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Obama Makes a Push To Add Time To the School Year
N!NJA sends in a proposal that is sure to cause some discussion, especially among students and teachers. Obama and his education secretary say that American kids spend too little time in school, putting them at a disadvantage in comparison to other students around the globe. "'Now, I know longer school days and school years are not wildly popular ideas,' the president said earlier this year. 'Not with Malia and Sasha, not in my family, and probably not in yours. But the challenges of a new century demand more time in the classroom.' 'Our school calendar is based upon the agrarian economy and not too many of our kids are working the fields today,' Education Secretary Arne Duncan said in a recent interview with The Associated Press. ... 'Young people in other countries are going to school 25, 30 percent longer than our students here,' Duncan told the AP. 'I want to just level the playing field.' ... Kids in the US spend more hours in school (1,146 instructional hours per year) than do kids in the Asian countries that persistently outscore the US on math and science tests — Singapore (903), Taiwan (1,050), Japan (1,005) and Hong Kong (1,013). That is despite the fact that Taiwan, Japan and Hong Kong have longer school years (190 to 201 days) than does the U.S. (180 days)."
It depends what you mean by "how long" -- how long in a given day, or how long between vacation periods? Cognitive psychologists have demonstrated that the spacing of study occasions is highly important for learning and long-term retention. The education literature is full of studies on summer learning loss. So Obama isn't just making this up out of nowhere -- he's basing his proposal on a substantial body of empirical research.
In South Korea, after going to "normal" school, a lot of students go for additional studying/tutoring. These are called "Hagwon" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hagwon)
I believe Japan has something similar with their cram schools.
Not trying to say more amount of time in school is either better or worse, but it'd probably be useful to look at how the total amount of time in school was determined before relying on it too much.
Some people criticize these other school systems as stressing memorization and test-taking abilities over individual/creative thought. Of course, that's an anecdotal statement, so take it for what it's worth...
If all you have are silver bullets, everything looks like a werewolf.
Ah, the misplaced hatred of standardized tests. Never mind that such a label is also applied to psychological profiles that are beneficial in classification and therapy decisions, or that those "other countries" who are supposedly so far ahead of the U.S. use standardized tests with higher stakes than Americans could imagine. (When was the last time someone committed suicide for failing their state tests?)
The effectiveness of an assessment is largely independent of its format. I've seen rote-recall essay and practical (lab) assessment tasks, and I've seen critical thinking restricted-response items. But good items take work to develop - work that most states are not willing to invest. The typical method is for the state to contract out the development of their tests to a textbook publisher - who will often sell the tests as a loss leader for textbooks. My state (NY) releases the technical reports for the publishers, but then doesn't do anything about low reliabilities (alpha of .50 on the CR items on the 3rd Grade Math in 2006), inaccurate placements (only 90% of 8th graders were accurately classified pass/fail on the English/Language Arts test in 2006), or other bizarre psychometric stats (only 24% of the variance in the student scores being explained by the dominant factor).
Rather than blame an inanimate objects (standardized tests), why not blame the policy makers who use them inappropriately and in violation of the 1999 Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing put out by AERA, APA, and NCME?
Oh, and the issue of testing 1 day out of 180 - Assessment people have known about that for almost a century. It's called Classical Test Theory and error due to occasion sampling. There are techniques to establish and mitigate its effect on test scores, but, again, states don't really care about the quality of the assessments.
I'd rather have someone respond than be modded up.
Depends on where in Asia. I've taught at 19 Japanese schools over a 7-year period, and two of those were high schools of differing levels. While the kids here excel at math and science, it's only in the areas where rote learning is emphasized. They really are at a disadvantage when it comes to original thinking. They think the teacher is responsible for telling them what's right. Also, they really hate trying to extrapolate an answer based on previous knowledge, because they might be wrong.
As for advancement through school, the boards of education are encouraging the "no child left behind" idea; even if you don't participate in class you receive a 55%, and 90% of your grade is based on the tests, not the classwork. This means that you only really have to cram for about eight weeks out of the year to do a decent job. For those who still manage to fail despite all of these measures, a single make-up test is offered every year for each subject failed, for which the student is rigorously coached (using the actual test questions) beforehand.
Japan and the US share a serious problem in common: a lot of bureaucratic interference from people who have no education credentials and are ham-stringing the teaching process to the point where everybody passes but nobody actually learns anything. Spending more time being taught badly isn't going to resolve the issue; we need to revamp the teaching system and eliminate the pandering cruft that is bogging down our schools.
"Give a man fire, and he'll be warm for a day; set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life