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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.]
The school year should be 23 months with a month off to scrape all the gum off the underside of the desks.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
School holidays are for learning social skills, learning that thinking/making can be fun and that not everything you do is controlled by schoolteachers.
Its not for homework, and its certainly not for anyone with a chart full of grade averages to cut short.
Kids should get two weeks off per year and it should be treated like holiday or personal time where each student can choose how to split up their time and when to use it. It keeps them learning, it keeps them out of trouble and it's reflective of what they will have to deal with in the real world.
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.
my kids are in a semester system. one month at christmas off, one at spring break, one in summer... same number of days as the "traditional method" without the big gap in summer. works just fine imo.
summer holds a special place in our hearts:blistering afternoons, camping in front of the TV, sweltering evenings gazing at the calendar
... waiting for October to finally arrive and bring with it daytime temperatures below 40C and the hope that before long (November, perhaps) we can actually go outdoors in something other than a mad dash to reach air conditioning again. Then, before we knew it, April arrived and it was back into our shelters.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
Instead of one huge chunk of time, break up the year a bit more with a few weeks in mid-term. They can still have just as much time off, but not in one brain-draining slab. Also, I'm dubious about the "open 10 days more" claim - that study's looking at charter schools, and there are a whole slew more variables there that don't look like they're controlled for in this study. In fact, the study makes that same point:
We should note, however, that a long school year tends to go part and parcel with several other policies, such as a longer school day and Saturday school, and this should make us cautious about assigning too much importance to a longer school year in and of itself.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
We don't need a longer school year. What we need is better holiday distribution. RIght now where I live (Ontario, Canada) our kids get two weeks off in December, one in March and about 9 in the summer.
It would make more sense to have August, December and April off so there are three month-long breaks. That way, there's no long summer holiday during which kids can forget what they've learned. It also makes holiday planning a bit easier on parents; we don't have to cram everything into the summer.
5 days a week for 3/4 of the year is 195 days.
According to NCES, the average school year is 180 days long, so they miss 15 of those days due to holidays or whatever. (Personally, I think it's more than that due to "special" days like teachers' conferences, but let's go with that.)
So... let the school year be 15 days longer to compensate, and let them get their full 195 days in.
Not to mention charter schools are allowed to expel poorly performing students.
How is it that this topic comes up every year at about this time? :) Around here we've been shortening the school year. It doesn't have anything to do with educational objectives. We're just doing it to save money.
2 months off in one block is probably not so good. A month off in the summer, 3 weeks in the winter might work better (as in an extra week in the winter). And then another week to coincide with some major culture group's major holiday, or in the middle of each 'term'. Say a week off in october and a week off in march, with school running august to june.
Teachers still need some vacation time, as do kids, and taking teachers out of the classroom for holidays is usually a disaster for the kids. Winter is probably a good time to have time off because kids pay relatively little attention when they have christmas coming/new toys anyway. Not to mention the problems with winter in general messing up schedules. Teachers also need prep time, so you can't really compact too much more and still leave them time for vacations + prep time+training etc.
But sure, overall, kids would probably overall benefit from more time at school, having to reteach 2 months of work because kids were gone for 2 months isn't really doing you any favours. Especially if you could make up that difference by teaching for an extra 2 or 3 weeks.
One of the universities I went to had a week long 'reading week' in each semester*, one in october, one in february, and the one in the summer was about mid july (the summer timing is a bit strange). The quality of work from those students was actually a lot better than were I am no, where they only get a break in the midst of february. The 4 months where most students aren't here doesn't do a lot of favours, but the one week break makes a huge difference to stress/sleep/quality of work, and I would suspect the same effect would apply to younger kids.
Semesters are sept-dec, Jan - > April, may - > august.
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.
Wrong.
We need several things. The end of the massive summer off. Take the quarters and put a couple of weeks between them. Second, the end of grade levels beyond sixth, or maybe beyond eighth, as important metrics. If proper feedback testing on their abilities and instruction was performed for the years leading up to this, the student gets placed in classes in each discipline relevant to the student's abilities. Allow parents to have one free "appeal" in the form of a test to re-place the student, but after that initial result, all further appeals cost the parent to prevent helicopter parents from abusing the system. For students that place at mediocre levels, offer practical electives so that when they get out of high school they have something that they can do for their income where they won't need a lot of further training. If anything, start with an intro to trades type of class where students get exposure to trades, and use that to place them.
Some may call this unfair, as it no longer gives each and every child equal opportunity. I would say that parents choose the path their child takes from the very beginning, and the school should accommodate that decision while still allowing those who choose to excel despite home choices to do so. If little Johnny wasn't encouraged to do well in school then little Johnny doesn't get to be placed into the classes where his sheer presence gets to drag others down to his level if he is inclined to do that. He doesn't get college prep classes as he's probably not going to college. On the other hand, if he does well in school, for whatever reason, he'll be placed to where it's expected that his education will continue past secondary school.
Lastly, for hellions, boarding school. Uniforms, curfew, mandatory attendance, the works. Put a fence around the place if necessary. We do not serve them by letting them get away with outright bad behavior. Boarding school is expensive, but as a whole, is it cheaper to let them disrupt normal school and keep them there?
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Another option I'm surprised has not yet been mentioned is the four day school week. Some schools have already gone this route with interesting results.
Our son is going into 5th grade. He's attending a public school that has a 190-day school year with an extended 8-3 day, and they go to school until late July, only getting 5-6 weeks of summer vacation. In compensation for the long July in school, they get a vacation week in late October and another one in the beginning of June that other kids don't get.
For the most part, he loves it. And when he and his schoolmates get back to school, there seems to be less time getting kids back up to speed than there is at the conventional schools here in town. Overall results trend better here as well, and we've got a lot of overall issues in the system here outside of our school. Within reason, I think an extended day/extended year model is ideal for most learning situations, but not necessarily universal. I don't think school should be fully year-round, there should be some sort of summer break. But the 2+ month summer vacation is a relic of this country's agricultural roots, and it certainly could go away without causing a problem.
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
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>".
If students go so far as to regress in simply 2 months after 10 months of education, then its not the students, but the way they are taught. Before we cut the summer vacation maybe we should focus on enhancing education that's received in a 10 month window and make that better instead of adding another 2 weeks of subpar education. Sure summer can be boring, but that's up to the individual child. If you sit in front of a TV all day you are going to be bored, but if you actually got up and did something productive with the time you had off, you'd be much better off. Also, that second "mis-perception" is by far the norm in America. More classes then not were void of enjoyment and learning in my education, and the way the education system is set up today, students are made to work toward a magical number so the school can receive funding, instead of creating joy in learning. We need to change the time we do have in the classroom, before we start adding more time to an already defunct institution.
Everybody's favorite buzzword to justify near-slave labor... Lengthen the school year, but shorten the 'work year'... to the point where you forget where you work.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
I admire the self-confidence with which someone speaks of the importance of education strictly through the lens of the global marketplace.
If that doesn't make you feel like a cog, the way it makes me feel like one, I'm not sure what will.
Defining how we raise kids based on their eventual suitability for employment under people who will casually replace them at every convenient turn sounds to me like a perfect way to deepen the chasm that is growing between those people who call shots and have freedom of time, thought and movement, and the rest of us. Being employable is not such a tremendous gift when you must be tethered to the same location 95% of the year, must always sleep and get up at the same time lest you be replaced with people better at self-nullification, and your ideas are only considered as worthy of your time as their capacity for growing corporate coffers...
I wish our economy could figure out a way to hybridize capitalism with collectivism, where it is considered normal to expend some of our resources on the necessities which keep people healthy and educated, and some of our resources playing that other game, of trying to outshine our baseline achievements, for commensurate rewards.
There are plenty of people who would do amazing, truly amazing things, if only given the opportunity, but who never will because they couldn't get a scholarship doing what they love. Well, what about earning a 'living' with 50% of your time, and then doing wonderful stuff the rest of the time (like rest and looking after your health and family, or your hobbies). I only see cultural momentum preventing this, but it is what I hope for. Science, the arts, community living would all benefit. Even the job market would benefit, as more 'half-time' jobs would be available. Of course many people would want to keep their full-time job because they're not sure what else to do with their time, but ...
All this rambling is just meant to point out I hope the search for a more humane economic system is not over. Thanks.
You can have students attend school even 365/365, but if in end you teach them Creationism I don't think they'll "excel in our global society" anyway.
Kids there are happy and creative! Not. Birth Rates are low, the majority of the population act like automatons, and suicide rates are high in school children.
Yes, throw children in an institution their entire childhood with longer hours and days, almost like a prison, and when they get out into the real world, they only know what the institution has readied them for. Bad enough school already takes up a good portion of your life. If anything, school needs to become more efficient and start teaching skills that can be applied in real life, rather than shoving wrote memorization down the throats of students, bashing the same concepts for several years over their heads. have them apply it, have them use their knowledge beyond testing and paperwork.
The reason they start forgetting over a summer session is because it was simply yelled at them, and were told to just write down what the teacher told them, rather than having them apply what they learned (applying a math equation to a real life situation, for example. Having students write a speech for the class at the end of every week, proof read, etc for english, making sure they actually use correct spelling and grammar, rather than correcting sentences every day for an entire school year as part of their english requirements!) and so on and so forth.
This solution just pushes the wrote memorization bullshit further, and instead of smarter, more engaged children, you will have an increased dropout rate, lower grade point average, and children just no longer caring after a few years. It happens to workers too, work someone too hard without a break, watch their efficiency drop, eventually they just stop caring. I have personally experienced it.
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..."
So teachers are now to blame for students coming in with an attitude of "I am supposed to forget everything I learned last year over the summer" and do not come at all prepared to learn?
"I may disagree with what you say, but I will defend unto the death your right to say it." -- Voltaire
I might be a hardass, but my kid does math homework even in the summer. An hour in the morning, an hour in the evening as a prerequisite to doing all the "fun" stuff, like computer games, watching cartoons and so on. He doesn't seem to mind too much. That's in addition to private math teacher that he goes to twice a week year round.
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.
I didn't know people did 9-month school anymore. All my nieces and nephews went to 12-month schools. All the school zone signs in the last two towns I've lived in have "12 Month" warnings. Are my observations a statistical fluke?
At any rate, I think summers off are a good thing. IMO being a kid is an important part of becoming an adult. Let them have a break for all those dirt clod fights and stuff.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Terms and Semesters, works well in Australia.
The trouble with education is that everybody has an opinion on it.
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
If they forget it that quickly, they never learned it at all, it was just crammed in long enough to pass some standardized test or another.
You know, you're probably right. If we had no summer and short breaks instead, we'd probably be better off academically.
But I don't think academic efficiency should be our paramount goal, above all others. I don't think we should be looking at kids and asking ourselves how to maximize their future utility as workers - even though it is for them.
When I look back at my summers, I remember vast stretches of time where I was basically free to do anything and had little or no responsibilities. I didn't have to worry about having to do anything. I was free like most of us never will be until maybe retirement. Sure, maybe I didn't use it productively. I mostly laid around or played with friends. I read a lot of books. Sometimes I was bored and just wanted school to start back. But it was great. And I sure wish I could have that back. There's more to life than working and yeah, even learning.
If you want to take some kind of psychohistory perspective, maybe you could even say that we owe a lot of our individualism and ideals to all that.
They should drop traditional teaching, which EVERY kid hates, and do like 1 month of independent study for 7th graders on up. That would let them apply whatever field of learning they most enjoy to a real world project. If you're into chemistry, build a battery and solar array. If you like computers, build and test one. Okay those are really expensive but still :-P If you're into history, do a gigantic research paper/presentation into a specific event or research the town's history. Giving kids a little freedom while forcing them to actually use their brains would be a great idea.
I'm a high school senior and personally I think that summers are a very important thing. I don't have a phd or anything that would make people listen to my opinion, but I think the problem with our education system is that we need to learn more when we're younger.
GENERATION 9882463: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig & add a random number to the generation.
The LA Unified School District, starved for funds, has cut one week of instruction from the school year; it is threatening to cut a month from the school year if Proposition 30 (temporary tax hikes) doesn't go through. Public education in California is headed into the toilet, and it's taking the students with it.
"Imaginary solutions to real problems."
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.
"after that initial result, all further appeals cost the parent to prevent helicopter parents from abusing the system."
I think you meant to say, "to allow only wealthy parents to abuse the system."
How do we pay for this? Many school districts are struggling to pay bills as things are and with their teachers on 9 month contracts. Is there the will to start paying teachers for year-round contracts? For paying janitorial staff for the summer months? Many schools don't have good enough ventilation and/or air conditioning since they are usually closed during the summer.
If we can start actually valuing education again as a society and pony up the money, then this might work...
That culture predates extensive standardized testing. Even when such tests were introduced, a lot of students knew that it had no impact on their individual grades.
"I may disagree with what you say, but I will defend unto the death your right to say it." -- Voltaire
Who pays for the extra month(s) of school? Localities across the US are already strapped for cash. Increase teacher's salaries by 20% (ish) and things get worse. And when will they do their continuing ed to remain accredited or get higher degrees? Similar stories for custodians, cafeteria workers, bus drivers, etc. In many (most?) school districts, only parts of the administration are 12 month employees. There's also an increase in electricity and possible retrofitting of AC in places that don't have it.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
No. We need better curriculums that focus on math, science, REASONING skills/logic, and english language shortcomings. We also need to lose the social and political propaganda stuff being taught in 'social studies' and health class and encourage self reliance whenever possible. It's not an issue of quantity but of quality.
I agree with your statements about the separate tracks, as long as each student is given ample opportunity to test out.. maybe once a year?
Hellions do not respond to prison any better than they do laissez faire 'open study.' They're hellions for other reasons. These reasons should be addressed.
My wife is a teacher. Do you know what teachers do during "Teacher Work Days"?
I didn't imply they weren't working, or anything like that. I simply said that those days when students are absent should be made up with further attendance days.
It doesn't cost any more than the current system. In fact, there have been estimates that a year round schedule will cut maintenance costs.
Learn to love Alaska
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
We need:
-year round schooling (with periodic vacations because kids are humans, too).
