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Do We Need a Longer School Year?
Hugh Pickens writes "Jennifer Davis writes that while summer holds a special place in our hearts: lazy afternoons, camping at the lake, warm evenings gazing at the moon, languid summers can be educationally detrimental, with most youth losing about two months of grade-level equivalency in math computational skills over the summer and students from low-income families falling even further behind. A consensus is building that the traditional nine-month school year might be a relic of the 20th century that has no place in an increasingly competitive global work force and an analysis of charter schools in New York reveals that students are most likely to outperform peers if they attend schools that are open at least 10 days more than the conventional year. What of the idea that summer should be a time of respite from the stresses of school? There are two wrong notions wrapped up in this perspective. The first is that somehow summer is automatically a magical time for children but as one fifth-grader, happy to be back at school in August, declared, 'Sometimes summer is really boring. We just sit there and watch TV.' The second mis-perception is that school is automatically bereft of the excitement and joy of learning. On the contrary, as the National Center on Time and Learning describes in its studies of schools that operate with significantly more time, educators use the longer days and years to enhance the content and methods of the classroom. 'We should expect our schools to furnish today's students with the education they will need to excel in our global society,' says Davis. 'But we must also be willing to provide schools the tools they need to ensure this outcome, including the flexibility to turn the lazy days of summer into the season of learning.'"
Rich kids with parents that care about their future attend schools that stay open longer. The kids care, and the parents care, so they outperform their inner-city peers.
Schools were out during the summer so that children could work in the fields. How relevant is this now?
[Aside: my high-school started a full week later than ever other school in the district, because we ere rural, and we actually did work the harvest.]
Take off the rose colored glasses. Learning constantly for 12 years is hard. Meaningful breaks are very important to avoid burnout and keep morale up. If people want to look at schooling maybe we should reconsider how the school time is allocated but lets not do it from the perspective of 'lazy students, they need to do more'.
I ate your fish.
I have 2 opinions that fall on both sides of this debate. Personally I do not see how they were not mentioned, as they are based completely in known facts.
1) If school was really all that stressful, such that you need months of free time to recover your sanity and physiological strength, then we should not be forcing children to spend 8 months at a time there.
2) You do want to create people who are able to function in society, you do not do so by locking them away from the world for the first 17 years of their lives.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
There will always be losers, layabouts, and lazy people. No school schedule will chance this.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
The one missing part is the family of the kids. Families do things like take vacations or trips, or large projects around the home that need the kids to help with. Summer vacation isn't just a break from school for the kids, it's a large block of time where the family doesn't have to plan everything they do around the school schedule. It's when the family can take a week or two for a trip. It's when they can take a week or two to haul the furniture out of the house one room at a time to do a thorough cleaning and rearranging of everything.
And frankly, competitive with the rest of the world? I deal with a lot of outsourced IT people daily, and it wouldn't take much to be competitive with them. Not just helpdesk types, software developers and the like too. I don't want the kind of educational system that makes you better at being like them. I want the kind of educational system that led to being able to "make this <holds up a square filter> fit in that <points to a round hole> using nothing but these <dumps out a random assortment of supplies>".
Much learning occurs *outside* of classrooms. Learning to be a good person, how to camp, swim, fish, etc. and enjoy life.And how to work, btw. I'm not aware of any curriculum that includes those classes. Are we going to add them in those 3 more months of failed public schooling ?
Our school system has many issues (starting w/ the NEA and - ironically - underpaid teachers). Turning it into a 12 year long death march isn't going to fix it. In the "land of the free", its important for kids to know what freedom is.
007: "Who are you?"
Pussy: "My name is Pussy Galore."
007: "I must be dreaming..."
The education experiment in the United States has consistently shown that the more resources we throw at it, the worse the results are. If history is any guide, extending the school year will make our children dumber, not smarter.
My wife is a teacher. Do you know what teachers do during "Teacher Work Days"?
Mandatory All Hands Meetings.
You might think they're working on lesson plans or report cards or grading papers, but that's what they do at home at night.
:wq
Kids do 75% of their growing during 25% of the year: the summer when they actually get sleep mostly and also sufficient food whenever they want to eat it. So cut out a bit of the summer, and we're gonna have some short kids :-P Of course, several school districts in the US bumped start time up 1 hour to like 9:00 and behavioral problems basically disappeared, skipping school stopped, test scores went through the roof, and kids' opinions of school went up. Since kids aren't designed to get up that early, it's just because of their selfish, lazy, assholes parents that both work, maybe they should just implement that instead.
