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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)."
No thanks, I waste enough time in school already. Of my 6 classes (3 of which are AP) and can already get my normal day's worth of homework done during downtime before I leave school. If anything, get better teachers and better courses. Don't waste money on longer school hours.
Kids in the US spend more hours in school ... than do kids in the Asian countries that persistently outscore the US on math and science tests
Doesn't that mean that the problem is not how long US kids are in school?
...it's quality.
It's not a matter of there being not enough time in the school year to get learning done. It's a case of the pace of learning being too low (essentially zero in some cases).
... spending more time in class is going to help the kids perform better?
How about we require them to actually pass the classes they do attend before letting them move on...
The problem is not the length of the school year. It is the profound incompetence of the public school monopoly and the lack of accountability of the teachers unions.
an ill wind that blows no good
Most parents send their children to either a public or private institution. According to government data, one-tenth of students are enrolled in private schools. Approximately 85% of students enter the public schools,[14] largely because they are "free" (tax burdens by school districts vary from area to area). Most students attend school for around six hours per day, and usually anywhere from 175 to 185 days per year. Most schools have a summer break period for about two and half months from June through August. This break is much longer than in many other nations. Originally, "summer vacation," as it is colloquially called, allowed students to participate in the harvest period during the summer.[citation needed] However, this remains largely by tradition. The other option available and being taken up by some schools is Year-round school.
From wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Education_in_the_United_States
It doesn't mean it's more quality but I think it's a start.
Hold up, wait a minute, let me put some pimpin in it
President Obama seems to conveniently overlook the large differences in educational structure and cultural attitude between the USA and the countries producing the highest test scores. Unless having a larger economy results in more money for education that is well spent on quality teachers and actually useful programs (looking at you, No Child Left Behind), there is no reason to expect the USA's students to do better on average than other countries. Throw in the fact that the highest scoring countries include those with either a pervasive cultural respect for learning or a relatively homogeneous population for whom centralized education control is beneficial, and one begins to wonder why President Obama expects the USA to be able to compete for the highest average.
On top of that, the USA produces a fair number of top notch scientists, engineers, mathematicians, and computer scientists right now, but those top notch individuals tend to be results of family pressure, personal ambition, or sheer-jealousy-inducing talent. Forcing those top level people into more hours of classes that tend to bore the living daylights out of them is not helpful. Mandating more school time for inner city or rural kids isn't going to be terribly useful for obvious reasons. The only students it might benefit are those who are capable and talented, but just a bit slow on picking up new concepts.
Of course, the biggest issue is what happens when you multiply the current school times by 25-30%. As best as I can remember, I spent about 9.5months in school in Virginia (a state in the USA.) If that time increases by 25%, that results in students spending roughtly 11.85 months in school. Alternately, students can spend 10 hours away from home for school, which I'm sure will work really well.
All in all, no thanks, the problem isn't the quantity of time spent in school, but rather the quality of said time.
Signatures are the new names.
Yeah, I have to call BS on Obama's idea and theory as to deficiencies in America's education. The problem with our education system does not come from spending too little time in the classroom. It stems from numerous factors, the least of which do not include, low teacher salaries inspiring more competent people to avoid teaching, lack of creativity in teaching techniques (really, not all children learn the same and A's - F's is just a stupid arbitration), inability to inspire young kids (I would bet that 9/10 American kids view school as a combination of social time and the child equivalent of 'boring work'), and a suppression of curiosity in those who do ask questions (completely anecdotal, but I can name 7 people I know right now that were actually punished for asking too many questions in the classroom).
The article and even the summary states that countries which continually outperform America in tests send their children to school for less hours than America. That doesn't even warrant the correlation vs. causation fallacy that's just crappy incomplete analysis by Obama's Secretary of Education. Forcing students to spend more hours in the mindnumbing clusterf*** that is the modern lecture system in America is not going to educate them or make them learn more, its just going to push them closer to brainless downer activities after school like more TV. I mean really, who wants to go home and play with an electronics toy/learning kit when they just spent 8+ hours listening to someone they hardly respect drone on about a bunch of topics that they haven't been given a reason to care about?