-fewer standardized tests (read that: none)
-appropriate homework, tests, and projects
-incentives for grades/performance (pay or decreased tuition, leeway with due dates)
-highly paid teachers/professors
-internship/apprenticeship programs
PS: I don't reply to ACs.
s/deficiently/definitely/g UGH! Stupid spell checker.
I would be royally fucked if it weren't for the summers spent educating myself on how to write software, how the economy works, and how businesses are ran. A lot of which happened through meeting people in meat space (woah!), along with hours spent in front of a computer.
Sure, the education system did a fair job of teaching me things such as mathematics, and some of the hard sciences, but we need more freedom, not more time spent sitting in a classroom listening to long lectures and reading outdated textbooks.
For the most part, K-12 is ran like a prison. You aren't allowed to socialize with the people around you unless you're breaking the rules. There is favoritism on all levels, of which I have experienced it on both the good and bad sides. If a "teacher" doesn't like you, then you can be damned if you're allowed to socialize with those that have been forced around you.
It's been over half a decade since I have set foot inside of a K-12 school as a student, and my success in business, my process of discovery, and my ability to learn would have been seriously impeded if I was forced to sit in a school and listen to lectures from "science teachers" about how astronomy is a farce, and that the space program is a hoax.
America is about Freedom. It's time to embrace it; both in business, and in education.
Sig: I stole this sig.
Have we not realized there is not one magic pill to boost student achievement? Is a longer school year a possibility? Maybe. Is a shorter day a possibility? Maybe. Will changing society's values on education make a difference? Probably. Will more money in the education system make a difference? Maybe. Will better salaries attract better teachers? Maybe. Will differentiated instruction make a difference? Maybe.
There is no magic cure all, but what people seem to be forgetting is that children aren't nearly as dumb/uniformed as today's adults want to believe they are. Furthermore, their knowledge is spread out amongst a large variety of topics that were not available 50 years ago or whatever golden age of education we want to believe existed (but, in reality, really didn't). I teach a basic computer class for 4th graders (on Linux, for those of you who wish to pat me on the back) and it's always funny to see just how much better on a computer than their teachers are. That's just an example.
The fact is children today aren't nearly as dumb as adults want to pretend they are. And there's no magical answer for improving standardized test scores (which apparently is the only way we can ever evaluate learning). In my opinion, the most important thing we can do for education is quit playing politics with it, quit pointing fingers and blaming everyone else, and have everyone pitch in to be responsible for every child's learning.
It's not the STUDENTS that decide to cram and forget in the case of the standardized test. Their entire curriculum is geared to it.
Funny thing, when I went to school and got back from summer vacation, we had not forgotten all that much. At most a week of review had everyone up to speed.
A recent study indicates that cost isn't really an issue. http://mobile.nytimes.com/2012/09/02/your-money/framing-prevents-needed-stimulus-economic-view.xml
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.
Often lost in the "12-month school year" discussion is the primary reason that schools are on a 9-month cycle: the kids are off for the warmest months of the year due to the costs or logistical issues with cooling the schools during June, July and August. If you've ever tried to sit in one place and learn for 8 hours in 90-110 degree heat for eight hours in a room with 20-30 other people, I can assure you that it's difficult.
Many or most of our schools in America were built without air conditioning, and the costs of retrofitting those schools - which may not have ventilation systems - would be enormous. Even for schools that do have air conditioning, they tend to be very large buildings, and cooling carries with it high energy utilization, which carries both a high economic and environmental cost. 12-month academic cycles may make sense for students in some locations, but it's virtually impossible for public schools to scale across the country.
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.
for poor kids. For kids who's parents work all day and have no disposable income (not even enough for the bus). Summer's very different when you're middle class. The War on Summer is just another example of the middle class going away. Yes, I know very well the origins of Summer vacation (farm work). I also know the origins of the education system (training farmers to work in a factory).
What I like best about this entire article is not one person asked why the hell we'd want to work that hard?
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
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.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, the leading educational theory, which I believe is correct, is that you don't have to force children to learn rote facts and methods as a chore - that children are naturally curious, and the best education would be adults facilitating children who were, to some extent, teaching themselves.
Of course, in the USA this is in the process of public library hours being shortened while school year length is elongated. Tests which determine the pay of teachers and schools, and which have little to do with students. Thus the process becomes teaching students how to pass a state test instead of learning a subject. Rote memorization. A skewed focus on STEM, even though Steve Jobs, head of one of the US's most successful technology companies, said things like calligraphy classes and the like were essential components to his products eventual success.
I've been assigned to read The Scarlet Letter several times from youth to college - I've never read it, I usually give up several dozen pages in, if I get that far, and reach for the Cliff Notes. On the other hand, books which I have chosen myself I have usually read. There's an assumption here that people only learn when they are in a classroom, 25 (or 30, or 35...) minutes into listening to a teacher drone on and write on a blackboard, after which you will eventually be tested. I probably spend more time figuring out the quirky questions and grading methods of certain teachers then I did the actual subjects.
Linus Torvalds was left pretty much alone to do what he wanted in Finland, and his learning seems to have come out OK, didn't it? In the US, the brightest and most motivated students seem to be forced into the least common denominator of doing the same exact things as students who don't want to be in class to begin with.
Thanks for the figures!
So out of 20 million people out of work we have ~150K (which from the article notes is ~2% total) ?
When we're talking about a nation of 310 million people, though 150K is a lot but not "all over the place" as was asserted earlier.
Also, in general higher income earners tend to send their kids to private school to avoid the generally overall poor performance of public schools (yes there are some good ones, but they are RARE).
And I'm honestly not surprised your teacher friends are having a hard time finding a job. Pretty much everyone that's not in the IT field is having a hard time finding a job.
Far better than a longer school year would be a longer school day. School days currently are about 6 hours, ending in mid-afternoon, so schoolkids can go to work. That is a holdover from when workers competed with children in the labor market, which is generally not even allowed. Parents who got income from their kids were more willing to allow this new "school day" for their kids if they could keep working them at least part time. None of that is necessary or even useful anymore.
What's necessary is kids getting more time to learn. At the very least schools should give them an extra couple-few hours of supervised "homework" time (better named "exercises" or just more "studyhall"). More ambitious kids who study more subjects could take extra lessons in that time. Or extra time for other activities, especially art, music, shop, programming time spent learning how to express themselves by making things. The longer day would give teachers and other staff a full day during which they can work the overhead of their job, instead of always taking it home with them unlike most workers.
Perhaps most important, kids would spend more time at school than their parents generally do at work, so complete daycare is part of the service, even when parents have a relatively long commute.
We should keep the 3 month Summer break, but simply make it optional. The schools should be in service year round, including both remedial and accelerated classes during the Summer. But kids should be free to spend those 3 months entirely on elective activity. Take a Summer job, take extra (or repeat) classes, teach a class if they're really advanced, or just take each day as it comes if they're not juvenile delinquents. Leaving them to a programme of either their parents (especially when young) or their own direction, even if it's just goofing off with their friends, makes most of them better people. If not, and that shows in their grades, they should take remedial Summer classes.
All this goes for teachers, too. If anyone needs a few months break from unlimited responsibility (with severely limited power) over everyone else's brats, it's teachers. Or the best ones can make extra money working during the Summer session, too.
There is so much to work with. Schools typically are in session 180 days a year, 6 hours a day, instead of the 260x8 adults work. That's just about 52% of work hours spent at school. There's room in there beyond the traditional base school calendar to accommodate practically every individual student's needs. Including those able to hit at least a median education even just sticking to the original calendar, earning control over the rest of that ample time for something that isn't school at all.
--
make install -not war
what about less tech the test and more hands on work?
College is not for all and not all majors / jobs are college material.
http://chronicle.com/blogs/decision2012/2012/08/28/higher-ed-status-quo-isnt-working-republican-platform-says/?goback=.gde_2084356_member_155071793
"expanding alternatives to traditional colleges,"
“The status quo is not working” when it comes to dealing with the rising cost of college, the document says, lending support to new learning systems that compete with traditional four-year colleges.
Those alternative programs include “community colleges and technical institutions, private training schools, online universities, life-long learning, and work-based learning in the private sector.”
and it's not just costs that are that the alternative can have peopel learning more jobs skills in a Shorter time frame With less filler that comes with traditional college.
Parts of the traditional colleges system is a relic of the past and the time tables are also loaded with the summers off and other stuff that is not the best fit in today's work force.
We do need more of a trades / tech track and maybe a college / AP track.
An other part of wasted time in education is all the filler and fluff classes well round is nice to have but how many people really put full effort into filler classes?
Honestly, you're right. I wish I had mod points.
I just read that article, and I found no claim like that, and nothing that supports a claim like that.
I'm pretty sure cost is, in fact, really an issue.
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
I know this is a US story but I'd like to pretend to be an outraged southern neighbour and point out the northern hemisphere bias here.
how dare you!
seriously though - things work differently here in NZ. Don't know if things work better but I can say there is certainly no debate here of this kind.
The school year generally starts in early February, and runs through to mid-December. In between there's a 2 week holiday for easter, another 2 week break in early July and another 2 week break in early October. Pretty rough eh. But because our summer coincides with christmas, almost everyone takes leave from work over christmas and for pretty much the whole of January. So you have the kids and the adults having a summer/christmas holiday together for about 6 weeks. Seems to work pretty well - NZ education standards are pretty good, and (I have no data to back this up) there seems to be a reasonable quota of high profile expats doing good stuff. Just don't try and get any help, service, accommodation or actually anything in January.
Hej! Nasi tu byli!
Quit treating the school system as such. It isn't. Some parents like having their kids out for the summer. Some families in tourist or farming towns need their kids out of school. Some kids just don't want to learn, so don't make them. Want to help the schools? Let the kids who want to drop out get the fuck out and get a job. We need those people working in the drive through or cleaning vomit off carnival rides just like we need doctors, fire fighters, and teachers.
Chewbacon
The Bible is like Wikipedia: written by a bunch of people and verifiable by questionable sources.
So you want of the same... That is currently failing. Isn't the definition of madness doing the same thing over and over again and expecting something different?
So let's take away the only point of learning, and robotise even more and take away the freedom of choice. Then erect fences and lock them away. Eventually coming out so institutionalised, completely unable to fend for themselves because they've never had the chance to see the real world - the out doors.
I spent my summers abroad, and scouts, and air cadets. I learnt to make fire, gut a rabbit and land a plane. More Time free to practice coding, more time to experience life without the clock for the first time. A glimpse into life the way you fit into, and a chance to see you're not a freak, simply an animal beaten by a system. A chance to find yourself and your own way.
Summer hols are a mess up for some, especially for parents who were also raised in a system without a summer holiday to practice being an adult and so cannot raise kids and leave them like in films such as the goodies, super7,ET, for they are not adults, and we are reliant on the state for our every baby screaming need.
Victorian education from the enlightenment needs to more from that era to the make mag/slashdot/TED era. I see the TED talk on education and pupil led lessons, so much more to look forward to.
Like sports the outdoors can lead on to inspire and that includes summer traditionally. Split the summer to more time thro the year, and get them sailing a yacht as a team in force 8 and similar opportunities.
That said my youth was active and now it's ipads and tv. We had a summer sports thing and I remember drinking 6 litres a day in the heat. Got to get outdoors but don't give up and throw the summer out just because lcd screens don't work in bright sunlight currently:-P
A blog I run for the wealth
Look at CS that is Science not really IT work and it's more on the programing side but at some schools you can take cs and have a big gap in programing skills.
But for say IT helpdesk / desktop / sysadmin work CS is big skills gap next to tech schools / learning on your own. Some jobs do say need CS or other IT degree. But some say CS required for stuff like help desk.
Now for IT work and even programing work a mixed tech school / apprenticeship system can be a very good way to get people up to speed a lot quicker (talking about 1.50-2+ years faster) then 4 years of CS + other time to fill in the gaps.
Also IT moves to fast to fit into a college time table and college is loaded with people who have little work out side of school vs a tech school where you have people who have done real work in the field.
sports the NFL and NBA need to forced to take non college players or that colleges should have a sports ONLY plan where you don't have to take any classes but can play.
Fall/Spring Semester - first Wednesday in September to second Friday in December with a 1-2 week break in the middle for mid-term break to study for mid-term exams. Christmas Holidays - from secondary Friday in December to first Monday in January unless it is New Year's Day then the second Monday - a 3 week holiday Spring/Summer Semester - first/second Monday in January to Last Friday in June with a 1-2 week break in the middle for mid-term break to study for mid-term exams Summer Holidays - Last Friday in June to first Wednesday in September - 2 months and 1 week summer break Separate days off given for President's birthdays, religious holidays (if allowed), Martin Luther King day, Memorial Day, etc. It gives teachers and students more off days but does not make the summer break so long.
brake college up into smaller chunks.
That can be a better fit for on going education, learning new skills, letting people work at their own pace, working a job and taking classes your time table.
MASTERS, PHD, MBA, POST DOC are all big time blocks and are hold overs from the past that need to be cut down to smaller parts.
I have a revolutionary idea how to pay for it; stop funding football and spend it on education.
"...can be educationally detrimental, with most youth losing about two months of grade-level equivalency in math computational skills" These students never had the skills to begin with. Public school in America is so largely a waste of time. We would learn the same over-simplified crap day in and day out, year after year. 3rd grade we learned how to multiply. 4th grade we learned how to multiply. 5th grade we learned how to multiply. In 9th grade, there were still those of us who couldn't multiply. The problem isn't that schools don't have enough time to teach - it's that they aren't teaching period. Giving them more time would, if anything, harm students by wasting more of their time. Over summer vacation, I could read literature books that I knew we would never get to in class, learn vim, take an internship, or write (usually, all of the above). Public school has already gotten so bad that if I ever have kids, I am strongly considering either sending them to private school or home-schooling them with the aid of tutors. But letting them spend MORE time in public school than I did? Never. Off-topic, something I have noticed as a successful strategy is to home school your kids from 1st to 8th grade, and then send them to public school. This is both so they can get formal credit and because high school attracts better professors so that it is almost worth it.
asia puts to much on the test and cramming for it also they view most school work as group work even when it's individual work.
Now the group work is more like the real work place but the testing part is a double fail as what is the point of test if you can cram and pass but have no idea on what it covered.
as for plagiarism.
* there are only so meany ways / ideas on how to say something.
* why are filler classes loaded with Busy work papers any ways?
