network, you all are either highlighting for your, your actual schools or sort of saying like, "Look, guys, these are the windows that we're operating in because these are our priorities, and, and here's what you need to work with, and here's some thoughts on how to get started."
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Yeah, that's a great way to segment them into kind of student-centric constraints. A teacher who doesn't wanna teach first period or, "Hey, I've always been in this classroom, and I'd like to be in this classroom again."
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I, I get it. I totally understand. Teachers are human beings with preferences and needs. I was a teacher, and adult constraints are a reality i-in any workplace. But here's the tension:
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every time we negotiate an adult-centric constraint, we potentially take away from what students need, and that means we're diluting the potency of getting the right student with the right teacher in the right class at the right time.
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And when a scheduler, the person who's responsible of this, has all of these preferences swirling and all this context for their school, "Miss Johnson is going through a tough time.
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I really wanna get her first period free.
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The department chair always wants all teachers in, in the same wing," they start making accommodations, and before they know it, the schedule is optimized more for adult convenience than student outcomes.
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And that's an unfair burden to put on the scheduler or school leader to make those judgment calls, especially when they don't have the tools to elevate the cost of those decisions as they're making them.
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And when you say evaluate the cost of those decisions, are you talking about kind of modeling this out in a way that leverages technology?
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'Cause I would imagine one of the challenges is particularly if you're doing this i-you know, in Excel or the whiteboard, you know, with strings and, and sticky tape, is kind of drawing those through lines of if I make this decision, what's the cascading effect on everything else?
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Like, that, that seems very challenging to me. Is that where the technology is going?
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And I don't wanna jump too far ahead to kind of future state, but i-is that one of the use cases that you feel like technology is able to solve for?
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Well, yeah, e-exactly right because all of those constraints do have to be attended to, and every school who's building a sche- build a schedule, and I was just building schedules this past spring and summer for a group of, of charter schools in Florida.
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You list out all of your constraints, a-and, and I don't mean to cast a dark cloud on, on adult constraints. They're a reality. They need to be in there. Yeah. They serve a purpose.
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But when you line up all of those constraints, and then you start to try to build the schedule, it's very difficult to pursue what I, I would hope is everyone's goal with a master schedule, which is you're getting one hundred percent of students one hundred percent of their core course requests.
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That's the job, is to get as many-- If you-- If we assume that the courses that are there, all the things that we talked about earlier i-in, in the conversation are true about strategy and instructional parameters and all those things, once this starts to get built, the job is to get one hundred percent of kids one hundred percent of their core course requests and build the most efficient schedule for kids first and again, then some of those needs are in there.
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The problem is that when you don't have technology, you, you make choices, and you don't see the consequences of them. When you use technology, you can do things like model different scenarios quickly.
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"Hey, what happens if we layer in this adult constraint? Does it impact class sizes? Does it create scheduling conflicts?"
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You can start to see the trade-offs in real time and take different models of a schedule, compare them, and say, "Hey, which one actually do- is gonna serve our mission the best?
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Which one is gonna align most with our strategic priorities for the upcoming year?" Right.
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So for schedules that do get built, let's-- I, I wanna put a pin in the technology conversation 'cause I think it's super interesting, and I wanna come back to it.
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But let's get into, like, once the schedule's actually built, there's thousands of charter schools across the country. Everyone's doing this process.
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I would imagine there's certain things that come to fruition that maybe weren't planned for. Somehow you missed it that they may be reflecting on as they go into this next round of, of master scheduling.
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A couple things come to mind around inefficiencies in the schedule.
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Sometimes schools, and, and we can really look into course offerings, which I would say sometimes schools offer too much, an overwhelming number of electives, again, all for the right reasons.
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Uh, they wanna be competitive. We talked a little bit, I mentioned enrollment earlier. Enrollment is more competitive than it has ever been in the charter space.
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You have to draw families and students in, and oftentimes, especially as we get into the middle and high school grades, families and students are drawn in by electives and specialized program.
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There's almost an assumption that they're gonna get quality core instruction, but hey, what else can you offer my kid to have them really engaged, excited about learning, and prepared for their post-secondary path?