Don't increase the schoolyear Mr. President, increase teacher salaries giving intelligent people a reason to teach other than philanthropy and find a way to inspire invention and innovation in the classroom. Increasing the time spent in a broken system is just going to increase the number of broken children's minds.
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obviously, lengthening the school year is a matter of vital interstate commerce . . .
Of course, just like with the drinking age, the federal government is unlikely to actually mandate that states lengthen the school year, but rather they'll take more money from the states, lose a chunk of it due to the overall federal bureaucracy that will undoubtably be created, and then blackmail the states into changing their laws in order to get their money back (while redistributing more of the money to states/districts that support the political party currently in power). All the while the politicians can look like they're doing something productive, ignore the constitution, piss away money, and slowly chip away at the last remnants of sovereignty that individual states once had.
Phil
I currently have four kids in school. The problem is schools are taking too many days off. They take a day off every other week. It's not like the teachers are working all year and need the time off.
This is stupid for several reasons:
1) Countries don't do an even job testing their students. In the US, everyone gets tested, even kids with severe emotional disabilities (meaning from broken homes and such). In some countries, only kids who are in the "college track" schools get tested. Yes, in some places young kids are tracked like that. In Germany students go to the Gymnasium, Hauptschule, or Realschulabschluss depending on ability. The Gymnasium is for kids who are going to university, the Realschulabschluss is for kids going directly in to the work force. Unless they changed it since last I checked, they only test kids in the Gymnasium with these higher level math tests.
2) Standardized tests don't do a good job of measuring things that are really useful. You can have pupils that do very well on them if you spend a lot of time teaching specifically for the test, and if you have a curriculum that emphasizes memorization heavily. Yes well that is not so useful in this day and age of computers. What is more useful is the ability to creatively problem solve. So just because countries produce kids with good math scores, does not mean they are producing the kind of workers you want.
3) Studies consistently show that the biggest factor in kids doing better in school is parental involvement. If their parents care, the kids do better. A simple measure of this is books. The more books parents have in their house when they have kids, the better the kids do. Not because the kids read the books, but because owning the books is heavily correlated with bright, involved parents and THAT produces better achieving kids. So what seems to be needed isn't more school, but more parental involvement.
I get real tired of crap like this because what they seem to want to do is work hard to turn kids in to little calculators. "Oh let's make sure our kids can score really high on number crunching tests!" Ya, how about not. We get students like that in university (I work for a university) in particular some of the foreign grad students form China and India. They are great at memorizing and slogging through formulas, horrible at doing any real world problem solving.
To them, knowledge is learning what other people know. If you don't know something, the answer is to find someone who does, or find a book with the answer. You look it up and then you know it. The idea of solving a problem through trial and error is totally alien to them. Thus they have a lot of trouble understanding what our group does (I do computer support and as such trial and error is a large part of the job). If you tell them "I don't know," they look at you like you are an idiot and want to know who does know.
We really need to stop worrying about how our kids do on contrived tests so much. Yes, they have uses to make sure kids aren't learning nothing, but we shouldn't have this penis contest over who gets the highest scores. It just doesn't matter. If we want to only test our best and brightest and tell the rest of our kids "Sorry, it's a life of menial labor for you," and spend all our time teaching those bright kids how to do the very best on the test, well I'm sure we could have top scores in no time. I'm also sure that we'd find the quality of our workers would decline.
It seems like somebody from the Obama camp has just read "Outliers: The Story of Success" by Malcolm Gladwell. There's a chapter discusses this topic -- Basically it says that kids from poor families score just as well as rich ones when they're young. The scores diverge over time because the kids from rich families are pushed by their parents to take classes, summer camp, etc. over the summer.
