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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...
Many kids in Asian countries also spend a lot of time at private institutes, after their regular classes.
Nevertheless, yes, American kids no not work hard enough to compete on a global level. The Economist had an article about this very issue a few months ago.
Nobox: Only simple products.
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
If malcolm gladwell's data is to be believed, the efficacy of extended schooling has everything to do with social class. It turns out that the upper end of the income scale actually do things with their kids during the summer increases their performance, because they're doing things like going to camp or participating in other enriching activities. The kids that don't have these opportunities by and large regress, intellectually speaking, over the summer break.
I would think that if anything is done in the US to extend schooling opportunities, it should keep this in mind. While a chicago south-sider is likely to get a lot of benefit from going to summer school, my child is likely not, because he engages in these sorts of activities, and I would not want it mandatory to pull him out of them.
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.
LEAVE SOME CHILDREN BEHIND
sorry- is that too callous?
http://factsanddetails.com/china.php?itemid=338&catid=13&subcatid=82
" According to government statistics, 95 percent of all children start school but the drop out rate is high. Only 80 percent graduate from elementary school. In poor rural areas the enrollment is only about 60 percent, with only 70 percent completing the first four years of primary school. Fewer than 35 percent of China's youth enter high school, and of these the drop out rate is high."
individual circumstances aside, with limited resources, don't you think it far more likely that the really good students, somehow find a way to be among those who remain.
The evelopmentally disabled ones are the ones who fall by the wayside and do not continue their education to the point where these internationalized standard tests are taken?
drop the ten% worst performers results from the US kids "math and science tests" and you may find that they don't suck after all.. APPLES & APPLES COMPARISONS PLEASE!
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
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.
Hear hear. If distinguished physicist Stephen Hawking had been born in a country with UK style socialized education, he'd be digging ditches today.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
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.
Motorcycles, Robots, Space Gossip and More!
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.
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.
http://www.tenjou.net/
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.
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
Yeah, because teachers want to extend the time they work every day and lose their vacation.
Spooooon!!!!!
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.
Part of the problem isn't even parents being unrealistic, it is that the options are straight to the work force or university. Nothing else is ever presented as an option by anyone.
That was how it was for me. It was just assumed I was going to university. My intelligence and academic performance was such that university wasn't a problem... But that doesn't mean I should have gone. I do computer support. That is not a degree career, it's applied, not theoretical. While going to university worked out ok for me, I didn't need to. I should have gone to a trade school, however it just wasn't presented as an option.
For starters, how about we repeal that idiotic, asinine "No child left behind" act, that does absolutely nothing of the sort. The only reason this passed is because of the name. Everyone thought, "Oh, that sounds like a good idea!".
Know what this thing really did? It penalizes those schools with the lowest test scores. If your students can't make the grades, it means you lose some of your funding.
My ex girlfriend teaches at a school that serves the lowest income demographic in my area. She had recently graduated from college and this was the only teaching job she could get anything remotely in the local area, and she still had to beat lots of other applicants. Kids come into the school not knowing how to read basic words or do any arithmetic from families with parents that are spending more time selling drugs in the evenings then they are with their kids. The school, surprisingly enough, was already one of the lowest funded schools in the area, and had some of the lowest scores in the area before it passed.
When "No child left behind" passed, know what it did? It cut the schools funding even further, when they already didn't have enough money for books and other things. The school is so overcrowded that several classrooms are actually "temporary" buildings that have been present for years. The principal started yelling more at teachers about bringing test scores up and having less money to do it with, upsetting the faculty. They didn't have enough money for school supplies. My ex started having to buy (some) of her own paper to use for class projects and other things because funding was so short. Some of the few decent teachers the school had left decided on early retirement or other career changes because they became so fed up with it.
The net result, of course, is that the students scores have not improved, they are losing good faculty left and right because everyone is tired of the crap, and their funding isn't getting any better because neither are the scores. Nice, big, circular cluster-****. Last I had heard, morale was at an all time low and things aren't getting any better.
"No child left behind". Right. As one semi-famous teacher would put it, "Crack is bad, mmmmm'k?"
One of these days i'm going to find this 'peer' guy and reset HIS connection!
