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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.
...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
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.
"Doesn't that mean that the problem is not how long US kids are in school?"
The problem is American popular culture, which exalts stupidity and is savagely anti-intellectual.
No public education system changes will affect this, and the solution is to facilitate school choice so the parents who appreciate the superiority of private education can rescue their children. We can't have an educated
public, but we can and should cultivate an educated. self-aware counter-culture from which we can groom future leaders.
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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.
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.
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The problem is not the amount of money or time available for schools. The problem is it is assumed we are all equal and the schools cater to the lowest denominator in the classroom, handicapping the rest of the class. Unfortunately, segregating students based on ability is an unpopular idea because it does not reinforce the idea that we are all equal.
Yes, but do you expect a politician to come right out and tell the members of the teachers union, that as a whole they suck?
I am not so sure about that. From what I have seen of how the public is educated, most people have an inherent curiosity that is slowly and methodically destroyed. Instead of being allowed to explore, they are herded into overcrowded classrooms and forced to learn things through repetition.
Then we are screwed. No democratic republic will stand long if the population is ignorant. The educational system needs drastic and immediate reform. There needs to be competition and the red tape and various nonsense which is stifling exploration and experimentation needs to go away.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
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.
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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Sounds like the problem isn't needing more time put into schooling, but, making the current time spent more productive and worthwhile!!
For one..maybe we need to quit teaching to the lowest common denominator. Perhaps we need to start rewarding actual success and progress, rather than giving everyone a reward for just showing up, eh? How about competition again and quit worrying so much about everyone's fucking self esteem...and try to prepare the kids more for a real world with competition...
How about stopping drugging the kids so much? In my day, it was called being a 'boy' they way I and my friends acted...now, they just dose you.
How about not assuming every kid is academic? How about making votech type schooling a positive thing, and if kids want to go that way, let them, encourage them....and don't keep them in classrooms bored and distracting other students...? How about rather than making school a right...make it a privilege that you earn by behaving, and progressing....?
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
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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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.
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IT said they're already doing more hours than kids in the rest of the world.
Sounds like the problem isn't needing more time put into schooling, but, making the current time spent more productive and worthwhile!!
Actually, I suspect the "hours in school" statistic refers purely to state-run schools. In Korea, and most of Asia, probably students leave school in the afternoon, only to continue studying at private learning centers until evening to get advantage for the next placement test. They spend a lot of time there. So I'll bet Asian kids study many more hours than Americans when you factor in these "hagwans".
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the schools cater to the lowest denominator in the classroom, handicapping the rest of the class
That doesn't explain the prevalence of Honors classes, AP classes, etc.
The problem is that there isn't a single problem but a whole rash of much larger, much more subtle problems. There's the problem of anti-intellectualism in American society. There's the problem of school funding being tied directly with property taxes (creating separate-but-unequal education that only reinforces class division). There's the problem of parents not giving a damn about their kid's future. There's the problem of those same parents having to work three jobs to make ends meet, making them too tired when they get home to give a shit about if their kids did their homework.
And there's the problem of people thinking there's just one problem, and if we could just fix that problem! then everything would be alright.