Where's the money going to come from? Adding a few days onto the school year will cost the states billions of dollars. I dunno what state you're living in, but here in California we're already in such a big hole we can't see the sky. Is Obama planning to raise federal taxes for this, or is it going to be another one of those unfunded mandates?
Almost anyone who works here knows that their education system is practically broken for the public schools. Children are legally entitled and cannot be denied their education; this precludes disciplinary measures such as in-school suspension and detention. There are no demerit systems -- after all, if you can't be given detention or suspension, how will you punish someone? The harshest punishment is usually a stern talking-to by the principal and homeroom teacher; a referral to a parent may or may not be as harsh.
From personal experience, many of the students who go to juku go because they don't pay attention in class. They sit around and draw pictures, stare out the window, or talk to their friends. There are students who simply sit and cross their arms, refusing to do anything in any class despite coming to school. And of course, there are students who just don't come to school, because there's nothing that can be done to them; they will move up through the grades and graduate from junior high regardless. There are also students who DON'T go to juku, or go once/twice a week. These students are the ones who actually do their homework and listen in class. Guess which of the two groups generally has better test scores in my school.
I don't really believe in the whole longer school hours argument, either. We have school from 8:50 AM to 3:35 PM; at my school, it was 8:10 AM to 3:10 PM, slightly longer. On top of that, they only have six periods in a day, with a lunch break after fourth period. And on top of THAT, Monday and Friday only have FIVE periods. I fail to see how Japanese children spend more time in school unless they count club activities (generally an hour before school and an hour or two after school). Or perhaps they're counting juku, which SHOULDN'T be counted; it's completely optional and you pay for it. Basically you're paying to go to a classroom with a cubby where you're forced to do what you should be doing in school to begin with.
For another rant, a lot of students who get good grades are simply memorizing and regurgitating facts, especially in liberal arts courses. They aren't learning how things fit together, or how to apply their knowledge, or even how to use their knowledge outside of regimented series of tests. If you think the SATs are bad in America, come here for a bit. This is a land where tests are God, so you learn to please God.
If that's what Obama wants America to aim for, I don't think I approve. At all.
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Yes, the educated benefit from being educated, but everybody benefits from having educated people around. The former is why private schools are seductive to many, but the latter is why we should embrace education as a public good - external to the market - and support/fix our existing socialized system.
So you're right, the problem is the incompetence of public schools. But privatization ain't the solution.
Libertarians, who are often persuasively consistent (and I really do appreciate your consistency), have given monopolies, governments, and other non-market institutions a bad reputation. Even the term for something that doesn't jibe with a market - "an externality" - belittles the importance of things like pollution, basic science, education, overfishing, national defense, a judicial system, national highways, and on and on and on.
How about an increase in time for teachers to prepare meaningful lessons for students? I get 50 minutes a day to prepare lessons, contact parents, and fulfill obligations to various other clubs and responsibilities. There's no overtime pay in teaching, but yet it's one of the professions that require the off-the-clock work.
Do the nit wits honestly think an additional 10 to 21 days will make a significant improvement in our present education system? GIVE ME A BREAK! How about we try a tiny experiment first. Let's get the monkey off our teachers' backs about teaching children morals and ethics. Since that should well and truly be part of the parents' roles in teaching their children to be responsible members of our society. Second, let's have a process where teachers are assessed as well. Far too often I see teachers more interested in establishing arbitrary rules and basing grades on personal opinions of a student than of the actual performance and assessment of the student in a given subject than with actually teaching a topic. For that matter there needs to be something showing the teacher is actually knowledgeable and capable to teach the subject. Once we have the roles and responsibilities established we can then have reasonable dialogue on expectations. What should we expect from our educational system? Furthermore, what do we show as expectations from the children? Get an established set of expectations and then hold ALL involved (parents, students, teachers, administration, etc. ) accountable and THEN we might "level the playing field". Until then all we have done is some ridiculous and pointless demonstration that, in the end, achieves nothing.