People don't need to be sorted and graded like eggs or meat, because people are capable of selecting a path for themselves. The system you're describing is an assembly line. People will never be able to meet their full potential (academically or otherwise) in a system that dehumanizes them and makes them feel powerless over their own destiny. And a system that objectifies people teaches them to devalue their personal sovereignty and mindlessly submit to authority. That causes social problems on a larger scale because people feel like they aren't responsible for their own actions since they were powerless to do otherwise. They were "just following orders" so to speak.
Your prescription for troubled students is especially off the mark. If a student isn't institutionalizing well, it doesn't mean we should double down on them and try to break their will. It just means that they're ready to grow up and start on their own. They shouldn't have to go to school, and should be able to take a job or an apprenticeship or have something else constructive to do with their time (depending on their age). School isn't for everybody.
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
Actually it is 14 cents.
The education experiment in the United States has consistently shown that the more resources we throw at it, the worse the results are.
Haha, now I see why teachers are underpaid in US. Are you saying that increasing teacher salaries (or # of teachers?) resulted in worse education?
I wonder if anyone tried cutting teacher salaries to zero to see if the reverse is also true. More resources make results worse, so fewer resources must mean better results?
Wrong.
No, you're wrong.
Our school system is fucked beyond belief. It currently serves no other purpose than to raise up obedient little worker drones. And you want to expose them to more of that?
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.
Join the Slashcott! Stay away entirely Feb 10 thru Feb 17! Close all tabs to prevent autorefresh!
For the population that uses schools as year-round extended daycare, because ultimately, they want nothing to do with their inconvienent offspring, year-round extended school days are fantastic. In fact, those who'd really like to just hand their children over to the state for "care" and institutionalization should just go ahead and do so.
For the actual parents out there, who care about their children and their education, summer break is a chance to spend time together as a family. It is a chance for children to learn about responsibility, independent learning, and the world outside their government run school -prison. The simple fact is that institutionalized learning stifles creativity, independent thinking, and severely damages the top 5%. It is designed for the least common factor, and falls short of even that mark. More children are harmed by our modern system than are helped by it. Take away summer break, and you will cripple our brightest minds even more.
Much of the time in school is a complete waste. All school sports are a waste, and a distraction
Stopped reading
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.
No, it's more like an argument for teaching kids how to be self-sufficient, so they can create their own jobs and vacation as long as they like. More government control over the private sector is NOT the solution to ANY problems we face today.
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.
selfish/lazy/etc., parents that BOTH work? kinda hard on us working-class stiffs aren't you?
You'd be surprised to find out how important the process of forgetting is to the human memory and learning, and how important it is to let the mind rest and process all the information digested at its own pace.
Maybe at some places, but then it won't be so at other places. I recall my school days in India. By the time our summer vacation started in end of May, the temp. was already +40C and even though the school had AC, it just didn't keep up. It was a routine to see someone faint etc. because of the heat. Hence as it got hotter all physical activities were cancelled and so on. Schools reopened just after Monsoon, and weather was bit more bearable. From what I recall, last few weeks of May, and the month of June, with first few weeks of July, practically everything slows down. The heat would grind everything to a halt, only time you would see activity outside was in the morning hours and then in evening. Although what was very different was that the school year starts in February/March, instead of Sept. (as in Canada), and for summer vacation practically every kid had loads of homework to do, which to a degree kept most kids slightly engaged with learning.... On the other hand. Obviously if there has been studies and concrete results about kids performing better etc. vs. Kids back in the day....maybe we should do that then.. Oh..btw...is it ok once we have had these kids in longer school hours attempts some Math/Science tests done by kids from 60s ( who had the summer vacation) and then compare general scores with the criteria being that kids can only use tools available to kids back in 50s & 60s. Curriculum that is set now, with the some of the rules that I hear about, should be fixed first before we do anything to hours/length of school year. Our education system has taken a nose dive for worse. Yet when you go talk to teachers, they say, "Oh yes, your kid is fine, he is doing great". I can't believe that we have adults and educations systems in North America exploring Creationism in school.....What are these people doing, why can they think rationally and logically. Do these people realize that there are other religions in the world too, some older than Christianity and Judaism for that. For anyone who argues that summer vacation should be reviewed, should first absolutely commit to the fact that all religions are farce. That alone will expose so much commotion, illogical arguments, bureaucracy and politics in the education system, which if all fixed you won't need extra hours to make kids smart. Six year old kids hear can barely write A-Z, 1-200, some better cases can spell 2-3 letters or add 1-2 digit numbers that is it. Whereas in some other parts of the world with similar amount of schooling, they are already doing short sentences...and are starting to explore addition/subtractions at higher order. All this rant... Fix the education standards first, otherwise all we are going to have more schooling, more expenses...yet same old dumb kids.
I am at loss with words...
TFA assumes everyone's buying into the corporate state BS. Let's try to remember that people are not the machines they operate, the are not just resources, and there's more to life than just your studies or your job. This goes double for children.
Unfortunately, you know nothing of poor schools. In my current community, a large number of the students don't get breakfast or lunch during the summer. There is a summer lunch program that feeds kids in the park, which helps. It's bad enough that coaches of some sports are giving the kids dinner, so that they get the nutrition needed to compete effectively.
As far as sleep is concerned, I've read some great studies about sleep when it comes to high school and middle school. One local private Christian school has looked to moving their 7th-12th grades to a 9:30am-4:30pm schedule, but never got the traction for it to take off. They opted to doing easy work from 8:30am-10:00am and at 10:00am classes get much more difficult.
Unfortunately, most schools are not built to handle the summer heat. Those buildings are dangerously hot in the summer and most don't have AC, and can't be easily retrofitted.
90% of the pleasure of being alive (be you animal or human) is your childhood. why regiment that. Sure it would be more convenient for me to not have to figure out what to do with kids while I'm at work. But the monotony of it would not be good for kids. Phineas and Ferb are all I need to know.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
My wife is a teacher. Do you know what teachers do during "Teacher Work Days"?
I didn't imply they weren't working, or anything like that. I simply said that those days when students are absent should be made up with further attendance days.
But the OP said they weren't working, instead they were in meetings all day.
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.
You can do that with both parents working. You just need to be a little flexible with their work schedule.
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.
Here, let me give you a tale of two school districts. One, the school district of the city of Newark, NJ, spends $21,000 per pupil per year (or $17,000 depending on how you calculate it), and is one of the worst in the state; students don't learn shit. The other, the school district for Millburn Township, NJ spends $17,000 per year (or $14,000 using the other method) and is one of the best. You know what sort of improvement you're going to get by sending the kids in Newark to school 12 months a year? Fuck all. You know what sort of improvement you're going to get by sending the kids in Millburn to school 12 months a year? Still fuck all.
It isn't the money, and it isn't the time. Figure out why Johnny isn't learning jack shit in school during 9 months of the year (and fix it) before proposing that he go 12 months to learn the same jack shit.
so our failure teachers can be paid more to not educate?
Summertime adolescence was the time for heavy reading. "Patanjali's yoga sutras" and "Tantric Mysticism of Tibet". Scientific American magazine (Dad got me the special on microprocessors and here I am), Analog magazine,Greek philosophy (and eventually, geek philosophy). Admittedly, this was fluffed with about 1 science fiction paperpack every day or two, but these two had quite some educational value.
Summertime childhood too, was full of books on dinosaurs and mythology. In addition, I got motor coordination and exercise better than gym class by wandering the mountains near home, swinging on grape vines (and falling), bicycling, hiking, and so on.
So, I say, three cheers for summer vacation. It was fun, and educational. A child not motivated to intellectual exploration will avoid it, school or no. A curious intelligent child will seek education, whether school is involved or not.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
I have an M.A., an MBA, and am two years away from my Phd.
I think that my summers, when I worked part time jobs and spent time traveling and visiting relatives in other parts of the country, were far, far more valuable to me than another couple of months of school. I remember those jobs and lessons from my summer "vacations" vividly. It's not that summer vacations are bad. It's that many parents don't properly ensure that their kids are learning about "real life" over those vacations.
FYI, I was raised in a lower middle income family. We did not own a phone until I was in 7th grade (1989). By most people's standards, I was poor.
What I'm saying is that the US spends more per student than any other developed country, yet we consistently score in the bottom quartile in science and math. The entire system is broken, and spending more days per year doing the same dumb crap isn't going to make the system better. http://mat.usc.edu/u-s-education-versus-the-world-infographic/
In florida we spend a week just administering FCAT and spend months preparing for it. We require it for high school graduation.
One problem with this...colleges dont care about the FCAT, not a single college even in FLORIDA will ask you will ask you about your fcat score.
They ask for SAT and ACT scores because those are multi-state tests that politicians cant screw with to manipulate scores.
Yeah because the bullshit nonsense taught in 'psychology' courses makes one an expert in human beings.
It rang true to me and almost every other Slashdotter who read those words I'd wager. Rebuttal required.
From hell's heart I fstab at /dev/hdc
The problem is that most schools are funded by LOCAL property taxes. That's not really "the problem" but many politicians have had states takeover handing out the money, bringing everybody down.
Let's use Michigan. Literally half of property tax goes to schools. It USED to go directly from the county treasurer to the school district and the states chipped in maybe 10-20% the Feds almost nothing except discrete programs (for instance lunches are pulled from food stamp money). The changes are pretty drastic after 1990's... The rules are different now.
In Michigan we passes a law that added 2% to sales tax and capped "homestead" personal home taxes to inflation, only adjusting at sale time. There was a problem because seniors were being "taxed" out of their homes because property values shot thru the roof. Unfortunately, that IS how property tax is supposed to work to allocate resources more efficiently.
The problems started immediately. The State 2% sales tax increase didn't cover the spread of decreased property taxes. Worse, the state handed out all the districts the same share. A boon to poor districts, but huge cuts where localities with lots of professionals were paying 50% more taxes in some cases.
To "fix" that problem, of individual districts voting in MORE taxes to cover the losses, passed another law that the districts had to have most of the operating taxes sent THRU the state. AND localities couldn't add more operating taxes because that wasn't "fair" to poor districts.
So now NOBODY will vote for one more dime of school taxes because it doesn't go to THEIR schools. We have districts with great building and technology budgets, but they legally can't pay their teachers one dime more. Of course just as fast as the state grabbed all that money, the first thing to go was that 2% committed to schools... Or rather it became 2% for "education spending". Then the state cut its share of general fund to colleges and trade schools... Taking the funds away from k-12 schools that the law moved to the State's care. (and nobody can raise local taxes ... Still) what's worse is that the "education" fund (that 2% sales tax) had a balance for over a Decade... Not a lot, but enough to smooth over year-to-year tax changes... But the most recent Govenor took THAT fund and paid it to colleges instead of the State's normal yearly share. So we spent 15 years building a cushion and in one budget we trashed it. Not to mention the state has been starving higher education for decades as well. It was just in the last few years that State University tuition cut from the STUDENTS is more than from the state (the other third comes from federal, alumni, and industry grants).
So sure, blame unions or whatever... How about blame the people that are pushing the system to break intentionally as they possibly can?
Shouldn't we be asking ourselfs why our kids are dumb as sand?
We keep blaming the summer or the teachers but never actually blame the kids. Summer break does cause children to loose some knowledge, this is true and we can't agrue it. However how many users of this site had summer break and now are engineers, inventors or scientists. If summer break is so bad for children then how year after year does the school system turn of engineers, scientist or inventors.
The problem isn't the break, it's the kids and therefore by extention the parents. Don't blame the wrong source to try and pass the torch.
The only education I got out of Middle/High school was how to sleep through class and a bit of socializing. BTW, my HS has some of the highest ACTs/SATs in the nation(averages top 10%). I can only assume how bad other schools are.
I didn't learn to enjoy education until college. There they treated you like a person and you actually learned something. Some how college was easier, but I think that's because teachers there made learning fun an engaging. Over here, un-subsidized 4-year uni is $12k/sem, but only $2k for in-state.
Like they said, it's the same number of school days. Teachers might actually appreciate having their time off spread out more too...
;-)
To me, a break needs to be at least 2 weeks long to fully forget about work. I would think 3 weeks at a time, several times a year would be nice. Problem then is that all the Amusement parks, camp grounds, hotels, whatever will be packed in those short summer breaks and not so much in the winter - it will be detrimental to the economy
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
Yes, DPS is broken possibly beyond repair due to other reasons. That does not make it a counter argument to the statement about creationism. Things can fail for a number of reasons, but when one of those reasons actually happens it doesn't invalidate the others. Your logic needs some work. BTW, I don't intend this as defence of the other poster - they dragged in another idea that's quite off-topic.
All this is neither here nor there... the big problem is your kids in school and then he's not... and you have to find childcare. Not only that, but THE ENTIRE COUNTRY has a giant break from school at the same approximate time. So the price of childcare skyrockets during that break. Summer break is idiotic and should be done away with on that premise alone. If school is supposed to prepare you for the working world, why not give kids 3 to 6 weeks vacation time a year at let them use it as they see fit just like their parents? A kid that's doing better in school could earn more, just like a real job. Oh wait... the teachers union controls our schools, so we can't ever makes changes. I forgot. My bad.
Usually we promote something by saying "it's for the children". But thinking the US economy is falling behind because of our education system is just wrong. While the Chinese are trying to move toward education more like ours, we're trying to be more like theirs and do crazy stuff like "year-round education". Let's not blame our faltering economy on the children or the way they are educated.
I'm all for discussing ideas, but let us not forget that one of the driving forces of innovation is creativity. Until we start measuring that I don't think the system should be changed too much. At any rate I don't see this growing consensus they mention.
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 !
Just imagine being in 20x20 room with 30+ people with no AC. At least when I was a kid(in the 70's and 80's) none of the classrooms were air conditioned and I can only imagine what they'd be like in the summer. Oh for reference the only place that had AC in the school was the front office. Yeah, because the office equipment needed it. Nah, it couldn't be because that's where the principal was.
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
> Do We Need a Longer School Year?
Based on the length of the OP's single paragraph, apparently.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
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.
Indeed. I feel like this whenever the topic of education is brought up.
What do kids want? To be out playing, having fun with friends, enjoying life.
What do parents want? The kids to be learned enough to live on their own.
What do educators want? A paycheck and a submissive student body.