At the risk of being modded under a bridge I'll comment here..
> In a time of massive layoffs of teachers and restricted education budgets, how the hell are you going to pay for this?
Huh? Where is this happening? Maybe private sector teachers, but deficiently not public sector ones.
> The current system is shit, but it is paid for. In every debate on education, people talk about results, results, results and how we need to improve them. But the only thing the legislators and taxpayers care about is the cost. If you don't have a revolutionary idea on how to pay for your program then don't even bother with it, or it will end up in the junk-pile labeled "one million and one education reform ideas".
We can't talk about the single major factor in the deteriorating education system in this country. Teachers Unions. How was it we successfully educated generations of students prior to the unions and now we consistently produce students which can barely read, write, and spell.
My own experience in the California public school system was HORRIFIC. Some of the newer teachers were good, however they lacked funding to really do anything, that said, the rest of them where HORRIBLE and should have been fired long ago.
With the current system in place, the unions will not allow for a longer school year, and no amount of additional funding you dump into the smoking hole known as public education will fix this. More money in, more money to get redirected into union dues and pensions.
But on a bright side, failure at this level is impressive, and doing it so uniformly is also a major accomplishment.
There's more to life than working and yeah, even learning.
Sounds more like an argument for minimum 4 weeks a year paid leave, like the rest of the world has, or maybe more. 8 weeks paid leave, and you can have your summer every year and not lose your job for it.
Learn to love Alaska
Much of the time in school is a complete waste. All school sports are a waste, and a distraction, and a lever for considerable classing amongst the students and between the students and the faculty. School sports should be completely removed. If you insist they need exercise and that we must exercise these cattle, er, I mean humans, then fine, exercise them. But end the body-based competition. Waste of time, and harmful as well. If they want to pursue sports, this should be done *outside* of actual education.
Next, we are teaching the wrong things: we need to teach critical thinking; logic; reading (a LOT more reading!); writing and typing; math for living so that they can balance a checkbook and manage a credit card and pay bills successfully. We need to teach how science works, not make them memorize a bunch of facts about one science or another. If they're interested in a particular science, fine, that can come later -- and they'll actually understand it when they get to it. The one thing we really fail at, and which is very difficult to learn on one's own, is math. Teach the broad strokes of history. That's all. No one pays attention to that unless they're interested; so teach it broadly enough as to spark those interests and otherwise quit wasting everyone's time. Our citizens don't care about anything as it is, so apparently it's a waste of time to teach them the details -- they don't stick.
When someone is found who has a great aptitude, they should be offered a different kind of education. Which they should also be able to turn down with no penalty. Some people do better on their own. Some people thrive in a regimented environment. There is no perfect answer for everyone.
All of that should only take a few hours each day. Which means if they're interested in sports (or science, or history, or whatever), then they have time to pursue it, and parents can (and should) help them specialize, or they can do it themselves.
There's a problem on the other end, too: There are far too many jobs that "require" a college degree, that don't actually require one. Test for your job requirements instead of relying on beer party institutions. I think in many cases candidates would be found without any trouble -- or any degrees.
Our schooling is *really* fucked up. It focuses on the wrong things, pukes out uneducated people because it's just not PC to fail people, and wastes their time and energy on setting up classing that is irrelevant to education. Adding time will just make it worse. Instead of adding time, we need to focus on what is important. You can't teach a pig to sing. It wastes your time, and it annoys the pig. However, if you FIND a pig that can sing, then you need to single that one out and treat it special. It's as simple as that.
If you don't have a revolutionary idea on how to pay for your program then don't even bother with it, or it will end up in the junk-pile labeled "one million and one education reform ideas".
I have a *revolutionary* idea.
FUCKING PAY FOR IT .
Fucking Christ. Seriously?
Why do we have to bail out all the fucking sociopathic douchnozzles on Wall Street? Those utter assholes at AIG who used millions to host a party? How many fucking cruise missiles do we need? How about one less billion dollar stealth jet?
How is that education and infrastructure, the very fucking backbone of our society needs to beg and plead to not get last priority over a bunch of fucking assholes in Congress that just give the money to their "friends" in the form of massive Military Industrial Complex, Wall Street, and Pork bailouts?