Has anyone considered adding a bit of science to the discussion? Not as a curriculum subject (no doubt covered in other threads) but rather - applying a bit of science to the question of "what is the optimum schedule for learning?"
Think about it - there must be a series of attention "ramps" during the day, week and year, where the ability to absorb knowledge is better than at other times.
Do we do math better before or after gym class? Is there any point to having a math class at all immediately after lunch? Are business classes enhanced after physical competition?
Would a 6am start kick start the day or is 10am better? Note that we have evolved to have half our numbers awake and on guard at night [citation somewhere].
Should we survey people in some way to determine whether they're day learners or night learners (and teachers too, to match the learning profile).
There must be hundreds of questions and answers to this. I suspect we've refined our way into a low-energy orbit, and it isn't getting us anywhere very quickly. We need to learn smarter, not longer, from the stats in TFA.
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
Yes, China the land of opportunity. That's why so many Americans are flocking to China to work in shoe factories, and why there are no longer any Chinese immigrants looking for a better life in America.
Yeah, because teachers want to extend the time they work every day and lose their vacation.
Spooooon!!!!!
The problem isn't hours spent studying so much as motivation. The stereotype for asian students (however accurate) is that they get pushed by their parents close to their academic limit. Contrast with the stereotype for American students being sports-centric and studying just enough to get those C's and D's needed to stay on the team.
Somewhere in between is where we want our average students to be headed. Unfortunately most students see they are neither valedictorian quality or star quarterback material and become disinterested, settling with 'just enough' and getting by with minimal effort.
NCLB seemed to try to address this, but is the wrong answer. More time in school would be a good idea if only we weren't already using so little of the current school hours- a wrong answer. Not sure what the right answer is, but until the average student sees benefit to working hard for those A's the smart kids earn in their sleep, I won't expect our education system's report card to improve.
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I have to seriously wonder why so many people here are so passionate about not needing an education.
The American government has demonstrated its utter incompetence in increasing the quality of education in America.
Increasing quality means doing a lot of things that a lot of people don't want, such as more spending, greater accountability, some extreme changes in curriculum, and so on. But even if told, by God himself, exactly what needs to be done, American politicians would still screw it up.
So, due to the inability to increase quality, we will increase quantity. And of course this will do no good.
The bottom line: if you want your kid to have a real education that will give him/her a real competitive advantage, you are going to have to fork over plenty of cash and/or take responsibility for it yourself.
TFA says that we already have our children in school more than the Asian societies that regularly whip us but good in testing. I don't think more schooling is the answer, I think better teachers are the answer. I also think our society that regularly rewards ignorance & makes it "cool" to be a dumbass is partially at fault.
There is a war going on for your mind.
More physical education is needed, not more study time. Exercise maintains brain health. Kids sitting in a chair all day is NOT good for brain development. Ass and belly development, sure. Spaced learning is better than crammed anyway. Or let them sit in the shade of a tree and read in the afternoon.
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The last thing we need for our drugged up kids is more time in government indoctrination centers. As John Taylor Gatto puts it, We Need Less School, Not More. Also watch State Controlled Consciousness by John Taylor Gatto.
How about make a career out of the service? Put your 20 - 30 years in, say, the Air Force and retire with 2/3's pay before you're 50. Then you can figure out what you want to do with your life now that you have your medical and living costs covered. There are times I wish that I had done that.
Oh, and you can go your whole Air Force career without using a gun outside of the training range. There are a lot of very interesting jobs there too.
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During the summer months, our system is not to "send the kiddies to the field" as Obama's inept education administration official claims
I don't think that's the claim they're making. The only marginally close statement I can find is one by Duncan which agrees with you: "Our school calendar is based upon the agrarian economy and not too many of our kids are working the fields today," e.g., our calendar has some agrarian roots, but by and large we don't have that population anymore.