I use a laptop in school and agree it is a very efficient (and neat) way to take notes. However, I often look over the shoulder of some other laptop-using students and see them either drawing in MS Paint or browsing the internet. In the hands of someone who doesn't want to learn, it does nothing.
I remember staying in a student hostel whilst on a school trip in Singapore. Once we arrived at the hostel, there were students in the cafeteria studying. (4 pm) After going out for dinner and returning, (8 pm) many of these same students were at the same tables with their books. After sneaking out and finding a place to drink upon return (3am) you guessed it, some students are still studying. - It is wholly a cultural thing based around the importance of education. Where I come from (New Zealand) qualifications are not counted as important as what you can do and have done. In many of these asian countries sited, where competition is high for all sorts of spots that Education and Qualifications are essential. Of course, in every culture, a little bit of who you know goes a wee way.
. .
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.
A Good Troll is better than a Bad Human.
I'm 12 years old, and a regular Slashdot reader. I'd like to offer my opinion on this: We don't need longer school days. We need more courses and teachers. Specifically, we need more separation of classes based on ability. To Heck with this 'fairness' stuff. We really need at least two classes: advanced and less-advanced. Sure, some kids will feel bad when they don't make Advanced, but it's worth it. Allow me to elaborate. Longer days don't make an ounce of difference if half the kids are bored out of their skulls. All my fancy, expensive, private school has managed to do is bump me a year up in Math. And I'm still ahead of the class. In all the other classes, I'm stuck where I am. I spent half of 5th Grade correcting other kids' work for the teacher. And it's not just me. There are plenty others in the same boat as I. We don't learn much (especially on a time-to-learning scale), and longer/more days won't help. If we separate by ability, eveyone wins (except the schools, who have to hire more teachers): The kids who are ahead have engaging and new stuff to do and learn, while the kids who aren't ahead have things tailored to their needs. And, everyone gets smaller classes and more time with the teacher. If we're going to do anything, I suggest we, in some way or another, give kids material that is at the right level for them. Maybe once we get that done, we can think about longer school years or days. Actually, I'm not strongly against a few extra weeks, as long as the school curriculum is challenging. If anyone reading this has any say in this kind of thing, please think of me. -Nathan
I used to go to a charter school that had a 10 weeks on, two weeks off schedule. I can honestly say that not only did I learn more in that school than I did in a public school, but also I was more focused on education. I think a similar system would be beneficial as education isn't really the focus of the kids of America. No education means we have less of a chance against the robot overlords... or even worse: no robot overlords =(.
I rather doubt the article calculated after school learning. I can only speak for Japan (and well S. Korea which isn't on the list), but it's pretty much accepted there that in order to succeed parents must send their kids to a myriad of after school programs. These range from just homework help, to advanced material the public school isn't teaching an age group. I've young (10+) cousins who end up coming home around 8pm sometimes even as late as midnight all because they've around 3-4 extra tutoring places they go to each day.
Well said sir...oh, and don't forget the really important bit of "opening schools on the weekends so kids will have a safe place to go". It's government daycare for school aged kids...
I'm not always the brightest pixel in the stream
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.........
0) The world is progressing. Why is it that when they get close we think we need to go higher? At some point there should be a reasonable limit to what education can do alone. Language, culture, family, become more important as education gets more "equal". It'll never be a level where one can completely rule it out and only look at other factors-- this is in the realm of soft science. Could be ours is the best already but the other factors are knocking it down... (not probable; just making a point.)
1) PUBLIC schools should be funded by the number of students, federally without any strings other than they must be public schools. This will lower the taxes we have on shelter (aka property tax or renter's included property tax.) It will increase income tax; however, it is NOT equitable to punish kids by underfunding their schools simply because they are located in a poorer area. (I'm not talking inner city either, we have poor rural and rich rural depending on what properties are in that area and local tax codes.)
2) Technology in education is unproven. it needs more pilot programs and less political stumping. The public is part of the whole gaming of the numbers system we have. Test scores are a poor measure; any systematic measurement system is going to get hacked by people like win98 on an open network. Other nations measure scores differently; they also filter out kids-- our system accepts everybody. My city's schools do about as well as the rich suburban schools -- but have less money and TONS of disadvantaged kids of every kind to deal with.
