Here in Madison, LaFollette High uses a block schedule. Unlike the example Mr. Mathews cites, LaFollette has each class meet 5 days/week, so a normally year-long high school class is completed in a semester. If a student has a strong interest in a subject area, s/he can take two classes in a year (e.g. calculus AB and BC can be completed in a year, as they would be in college, or a student could study more than one non-English language during high school).

My son took a lab science class at LaFollette and thought the longer class period was an advantage. Set up and take down of a lab consumes enough time to make it hard to complete the lab in a 53 minute period (39 minutes on early release days). He wasn't so sure it would be an advantage for all courses, but the rest of his course work was done at East.

I also thought immediately of LaFollette and how they have implemented block scheduling, Steve. The idea appeals to me strongly, for exactly the reasons that science classes and foreign (or "world") language classes give for 90 minute classes working better than 50 minute ones. And LaFollette has found a solution that still allows them to meet every day for a student's current classes. But I also wonder how hard that makes it for students coming in partway through a year? How much harder is it if they come in at mid-year from outside Madison versus another Madison high school? MMSD is much more "mobile" than it used to be, with a significant percentage of students across the district moving between school attendance areas - within a school year, as well as in the summer break. Having different systems in different schools would seem to make that more discombobulating. If you were taking 10th grade biology at Memorial, and you move to LaFollette's attendance area in December, now what do you do? And families living in the lower half of Madison's socioeconomic continuum have arguably far less control of when they have to move residences: whether because of rising rents, month-to-month leases, job loss or gain with transportation issues, or for whatever other reason. Does it hurt students who are more mobile? Can anyone here share personal experience with it, or give numbers from any MMSD data?