The key in where the president is actually coming from is probably in this paragraph:
"The president, who has a sixth-grader and a third-grader, wants schools to add time to classes, to stay open late and to let kids in on weekends so they have a safe place to go."
It fits with the President's roots as an activist for the urban poor, which probably shape his perspective. And a lot of the research does say that poor/disadvantaged kids do the worst in making progress during the summer. Institutional support during summers could do a lot to help them become more productive and self-sufficient adults.
Those differences aside, I'd say you have a good point. Summer vacation isn't just downtime from school, it's still an opportunity to work (even if it isn't in the fields) and learn. Moreover, slack has value as recreational time and as a catalyst for creative foment -- not just for the kids, teachers use the time to refine their approaches as well. Extra days could put more into the curriculum for achievers or allow for a gentler curve for stragglers, but narrowing it down is going to have tradeoffs.
It sounds to me like the fifth grader in the article seems to have the balance about right: summer programs offer opportunities to kids that they might even enjoy (and which would meet Obama's goals), but don't force everyone into one particular tradeoff.
So: are we smarter than a fifth grader? :)
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Standardized tests are blatantly anti-education. They measure the ability and motivation of a kid to memorize answers from other days, and fill in those answers on one day out of 180.
1) If standardized tests are so bad, why do educators constantly use them to tell us how bad US students are? We constantly hear that we are ranked low compared to other countries. 2) If standardized tests are so bad, why do our universities use SATs and ACTs? 3) If you don't have some sort of standardized test, how then do you tell whether teachers are doing a good job? 4) I haven't taken a NCLB test, but I took plenty of standardized tests in the 80s growing up. Sure the science was more memorization, but you can't memorize your way out of math and reading comprehension. 5) Most importantly MUCH OF LEARNING IS MEMORIZATION. I've had to memorize a ton of facts just to do my daily job. Bits in a byte, Java keywords, fundamentals of OO programming.
If you are really concerned with having a better outcome, and better education, with kids learning more - give us vouchers.
Let people go to private schools who would never be able to otherwise.
Let families afford to be able to homeschool, where learning can really be around the clock with committed parents.
For whatever reason, private education is poison to the current political leaders (like the whole DC voucher fiasco). If you care, let us have more choices for how we educate our kids.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I went to Portland State University in Oregon (definitely not a bad school). The median student age was quite a bit older than me. Your implication that once you attend school you are somehow "locked in" and can never go back is absurd. People can, and do, go back to school for second or third degrees all the time. If you're 30, 40, even 50 (and I've seen even older than that) and you want a degree, go get one. You may not be able to get into certain schools (usually private, elite schools where the student body is strictly 18-22) but that doesn't mean there's nothing you can do. Far from it.
I'm pushing 30 myself, and considering going back to school part time to slowly earn a Master's in engineering. I have one child already and another on the way. I have a full time job. I can't go back to school full time, but that doesn't mean I can't go back to school.
Sock Puppet Alert!
Adding time in school won't help, because the problem isn't the number of hours or days spent in school.
In fact, there are a host of problems which all contribute to the issue, none of which will be addressed by keeping children in school longer.
The issues as I see them are:
1) Fundamental flaws in the theory of education at the policy making and administrative levels. An example of one such: I am old enough to have been in school when grading systems began to be changed from A-F to E(xceeds expectations), S(atisfactory), and U(nsatisfactory). The reason given for the change was that children who got poor grades felt inferior to those who were doing better, and that this was bad. Some time later, the 'E' grade was disposed of for the same reason. While that grading system is gone, the fundamentally flawed premise that caused it remains to this day. American education became for a long time, all about making students feel good about how much they didn't know. The flawed premise here is the same as in Communism - when you remove the rewards for doing well, you also remove the incentive to excel.