3) Simply BEING A STUDENT does not make you an expert in education. Its like saying you can advise airplane design because you ride on jets. There is serious work done on learning, the brain etc. in academic institutions and by profession educators already. But forget that, a couple stats make us look bad so lets ship the kids off to more schooling and give them all laptops! Just how long have we known its better for children to have different school hours than we do now? We still have the same hours-- to keep the parents happy and their dreams of their kid getting that sports scholarship they didn't get. (college funding being a separate issue best solved instead of the lotto scholarship mess. Don't expect that CHANGE since college loans handle more money than the credit card industry!)
4) Children, like all mammals LEARN and develop by playing. Sure, TV robs them of this--- thats not the fed's business; if parents suck. (unless you are in the UK...where they want to monitor parents!) I LEARNED far more things in the summer that were useful in the "real world" than I did in school. I didn't have to work on a farm, but I worked on other things and learned, played, and developed my imagination. Many of my peers went to "camps" so they'd get an edge the next school year while the flunkies went to catch up so they'd not have to drop a grade.
5) Just HOW long should kids be in school? how about some REAL numbers? We already know health wise its better to take a long nap in the middle of the day but other than a few countries nobody does that... (BTW, the WTO is pressuring those countries to change their ways.)
6) America rose to the top (FYI we are not there anymore) and went to the moon with people who didn't have technology or even went to those "shameful" rural schools where 1-6 grades were in 1 room with the same teacher. Now we can't do math without a calculator-- even then we can't do math. My father had a shooting range in the basement of his high school; kept a gun at school too! Yes, this points to cultural degradation-- but THAT is the point! The real big issues are the elephants in the room nobody dares mention! I do credit Obama a bit having touched on a few... I am not saying we need to go back to those idealized times and "get off my lawn!" More social science is needed.
7) American kids are F***'d up. School psychologists are needed. #1 problem for any student is mental. We expect teachers to do everything and moder
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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? :)
Tweet, tweet.
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
Our schools don't teach very well, so let's fix it by making students sit in badly run schools for more hours. That will do it.
My kids are home-schooled. It's the best thing we've ever done. When I think of all the hours of my life I wasted scribbling on meaningless dittos I feel so jealous of the life my kids have. They do school work for 3 hours a day, really do the work. Then they work on their choice of project for a couple of hours, then they have all the rest of the day to play with other home-schooled kids. All three of my kids are approximately 2 years ahead of kids their age in the local public school, which is among the highest ranked in the country.
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
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".
Currently hooked on AMP
The numbers they put in the article seem like bullshit. Elementary school in Taiwan for my wife was 8-5 (1hr break for lunch). In high school (inc. junior high) you had to be in for quizzes by 7:20 and from 5-5:30 there were often extra review sessions or quizzes. Then kids usually go to 'cram school' (basically tutoring, but it is a huge business there and once everyone is doing it, it becomes less optional if you want to do well in school) from 6-8 or 6-8:30. So, the article says they have more days in school per year, and from my wife's personal experience she was in official school from 7:20-5:30 (which is more than here) and then in cram school until 7 or 8... I think it is a joke they try to make the argument that our kids are in school longer than asian countries and try to call out Taiwan as one of those.
It would cost only 3,000 dollars a year to educate a child in China, plus air fare both ways for summer break would be a little over 4,500.00 dollars.
In Washington D.C. taxpayers pay 10,000 per child. Clearly the best solution is outsourcing. Plus punishment can be handed out byt the Red Chinese, when you kid gets suspended they get sent to a weeklong shift in a factory. It lowers labor cost and kids learn discipline and when they get back they will respect their elders, RESPECT THEIR ELDERS!!!!!!!
Plus during the School year you won't have young punks all over town, instead they will be in another country wrecking that place up. DOUBLE WIN-WIN
Now get off my damn lawn you whippersnappers!!!
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
that Obama wants to increase hours, its in order to lower the influence of the parents on their children. Clinton has for a long time opposed "unregulated child-rearing". In general the government would prefer more time with your kids.