You've tried lengthening and shortening the school year to compensate for lower test scores (and everyone hates being in class during the month of June; the heat is tremendous, and it's almost worth calling in a bomb threat just to have a day off), You've tried tweaking the tests to more accurately reflect students' learning. You've tried parent-teacher conferences. You've tried cutting teacher's salaries and increasing them. You've tried changing the teaching methods. You have Montessori schools and Play schools. You've employed off-duty police as security guards to make sure the students are in their classrooms as the appointed times. You've tried using fear, fear of the known and unknown, to motivate kids to learn, because the life you're living is similar to the one they will be living. You've tried honours classes, and you've tried remedial classes. None of it seems to work, does it? Every attempt to increase the yield of better learned students seems to make things worse.
I am here to tell you that you don't know what you want. Could children be taught subjects like Calculus, Physics, and Advanced Humanities at grade 5? Yes, but you have a plan, or someone does, which requires the workforce to maintain a certain number of people; is that not the rally cry these days, why don't the older ones retire, so the younger ones can give it a try? If you created an army of PhD candidates by grade 8, where would all the jobs go for the former generations? Face it guys, this is all social engineering gone awry. You can't have your cake and eat it. You can't have super-intelligent kids at a young age without having to change how things work, but in doing so, everyone older loses out on their 'shares' in the way things are. They're too old to change, to adapt, too unwilling, and doing so means they 'lose' everything. So, make up your minds. Do you want Doctoral candidates by grade 8, or do you want a slightly idiotic workforce that is still maturing well into their 50s? Lengthening or shortening their summers won't do much here, save the students enjoying themselves or growing up to be terribly dull.
Are you giving birth to sentient beings, who have the rights and privileges to be whomever they want to be, or are you putting out a product, for future consumption by some terrible beings? I will play the game however you want to play it. Idiots or geniuses, the choice is yours.
I am John Hurt.
Forget school years, we need longer years. I'm tired of getting so old.
We don't need a longer school year, we need schools that actually TEACH.
Not teaching to tests, not spewing data by rote, but schools that impart the foundations of learning, first.
How to learn, how to reason, how to think, how to analyze information gained from ANY source, and use it to make informed decisions. In short, we need schools that create knowledgeable, thoughtful, responsible citizens, capable of making informed decisions, and desirous of such.
I consider myself lucky to be as old as I am. I graduated High School in 1982. With honors, much to the surprise of my guidance counselor, who, despite my tested IQ and being place in honors and "gifted" classes, thought I was basically white trash... on the day of graduation he tracked me down, handed me a set of honor cords and said "Here. I don't know how how you managed it, but these are yours" [1].
Now, why I say "lucky"? While the overall quality of eduction wasn't all that great, there were still many great teachers, who, not having to worry about standardized tests, actually TAUGHT, and I was fortunate to have been in their classes.
Today, many of them wouldn't have jobs in the education field: My Freshman year Honors Social Studies teacher would, by today's standards, be deemed a "bad influence" at best, and subversive at worst: He tended to pepper his lectures based upon the official study materials with cynical observations as to their biases, and it was from him that I learned to "read between the lines", and look elsewhere for what wasn't mentioned in the official histories.
My Sophomore year Gifted English teacher started the school year by saying: "I've a list of books that I'm supposed to cover, here it is. However, since you're all supposedly gifted, I'll leave those to you to read." Then he handed out copies of James Joyce's "Dubliners" to each of us, which he'd bought with his own money, since it wasn't part of the official curriculum, and said "This is one of the greatest works of literature in the English language, and this is what we're going to study."
And study it we did. He was brilliant, imperviously knowledgeable in his field and cynical beyond belief... but, he did one thing that so few of my teachers did at that point: He made us think, and had no problem explaining in great detail why were were wrong. At one point, he was expostulating upon one of the themes in Dubliners, that of self-perception, and especially how such tends to be different from reality, and how many of the images in the stories show that. I don't remember which story it was that we were studying, but, something within me "clicked", as he was talking, and, as I glanced around, I saw another student with that same look. He looked at me, I looked at him, and nodded... there's a description where the protagonist is looking at a copper kettle... and I knew that he knew, too, and he raised his hand and asked "Wouldn't the reflection from the copper kettle be an example of that? It's convex, and so his reflection would be distorted..."... and the stunned look on our teacher's face, as he realized the import of that question, was priceless: He'd never seen that, nor, apparently, had anyone else so far as he knew. He said that he was going to write it up and submit it, but I don't know if it ever went that far.
Regardless, that one moment drove all of us to learn it, experience it, know it for what it was: Life, in fiction created, captured, and made real in words. It was, for me, the moment when I SAW, for the first time, beyond just the words, above them, between them, behind them, and learned that how truly powerful and wonderful words can be.
My Sophomore year Honors Biology teacher was HOT. She also told me that I was her only hope for a perfect score on the NYS Regents Biology exam... which drove me to study HARD. Sadly, I only got a 93%.
My Senior year Honors Physics teacher was as smart a human being as I've ever met, ever. He was in his 60's, then, had retired from industry after selling
I have four kids, three are currently in school. They impress the teachers every year when they come back and its simple. For one hour of every day whether we are on vacation or at home they do age appropriate math and writing. The curriculum is free online and they progress rather than regress. The rest of the day they are free to swim, hike, play video games, build models, read etc in short be kids. We always try to fix the system, we fail to recognize that sometimes its us.
I don't have a simplistic view that more money will solve education in of itself.
We desperately need to do more for education, whatever that may be. It offends me to no end when we discuss what can be done about education, and we stop ourselves short over money. The primary reason for this is all the stupid, unimportant, and corrupt shit that gets higher priority over education, and also infrastructure.
It's easier to get money approved for a military contractor to screw around with a ton of money and deliver next to nothing, than it is to fix or build a bridge. I'm not saying we should spend nothing on the military, but let's be reasonable. It is far more important to keep a bridge that is servicing people in working order than have some new military shiny.
We should also be looking at other offensive spending scandals like AIG, Wall Street, and where I am, an upper 8 figure boondoggle of an database and web services platform for the DMV.
There is more than enough money and resources once you cut out the 1%'ers and their associated corrupt bullshit.
Yes, I get the cynicism. "It will never happen so let's figure out how to work with what we have". Well, that is utter bullshit. As long as we continue to not the fix the problem it will only get far worse. At some point we have to take a stand and make real meaningful reform in government from education, campaign finance reform, legislative procedures, etc.
Crap like this just touched a raw nerve with me. Let's figure out a solution to education first, just fucking fund it regardless, and then figure out what to cut to make it work. At least we can give all the people involved in education a turn at the corruption trough to get their fair share.
There are several problems with the idea. First, public education is crap and already takes up too much time. If it were a full time job, students would already be putting in roughly 8-10 kid-years of work. And they'd get out a high school diploma which most places no longer respect and near-zero work experience. The schools already are in a great position to educate or train students. How about they use those opportunities first before sucking up more of our students' time?
Second, where's the time for long vacations going to come from? If the longest free period of time is three weeks, then you aren't going to be able to have vacations longer than that. That excludes, for example, my cool road trip with my family to Alaska along the Alaskan highway. It took us five weeks to do that.
And of course, this is all forced upon defenseless students. Just another cost of being alive and sucking air that doesn't need to be there.
I think the independent summer is one of the things that make the western world great. It lets some kids do what they want, learn things that the government doesn't teach. A longer school year is a great idea if you want mindless factory workers.
...X.
Some kids will spend the summer drinking, playing video games, hanging out at the mall, etc. But hello bell curve; I suspect that there are some nerdy kids doing cool stuff, and entrepreneurial kids doing businessy stuff.
I am willing to bet that if you do a poll at MIT about what the kids did for their summers that it was not school but something cool. If you ask the kids in jail at 18 what they did with their summers it was probably quite jail preparatory.
Check out the PISA scores for countries like Indonesia (they really suck) yet they have a 6 day school week and not that long a break. I am sure that some of the top countries in the PISA scores also probably have crazy school years but many of the top countries such as Korea aren't exactly noted for their independent thinking. So the question goes even beyond math scores. What kind of citizens do we want?
So maybe it shouldn't be about a longer school year but more offerings for kids to do things in the summer. Camping, science, music, etc. But not aiming for an elite level OCD thing but a hey lets have fun doing
No time off from mindless busywork which doesn't, by any stretch of the imagination, prepare anyone for the real world.
No time off from senselessly time-consuming homework. (Why is it that students are given homework anyways? In the real world, your boss doesn't generally give you 'homework'; you work your 8 hours and you're DONE FOR THE DAY.)
No time off from cruel and sadistic bullies.
No time off from incompetent and disinterested teachers.
No time off from the mind-numbingly uncaring bureaucracy of the school administration.
No time off from waking up before dawn to trundle out to the school bus, alone and half-awake.
I'm 33 years old, and I look back at my school years as some of the worst times of my life. The suggestion of eliminating the summer respite would only make an already grueling and unpleasant period of every person's life significantly worse.
Now, there ARE ways to improve our school system. They don't involve adding more time to the school experience. They involve, among other things, tailoring the curriculum to the needs of each student, reducing the focus on mindless drilling for standardised tests, reshaping the curriculum to focus on useful real-world skills, transplanting money currently spent on sports (which should have no place in an academic environment anyways) and other non-academic things such as ROTC into better textbooks, better teachers, and perhaps even undoing some of the damage idiot parents in this country routinely do to their children (such as teaching them that Earth is 6,000 years old and was created in six literal 24-hour days, for example). They also involve treating students like human beings and not mere items on an assembly line, and ensuring that every student is treated with dignity. (The epidemic of school bullying needs to end NOW.)
With spending like this, exactly what are "conservatives" conserving?
So you married the devil? All teachers must join unions, and all unions are evil. Therefore, you married evil. Didn't you know how it works?
But how would you feel (or think she'd feel) about 4-weeks off in December, 3 weeks off in March, 3/4 weeks in June, and 3 in September?
Learn to love Alaska
That's when my kids did summer camp (actually being a kid) and eventually got their camp jobs where they worked their butts off for little pay while sweating and staying away from computers, TVs and videogames. We lived at the beach and that's when we made real money. Summer vacations and family trips.
We could do year round schools but they do it in a lot of places with overlapping schedules so that your kids end up with different break schedules. It's even harder when trying to vacation with friends.
I'd be a lot more in favor of extending the school day by 30 minutes.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The trick is - salaries WON'T go down (much) if the holiday (or additional pay for worked holiday) were really mandated for everyone. Every employer would face the same decrease in productivity as its competitors, so cutting pay won't give any competitive advantage.
Now, the real world is not completely ideal, so cutting work days causes some structural changes, namely:
1) Not all areas can easily tolerate reduced work days.
2) While reduced work days do not (in theory) affect the competitiveness within the country, they certainly affect the international competitiveness.
3) If the economy is running with maximum utilization, then there might simply not be enough workers available. But last time that happened the US was in the middle of the WWII.
Even if the number was zero, we'd still be falling behind because of population growth. We need to add more teachers every year just to keep up with the increasing number of students. So any cuts at all are doubly harmful.
And the social problem here is not that teachers themselves are struggling (although public sector employment is worse off than the private sector) but that we're undermining the education of the next generation of citizens.
With very few people still living on farms it is now an anachronism.
Holidays are certainly needed, just not so long.
Perhaps a month off to allow people to vacation is a reasonable length.
We likely need to stagger those intervals of one month across the summer.
Otherwise too many families will be competing for the same vacation resources.
Maurice W. Hilarius Voice: (778) 347-9907
In my opinion, you guys started demonizing and drastically underpaying your teachers.
I have a question for you, why was education better when the relative salary of teachers was lower than it is today? The armies that fought the U.S. Civil War were the most literate armies in history (as evidenced by the many letters and journals that they wrote), yet at that time school teachers were generally paid a pittance. As best I can determine the average wage in the U.S. in the 1850s was somewhere around 80-90 cents a day, which works out to between $24-$27 a month. The average teacher's salary at the same time was $4-$10 a month. If the estimate of average monthly salary in the U.S. is correct, teachers today do much better relative to the general population (teachers today with a bachelor's degree earn a pro-rated salary that is slightly above average for a person with a bachelor's degree) than they did in the 1850s, yet the evidence suggests that students received a better education in the 1850s.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
2) While reduced work days do not (in theory) affect the competitiveness within the country, they certainly affect the international competitiveness.
I don't see why you'd say that. The US holidays are shorter than most anywhere else, especially the places beating the USA in "competitiveness" (unless your definition of locations beating the US consists of only China and India).
Learn to love Alaska
Not all states have teachers unions. Her's is just a group-rate for liability insurance and a magazine subscription.
She would recommend the full summer vacation and that parents read to their kids every day. The real issue here is that a large portion of parents expect the school system raise their children for them. Anybody who plops their kids on front of the TV for the whole summer is a failure as a parent. I'm vehemently against home schooling but that's what I'll have to do if the government tries to take away our summer break. That time belong to me and my kids. And I have plans for it.
:wq
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.
Educate yourself about how George W Bush destroyed American public education with "No Child Left Behind". "Teach the Test" is all that matters now and unless you can afford private education, continuing through college (because professors are inundated with "teach the test" students now) all you will end up with is people that want every answer handed to them and refuse any challenge in life.
"I don't want more choice, I just want nicer things!"
-Jennifer Saunders as Edina Monsoon
One of the students did not know 8 x 4 is "32". He did know 8 x 2 but, according to my son, could not double "16" to get to "32".
I don't think he forgot that over the summer - he never learned it. This high school is a popular public school in my city many students "choice" in if they are not in the school's immediate vicinity. Even the silly statewide proficiency tests let this kid fall through the cracks.
He wasn't failed by summer but by a school system that allows a fourteen year old boy to enter high school not knowing 8 x 4.
There is noting wrong with summer than a year-round school will fix.
The Luddites were ahead of their time.
No, not the current teachers whose degrees are in elementary education or secondary education.
Let people with advanced degrees in actual subject areas teach. If you want to give the elementary education people something to do, let them be TAs and handle "classroom management" and "pedagogical methods," which is what most school districts right now tell people with advanced subject degrees they're lacking.