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And so some schools end up offering too much and too many electives, and it doesn't necessarily match up with their staffing allocation. So that's one.
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I would say the second is there's the right courses are being offered, but they're offered in an inefficient way.
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So you start to look at your schedule, and you say, "Hey, we have five sections of Spanish 2, and there's 20 students in each section."
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You could consolidate that down to four sections of Spanish with 25 students each and redeploy that teaching capacity elsewhere.
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Heck, you could have your back against the wall and say, we actually need to get that down to 33 students a class and three sections.
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And so you can go in and see efficiency, but there always has to be that, that backstop or that, that checkpoint against how far are we willing to stretch it.
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And when you have a clear instructional model and priorities, you really know what your boundaries are. But those are the kind of the, the type of efficiencies
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Something that's interesting that I've, I've started calling zero-based scheduling, and you would know this, Daniel- Yep... similar to zero-based budgeting.
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Instead of starting by saying, "Hey, we've always offered these 47 electives," you, you ask instead, "If we were to build our course catalog from scratch, knowing what we know about our priorities, student and family needs and wants, then what would be-- what would we offer?"
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And it forces you to justify every course based on current data and not tradition, and that's a hard thing to do because, you know, maybe you've offered Ceramics Three for the last decade, but if there's only 12 students who have requested Ceramics Three, and you have another, you know, section of, let's say, Modern Art, where we have 28 students trying to get into that course, it makes the conversation more objective and data-driven and makes resolving those inefficiencies a, a little bit easier.
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Yeah, I think that's such a good point because a lot of times you'll see, you know, a new leader will come into an organization, and then there's just, you know, uh, they become a catalyst for change, and the organization's in a totally different place two to three years later.
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And a lot of times, if you dig into that story of, like, what really happened, like, yes, the person's an amazing leader, and they brought in, you know, maybe additional staff and things like that.
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But a lot of times, it's the same people in the same organization and, and the school or business or nonprofit looks totally different.
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And a lot of times it's 'cause that leader comes in, and they just don't have the same kind of, "We've always done it this way."
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They're not worried about, you know, this relationship and this political issue on the board.
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And so they're able to take that kind of zero-based approach to, to everything and kind of ask first principles questions, which is what it sounds like you're really encouraging folks to, to think about.
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And it allows you to make the right decision that might be harder but has better lasting outcomes for the students as opposed to the decision that's gonna keep, you know, one specific staff member happy.
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It kind of gets us back to that adult-centric versus student-centric when thinking about the constraints and the drivers.
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So I think that's a really interesting framing for folks to consider as they're, they're kicking this process off.
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What do you think the biggest-- On that topic of change, like I, I wanna jump us into the future here a little bit.
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What do you think the biggest, and I'm [chuckles] I'm sure you've actually heard this in your, your current role, pushback is to changing the way scheduling is viewed and approached? Like, what's the pushback to this?
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'Cause when I sit here and think about the operational complexity, like, I would think leaders would always be chomping at the bit, like, "Please tell me there's a better and easier way to do this."
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But, you know, what's the case against change? I would say the most common one is our school is unique, and a standardized model or tool won't, won't work for us. Hmm. And you know what? They're partly right.
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Every school does have unique characteristics, but that doesn't mean you can't work from a common instructional model, a strategic foundation, and a really thoughtful scheduling process from, from beginning the e- to end.
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Because the goal isn't to make every schedule identical. It's to ensure every schedule is aligned with your priorities and built efficiently.
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On the technology point, though, the other pushback can sometimes be against bringing in a tool because some people feel like, "Hey, I've been doing this for fifteen years, and I'm good at it. I don't- Right.
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[chuckles]... need a tool." And I get it. There is pride in craftsmanship.
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But having led the adoption of Timely when I was the COO at Mastery, I would say, you know, w- would you rather be good at manually building a master schedule, or would you rather be excellent at leading the strategic implementation of a master schedule?
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Technology doesn't replace human judgment in this scenario. It amplifies it and helps take the computational heavy lifting off so that our directors of operations and our APOs can engage in strategic leadership.
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And I made this a, a big point of my time in the COO role when at Mastery. Too often, our DOOs and APOs are considered doers by their colleagues, by central offices, by whatever else. They can do that strategic work.
