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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)."
... 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.
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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
It depends what you mean by "how long" -- how long in a given day, or how long between vacation periods? Cognitive psychologists have demonstrated that the spacing of study occasions is highly important for learning and long-term retention. The education literature is full of studies on summer learning loss. So Obama isn't just making this up out of nowhere -- he's basing his proposal on a substantial body of empirical research.
In South Korea, after going to "normal" school, a lot of students go for additional studying/tutoring. These are called "Hagwon" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hagwon)
I believe Japan has something similar with their cram schools.
Not trying to say more amount of time in school is either better or worse, but it'd probably be useful to look at how the total amount of time in school was determined before relying on it too much.
Some people criticize these other school systems as stressing memorization and test-taking abilities over individual/creative thought. Of course, that's an anecdotal statement, so take it for what it's worth...
If all you have are silver bullets, everything looks like a werewolf.
They don't have the budgets necessary to use the days they currently have, adding additional school days will strain already thin budgets, and it will just make the kids who slack off, slack off more. Reducing the pointless waste of time and resources and increasing the schools ability to get and keep good teachers who can engage their students would be a much better use of the proposed legislation and budget. I was in highschool when No Child Gets Ahead was implemented and it encouraged schools to push kids into higher level classes they weren't able to keep up with. Have higher than a C in on level, take honors, have higher than a C in honors, take AP, have higher than a C in AP, take gifted; and it pushed kids who were doing well at the classes for their level into classes which they performed worse in, and it burned them out causing the kids to not like school anymore.
Orwell was an optimist.
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."
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.
Hey, think positively. It prepares students for the real world, where people get promoted until they fail. Then they get fired or laid off for not meeting expectations.
"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.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
A lot of fields still require a University degree, nevermind that they don't actually need it
No sig for the moment.
Read the story again. The argument is for a longer school year, and not necessarily more hours in school. Think about that for a minute, especially on how it affects knowledge retention. If you have a good argument, by all means make it, but if the debate on education in the country in general is at the same level as in your post, we are in a very sorry state indeed.
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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.
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.
Sounds like you could stand to "waste" a little more time in English class...
I don't understand this.
First Obama says kids in the USA don't get enough schooling. Then the article says kids in the USA do get more than most and STILL don't do well in international testing.
Surely the conclusion is not the quantity is wrong, but the quality.
You know, if there's one thing I'd like to change about school - it's homework. There is too much of it, and it's far, far too boring.
My daughter (14) has been leaning about trigonometry. Well, actually she hasn't, she's been learning to use sines and cosines (looked up on a calculator) to solve simple trig problems. But she isn't leaning why it works, what it means, and what really cool things you can do with it. No, it's boring rote work. And she hates it.
There's that crucial word - boring.
Learning isn't boring. It's brilliant. Learning new stuff is hard, but often the most wonderful thing in life. How hard must the teachers has struggled to make it boring. Maybe it's the administrators, those destroyers of joy in life ...
Makes me sad. Maths - boring rote work? ... when e raised to the power of i time pi is minus 1 ... what happened there? Boring? sigh
"Cats like plain crisps"
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 highly doubt it. I just escaped 5 years of teaching, and without the break, you'd have a lot of pretty insane teachers.
You don't truly grasp the insanity of a public school as a kid in it. Herding teenagers wore me out like no other job I've ever done. It's amazing to be immersed in a pressure-cooker of immaturity, hormones, and lack of private space. Add in the tendency of youth to rebel against authority, push boundaries, and do stupid things, and you end up with probably one of the more stressful places outside of operating rooms. (If you've got pre-teens to teens, imagine a population-density of one per square meter in your house, 6 hrs a day. Now imagine trying to get them to do something useful that ENTIRE time.)
We don't have great teachers for a number of reasons:
First, the pay sucks. There's all sorts of public bitching about what teachers get paid, but it's really not that much. After 5 years of teaching, with a Master's degree in Education, I was making $40k. Not bad, except for the amount of school loans I had put into that.