In the early 2000's as someone with an ivy league masters in a science subject, I wanted to teach at the high school level. Forget it. Now, as someone with a Ph.D. I'm still ineligible to teach anywhere but at the university level. I have fabulous course evaluations, loads of teaching hours (many thousands), and have mentored multiple high school juniors and seniors into the university system. But it doesn't matter—they want an education degree.
I went to a public high school (three years early, but a public high school nonetheless). My math teachers did not know math. My science teachers did not know science. My literature teachers did not actually know much about literature, much less literary criticism. It was a total yawn. I withdrew after a year, studied on my own, and applied to enter university early. The next year, I applied again. Finally they gave me an interview and I was admitted in my early teens.
What a difference! My calculus instructors knew calculus! My physics instructors knew a thing or two about physics!
One important detail missing from all of the discussions about "good teachers" and "bad teachers" is that no one can teach something they don't actually know. Period. No amount of training in an "education" graduate program can give one the finer details of theory and practice in some other field.
My niece recently took a social sciences class in her high school, and she suffered from the same experience. The instructor was "mainly" a "physical science" teacher (who didn't, of course, have a degree in any science, but rather an M.A. in elementary education), but she drew the short straw and was handed a social sciences book and told to teach it. The result? Read the chapter, fill out the (textbook publisher supplied) worksheets, and don't ask any questions because the instructor can't answer them. (Or answers them woefully incorrectly—something I know since after my science masters I took a social sciences Ph.D.—and the class my niece had was nonsense.)
It all brought back horrible memories of my linear algebra teacher in high school that was learning it as we were, doing the chapter and problems the night before and struggling the next day to duplicate the work on the board for students.
And yet we prevent subject area experts that are interested in teaching from teaching their subjects. Apparently four (or more) years later, at university, the same instructors can be not only employable but great. But god forbid we let people that know the subject actually teach it to high schoolers, without making them wait while drooling on their shirts with frustration.
It's the education equivalent of MBA culture. Only an MBA can run a [insert noun here] company, not someone that actually knows [insert same noun]. And only an education major can teach [insert subject here], not someone that actually knows [insert same subject].
Until this is fixed, no amount of extra days will help.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
You sound like someone who needs some perspective.
My dad tells the story on how his high school was visited by reporters from a magazine (I believe that it was Life). When the article came out, the headline was about the poor state of education in the country, next to a picture of his high school. This was in the 1930's.
By the way, my Dad (as well as a lot of people who have gone to that school over the years) managed to get a good high school and college education. He continued to pursue education throughout his life (and continues to, to the best of his ablility). Education depends most on the student, second on the influence of family, friends, and maybe teachers, and last on the length of the school year.
In fact, lets just get rid of "School" all together and come up with a completely new paradigm called "Learning for Life." Have children exposed to beautiful and moving information from their first ability to understand language. Expose them to the things that make us human. Let them hear language and speak to children from all over the world. Give them access to all the knowledge they can hold and show them how to learn. Show them how to take what they learn and apply it to the puzzles of being alive. Show them how to take what we know and tease out new truths and understandings from the world. Call that "Learning for Life". Tickle their fancy, inflame their curiosity, empower their search to know and understand. Give them the methods, the tools, the gross concepts, the vital paradigms. Let them fill those contexts with content.
Of course, you'll need to have a race of intelligent, informed adults, who don't mind that their children will be unruly and ready to point out their fallacies and superstitions. That or you can do what we in the U.S. do, we raise sheep. I don't see how a three month summer impacts that one way or another.
Then why did my local district have to make a choice between losing six teachers and fixing a roof on a school? That was improperly installed by a bankrupt contractor.
They chose the roof. After all, what's a few more students in each class....
To a point, money does matter, especially in high poverty schools.
And what gives a union a reason to exist? An employer who reasons only with unions and not with individual employees.
Unions are the symptom, not the disease.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
Corporate bought and paid for?
That's quite a stretch. When have you seen GM sitting on the school board or attending aPta meeting?
Oh right you haven't because you never attend these things either.
But hey, never miss an opportunity to lay the blame for any fucking thing at the door step of corporations.
Hate rage much?
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
The children starving in the streets is massiveness over played. If children are starving in mass numbers, the school system isn't the place to solve the problem.
It's because the money isn't being given to teachers. Pay all the teachers twice as much, and stop filling schools with iPads and massive swimming pools and ultrafast broadband and all that crap. Pay the teachers.
I think a lot of the problems in cost is in administration: too many and too highly paid. IMO.
I think it would be more sensible to go to a trimester system: three months in class, one month off. I've seen studies that reported higher retention with shorter breaks between semesters.
When you sympathize with stupidity, you start thinking like an idiot.
I agree with those saying that days off should just be rearranged for a variety of reasons.. one long block is a lot less useful than many shorter blocks of time off.
First, it can get boring, and it certainly gives you quite a bit of time to forget things. Even if it is fun, the thrill dies quickly, and there are rarely many remedies to this.
If anything, in my experience summer was in some ways a chore, as parents didn't have time to watch me all day or thought I should be active, and had me do annoying daytime summer camps that took a lot of the freedom out of summer. And I consider my parents comparatively responsible people.. they just had life to deal with, that wasn't their fault. If breaks were shorter, parents would be a lot more able and likely to take out time for kids and do things with them, instead of seeing finding things for their kids to do as more of a chore. I know on spring break we generally did something, and it's just a week off. Contrast this with summer where maybe we took one week trip (generally not even that vacationy.. just family or something), and the rest of it was pretty uneventful.. certainly the break should be there, but it need not be months long.
I also think I would've welcomed further breaks during the year, particularly as I got older. Stress mounts easily and quickly, and while summer is nice and stree-free, the rest of the year is not. Breaking up the year better would likely help destress students more often, helping them to learn more effectively.
Heh. I had an electronics teacher in the late 70's who thought vacuum tube tech was still the way to go. No discussion of solid-state transistors and such. Man, that was a horrible class.
When you sympathize with stupidity, you start thinking like an idiot.
I'm not going to say that there are no families that require both parents to work, but "needing two incomes" is an excuse that doesn't fit reality more often than not. It is a question of priorities. Every family has their own that they need to make. Is living in a better (and more expensive) neighborhood more important than having a parent home so that the kids don't need to be shuffled off to daycare after school? Is it worth it to ship you 18 month old child off to daycare so that your household can afford to watch NFL on cable? What about setting an example of going off to work each day? Is that more important than being home for the kids?
In my household, we decided that it was worth lowering our financial standard of living for one of us to stay home with our child. We also decided that it wasn't worth it to decrease it even farther to have both of us home more often than we are.
Both parents working is more often than not, a decision on what financial level the family wants to live at in exchange for time with the kids.
Just because you cannot see the point of sports does not mean that there is not a good one.
Seriously, you are going with the "you're too dumb to see things my way" argument?
There is really no point in high school sports, and even less in middle school sports. All the team effort lessons can be taught in Science, or even English classes by group learning projects.
You could have learned as much in a basic after school pick up game of basketball as 3 years o football taught you, and you would still have your knees and far more of your brain cells intact.
My high school taught home construction as a team activity out of the industrial arts program. Building 3 bedroom houses, and selling them at a profit, until labor unions objected. The workmanship was excellent and electrical and plumbing codes were followed to the letter. The grade was based on how well they understood the concepts, as well as how they got the job done, and extra credit if the house sold at a profit.
Some of those kids went on to become engineering students, others went straight into the trades. None of them went on to running around bashing into other people for a living.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
I taught myself to program in the summers. That is now my profession. I have to believe that many children/teens also take advantage of summer as a time to look into and pursue interests/hobbies that end up becoming careers.
I learned far more outside of school than I ever did in school. Learning to live, learning about life, nature, our planet.
To me the most heinous thing I can imagine for my kids would be sticking them in year round school. They are not drones.
We should cherish the gift we give our children during summer breaks. They grow so much as people.
They have much more profound interactions with their family, friends and all of the new people they get to know.
No amount of education can account for this.
So when people start talking about all the learning they lose, I will always point to the greater complexity they gain as people.
All of my kids are much better off at the end of the summer than they were at the beginning. So much experience, so many memories, an intense experience with the flow of time in a way they can't get by the regimentation of school. They actually have to learn to become more adaptable and think more outside of the box.
And in the end... after a couple of weeks back in school they already surpass where they were the last year.
You think they don't leave kids behind in China or Japan or Korea? I think the dirty little secret of all those international achievment comparisons is that most of the countries doing better than us are only testing the kids who got on the college track, while we include everyone in our metrics. I wonder where we'd come out in a fair comparison.
I suspect they do, but the real dirty secrets in Japan and Korea (and perhaps China) are that
b. This means that they cram what's done in the States in ten years (from first grade to about sophmore in college) into roughly eight. They do this by cramming after school, on weekends, etc.
c. Children in Korea and Japan are horribly overstressed and generally very unhappy.
d. Some of the cliches you hear about creative work, thinking as opposed to cramming, etc. are true.
Confucianism has oriented these societies towards test taking and fact memorization as a culture for 1500 years. Societally, they're good at it. But it takes toll on their kids, and it delivers high quality goods on a multiple-choice test, but not fantasically well when you're trying to create something. (Note that many Koreans and Japanese then go on to do well in colloge, learn lots there, learn to write, learn to create, etc. But they do this is spite of the system, not because of it.)
Another dirty secret is that acheivement comparisons between Eastern (or some Eastern anyhow) systems and the US education system compare apples to oranges. US advanced ed. is not about making kids that test well, it's about making thinkers and writers. It's still doing a great job of that, if you ignore all the people going to college now who wouldn't have 50 years ago. Those peope now go to college to learn a trade and get rooked. That's not what US higher Ed. is about.
US public primary ed. (and virtually all Western primary Ed) is aimed at making workers and always has been. It's doing a great job of that, assuming all our jobs include the ability to say "want fries with that?" Truely it is. When something keeps "failing" so consistently, you need to take a step back and realize it's not failing in the eyes of everyone, or there'd be general concensus to fix the problem. Western public primary ed. is succeeding, as far as many people are concerned. They don't use it directly, and they like the current outcome, though they'd like the same outcome cheaper, thank you very much.
They can hire the top 5% from US colleges as the real thinkers and the top 30% of Asian schools (more H1B's, please) to be the semi-clever layer, but they'll always need people to offer to supersize their meal, and the more of those people competing with each other there are in the pool, the cheaper such workers will be.
It all works just fine, thank you.
So you don't work? I have plans for summer as well. They happen over weekends and evenings when I'm home from work and the kids are home from school. If they had the whole summer off, I'd not have any more time to spend with them.
Learn to love Alaska
Almost everything you said is exactly wrong.
Most parents would rather their children didn't play high school sports, except for dads who played high school sports and want to live vicariously thru junior, so they can brag about down at the plant during lunch break from their meaningless drone jobs that high school sports prepared them for.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Where in America is social promotion not the norm today?
to the teacher unions and the educational industry who have brought nothing but high property taxes, debt and excessive spending all the while not doing a bit to make little johnny any brighter than he was 10 years before (or 10 years before that or...)
People need to wake up to the fact that this is no different than the so called "military industrial" complex or the terrorism/security industry. They are constantly "fixing" something that is "wrong" to make Johnny smarter, yet no evidence is ever found to show that the changes were a success. Wash, rinse, repeat.
In fact, school days are longer now than at any point in history, especially when factoring in school associated after hours functions. But is Johnny any brighter? Can he do basic arithmetic? Can he read? Can he write (we'll skip what it looks like)? Can he do anything even at the same level as a child of the same age in 1950? Would he score better on a chemistry test? An English Lit. essay? A geometry proof? Sadly, the answer is no. Of course, Johnny today can play Xbox, surf the web and download music though I don't think I'd be going too far out on the limb to say the kid from the 1950s could have done so as well if exposed to that technology - after all, many of them could use a slide rule which requires not just memorization but comprehension to use properly.
We have had fifty years of trying to improve what was already working quite well. Instead, things have gone stagnant or backwards at great cost to every community. Stop the insanity now.
I have a question for you, why was education better when the relative salary of teachers was lower than it is today? The armies that fought the U.S. Civil War were the most literate armies in history (as evidenced by the many letters and journals that they wrote), yet at that time school teachers were generally paid a pittance.
So, when I first read the above, I figured you were just trolling. However, a quick google search turned up the following:
Civil War armies were the most literate in history to that time
Emphasis mine. I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader to ascertain the precise mistake made by the parent post.
I completely agree. We need to foster a system like they have in Japan, where students commit seppuku if they don't finish their homework.
Lots of teachers work a second (shitty, low-paying) job in the summers.
Better be prepared to raise their pay.
International competitiveness is influenced by a lot of factors (by structure of import/export, strength of national currency, etc.) Number of workdays most certainly influences it, but does not define it alone.
When a child shrugs off summer because "...we just sit there and watch TV" I *guarantee* that it indicates something more than any potential drawback to a 9-month curriculum. What it indicates is bad parenting, and/or a lack of initiative on the part of the child. You cannot teach either of those things in school, no matter how much more time you demand from the students. In addition, if your skills regress so much over the course of a summer, then I humbly submit that YOU NEVER LEARNED THEM THAT WELL TO BEGIN WITH. Yeah, I said it. You want to motivate someone to learn who doesn't naturally love to do so? Make something fucking ride on it. Treat these kids with respect, and start handing out failing grades again. I hazard a guess that they'll appreciate summer holidays more. Rant over.
Is living in a better (and more expensive) neighborhood more important than having a parent home so that the kids don't need to be shuffled off to daycare after school?
If that means the difference between a good and crap school, then yes. And that's just in the narrow viewpoint of educating students. It can be a lot of money to throw away merely because you think the kid should have a different home environment.
OK, it will cut maintenance costs.
I was in education for a while, a decade ago. A very, very larger percentage of the cost of running a school is salary. 70% to 80% if I remember correctly.
Schools don't pay property taxes, or many other business expenses, and it's a very labor intensive industry - so much of the budget is for people. By increasing the number of days of instruction, you increase the number of days you pay teachers, and cafeteria workers, and bus drivers, and librarians, and nurses, and security, and... on and on.
Where I went to school, it was only hot enough to need air conditioning a few months of the year - summer. So we didn't have AC in the new high school. On those rare, hot days of fall or spring it was miserable. It would cost many tens of thousands of dollars to retrofit the building at this point.