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They need to be given the tools to do that strategic work.
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So tell us a little bit more about where the tool development is coming, and you can speak to Timely and, and if there's other tools out there or, or innovation happening in this space, whether it be on the SIS side or, or otherwise.
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Tell us a little bit about, like, what is the tech-enabled version of this, and how is it supporting-- Let's maybe talk about the different layers of the cake we've, we've been hitting on here.
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Like the network level, I would imagine, you know, providing visibility and kind of oversight and modeling.
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For the schools, you know, they're actually doing the direct puzzle moving for, for their, you know, local community.
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How is tech helping organizations do this more efficiently, and, and what are some of the things you guys are building at Timely?
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So as I, I've kind of hinted at a couple times, I joined Timely, uh, for many reasons, but one of them was I was, I was an early adopter. We were looking for a solution at Mastery.
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Our former CEO, Scott Gordon, had identified some inefficiencies in our, our scheduling, both on the resource allocation side but also on the how aligned we were to our instructional model.
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And I think we already did it really well at the time, but there was an opportunity to be even better.
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We, we were trying to improve our results, and we were thinking like, "How can we make sure that every teacher that we invest in is in front of," I don't wanna say the always the most number of kids, but can be in front of students in a really strategic way, that that's where they're spending their time, and that all of the courses we're offering, the minutes, the curricular materials, class sizes, all of those instructional parameters are all working towards, uh, towards the same end.
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And so this challenge was in front of me around resource allocation but also instructional parameters.
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Eventually becoming schedules and not letting that kind of weed grow that I talked about before, where you start with the best of intentions for what your schedule is gonna look like, and you wake up in August and it looks nothing like it because of how schedules just naturally calcify.
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You make those kind of either/or choices, impossible choices with no visibility, and you're a little bummed out at the end, but at that point, you just wanna get to the finish line. Right.
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So Paymon Rouhanifard, who's the founder of Timely, he and I had a relationship. He was the superintendent of Camden City Schools.
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We-- he came into Mastery and showed us Timely, and this was three years ago, and I thought, "Wow, this, this thing's gonna, gonna really be a game changer for us." And there's two parts to it.
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It, it's a, a web-based platform that has AI optimization. And what it does is it takes all those constraints that we are talking about, it takes all of the student course requests, and it starts building the models.
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And it said, you know, thousands and thousands and thousands of different iterations to say, "If these constraints have to be true, then how can I get the most number of students the most number of courses?"
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And ultimately, what it spits out is the most efficient schedule because it's just following those, those rules.
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And the thing that really tipped me over the edge was not necessarily the technology, but the hands-on support.
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So there's a dedicated school success manager who's someone who's done scheduling in the way we [chuckles] we've talked about it, maybe more sophisticated too, but has done it in the old way that we've talked about it, and they're able to sit side by side with schools to make sure they not only understand the platform and can maximize it, but also that all of the kind of technical stuff gets through and, and can be a thought partner on the scheduling side of things.
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When we think about, you know, technology in general, there's things about Timely but, you know, any other technology that I think have to be true for any network or school to say, "Hey, I want this as a, as a solution, and it's actually gonna move me forward."
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And it's some of the things I've talked about.
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You, you have to be able to layer in those constraints, and the, the technology should do the heavy lifting of building the most efficient master schedule and concurrently optimizing for all of those student pathways.
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It, it has to be able to do that.
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It should also allow the visibility that you just talked about because that's gonna allow for better support when network leaders can start to see what different models look like without, "Hey, send me that spreadsheet.
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Can you give me access to that spreadsheet? [chuckles] Hey, is that the, is that the first version or the second version?" And then there's even the issue of, you know, comparing one tab to another on, on spreadsheets.
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The process of master scheduling is so fraught with human error and, and I still consider myself a scheduler, but technology does not get tired. The optimizer doesn't make mistakes. [laughs] Right.
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It doesn't make those errors. And so again, to the point of let the technology do the heavy lifting, DOOs, APOs, networks, so that you can ask the right strategic questions about that, about that schedule.
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And then lastly, on any sort of technology tool, it should save time. If the tool doesn't meaningfully reduce the hours and hours, days, weeks that are spent on master scheduling, then, then what's the point?