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
How about requiring that the President of the United States actually perform the duties of the President at least 75 percent of the time or more?
You know, instead of endless T.V. interviews, campaigning disguised as promoting "health care", presentation to get the Olympics awarded to Chicago, etc.
Just one point in reply--on "drugging" kids. I have ten kids, six of whom are boys, and five of those boys are in school this year. We've seen plenty of the "boys will be boys" behavior from four of the five. One, however, has had constant problems to a tenth degree of magnitude of that of his brothers. He had sensory integration disorder as a child (in his case, he was over sensitive to tactile stimulii, but things like spinning him round 100 times wouldn't get him dizzy), which was helped with therapy. As he got older, however, and as struggles increased (both at home and in school), we took him in to be evaulated by a pediatric psychiatrist (no, we didn't realize there was such a specialty until we got the appointment, either).
The long and short of it? He has ADHD but without the typical hyperactivity component. Did we choose to medicate him? Yes, but only after carefully consulting with a number of specialists, and we have switched his medications numerous time to try to find the right formulation. There's a common perception out there that these kids get put on sedatives--that's not true. Kids with ADHD are typically prescribed stimulants that help their higher nervous system functions to be better able to execute control. We would not accept any medication that would sedate our child, or put him in any form of mild stupor. As we've switched meds, we've stayed in close contact with his teachers, to make sure he is not "drugged out" all day.
It was a tough choice to make (not only giving our child a label, but opting to use meds), but it was a choice made for the benefit of our child. I'll be the first to tell you that meds are overprescribed to a lot of kids who don't really need them, but just ask you to remember that some kids, like my son, do need them to function well. I know that they will help him, because I started taking stimulants for ADHD as an adult. I never imagined that I could have such a condition (I pictured kids would could never stay on task or would daydream constantly--I learned that hyperfocusing is a common symptom, and that above average intelligence can mask {compensate for} the condition so that it often goes undetected in such cases), but learned how much better I could be at controlling my task management and other executive functions when taking my meds.
Cheers! and best regards to you.
I use irony whenever I can, but my shirts are still wrinkled...
* 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.
All these things are probably good (some, very good) ideas, but they will not happen for one simple reason.
Americans are no longer philosophically equipped to deal with the reality that different people have different capabilities.
We live in an age that Charles Murray refers to "Educational Romanticisim", whereby the Left ponders that every child would be an Einstein, if not for insufficient funding, and the Right ponders that every child would be an Einstein if only we had school choice.
Whatever the merits of each proposal, the indisputable reality is that human ability occurs in a distribution from one end to another (hence "The Bell Curve"). As a fairly radically egalitarian society, we obsess about the left side of the curve.
Can schools be made better, in general? Probably. Can they be made dramatically better, in general, by any approach? I doubt it. Will they be made significantly better by simply spending more time doing what they do now? I'm certain that they cannot.
One last quote, from Thomas Sowell:
A man is not even equal to himself on different days.
If your bitterest enemies are people who hack the heads off civilians, then I would say you're doing something right.
If you want to be a pro athlete, you have to be involved in the school athletics program. While I personally don't have the drive to be a pro athlete, I understand the call of fame and fortune. If you want to be a famous anything, athlete, movie star, whatever, then you have to take the chances you have. Sure, your chances of actually making it as a pro football player are low, but if you give up your dream because it's hard, then that chance becomes zero.
What you are saying is that someone who wants more than anything else to be a professional football player should abandon his dreams, give up, and become a good little productive unit.
(1) He doesn't have that authority (neither does the Congress) and (2) it violates the tenth amendment.
Chicken or the egg problem. Do music skills increase math skills, or do math skills indicate music skills. I sucked in band, but on the other hand I've forgotten more math than most people ever learn.
For PE, there is a big difference between having everyone run laps for an hour during school and spending thousands every year for the dozen students hand picked for football. If you are going to spend as much on the chess team, robotics team, starcraft team (thats a joke btw), and math club the more power to you. You live in a very rich school district. Otherwise, why are we spending public funds so a small group can have fun at the expense of everyone else? O I remember, because thats the New America...