I'm a taxpayer. I care about the cost. What irks me when they raise taxes is that it does not solve the problem. It's as if I gave you a million fucking dollars for groceries for the year, and you come back to me saying you need more. I don't have a problem with paying for something, as long as it is done correctly and not without parasitic levels of corruption and inefficiency.
It's like that douchebag that owns Papa Johns Pizza trying to tell me that my pizza will cost a whole extra dollar to pay for health care for his employees. Ummm, yeah, what's the problem you fucking dick. I would gladly pay the dollar if I knew it was going to your employee's (and their families) health care.
Some things should be paid for. Education is one of them. Cut the military budget by 25% and dump it into education.
I'm pretty sure we can terrorize the rest of the world with drone strikes with 25% less money.
Huh? Where is this happening? Maybe private sector teachers, but deficiently not public sector ones.
Here is a link that has real numbers for layoffs. It says there have been 150,000 public teacher layoffs due to the recession. It also mentions Bureau of Labor Statistics which says 33,500 teachers were hit by layoffs since September. (Article was written in June.)
So, you may not have noticed it happening - but it is. Also, and this is a guess, it is affecting lower income schools since higher income schools generally have parents that are able to complain, hire lawyers, call their city/state/federal representatives, etc. So, if your kids go to a "good school" they might have kept their teacher numbers by shifting the burdens to schools that aren't performing.
Also, talking to teachers that I know, finding a teaching job is next to impossible right now. So, it might be less about layoffs than not filling positions as people retire/leave the field/whatever.
Reading code is like reading the dictionary - you have to read half of it before you can go back and understand it.
I've come face to face with the "pre-union" results of education. Students who didn't perform were socially promoted, stuck in the back of the class because they knew they couldn't flunk the student out and didn't want to deal with them for another year. Better to just hand them off to the next teacher.
The result is adults who cannot read even now in their 60s or older. Any math beyond making change? Impossible.
Their education level was so rudimentary that a modern fifth grader is expected to know more reading, more math, more history (except for the parts these older adults lived through).
Yes, I've met also many highly educated people in their sixties, seventies and eighties, but I also have known personally enough who were socially promoted or encouraged to stop learning and then drop out without even being able to read to know that the problems you describe in education are hardly knew.
The problems you describe aren't new, aren't unique to the era of union teachers, unless you're saying they existed back before WWII through today.
"I may disagree with what you say, but I will defend unto the death your right to say it." -- Voltaire
Why? What's the point? A few more days per year isn't going to overturn an entire culture that eschews things like math and proper writing skills as stuff for dorks who never get laid.
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We can't talk about the single major factor in the deteriorating education system in this country. Teachers Unions. How was it we successfully educated generations of students prior to the unions and now we consistently produce students which can barely read, write, and spell.
In my opinion, you guys started demonizing and drastically underpaying your teachers. At first, that certainly saves money, but over time it encourages talented people to seek employment elsewhere. Will raising teacher's salaries make them better? Of course not, but it will attract people to the profession that might actually be good.
Most of my friends who have smart kids are seeing them go into finance. Why? Talented people follow the money. Yes, it would be nice if people became teachers for the love of education, but we live in the real world.
My own experience in the California public school system was HORRIFIC. Some of the newer teachers were good, however they lacked funding to really do anything, that said, the rest of them where HORRIBLE and should have been fired long ago.
You get what you pay for.
http://johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm "Before you can reach a point of effectiveness in defending your own children or your principles against the assault of blind social machinery, you have to stop conspiring against yourself by attempting to negotiate with a set of abstract principles and rules which, by its nature, cannot respond. Under all its disguises, that is what institutional schooling is, an abstraction which has escaped its handlers. Nobody can reform it. First you have to realize that human values are the stuff of madness to a system; in systems-logic the schools we have are already the schools the system needs; the only way they could be much improved is to have kids eat, sleep, live, and die there."