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And at Timely, we're seeing schools cut their scheduling time not by days, but, but by weeks.
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So in five to 10 years from now, as the technology gets better, as AI continues to improve [chuckles] almost daily, this process gets, you know, it gets compressed, thousands of different variations are run in minutes.
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School leaders can ask really strategic questions like, "What's the long-term impact? Like, what's the downstream effect of the technology getting really good here?"
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I think you're probably g- just gonna see more dynamic and efficient scheduling.
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So instead of building one schedule or building a schedule once in the spring and kind of living with it all year, the implementation of technology should allow schools to adapt and adjust more fluently.
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There may be enrollment shifts, which are a reality. Student needs are evolving. We have far more students with IEP, with, uh, IEPs, with multi-language learners.
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Like, all of those things are, are le- leading to more complexity in schools, and therefore, master schedules need to both respond to that when they're first built but also adapt along the way.
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So I think you're gonna see technology that's gonna allow for adaptation both on the front end of the process and then in the middle of the process.
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I also think that we're gonna see more transparency and accountability around scheduling.
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We talked about visibility a little bit at the network level, and that's gonna be important to make sure that all those resources and all that intentionality around student outcomes is being delivered on in the instructional model and master schedule.
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But boards and authorizers might start asking more sophisticated questions about how resources are allocated through the master schedule as they look to turn over every stone around how to improve student achievement.
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Yeah, I wondered about that.
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Some of the other-- The people who are invested in the success of the school, like, it, it seems like this is a logical conclusion that others would wanna be able to kind of see the through line between budget, you know, strategic vision, budget priorities, how-- what's the actual output into how we're structuring the, the day-to-day.
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So I, I think that certainly feels like a logical conclusion. One other note on that.
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On the kind of, you know, board and authorizer side of things, like, if you're on a charter school board And you're approving multimillion-dollar budgets each year.
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You should understand how that budget comes to life in a master schedule. Right. And I don't think boards and authorizers are often getting to that level of granularity.
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Are the strategic priorities that you're approving reflected in how time and people are allocated? That's a, a governance question as much as it is a, a mission or an operational one.
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That's probably also the perfect question to kinda come to a close here on.
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I was gonna ask you, you know, for anyone who's in the thick of this or about to kick off their master schedule process, you know, any final advice.
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I think what you just said [chuckles] there is probably a perfect kinda fundamental question. Anything else you would offer a- as final advice as we come to a close? Yeah.
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It's scheduling season, Daniel, so I'm full of ideas. [laughs] Uh, I'm excited about it 'cause I, I, I do love this time of year.
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But first I would just start by asking yourself, is your current approach to master scheduling aligned with your aspirations for instructional excellence?
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If you're a network leader who deeply cares about data-driven instruction, multiple pathways to and through post-secondary, a- and about overall student outcomes, but you're asking school leaders to build the schedules with y- 15-year-old tools and fuzzy parameters, there's a disconnect.
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So invest in defining those, those model and parameters. It's foundational. It's gonna make everything else easier. You can't optimize a schedule if you don't know what you're, what you're optimizing for.
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And then finally, be willing to rethink the process, whether it's zero-based scheduling or whatever it is. You know, just because you've always have done it one way doesn't mean it's the best way.
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The challenges our schools are facing with enrollment volatility, staffing shorta- shortages, increasing student needs are different than they were a decade ago. Our tools and our processes need to evolve, too. Perfect.
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Where can people learn more about Timely or connect with you, Matt? You can reach out to me directly. I think we're gonna share my information.
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I am happy to talk through their current scheduling process, share what we've learned, ex- explore whether, uh, Timely may be a, a fit.
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Even if they're not ready to, to change tools, I'm always glad to connect with fellow charter leaders and talk about this work. We're all trying to do right by kids.
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We have to do something about those NAEP scores, and if I can share my insights from, from 20 years in this sector that'll help somebody else, then that's, that's time well spent. Awesome.
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Well, I appreciate you coming on. Thanks again for sharing your expertise. Thanks, Daniel. Appreciate it. [upbeat music] Thanks for listening to Charter School Insider.
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