I think there's a lot of factors you don't see.
I'm not saying what we have is great, but you can't just add to the number of days taught by lowering maintenance costs.
Yeah, that's what schools sometimes are, and the slant of the whole article, while not quite flamebait, is going for the whole "in today's competitive world" meme, clearly with an agenda that the writer will probably benefit from.
This is Slashdot, and I'm hearing the choice come down to "To watch TV while bored or work harder not smarter?!". Is no one using their summer to learn some computing, or form a band, or dig around uncle Joe's beat up old Datsun, or build some Hardware Hack?
Elsewhere on other days the "cynical idea" of paying students to get good grades has appeared, to the shock and horror of "but Education must be pure and noble!" Gee, if they're now saying "to be competitive, let's work harder", it's not noble anymore, is it?
There's other articles out there that say "unstructured time", the bane of writers of articles like this, "is necessary for young adolescent growth because it forms a mental glue that is difficult to measure but is important". Sorry, I also won't fall feed a "Citation Needed" Troll. This whole set of articles is 2012 going on 1981. Why 1981? Let's all intone together! "In this fast moving, high pressure, get it done world, aren't you glad there's one company that can keep up with it all?" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=31yxkSIIn9A
P.S. Nothing is ever good enough. So might as well spend a couple month each year reclaiming our humanity.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Really? Most schools don't have AC?
I'm going to disagree with the quarter system and any variants that have a shorter 'break' duration then that. I agree that a loooong summer break is a bad idea. I personally know I'm losing a lot of information during this (in college and during high school this was pretty evident). But people need time to recuperate after putting in their all so giving them a standized couple weeks off in which all families around the country need to schedule their family time isn't necessarily a good idea.
A good month off is about what you need to recuperate and both in the fall and in the spring time I've found myself suffering fatigue towards the end of the semester. Moreso in spring during that lethargic period before may (mainly due to Christmas brightening things up).
A trimester would fit this perfectly and still give kids a chance to have a life outside of school and do fun things/family things. Japan does this and it works out very well for them. They do a lot of things over there that are quite a bit different from the US (like job fairs and cultural festivals that everyone is required to participate in), but that's one I agree with the most. I know as a kid I would hate the idea of this, but it really is a better system and it's not as invasive as a quarterly system or one that simply doesn't offer a break.
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
WTF? Sorry, i want to bring my children up without stressing them from an early age about being part of a competitive global workforce. I want them to enjoy their childhood while they can, because once they are adults the shit really starts to hit the fan. Summer holidays are an essential break for the kids, one that lets them enjoy their childhood for a couple of months. Sure, its a pain for us parents having to deal with find someone to take care of them while we are at work (assuming both parents work), but i think its good for the kids.
And, as an earlier poster pointed out, a million different proposals have been made over the years, and many of them have been tried, and they all tend to fail.
The reason? Because they try and teach the kids stuff. What? Wait? Isn't that the point? Yeah, but how about starting with teaching the kids to learn and reason and discover information for themselves. Teach them how to learn, the rest will follow naturally.
Quality > quantity. If schools actually did a decent job of teaching children in the first place, we wouldn't (we actually don't) need to get rid of long summer vacations. For those that are able, homeschooling may be the answer.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
The second mis-perception is that school is automatically bereft of the excitement and joy of learning.
K-12 nearly drove the love of learning out of me. If those assholes try to go to the year-round model with my kids, I'll homeschool them.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
I own my own company so no. It was 100% selfish greed that put both parents in the workplace in the first place by the way. That and alleged sexism that did actually exist but still, SOMEONE has to raise the kids. I honestly don't care which parents myself, just one of them should be home.
I think in the US (I assume you're talking about) all hunger stats are BS. I just bought a double cheeseburger for $1. I can personally go with nothing on me and find and make $1 in recycling steel scrap in about 30 minutes. It's not healthy, and yeah it's a huge well known problem that poor = fat too often just because of the cost of good food, but saying people in the US go hungry is absurd. Irresponsible parents failing to feed a child is one thing though because kids can't just find food. Other than that, they just can't find "good" food. If you want to see hunger, go to Africa where nothing grows, it's hot as hell, there's no surface water, and most animals that are edible will kick your ass. Although, most African countries do have McDonalds now but I'm not sure about the price levels :P
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.
You can do that with both parents working. You just need to be a little flexible with their work schedule.
Well, there's that. That's why one parent should work part time and I personally don't care which. Make sure one's home or take all that money you're allegedly making with 2 full time incomes and move to a house right across from the school. I walked about a quarter mile (so like 1000 feet) to the school door even in -20 degree weather and it's just 1000 feet lol. That's not that cold until at least 2500 feet, even in the morning lol. Welcome to Wisconsin. I think I got there before the car would have started.
I am an American high school math teacher that teaches at a semi-rural high school that teaches bi-lingual minority students (85%+) of which are poor enough to qualify for free lunches (50%+). As much as I realize it is a total waste of my time, I have to say that most of you don't have a clue.
1. The actual, factual data indicates, in spite of the popular beliefs, that the educational system is not failing children. Schools are graduating more students with higher and more difficult requirements than before (historically). Declines in education came about 2 years after mandatory testing.
2. What teachers teach, critical thinking or not, is not determined by teachers. They teach what they are told to teach by people who haven't seen the inside of a classroom in a decade or more, if then.
3. There is a monumental decline in student skills because of summer break, and the largest resistance for year-around schooling comes from parents.
4. While students get a summer break, teacher do not. The public belief is to the contrary.
5. Lastly, but most importantly, the systemic problems in the American educational system do not come from teachers, administrators, districts, or any unions. All, and I mean ALL, of the systemic impediments to student learning come from outside the school systems.
I'm not going to waste my breath to explain the details of how it exists or came to be. I can say this, For all the roadblocks that are placed in front of me, I teach kids math, and I am damn good at it in spite of the bullshit.
Link please- I'm sceptical.
If you want teachers to work an extra month a year, it's reasonable to assume that you'll be paying them more. Teachers aren't cheap- assuming they're paid an average wage of about £22,000, and assuming you need to pay them 10% more, that's an extra £2k per teacher. If a school employs 15 teachers, that's an extra £30k a year- the equivalent of employing a whole extra teacher with money to spare.
Maintenance costs? My wife is a teacher. At her school, during the summer holidays, the school has it's doors locked for 4 out of the 6 weeks. The sole maintenance staffer (the caretaker/janitor) is employed full time all year round, including throughout the summer. How would you save money by having kids in for extra time? How would you save £30k a year, to counteract the extra pay for teachers?
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.
When did a government school ever say they didn't need more money?
Some things should be paid for. Education is one of them.
OK, but it's going to cost endless zillions of dollars. And even more next year, even though the number of students is fewer.
Thanks for that, I'd never heard the expression before.
I used to call it Belgian disease - the belief that if you can't see it, it doesn't exist.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Wrong. What you originally said was:
Sorry, not the same thing at all.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
FFS change the record, or at least clean the fluff off the needle.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Really?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Perhaps, but education in the U.S. was much better when the salary of teachers relative to everyone else was much less than it is today (I am not suggesting we should go back to paying teachers that way). Which suggests that the problem is something other than how much we pay teachers.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
if you can't see it, it doesn't exist
The ultimate weakness of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal.
I'd argue that there's quite a few up north, but I don't know about 'most'. Where I am heat is one of the biggest expenses.
I don't read AC A human right
The "can't be easily" = budget.
We heard the same story in our district, thats why the one air conditioned school got all the summer school sessions. Then after the usual management shakeup they decided to have SS at most schools, and simply installed window AC units.
Electrical was not a problem... look at how much power a grid of 100 old fashioned overhead lights draw in each classroom. Turns out to be cheaper to upgrade the lights to low power efficient lights AND install AC units. Its actually become an issue in the winter because the old lights were basically a distributed couple KW electrical heater in each room and now they have much less heat in the winter. Luckily its cheaper to heat with natgas than electricity so they still save money, but the natgas bill going way up was a surprise.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
It would make more sense to have August, December and April off so there are three month-long breaks.
A study made in Switzerland showed that the optimum distribution of school holidays (from a learning point of view) was based on blocks of 6 weeks school + 2 weeks holidays.
Of course it is socially difficult to shorten the summer holidays that much, but it is better to tend to 6-7 weeks summer holidays rather than 2-3 months.
In the USA, there is a negative correlation between per pupil spending and actual achievement. Even accounting for rural schools that lose efficiency due to being so small so have to bus kids from many miles away just to get enough for classes together, it's true. DC public schools are near the top of spending, but near the bottom for actual achievement.
Part of this is cultural - the students don't value their education(and thus don't learn), but there are other issues.
It might help if the money did go towards teacher pay, but we have a real problem with getting the money to the teacher - First you have the school administrators that need to be paid, then the principal. We can't have just one vice-principal anymore at many schools - we need 6. All of which need to be paid more than the teachers. Oh yeah, and a half dozen or so secretaries, at the high school level a dozen counselors. Can't forget private security. When I left my high school, I'd be surprised if there were as many teachers as other employees in the school. It was crazy.
Before we start paying the teachers more, we also need to spend money setting up networks, giving all the kids laptops/ipads, worrying about redoing the sports area, etc...
Misplaced priorities all around.
I don't read AC A human right
Most road-travelling farm trucks in the US are so old they actually qualify for ANTIQUE license plates.* A massively-loaded truck with decrepit brakes and steering; the perfect vehicle for novice young drivers (and most Ag states have dumped yearly vehicle inspections).
* - We only use them 3 months a year, so why ever replace them?
The class sizes are still smaller than they were when I was in school. The education level has not improved with those smaller classes (I know because I help my daughter with her homework and see what they teach in school.)
Part of the story you're alluding to but didn't actually say: A few decades ago, lots of high schools had significant vocational training programs. For instance, my hometown had a separate facility where students could elect to study cooking, auto repair, welding, electrical work, child care, and several other trade skills. Since roughly 70% of students do not go to college, and most of them know they aren't going to college, this kind of program is in fact vital to training them for the working world.
Public policy is, unfortunately, the fallacy of composition writ large: College graduates make more on average than high school graduates. Ergo, (goes the flawed logic) if all high school graduates got college degrees, everyone in America would make more money. Of course, what actually happened is that we now have approximately 50% of college graduates under age 35 have either no job at all or a job that they could have gotten without that degree. As any economist should have told them, the effect of everybody getting PhDs is that you'd end up with PhDs mopping floors because not everybody can work in the lab. Instead, they talked to Larry Summers, who was convinced for no obvious reason that the US had an educational advantage over the rest of the world, so they could take all the good jobs and make foreigners do all the dirty work - the US done that up to a point with the really nasty stuff going on in China, but it turns out there aren't enough good jobs to go around.
I am officially gone from
I'll note that private schools in the USA are mostly attended by middle class, even poor people. Most of them manage to educate kids more on less money.
US public schools are in many cases vastly bloated with uncaring, ineffective administration. I hate to say it, but there are regions where paying the private schools to take the public school kids is effective at reducing costs and increasing education.
I don't read AC A human right
I remember reading a special about the NYC schools - they have whole classrooms of fully paid teachers that they don't dare allow to teach for various ways. But because they're not allowed to fire them(Union benefits) without some rather extreme 'due cause', they stick them in a spare classroom. Called them rubber rooms.
I don't read AC A human right
Specifically, less than half of American children went to school at all in the 19th century, and most of those that did dropped out at age 12. Poor children, girls, and of course slaves regularly grew up without the benefits of education. So they might have been able to read, but they wouldn't have been able to do complex financial math or discuss great works of literature.
Americans are, on average, better educated today than they ever have been before.
I am officially gone from
The NBA does take players who didn't play in college, the best-known being LeBron James. Both the NBA and MLB also take players from foreign countries that may or may not have been through that country's educational system.
I am officially gone from
Want a direction to the start of a solution?
Empower Teachers. Get parents involved. Make it so if the parents don't care about the education of their child, that child warefare is called in to ask the tough questions on why.
Depower the children. When little johnny can verbally threaten the teachers with murder, and get nothing more than a detention or (gasp) suspension, then there's a problem.
When the child can dictate the terms on HOW they learn in class, then there's a problem.
When the 'no child left behind' guidelines pumps out idiots and forces the brilliant children to hide what they can do to 'fit in, there's a problem.
When America shows that zero education, but being able to run 200 meters in 25 seconds, or kicking a ball 50 meters is more important than understanding the underlying principles of how metaphysics or quantum string theory works, there's a problem.
When an actor or a sports player gets 100 times the pay of an 8 year college graduate with a PhD, there's a problem.
The problem? A total degradation of our value system and morals. When people no longer give a shit and can think of no one but themselves, this is what happens. We've made our bed, now we live in it.
"Learning constantly for 12 years is hard."
Why stop learning after 12 years? We homeschool. Our kids are learning every day of the year, every day of the week, all hours of the day. They were learning before 'school age' and they keep learning past '12th grade' and so do we. School is never out. We do structured school work, work on the farm, work on construction and then there is just learning in life. The eight hour ten month five day a week school learning environment is totally artificial.
Public school in particular is a terribly inefficient system. Most of students time is wasted waiting. Kids know this. Then they spend the months of summer forgetting. Studies show that each summer they lose a third of what they learned in that school year.
Life is learning. Better not stop at 12 years!
What do educators want? A paycheck and a submissive student body.
My dad is a teacher, his mother was a teacher, and my other grandmother is a well-regarded academic in the field of education (she's currently advising the Australian government on how to educate aborigines so they can both succeed in the modern world and maintain their own cultural identity). And a good friend of mine also teaches in one of the most challenging schools in the country, where they've put all the kids that were kicked out of the other schools in the city. And of course I have my own experience to draw on from a public school system that was decent but not great.
You're vastly misrepresenting why teachers go into teaching. If they were in it for the money, they wouldn't be in teaching, they'd be in finance or business management or engineering, all fields which pay much better than teaching and require the same level of education. There's nothing that delights them more than students who really care about and learn the material they're teaching. There's nothing that makes them happier than to hear from a former student that they've succeeded in life because of what they learned from their work. Just like software developers take pride in their successful work, teachers take pride in their successful students.
You're not entirely wrong though: They do like getting paid something close to what they're education says they're worth, and also dislike having to defend themselves against violent students.