Thus, this initiative. At least Canadian doctors realize a bit more the importance of vitamin D deficiency; keeping kids indoors even more during the summer is going to be terrible for their physical heath. Education serves multiple purposes -- to help an individual grow in human potential, to help someone become an informed citizen of good civic judgment, and also to learn some practical skills. School unfortunately focuses mostly on the last, and mainly in the context of shaping children to fit the needs of 19th century factories which mostly no longer exist. The most important "skill" is to be able to learn from real need and curiosity, and unfortunately that is stomped out of most children very early on because it would be too inconvenient for the school curriculum. Thus we then have the pathetic statements of kids in college saying they finally "learned how to learn", never remembering they were a "scientist in the crib". Keeping kids in school more will only mean even less of that most important "skill" will survive. See also:
"In Defense Of Childhood: Protecting Kids'' Inner Wildness"
http://www.chrismercogliano.com/childhood.htm
"As codirector of the Albany Free School, Chris Mercogliano has had remarkable success in helping a diverse population of youngsters find their way in the world. He regrets, however, that most kids' lives are subject to some form of control from dawn until dusk. Lamenting risk-averse parents, overstructured school days, and a lack of playtime and solitude, Mercogliano argues that we are robbing our young people of "that precious, irreplaceable period in their lives that nature has set aside for exploration and innocent discovery," leaving them ill-equipped to face adulthood. The "domestication of childhood" squeezes the adventure out of kids' lives and threatens to smother the spark that animates each child with talents, dreams, and inclinations. As Mercogliano explains, however, there is plenty that those involved with children can do to protect their spontaneity and exuberance. We can address their desperate thirst for knowledge, give them space to learn from their mistakes, and let them explore what their place in the adult world might be."
Public schools as we know them are going the way of the Dodo bird. Khan Academy is just one example of "learning on demand" as a larger trend I wrote about five years ago:
http://patapata.sourceforge.net/WhyEducationalTechnologyHasFailedSchools.html
Pushes like these are just one last gasp of a dying system. Jerry Mintz talks about that here:
http://www.educationrevolution.org/blog/sustainable-education/
If we are to continue to have public schools, they should become a lot more like public libraries -- but at John Taylor Gatto points out, "public" means something very different in those two terms. See also:
http://www.newciv.org/whole/schoolteacher.txt
"Look again at the seven lessons of schoolteaching: confusion, class assignment, dulled respon
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
I'm not sure what your point is. I CAN, however, tell you what the difference between schools in Newark and Millburn Township is: Parents who give a shit.
If someone can come up with a way to coax parents from poor socioeconomic backgrounds to start caring about providing educational support to their kids, they can have all the rest of the Nobel Prizes for the rest of eternity AFAIC. It may be the biggest problem faced by society in the USA.
From hell's heart I fstab at /dev/hdc
Chesterton's gate: if, while driving through the English countryside, you encounter a gate across the road which does not at first glance appear to serve any purpose, you are not allowed to remove it just because you can't imagine what it is there for. Only when you can figure out why someone put up a gate there in the first place, and determine whether that reason is still valid or not, can you decide whether or not to remove the gate.
Just because you cannot see the point of sports does not mean that there is not a good one. Physical fitness is a desirable thing to teach. It lets people know that they can improve themselves, something which is considerably more difficult to convey in an intellectual context. I learned many valuable lessons playing football. For example, I know that I can eat as much as I want of whatever I want, every day, while still having 15% body fat and pretty good muscles. I just have to put on twenty pounds of gear and run around in the heat for three hours smashing into other people three days a week with a high-intensity workout (aka a game) once a week. Plus weights four times a week.
You guys have been taken for a ride
It's not the vacations that have failed the students
it's the SCHOOLS
The school we have right now is a "one-size-fits-all" approach to education
No matter how smart or dumb the student is, he/she is put through the same threadmill-like system
No wonder so many students (and not only the students of today, students several decades back also faced similar problems) got so fed up and decided to turn off their brains altogether
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Following that policy leaves you open to the sort of jackass who would put up a gate just for the sake of doing so; because there was no reason for the gate, you can never find one in order to decide to take it down.
No need to be humans. Be slaves and work 60+ hours a week, 49 weeks a year.
We are on a bad path.
Robotics are going to make it worse when they should be making it better.
People do not have to work this hard to survive. When you work your entire life away- unless you love working- you basically didn't live. They took your entire life from you.
It's one of the best systems of slavery ever developed. The slaves are all eager and willing to work until they have black eyes and are dying at their desks before they are even 55 years old.
For bonus points, let's cut back retirement programs and make them work until 70 (if they can get a job) or until their bodies are unable to work any more (maybe disability- maybe out on the streets homeless to die an average of a decade earlier).
It's horrific how much our society has changed over the last 50 years.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.