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More Schools Go To 4-Day Week To Cut Costs
Hugh Pickens writes "As schools return to session in South Dakota, more than one-fourth of students in the state will only be in class from Monday through Thursday as budget constraints lead school districts to hack off a day from the school week. Larry Johnke, superintendant of the Irene-Wakonda school district, says the change will save his schools more than $50,000 per year. In order to make up for the missing day, schools will add 30 minutes to each of the other four days and shorten the daily lunch break. 'In this financial crisis, we wanted to maintain our core content and vocational program, so we were forced to do this,' says Johnke. Experts say research is scant on the effect of a four-day school week on student performance, but many of the 120 districts that have the shortened schedule nationwide say they've seen students who are less tired and more focused, which has helped raise test scores and attendance. Others say that not only did they fail to save a substantial amount of money by being off an extra day, they also saw students struggle because they weren't in class enough and didn't have enough contact with teachers."
To save $50,000 a year, they make an already bad education system worse. The future implications of that are..... I mean that much money for an entire school in one year is not that much. It's like having one less teacher. I'd for one prefer larger classes over this.
This may or may not work out for schools but I would love a 3-day weekend every week at my job!
we've had that in france for a while. it has been discovered that pupils end up extremely tired at the end of each day, and the whole thing is totally inefficient. in fact, we're having talks of going to a US style week, with morning classes and afternoon outdoor activities and stuff... also, switching to a 4 days week to save money is the most ludicrous and stupid thing I've heard. ah, no, I've heard worse. closing a school in a mountain village, and forcing parents to drive their kids 1 hour away every morning and back
If they are able to keep extra programs and such? Plus the dollar amounts are all relative to the schools involved. 50K would be a rounding error in NYC schools but in Podunk wherever results in a class being taught for fuel for school buses.
We have counties here whose fuel bills are in the millions, going to four day weeks would save money wasted on buses; let alone what parents and students who drive spend; and allow them to be spent more effectively.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Isn't it funny how the leaders of a fallen nation always claim they didn't see it coming? How they keep claiming to the very last day, that theirs is a strong nation that will never fall?
You know what? They don't even lie.
There's a lot of truth to what you are saying. Our education woes have nothing to do with time. It has to do with the culture. When will it become "cool" to ace a math test? When will the science fair be bigger than a football game? It looks like Glee made Glee Club more popular...now come out with some similar show to help in the core subjects...
So are all of the local companies in those districts going to four day work weeks? A lot of parents are at work during school hours and have to take vacation days to cover school holidays that don't overlap with their work ones. I wonder how the parents are handling an extra day each week. Day care facilities must be booming!
Over here in the UK (and according to plenty of Europeans I know), it's certainly not "cool" either. It's just society in general really considers it to matter once you reach a certain age.
From TFA: "Two different Boys and Girls Club sites and a church are offering affordable child care and tutoring, respectively, on Mondays for between $10 and $15."
The district has 300 students - 300 x $10 (or $15) x 36 weeks = $108000 to $162000.
So you are right, the cost of childcare is far more than the cost of the extra $50k to run the school for a day. However, the article also states that locals are unwilling to pay the extra cost in taxes: "We've repeatedly asked our residents to pay higher taxes, cut some of our staff, and we may even close one of our schools. What else can you really do?".
I do wonder why more effort doesn't seem to be put into using Technology to help save money.
Sure, take your 4 day week. Does that mean the kids can't be given a website to go to, with their on personal login, that has a bunch of weekly tests and exams for them to do, that they can spend friday doing? Have set times, make them sit the "exam" at the same time as everyone else, effectively making it a "school day" without the school. Even if it's something simple like watching an educational video and occasionally interrupting to ask both education questions and questions to make sure they're actually paying attention. It's not a perfect idea, it sure as hell wouldn't beat having direct access to a teacher 5 days a week, but surely it's better than just not being in school on the friday.
It seems that technology in the classroom is constantly shunned, with people stating that computers distract kids more than they help, but maybe that's just because people haven't invested enough in them. Or maybe it's just a pipe dream.
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
From TFA it seems teachers pay stays the same since they work the same hours, but other workers who don't get their pay cut: "Teachers who still work the same number of hours over four days, instead of five, generally don't see a reduction in salary. But staff who can't make up the lost time, such as bus drivers and cafeteria workers, are often hard-hit, losing as much as 20% of their pay."
But the problem has little to do with money or four day weeks... if they implemented four day weeks correctly, especially for middle school and above, you'd get the same amount of total classroom time and be able to have more focus because you don't need those first 5 or 10 minutes of class to get back "up to speed."
When I was in college, I always felt like my Tue-Thu 1.5 hour classes were more productive than my M-W-F 1 hour classes.
But even that has little to do with it - there's no silver bullet, no single thing that you can "fix" to suddenly make the educational system in the U.S. dramatically improve, there's just too many things that went wrong...
I could go on - but the bottom line is things have spiralled out of control and there's no way someone's going to step in and "solve" the problem by attacking just one issue.