I am officially gone from
Find some way to make teahcing math interesting, and I might give a crap. Until then, stop wasting your time with studies about things people don't care about. I go to my math class, do what I need to do, and get the hell out.
Kids get way too much work and never have time to be curious and learn new things that interest them.
My suggestion would be, keep school going year-round (with perhaps 2 week breaks between quarters), but SHORTEN the day. Make school 8-noon or something. Then after lunch, they have time to do homework while still enrolling in an extracurricular -- a sport, karate, ballet, robotics team, etc -- and having the time to enjoy it. Or parents can opt out of extracurriculars, and simply help their kids with homework or take them to a park/zoo/aquarium/science center/museum here and there.
For that matter, I feel like careers should be similar. 40+ hr work weeks are awful. By the time you get home and eat dinner and handle laundry, it's time to go to sleep to get up early to get ready to go back to work. There's no life in that. Our work days should be shorter too for similar reasons; time to better yourself, seek more training, be involved in politics. And as a comment above pointed out, especially in winter, WHY does EVERYONE have to work/school during the precious 8-5ish time frame while the sun is up?! We need vitamin D! But this is slightly offtopic.
What high school actually has sports as part of school though? I ran track, winter track, and cross country in highschool/jr. high. It was a lot of fun. I'm pretty sure it's the only reason I'm not overweight right now. It was also the only place I met people and made friends. Maybe once a month we'd miss a class or two, but mostly it was after school. I also got to know a lot of my teachers (who were also our coaches) better. Hell it gave me extra time to ask my Calc teacher any questions I had. When we had meets I could even do my homework right there and talk to him immediately if anything came up. But that's obviously not always the case and simply a side benefit.
The real point is, it made those six years of my life a hell of a lot more fun. It gave me something to do and work for over the summer. It was actually fairly stimulating mentally, as you're going to have a hard time going out for an hour run through the woods or even just a two minute run around the track without thinking about SOMETHING. I also knew a couple kids on the football team who only bothered to study for their classes because they wouldn't be allowed to play otherwise!
School sports don't interfere with education; they provide incentive to learn, they improve 'moral' and the general atmosphere, and they can actually improve mental discipline. The only possible reason I can come up with why they would be removed is if you were trying to save money -- but the coaches were on a volunteer basis and the uniforms were only replaced every 15-20 years, and the facilities are frequently paid for by donations -- so I don't see how it's a significant cost comparatively.
Most parents would rather their children didn't play high school sports, except for dads who played high school sports and want to live vicariously thru junior, so they can brag about down at the plant during lunch break from their meaningless drone jobs that high school sports prepared them for.
What the hell parents are those? My _mother_ (who never did any sports herself) required my brother and I each participate in at least two sports in highschool. It was good social interaction (the only place in highschool I was able to make lasting friendships) and it was pretty much the only exercise we got.
Maybe you and your parents don't consider anything but facts and knowledge to be important, but in my experience most parents want children who are socially adept, physically fit, AND intelligent. No reason you can't try to get all three.
Summer break is so you can plant, tend, and harvest the primary crops. However, since it's been over 100 years since we were a primarily agrarian economy, maybe it's time to move forward.
Interestingly, in Virginia, schools are no allowed to go back in session until after Labor day unless they have a weather hardship (mountainous areas can get quite a bit of snow here). Do you know why? It's called the Kings Dominion rule (or maybe Busch Gardens) - Those two theme parks rely on high school age labor to run the parks throughout the summer, and if they lose their workers early they lose money. And nobody else is willing to work for those wages (and speaks native English).
IMO, I would prefer a real quarter system with four 3 week breaks. That's enough for almost any "vacation," short of through hiking the App Trail or similar. It would be far better for the kids - regular vacations, less boredom, less loss of continuity.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
None of the schools I attended had air. Summer school was always miserably hot (90-100F/upper 30s C wasn't uncommon), and we used fans and lots of water to get through it. That said, I never had summers off until Jr High School, though I went to camps that were essentially educational in Jr High (music, computer, etc). In Sr High I worked menial jobs during the summer so I could afford car insurance and gas during the school year. Had to learn how to seriously squirrel away money because my parents wouldn't let me work during the week during the school year and wouldn't let me have a balance on my credit card. Probably the best money lesson I ever learned. Wish I could teach the US government that.
You don't necessarily need to increase the total number of days - The problem is basically letting the mind sit fallow, so just eliminate the long vacation period. Moving to 4-day weeks/3-day weekends would just about completely redistribute summer vacation by itself. Alternately, you can insert week-long breaks evenly throughout the year. I'd have preferred 3-day weekends myself, though.
What eliminating summer vacation WOULD do, though, is make it very difficult for major renovations and additions to take place. Summer vacation is just about the only opportunity to do major construction inside the building, like replacing ceilings or renovating offices. You can't have the buildings occupied with open ceilings and unfinished floors so everyone would have to be relocated to either temporary structures or other school buildings. That's a logistical problem, though, and workable IMHO.
=Smidge=
The school year is already a year long - how do you increase the length of a year?
OK - snarky remark aside.
I don't think the answer is increasing the length of time children spend in school in the current form. There are way too many institutional hurdles that will need to be overcome.
The broad and vast set of industries that are dependent upon children being off - from tourism to agriculture.
Enrichment that can occur during the summer - commonly known as summer camps (Scout, language, baseball, etc.). And, family vacations - there is enrichment in an Griswold's style road trip.
The demarcation between one grade and the next that psychology occurs during the summer time off. If you run year round, when does the next year start?
If summer learning is so important why do most (all?) colleges and universities have the summer off? The only students I ever saw at university over the summer were either - trying to get ahead or were behind and trying to catch up. The professors wanted their time off as well.
What I would rather see, than more rote STEM+Reading / Writing during the summer - is maybe a series of 1-2 week mini-camps that are organized by the local school districts (and, yes paid for out of tax dollars) for students to attend. If there are 12 weeks off, the students must attend 6-7-8 (somewhere between 50 and 75%) of their choice. Each session is part summer camp (you get outside to do kickball) but also is focused on a specific subject matter. Gives the families time to do family things. Gives the kids time to do kid things. That is still important.
Suggested topics:
Model rocketry - and all the science camps that can go with it.
Foreign language - French, Spanish, Mandarin, etc.
Performing arts - you can do a 1-act play in 2 weeks - who says you need sets?
Craft arts - pottery, painting, etc.
How to structure one - each session has some sort of reading, writing (journals count), social studies component. The more 'engineering' ones would integrate age appropriate math, science, tech, etc. into them. Add in some field trips, edumakational films, discussion groups, labs, etc. and you've greatly enriched the learning environment along with kept the giant summer brain leech at bay. Something I think everyone agrees need to be dealt with
Yes, these would be graded - and the grades would count on your transcript.
Surely that's only an issue in certain climates. And people went to school and worked in offices long before AC even existed.
This is the worst study I have seen in years. Other commenters have gone into the discussion with more brevity, but I'll simply say: people need less work and more play.
There are a certain set of basic skills that we need to function and succeed in society. The school system provides most of these (language, math, science, social interaction) but not all. There are other skills that are just as important, such as meeting unexpected challenges (both physical and mental), developing curiosity, self-reliance, exploring new experiences and having time to reflect on it all. Having time off for the summer provides opportunities for this type of learning. If a child is in a sheltered protected shell of the school system for 12 to 13 years of their lives, they aren't going to learn these skills until they are adults, if ever.
Note that I said that the summer offers opportunities for a different type of learning. This requires parental involvement and, in most cases, some sort of flexible work schedule. The way my Dad used to handle it is that he took Mondays and Fridays off during the summer for the months of July and August, which we spent at the family camp on a lake.
Parents just aren't providing an environment during the summer that is conducive to exploration. Kids, today, aren't allowed to go biking to a fishing hole with their friends because of fear. Instead they are essentially locked in their house with the TV. This isn't going to be solved by a longer school year. I'd rather see the money spent on summer camps and community activities for financially strapped families.
The primary goal of the school system and university is to teach the skills that are needed to enable an individual to be able to learn on their own. Once you have the ability to learn on your own, you are in control of what you want to spend your life doing. Don't get me wrong, learning takes a lot of work. Success requires a bit of luck and help from others. Sometimes those contacts are made at summer camp...
What utter nonsensical racist trash you people spew within your white collar, white skin IT domes.
All parents care about their children's education. Some parents have the freedom to stay home with their kids due to their private wealth (Ann Romney) and some parents work two jobs to keep the electricity on.
Does Ann Romney care about her children's education more than a resident of Newark? Bullshit.
Do Ann Romney's children face the same day-to-day struggles to survive socially, retain their physical safety, and help their mother keep the roof over their heads? Bullshit.
More narrow-viewed and racially-insensitive perspectives from the IT geeks. Where did you all go to school, anyway?
about 12-year-olds, long division, and fractions. Not to mention world geography and world history.
Elementary education is great for kids that are working on basic literacy and social skills.
By the time we're into pre-algebra, world history, basic natural sciences, and cultural literacy, you're into an area in which many education majors are already in over their heads and are either unable to convey information that they only partially understand themselves or simply providing misinformation.
IMHO this begins to be a serious question at the 5th-9th grade levels and by the time we're in 10th-12th, we need subject experts because we're rotating through subject area classes and talking in terms of "college prep," which right now is no such thing since universities generally agree that students arrive woefully underprepared and must spent Subject Area 98, 99, 100, 101, and 102 re-learning what they should have learned (or what was learned incorrectly) in high school.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
If Teachers lost their free summer vacations there would be riots in the streets, strikes, and disruiptions (to which the public would not stand).
I think the appropiate quote would be "You can take my summer vacation from my cold dead hands"...
It may have started with the intention of letting students go help their family in the fields, however now it is teacher time drinking mojitos in mexico... and they like those mojitos!
Very much has nothing to do with students and more with teaching benefits.
Why do Americans constantly feel the need to push themselves to burnout? How would you like if your boss assigned you hours of work that had to be completed on your free time after already working 8 hours a day? Do people really believe that school is less effort and stress than work? Must be those rose-colored glasses.
Besides, I think a more effective change to the school year would be to take the three months of summer break, and distribute them through out the year, one month at a time. So kids would go to school for a couple months, then get a month break after every quarter, trimester, what-have-you. Then there is the crazy long 3 month break that TFA references where kids forget everything. And kids get to have more significant breaks more often so they can unwind and relax a bit more between quarters and start the next one refreshed and ready to go.
The best thing for Summer Homework is to do some prelim stuff to get things started now this should be weighted a small but non-trival amount on the Final Grade (and graded with the knowledge that this is before the class starts). The point is to keep the kid THINKING.
Personally i would have some sort of site where the Standard References could be browsed if a kid wants (with maybe some sort of locks to prevent an 8 year old from getting access to the more "interesting" stuff unless a teacher does an unlock)
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
All school sports are a waste, and a distraction ...
Wrong. Very wrong. Sports may be over-emphasized, but they are essential and here is why. Although some of us would wish to be all brain and no body, we have bodies that need to be taken care of. Exercise is absolutely essential and sports makes exercise fun. It should be part of the school day because
I guarantee there are a large number of readers who's health has suffered (overweight, high blood pressure, etc) because they held the parent's point of view, only to find out 20 years later it was killing them quickly and a change of lifestyle was required. Do your kids a favor by making physical activity an integral part of their day and making it fun. Again, sports makes exercise fun.
What better way to prepare children for the future by teaching them what career burnout is by grade 6? That way, they can gain an early appreciation for how utterly pointless it is to work as many days a year as Americans do. It's unhealthy, stressful, and painful.
Europeans are much smarter because they take a lot more holiday/vacation time.
The Christian Right is Neither (Christian nor right). See: Matthew 23, Matthew 25, Ezekiel 16:48-50
Where I live, they already pay the teachers for the full year anyway. But I am sure that they would begrudge actually having to work. Many of them take additional jobs in the summer to help make extra money.
That being said, one of the local school districts (the inner city) has started doing school all year. Undoubtedly, it reduces crime and keeps information fresh in the mind of the students. However, it basically means there is no opportunity for a summer vacation. Summer jobs are right out as well. Also, it is extremely inconvenient for parents, who now have to scramble for daycare for the one to two weeks off which occur every other month. Daycare facilities are, of course, not really geared for quick bursts like this for short periods of time.
Even worse is one school district locally that decided to start school an hour later on Wednesdays than on every other day of the week. They put it to a vote of the people and it was nearly unanimously voted down, but they did it anyway.
All of this stuff is done to reduce costs. It seems that educational facilities are stripped down to the skin to educate out children. They have to cut music and the arts, avoid buying new textbooks, have the parents buy all the supplies, and yet still seem to be strapped for cash. I'm not sure why this would be. Back in my day, the schools did okay, and the tax rate was half what it is now, and the salaries were half what they are now. Essentially they did OK on 1/4 of what they get now, but when they are given 4 times as much they can no longer survive. Maybe we should cut them back to what we used to give them.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
It has nothing to do with teacher's unions, and everything to do with our corporate-designed, bought, and paid for school system.
Hey, if it was corporate paid for, I could probably get behind that. Right now, it is corporate owned, but the taxpayers have to pay for it. If the corporations want to crank out worker monkeys, they can darn well pay for the privilege.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
Since kids aren't designed to get up that early, it's just because of their selfish, lazy, assholes parents that both work
The parents probably don't have much choice about their working hours. In the real world, if your job starts at 8, that's when you turn up for work.
The problem is more with the ridiculous US concept of the work ethic, working from as early to as late as possible to prove you're a good god-fearing cog in the wheel.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Schools are already ridiculously over-priced. We don't need a 10% tax increase to fund a 10% longer school year.
I think the effect of summer sort of depends on how you use it:
'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.'
It's the TV, not the time off from school that turns you into an idiot.
When I was in 5th grade, I'd be outside most of the day every day. Especially weekdays. When I was older, summer was for working and saving money. I was NEVER happy to be back at school.
My own experience in the California public school system
s/deficiently/definitely/g
UGH! Stupid spell checker.
Its' OK, most of the rest of us want to publick school to.
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.