Now, while I could have gotten something part-time in the summer, I had to take classes. Finishing a degree, moving to a Level 2 license, becoming eligible for equipment grants with training seminars, etc.
More importantly than the pay, I wasn't ALLOWED to be a good teacher. I was asked to teach stuff that was horrifically boring, in a boring way. Because success was determined based on how well kids filled in bubbles on a test. How do you demonstrate the ability to do science with a bubble-sheet? You don't. You demonstrate that you can MEMORIZE science facts.
Eventually, after I was off my probation period, I started really teaching. I said fuck all to the standardized test, and we actually did science. However, coming down the pipe was the district-wide curriculum revamping, where we got to help formulate the approved curriculum which was aligned to the state standards. Once I saw that coming, I bailed to head back to grad school.
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. Treating one day in the life of a teenager as equal to all the others is moronic, for anyone who's spent any time around teens. Do what most of the country does and place no student motivations in place to do well, and you've destroyed an already flawed test. (Most states never put NCLB test scores on report cards, transcripts, or even give them to teachers or parents. As if teens weren't apathetic enough already....)
There was a time when we had masters and apprentices. Where we actually taught kids what they needed to learn, what they wanted to learn. Those days are far gone. Today, we have factory-schools, like we have factory-farms. Stinking places crammed to the gills, where the livestock has shit jammed down their throats until the folks in charge deem they're ready. I was in a fairly extensive farming community, in a state well known for farming, but our state standards don't cover much in the way of soil science. So my success was judged based on whether I could convince multi-generation farmers to fill in bubbles about stellar life cycles on a test that didn't count, and which their parents would never see the results of. That's brilliant!
As long as we treat every student the same, and give them the same material, we're doomed to failure. We need to tear ass through the basics of reading, writing, and math, and then start giving kids what they NEED to learn. Not what some group of six retired teachers in a conference room somewhere thinks they should learn. Actual, relevant stuff. Then, we need to actually assess whether they've learned it, by watching them DO IT. Not see if they can logic away two answers out of four, and then guess one of the remaining two.
As far as I can tell, I was a pretty good teacher. And now I'm in grad school, doing actual science. Frankly, I should have done this earlier. I'm much happier out of that clusterfuck.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
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 currently teach in an Asian school, and I have taught in more than one country on that list. I'll tell you the reason that Asian kids do better at math and science: they work their butts off. The amount of homework they get is scary, and most kids are enrolled in an after-school math program as well, to get more time with a teacher and more time doing homework. Added to this, the level of math being taught is way higher then I remember it being at school back home.
I guess this is a cultural thing, as you pointed out: because this state of affairs hasn't grown up in a vacuun, and society here does value achievement in these subject areas. Kids are rewarded for doing well, and even more amazingly respected by their peers who don't get results which are as good.
But kids here graft. That's why they are better at what they do.
Depends on where in Asia. I've taught at 19 Japanese schools over a 7-year period, and two of those were high schools of differing levels. While the kids here excel at math and science, it's only in the areas where rote learning is emphasized. They really are at a disadvantage when it comes to original thinking. They think the teacher is responsible for telling them what's right. Also, they really hate trying to extrapolate an answer based on previous knowledge, because they might be wrong.
As for advancement through school, the boards of education are encouraging the "no child left behind" idea; even if you don't participate in class you receive a 55%, and 90% of your grade is based on the tests, not the classwork. This means that you only really have to cram for about eight weeks out of the year to do a decent job. For those who still manage to fail despite all of these measures, a single make-up test is offered every year for each subject failed, for which the student is rigorously coached (using the actual test questions) beforehand.
Japan and the US share a serious problem in common: a lot of bureaucratic interference from people who have no education credentials and are ham-stringing the teaching process to the point where everybody passes but nobody actually learns anything. Spending more time being taught badly isn't going to resolve the issue; we need to revamp the teaching system and eliminate the pandering cruft that is bogging down our schools.
"Give a man fire, and he'll be warm for a day; set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life