I'd also like to point out that what you've stated is somewhat true, but at lower grade levels, American students score comparably to Asian and European countries. By the time we graduate high school, though, the performance falls dramatically. IOW, the potential is there, but our system - including our culture, helps destroy it by the time students become adults. Fourth graders in the U.S. outperform England, Canada, most of Europe, in fact; by grade 8 we drop below those countries... by grade 12 (U.S. public education goes through grade 12, I know it's different in other countries) we are on the bottom of the list.
Stupid sexy Flanders.
The "obvious" solution would be to force people who are doing poorly in math and/or science to work in a field that requires a lot of either, or both. That way, they will see where it applies to their life, and I believe they'll be more likely to remember the material. Or not. Because they still probably won't be interested in it (and, at least for me, and quite a few other people that I know, that highly decreases the chances that I'll even vaguely remember something).
Some people simply don't need certain knowledge, and asking "what if" questions simply isn't all that convincing to me (even when speaking of high school students). Increasing the rate of failures by forcibly teaching people advanced mathematics and such (rather than just basic everyday things) is rather foolish, in my opinion. They might change their minds later, but that is their problem. They have options if they need to learn it, so don't hold everyone else back and waste their time.
I believe that too much time, money, and resources are wasted on trying to teach things to people who simply won't need them, and not enough responsibility is placed on youth.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
While bemoaning the state of American education is fun, and often justified, it really makes more sense to do a more granular comparison.
The state-by-state comparisons of educational outcomes are... quite dramatic. They don't totally salvage the situation(MA, the best performing, still comes in below some but not all of the usual suspects in Asia); but there are parts of the US that do considerably better than "American students" and other parts that, well, do their bit to ensure that the first group doesn't skew the average too much...
Thank the Republicans and the TEA Party. Taxes are the lowest they have been since the 50s on the upper classes, but these people have been fighting tooth and nail to cut budgets even further.
While the rest of the world is increasing the school week, the US is decreasing it.
Not only are these people working to make you poor and miserable while you are old, but trying to slash medicare and "taxing" your 401K with their debt ceiling/S&P/default stunt, they are working to make your children under-educated, to make sure they are poor all their lives.
Please vote these people out in 2012.
For your self interest.
The problem is that our government both spends unwisely and in ever increasing amounts. When the economy is going strong, government spending increases because there is plenty of tax revenue to support it. When the economy is doing poorly, government spending increases because "we can't afford to cut spending when the economy is weak." Of course, they never, ever actually cut spending. All they do is not spend as much more than last year as they said they would.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
That's the thing. It's the parents, not the schools. I'm on the west coast. The schools I went to and the schools my son attends are full of Koreans, most of the families have some sort of family business and, thus, are fairly entrepreneurial. They push their kids to the top of the class in school by loading up their extracurricular activities with tutors, tutors, and more tutors. When they break out API scores by ethnicity, you'll see numbers like you see at the example I've chosen in So Cal(higher the better, obviously): Asian: 946, Filipino: 906, Non-latino White: 889, Hispanic: 835, Black: 830. The majority of schools have similar discrepancies by ethnicity. Considering the trend, it's obvious it's completely cultural. No race is "smarter" than the other, and even then test scores are about recall ability rather than intelligence. When scores by ethnicity have similar results as above across all schools you can't blame the school.
What about the parents who used to be able to rely on their kids being in school so they could go out to work? Do they now need to arrange childcare for Fridays too?
This is just transferring a small cost to the system into a massive cost for society - unless you're in the childcare industry.
You know, they said the same thing about the various sacred cows of prior generations of kids, that they were more expensive and more frivolous than what came before. Every generation says the one or two after it is "much worse" than the one prior. Moral decay is always right around the corner**, and the golden age was whatever was happening when you were 18-24, regardless of whether or not that was 1930, 1950, 1970 or 1990.
Do you sense a theme, here?
The point is that people are people and really don't change all that much generation to generation. You'll always have a certain amount of shallowness, consumerism, base social urges and so forth, but the proportion doesn't really change that much, and what certainly doesn't change is "Get Off My Lawn"-ism, as you note but don't really accept.
What's happening is that each generation goes through a phase of a) (mostly) growing up and realizing that actions have consequences, and b) realizing that it isn't their world anymore, and that there's all these young people around. For sound biological reasons (certain brain development doesn't finish until after puberty) you don't figure this out until you're 25, and it doesn't sink in until you're older than that.
** even though crime is down, pollution less of a problem, information easier to access and the powerful held as much, if not more, to account than ever before. Funny, how if we're at the precipice before the pit, that objectively things aren't too bad.
--srj/mmv
Don't forget that in America there is also a strong counter-culture of do-it-yourself types. A lot of people like that are here. I didn't learn much in school, but I always had my own research projects. The difference was that I didn't exactly report on what I researched, or care to. There are a lot of us that take pride in building our own homes, fixing our own motorcycles and brewing our own beer. A lot of us consider Harley riding, Jack Daniels drinking, iPhone buying jerks to be dweebs with more dollars than sense.
Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don't know because we don't want to know. --Aldous Huxley
I find I do better when we have 4 day weeks. This happens fairly frequently during the winter months, since skiing to school really isn't a viable option for many students. Our workload doesn't really get any smaller, since we just get our assignments from the internet, but it still results in more time that I can manage in a personally useful way, rather than have it managed for me by a computer program that brute forces a schedule with no conflicts. However, the amount of work we have is also huge relative to public schools.
I could definitely see myself slacking off (rather than taking breaks) if I didn't constantly have something to work on.
I think you got a good point with "lack of focus". I grew up in France and now live in Ohio. I got a 7th grader at home and I went to his parent conference on monday. The timetable is just ridiculous. They spend about a third of their time on music, art and PE. And all the activites kind of collide with each other such as "if you are doing band, then you miss the first 10 minutes of foreign language". WTF?
Don't get me wrong, there is nothing wrong with music, art and PE. They are important things. But that definitively tells you want type of society you are tending too.
When I grew up, we had about 30 actual hours of class a week. Here they are doing 33 hours everything included (lunch break, recess and "room switch" take time over a week).
I am not even talking about the content of the class. They have each day 25 minutes of silent reading. Why do you do that in class. It is wasting teacher/school time. It can be done at home.
I'd wager less than 25% will be put into daycare. These two towns are out in the middle of farm country, there's not much else there. These will tend to be single earner families and many of them will have both parents around home much of the time. Add in the roughly 50% in middle and high school who can stay home by themselves and there you go. The daycare costs should be closer to $30K.
Sig is on vacation
A few of the other big issues with the US system:
* The US system has a summer vacation, while most other school systems do not. The effect of this policy, a legacy of the 19th century when kids had to go work the family farm in the summer, is that not only do students lose about 2-3 months in the summer, they also lose 2-3 months in the fall reviewing all the stuff they covered in the previous year that they've forgotten over the break.
* A particular style of conservative Protestantism actively discourages the proper study of many subjects. In the really extreme cases, they'll go after math departments for teaching that pi != 3, but more commonly go after history books that acknowledge that the world existed before God created it c 4000 BC (and none of that "BCE / CE" business either, it's "BC" and "AD"), biology books that teach that life as we know it was the result of natural processes, and any efforts by humanities teachers to incorporate art and culture that has viewpoints that don't match up exactly with their worldview.
* A lot of politicians want to go to a system in which only private schools exist and education is limited to those who's parents can afford to pay. A good way to make their political case is to ensure that the public schools suck. Or as the joke sometimes goes, Republicans argue that government doesn't work, and once elected to office do their best to prove their point.
You're absolutely right that with US schools, there is no silver bullet.
I am officially gone from
South Dakota teacher salaries are very, very, very low.
http://teacherportal.com/teacher-salaries-by-state
26,000 is the average.
Your point being?
When unemployment is high the inexperienced often suffer the most. It's the kids who are the least experienced and thus they are the ones most affected by unemployment. People who are laid off that have better qualifications often settle for less money, and in lesser positions that the inexperienced would otherwise be doing.
Offering a kid $20 to mow your lawn gets the kid occupied for an hour or so, and you can be certain that $20 is going straight into the economy elsewhere. The more you spend money directly in your community, the more you will see that community prosper. Go buy garbage from Walmart if you want to see China prosper.
Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don't know because we don't want to know. --Aldous Huxley
My high school teacher wife added up the days they wasted on standardized testing, pre-testing, re-pre-testing, coaching for the testing, blah-blah-bla and it was *ONE FOURTH* of the steenking school year. Fact, not making it up.
Flushing the standardized testing would allow us to cut the school budget, and taxes presumablly, by 25%. I would buy that for a dollar.
(Or, we could spend more on the football team, this is Texas :)
Fortunately, all shops (online and brick) in the UK display all prices including VAT. It's a legal requirement (apparently only since 2004, so probably the law was made to stop people trying to compete with "lower" prices in advertisements).
Actually I think it is cheaper now for everything but the throwaway iCrap. When I was a kid everybody wanted or had a muscle car. Sure we bought rustbuckets but when you figured the amount of $$$ and time we sunk into those rustbuckets they got expensive pretty damned quick.
Now when my oldest got accepted to college my dad, who got me a 72 duster with a crunched side when i was his age, gets Jackson an S10 fully loaded in mint state. We are talking deep midnight blue paint, mags, kicking stereo, man that is a sweet ride. When I was a kid something THAT nice would have broke the bank, but now? $2300 and the thing is perfect, hell the engine even looks new as well as purrs like a kitten. The mechanic that checked it out said "Its the same as the day it rolled off the showroom floor, completely perfect" and then promptly tried to buy it off us.
So if anything I'd say we have quite an abundance. Both my boys have multicore desktops AND laptops, hell we have to have 7 PCs just between me and the boys, everybody has a car and a PC and an MP3 and consoles and handhelds and just...more everything. When I was a kid having enough money to get a Coleco was considered a big fricking deal. Owning a PC? I was the only one in the entire town and that was only because i had a trucker uncle who scored a VIC20 that "fell off the back of a truck" for me.
So now all the kids are really really spoiled and don't even know what its like to trudge uphill in the snow both ways. Damned spoiled brats getting on our lawns!
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.