2) Use of schools as a platform to indoctrinate students with the current popular ideology. Whatever the ideology in question, this -always- happens at the expense of useful learning, both because the 'facts' presented by the curriculum tend to be skewed to present that ideology in the most favorable light, and because students are discouraged from questioning the 'facts' presented (as that represents questioning the ideology itself).
3) Fundamental flaws in the theory of education at the classroom level. Schools used to use rote memorization only for the purpose of teaching the basic building blocks of a subject. The next step was to teach critical thinking and problem solving to allow students to figure out how to solve problems given the basic information. As a result of the second point above (and the reliance on teaching to the standardized tests), critical thinking is now discouraged.
4) Standardized tests are presented in such a way that teachers (and those who create the curriculum the teachers use) are able to teach to the test, and spend a large portion of the school year doing so via rote memorization. The concept of standardized testing being necessary grew out of the poor performance of American students. Unfortunately, the manner in which it was implemented allowed rote memorization to be used to prepare for the tests, rather than teaching the fundamentals of the subject and encouraging the development of problem solving skills.
5) Colossal waste of money in education. Most of this money is wasted in administration and bureaucracy, some in fraud, and some to genuine attempts to improve the quality of education at the student level. A problem here is that (except for the poorest school districts where there is not enough money to cover essentials), spending more money per student does not increase the quality of education. Some experiments were done to vastly increase the amount of money being spent per student - those experiments universally resulted in no measurable improvement in test scores. When the educational process is flawed at its most basic level, throwing money at the problem is not the answer.
6) Failure of certain American subcultures to value education. When you are told from birth by the people who are raising you, the people around you, and the leaders in your community that you aren't good enough to make it without handouts; that you are by virtue of your ethnicity or skin color doomed to substandard employment and a substandard lifestyle; that people who succeed despite that are traitors, and that crime is the best way to get ahead... then the students tend to see education as a waste of time. They know that if they choose to avoid crime as a way of getting ahead, that jobs in menial labor will always be available, and require no education. Since they don't believe they can do better, they don't see t
Rote learning has been de-emphasized in the US for a few decades now, to the point that many of us believe that American students could benefit from some boring memorization. Multiple choice is not used for learning, it is used for tests in the US because they are very easy to feed into a computer. Teachers that are serious about their topic tend to have assignments that are hand checked. Other teachers just lecture then test with a scantron or equivalent.
We have entire units in school about how to use a library, how to find information, how to research a topic. We also are required to solve math problems and show our work, just the answer alone is never enough when doing an actual assignment. For a standardized test, then yes, you just give the answer, often multiple choice, but this is more to do with the limitations of test checking technology than a doctrine of "trivia style learning".
I think it is pretty insulting that you think you can sum up the solutions to the American education system in a paragraph.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
I agree that tenure causes problems, but the problem with eliminating tenure is that the truly great teachers will always be controversial because they'll be teaching students to think critically, question everything. So junior goes home and points out a flaw in his parents' preferred ideology, parents get all mad and start calling for firing the teacher. Admin gives in to pressure, and you've lost a good teacher
* More hours are not necessary
* More choice would be a good step (school vouchers for instance)
* Reduce effect of tenure (i.e. make it easier to fire a bad teacher)
* Pay for performance (why does a teacher need to be in their 50s before they earn well, and conversely why should a bad teacher in their 50s be paid very well)
* Encourage academic competition (knowledge bowl, mathcounts, etc.)
I took advantage of the talented youth program at a local University to get ahead in Math. I started that in 9th grade after a successful year in the Mathcounts team in 8th grade. Believe it or not, my local math teacher _discouraged_ me from doing it. Why? Because he thought I would get a better education with him.
I ended up being the first student at my small school to achieve a 4 or better on the AP calc test, and I took the test as a junior instead of as a senior. My point is that students should be challenged and not discouraged from pushing themselves to greater achievements. I believe many in the educational system find the lowest common denominator and teach to that, which is a real dis-service to most students.