Inside Racine Unified’s decision to audit their schedule—and what every district leader should know about instructional time loss and the master schedule.
Emily DeBaker had been Chief of Staff at Racine Unified School District in Wisconsin for nearly a decade when BetterLesson’s team came back with the analysis. She knew roughly what they’d find—too many low-enrollment courses, seniors coasting through their final year, a schedule built more out of habit than intention.
But knowing it anecdotally and seeing it in data are two completely different things.
“It was refreshing. Anecdotally, we knew. But it’s one thing to know that as an internal district staff member and another thing for an outside entity with absolutely no ties to your district to come in and say—here’s the data. Here are the facts.”
That moment—when gut instinct becomes irrefutable evidence—is the moment districts move. And it’s the moment Racine’s story starts.
Most districts arrive at this moment the same way: enrollment is down, budget pressure is up, and the schedule hasn’t been looked at in years.
The Problem Familiar to Many Secondary Leaders
Before looking at the data, Racine looked like a lot of districts doing CTE right. Seventeen thousand students across five high schools. Decades of investment in career and technical education pathways. A course catalog that could genuinely claim “something for everyone.”
But their Chief of Staff put it plainly:
“We have too many course options. While we like to tout that we have all these courses for students—it was actually a hindrance to our schedule, our efficiency, and even our students’ learning.”
The warning signs had been there and increasingly visible. What Racine needed was the data to act. That changed when they partnered with BetterLesson to run a full Integrated Insights analysis—student transcripts, bell schedules, staffing, CTE pathway enrollment, and instructional time, examined together for the first time.
Three Things the Data Analysis Showed
1. Students weren’t being challenged past the minimum.
About 30 to 40 percent of Racine seniors were taking a “light senior year”— three or fewer courses in math, English, science, social studies, or world language. The reason? On an 8-period schedule, students accumulate credits fast. Racine’s graduation requirement was 24 credits. Students were reaching 32. By senior year, many needed just one or two courses to finish—and chose accordingly.
But, graduation wasn’t the goal. College and career readiness was.
And, the teachers were already hired. The classrooms already existed. The seats were just empty, because no one had designed the schedule to fill them.
“We had to take a look at this and realize that our schedule was hindering our students. They are not getting nearly the amount of instructional time they can or should be—and on top of it, achieving at not-so-high rates.”
2. Their schedule was quietly costing students instructional time.
Racine ran an 8-period block schedule. On that structure, each course carried roughly 144 instructional hours per credit. A comparable 6-period schedule provides approximately 187 hours for the same credit.
Multiply that gap across four years of English, and students on Racine’s schedule were receiving meaningfully less time with their teachers than students at neighboring schools.
This wasn’t a teacher shortage problem. It wasn’t a curriculum quality problem. It was a structural problem to solve through the schedule.
3. Too many pathways meant too little chance of completion.
One Racine high school offered 12 CTE pathways. Another had 11. A third had 9, with some programs available only at that site.
The research on CTE is clear: students need three or more years in a pathway to access industry credentials and meaningful dual credit. But spread enrollment across 12 pathways and year-three courses end up with six, seven, eight students. Costs per student climb. Teachers can’t be sustained. There’s a risk of programs disappearing, or students not persisting to completion — and the goal of college and career readiness.
When BetterLesson analyzed Racine’s science pipeline, they found students flowing in all directions—into earth science, into biology, into nothing at all after meeting their course requirement. Not because students didn’t want to continue. Because the schedule made stopping easier than going further. Because leaders didn’t have the visibility needed to be actively recruiting students into year three. Because the registration process, designed around checking boxes, had inadvertently trained students to stop asking what’s next.
The data made clear to Racine which courses were no longer helpful to their students’ pathways, and what could be gained by streamlining course offerings and overall pathways.
“The way high schools often register is: students look at their graduation requirements, check them off, and stop. ‘I’m done with science. I’m done with math. I don’t need social studies.’ The process creates exactly the outcome nobody wanted.”
The $25,000 Decisions Being Made, One at a Time, Districtwide
Here’s the framing that changes how district leaders think about scheduling: between 75 and 80 percent of a school district’s budget lives in the people hired and the courses offered. Every section a principal puts on the master schedule is roughly a $25,000 decision. A secondary school’s course catalog is a multi-million dollar budget, built one tile at a time.
Most principals—even excellent ones—aren’t trained to think about it that way. They’re trained to fill seats, meet graduation requirements, and submit the schedule before the district deadline. Whether it’s a good schedule is a different question—and one most districts have never systematically asked.
“Every tile they’re putting on the board is about a $20,000 to $25,000 decision. You’re handing principals multi-million dollar budgets—and a lot of times they aren’t trained to understand what type of schedule you’re actually trying to build.”
This is what makes a scheduling analysis so powerful in a budget-pressure environment. It doesn’t ask districts to spend more. It shows them where current spend isn’t working—and where they already have the resources to do better.
BetterLesson’s Integrated Insights approach has identified more than $100 million in efficiencies across K–12 districts and states. The money is rarely missing. It’s misaligned.
This is the shift that districts are making: from passive scheduling to active scheduling. Instead of collecting student requests and building around them, leaders are starting from a point of view—these are the pathways we’re growing, these are the courses we’re recruiting for—and working backward.
“The numbers don’t lie. He simply took what we had and outlined it in an easy-to-digest presentation. Let the data speak for itself. Try to remove emotion as much as you can. And just know: it takes time.”
The Reason Districts Move Faster With a Partner to Analyze the Data
There’s a version of this conversation that happens in every district, every spring. One leader says the schedule is inefficient, another says it isn’t. Both are working from instinct, institutional memory, and the need to protect their turf. Nobody’s wrong, exactly — and nothing changes.
The difference isn’t better data. It’s data that doesn’t belong to either side.
“We think the schedule is costing us instructional time” is an opinion. But, “Here’s what 14,000 student transcripts show about your senior year enrollment” is not an opinion; it’s objective data.
Having an outside voice—someone with no political stake in the outcome—changed the dynamic. Teachers and principals paid attention differently. The conversation moved from “whose opinion is right” to “what does the data show.”
This is the part that rarely makes it into conversations about scheduling reform. Internal leaders often can’t be the ones driving the analysis—not because they lack knowledge, but because they carry history. The data lands differently from someone who has no ties to the district.
This is also why Racine was deliberate about who facilitated the stakeholder workshops. Teachers and principals were in the room. Frontline voices were heard. But the framing stayed anchored to data, not personalities—which meant the people most likely to resist change ended up co-owning it instead.
Quick Wins First, Then the Hard Stuff
Racine didn’t transform overnight, and Emily was clear about that. When the analysis was done, they started with the obvious: eliminate keyboarding, consolidate six beginner photography courses down to one or two, clean up the offerings nobody would fight to keep.
“Those quick wins help gain momentum and buy-in. We didn’t hear a word of pushback. People were like—yeah, that makes sense. So capitalize on those first.”
Then came the harder conversations: bell schedule restructuring, FTE implications, staffing alignment. Those take longer. Racine’s goal is full implementation by fall 2026—roughly two years from analysis to change. For a district of 17,000 students, that’s fast.
In the meantime, they have something they didn’t have before: a shared language for hard decisions. When principals arrive in spring staffing meetings asking for 1.8 more FTE, the district no longer has to take the request on faith. They have data. They have benchmarks. They have a point of view.
Watch the full conversation with Emily DeBaker and Steven Gehring →
Watch the full conversation with RacineBetterLesson’s Integrated Insights approach has identified more than $100 million in efficiencies across K–12 districts and states. To learn how strategic scheduling analysis could support your district’s goals, reach out to our team.
