The idea that changing the length of high school courses will improve performance at troubled CMS highs schools draws a big shrug from front-line teachers.

“It is kinda like moving the furniture around. You try it one way for awhile, then decide to move it back,” one told me. Weak students will still be weak, the strong ones, still strong.

In fact, it is the longer class periods that teachers say bog things down as students struggle to focus for 90 minutes. But as the state educrats in Raleigh want the entire state to be on the same schedule, the 4×4 semester system it is.

That will mean some tweaking for AP classes, which will be difficult to shoehorn into a semester format and might need to be broken in two “different” semesters.