Why should Papa John's have to pay for an employee's healthcare? Shouldn't the company just pay the employee an agreed upon wage and then the person can choose their own coverage from a list of competing companies? If employers are required to pay for healthcare, then only employed people will have healthcare. That is not a solution.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
What utter nonsensical racist trash you people spew within your white collar, white skin IT domes.
You are the one who brought up race, you racist. You are applying the label of poor socioeconomic background to equate to race. What a racist.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
It'll never happen.
The teachers unions will never let it happen.
The system of education we have in the US is an utter failure as it is. We have teachers that are incompetent that can't be properly evaluated and dealt with, we have administrators that are even worse, particularly in districts where there are huge challenges. Mediocrity doesn't fix severe problems.
We teach kids to pass tests, and that's about it. They don't know HOW to think, HOW to see connections and interrelations, because they aren't educated, kids are merely programmed.
And we have parent hell bent on teaching their particular religion in school, wasting resources and aggravating an already disastrous situation.
A child that can not read and comprehend grows up to be an adult that is a pawn. A child that never learns to understand interrelationships and history is a child that is easily manipulated. It makes for a fine consumer class of easily manipulable low wage earners, but it doesn't make for an intelligent society that solves problems and develops and builds. And that's exactly what we have now.
No child should ever graduate unable to read beyond a 4rth grade level, yet this is not unheard of. No child should graduate without skills and education that are immediately applicable. Kids should graduate able to manage their own finances, read and understand a contract, and ready for the big ugly reality that is modern America.
I don't know about the rest of you but my kids who have hit 13 and older have summer jobs. Those jobs not only provide money for things I no longer have to cover, they also provide a variety of life experiences they cannot get in school. I agree there are pros and cons to this argument but one con has to include the ever increasing time for our children to be coddled. I'd rather they get some life experience early than spend their first 21 years in school and nothing else. As for the kids whose parents don't let them get jobs.............that's your loss.
"get your kids to do one page of math a day for 300 days of the year and they will be way ahead."
I don't understand the point of that unless you're also introducing new concepts. Once your kids have mastered + - * / what's the point in giving them more pages of problems? How does this get them ahead?
You can only drill someone to the point where they've mastered a certain skill. After that it's just meaningless work. Like many geeks, I was a good mathematics student and I got bored as hell with the pace of my public school math education. Last thing I needed was my parents giving me more of the stuff I was already bored with.
If the USA had schools where the student bodies consisted of white, middle-class kids who grew up speaking English, I'm sure that our education system would look much better.
We are only asking "Do We Need A Longer School Year" because schools are run by the government. If schooling were free market based, that question would be like asking "Do we need a bigger container size for milk?", and the answer would be that parents could choose whatever kind of school they want.
AFAIK 19th century New England had a higher literacy rate then than they do now. As for the South..........well they started pretty far behind, can't expect too much
You say teachers aren't cheap yet you quote 22,000 pounds? Surely you're not saying they're making too much at that salary? That's about half what a Canadian teacher makes (including currency conversion.) It's amazing how little the general public values teachers. Wonder why they have unions? They would be treated like utter shit if they didn't. They were before unions and they are again as their unions weaken.
I think you misunderstood me. What I mean to say is that education should be funded, and at a much higher priority. If there is a solution, and it is reasonable with a chance of working, then it should be funded period.
Education should be the 1st priority for all funding, everywhere. It's the very foundation of our society. Without it, we don't need to worry about infrastructure, and without either of them, we don't need to worry about a military to protect what is no longer there.
I agree with your sentiments that we need to figure out what is wrong first, I just wanted to strongly add that we should not have a defeatist attitude about the funding of any proposed solutions.
Utter bullshit. Teacher's unions maybe costing the system more but without them, teachers would be treated like shit. They are already even with meagre protection. Once the unions are gone, I assume you'd blame the teachers. When they're all fired who do you blame next? There is only one problem with education, its the parents, period. Modern parenting is doing more harm than any school. Thing is, no parent wants to admit. Blame everyone else but ourselves.
How the bloody fuck did your post get modded Insightful? FYI, there are far more fruitful ways to inculcate care for one's body and the virtues of team participation than throwing a dead pig around.
'He who has to break a thing to find out what it is, has left the path of wisdom.' -- Gandalf to Saruman
Ha! AC is jealous of anyone who actually develops their physical abilities. I was starting offensive and defensive tackle... and valedictorian. Learn to exercise your mind and body, you'll be healthier. Even if you don't keep up with the exercise, at least you know how to get in shape whenever you decide to do it.
See, what's different about team sports is that the team doesn't work if somebody slacks. In class you always end up with at least one or two slackers... on a team, when you're letting down people you work with every day for years on end, that's a lot different than some group you were randomly assigned to in one class a day. And it's better.
You sound like someone who never played a team sport except pickup basketball after, say, age 14. You missed some amazing experiences that, yes, continue to enrich my life twenty years later.
No argument from me. My wife is a teacher, and she has a 1st class degree from a top university- her uni colleagues are on 2 or 3 times what she's on, most of them with lower class degrees.
I chose £22k as it's around (from memory) the UK average wage across the board. Coincidentally, it's also the starting salary for a teacher on the main pay scale (which most schools are no-longer bound to, incidentally- thanks Tories!).
I'm not saying teachers are paid too much; the opposite really. What I was really saying was that if you want teachers to work more hours, you'll need to pay them proportionally more money; and that that sum is significant when weighing up whether to go into this scheme.
What I mean to say is that education should be funded, and at a much higher priority.
What does that mean? Currently we know that schools with higher rates of funding per student than schools with lower rates of funding per student do not have better educational outcomes. What would it look like if those schools that already have higher funding per student were to be funded at a higher priority? How would that higher priority effect student outcomes?
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
They said sports, not physical education.
PE classes and intermural sports both serve an educational purpose. Bread and Circus style spectator events do not.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
I'm sorry, you're missing my point entirely.
I was responding to the cynicism that we could not discuss any solution to education that required more money because it would never get approved or be too hard.
That greatly offended me because in context that would mean that education has a lower budget priority than the military, pork projects, and corrupt bail outs of truly sociopathic people in Wall Street.
I still think that teachers are underpaid, overworked, and in some cases, not held to a high enough standard.
Once again, I realize money alone does not solve the problem. All I am trying to say is that given education's importance in our society, money should not be a factor in whatever we decide to do. We act like money is no object with respect to the military and Wall Street.....
> What utter nonsensical racist trash you people spew within your white collar, white skin IT domes.
It has nothing to do with race. Trash is trash. Doesn't matter if they come from a ghetto or a trailer court. The observations made by the OP are not limited to WASPs. The OP may in fact be black.
Being gutter trash with no respect for education is not a strictly black thing.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
OK, sorry I missed your point. I happen to think that the problem with education is that people keep trying to reinvent the wheel. There is a tried and true method that works. Beat the information into their heads until they get it right. Those that refuse to learn and disrupt the education of others get dumped out to fend for themselves.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Summer is also a time when a lot of the renovations/work on the schools themselves get done. Just because the teachers aren't in doesn't mean the maintenance people aren't.
Ducting. Cabling. Carpentry. Parking lot resurfacing. Playground construction. Grass seeding. Computer/lab replacement+upgrades.
There's lots of stuff that gets done that's pretty hard to do in regular hours of a school year without causing some fairly major disruption.
I saw one interesting study on TV a number of years ago. Since this was only one study shown on one TV show, it's hard to know how true it is. But anyways, what they were pointing out is Japanese math textbooks are a lot smaller than ours. They focus on a smaller number of core topics and try to ensure proficiency of those core skills. In American school, we try to stuff in as much math information as possible. From what I remember in math, often times we'd have a new topic every week, and often times those were throw-a-away topics, that yes while interesting in an elective, or distracting from core proficiency.
One things I've always remembered from school, we never finish a text book. I would longingly look at those last few chapters, often containing some interesting info I wanted to learn, such as Medieval Europe. The next year we started on the Renaissance. To the outside observer, maybe it looked like I forgot two months, but I was actually never fully taught the period from the fall of Rome till the Renaissance.
Years now after high school, I've observed that my peers don't remember most of what we learned together. For instance from my Honors Biology class, I'll hear a former classmate understandable how bacteria and penicillin work in the human body, and I'll be, "Don't remember when the teacher taught us this?" The interesting thing is they might have gotten an A and I barely got a B-. I think this is an indication of people pulling all nighters to get the grade rather than learning. Studies show that sleeper is very important to the learning process. Perhaps a later start time would help.
Sports lessons teaches kids that there are fun sports out there, and maybe they should consider starting playing one of them. With obesity rising in the U.S. (along with most of the developed world, even if the U.S. is one of the worst cases), more kids being physically active can only be a good thing.
This also applies to grownups. I play floorball once a week with my colleagues (a simple game played indoors with a plastic ball and clubs, sort of like field hockey, big in Sweden and Finland). All of us probably tried first it in PT classes in school, and it's highly unlikely we'd do it if we hadn't tried it before and realized it was fun. That's how you usually develop an interest for something - you try it once, decide it's fun, and start exploring the possibilities of doing it more regularly. With obesity rising in the world, more grownups being physically active can only be a good thing.
There are two themes. Days per year of education and school break schedule.
I'm a big fan of "year-round" school schedules for K-12, but think higher education works best with a long summer break. In the US, a year-round schedule is typically the same number of days as the traditional schedule; about 180 days. In many Asian countries, it's 240-250 days per year. US and EU have seasonal farming. Prior to the industrial revolution, having the kids home for 3-4 months during the growing season made sense, but not anymore.
K-12:
* There should be 200+ days of free socialized education (increase from the current 180 days)
* A typical K-12 year-round vs. traditional school schedule looks like this:
http://www.nayre.org/calendar_comparison.htm
* My father was a Superintendent of Schools in the Los Angeles area. He converted K-8 to year-round largely because the majority Hispanic population would return to Mexico around Christmas for several weeks and the schools would loose crucial ADA funds. It also keeps kids from regressing in their learning over long breaks.
Higher Ed:
* Keep the
* Keep the 3 month summer holiday. Summer jobs and Internships are critical for the development, and often finances, of young adults.
* There is more choice in accreditation and schedule for higher ed.
I continue my father's mission by financially supporting year-round school lobby orbs. Personally, we are still on a traditional school schedule with our two elementary kids, but would prefer a year-round schedule. We like to take time off and travel for 1-2 months a year with the kids. The year-round schedule helps space out the travel.
Few public schools have much of interest to the gifted student. Keeping those students in school longer will just take away time from the real education they can only get outside school: dance instruction, piano practice, independent reading, computer programming, etc. We already waste much of the time of the best and brightest in a vain attempt to teach impractical subjects to the uninterested.
I would proffer the idea that in Newark the summer vacation is more detrimental. Most rich kids go to camp, travel or participate in other enriching activities.
love is just extroverted narcissism
Did you know that the percentage of overweight children and adolescents in the US has nearly tripled since the early 1970’s? More than one in five children between the ages of 6 and 17 are now considered overweight. The lack of physical education (and sports) is going to cost us billions in medical expenses because our children believe like you.
In destroy your point in your own post.
There IS NO LACK of physical education, by law, in the US over that same time span. Yet obesity continues to increase. So while every student has been in gym class all these years it hasn't helped.
Had you paid as much attention in biology as you did at practice, you would have learned that you simply can't exercise weight away without changing diet. No amount of jumping jacks will make up for two bowls of Apple Jacks, or a burger and fries for lunch every day at Jack-in-the-Box.
Note that physical education classes are really not the issue here.
Competitive inter-school football, basketball, hockey programs are what this thread is about.
Gym class is cheap, arguably effective. Competitive sports are a waste of money, except where its used as a means of making money. And when is is used that way, it often becomes corrupt.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
I disagree. We have GATE kids and our school day is 8am-2pm and one "half day". That gives plenty of time for our half dozen outside activities, independent reading and play time. 300 days a year is too much, but 180 is not enough.
> School is not about earning a living and that is not even a legitimate consideration.
I strongly disagree. I'm a supporter (political and financial) of liberal education, but public schools' main mission in society is to provide the knowledge and skills to be a productive and useful citizen. There will be poets, artists, and philosophers despite the curricula.
Roger Bly
(closely related to a poet)
In a way, regular classtime could be regarded as a meeting.
Who will help the parents bring in the summer crops if they kids are in school????
It's still shit to say that poor people don't or won't care about their kids' education, and still ignores the problem that a lot of them don't have the time to be able to help their kids through their education.
// file: mice.h
#include "frickin_lasers.h"
If little Johnny wasn't encouraged to do well in school then little Johnny doesn't get to be placed into the classes where his sheer presence gets to drag others down to his level if he is inclined to do that.
You're an elitist twat.
I went to a comprehensive (UK mixed ability school) and I was never dragged down to less able kids' levels. If anything, we all rose up together. As long as there is basic discipline imposed in the classroom (so that stupid potential bullies can't physically disrupt lessons) it all works out fine.
As soon as you start filtering kids out into academic and non-academic streams, you end up with slow/late developers being pigeon-holed as thick cannon-fodder and denied the chance to become as good as they possibly can.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Problem is in Texas they hire good coaches and expect them to teach science and history too. After seeing enough grades bumped to particular students based on their extracurricular activities, that the teacher giving the grades shouldn't also be the same coach that needs the kid to get good grades.
Then saying their statistically less likely to care would be the best way to put it. Care is really the wrong word; the biggest problem with poor people is they don't have an education. It is difficult to convey to your children what you do not have yourself. Thus, uneducated parents are likely to continue the cycle of uneducated children.
Wrong.
We need several things. The end of the massive summer off. Take the quarters and put a couple of weeks between them. Second, the end of grade levels beyond sixth, or maybe beyond eighth, as important metrics. If proper feedback testing on their abilities and instruction was performed for the years leading up to this, the student gets placed in classes in each discipline relevant to the student's abilities. Allow parents to have one free "appeal" in the form of a test to re-place the student, but after that initial result, all further appeals cost the parent to prevent helicopter parents from abusing the system. For students that place at mediocre levels, offer practical electives so that when they get out of high school they have something that they can do for their income where they won't need a lot of further training. If anything, start with an intro to trades type of class where students get exposure to trades, and use that to place them.
Some may call this unfair, as it no longer gives each and every child equal opportunity. I would say that parents choose the path their child takes from the very beginning, and the school should accommodate that decision while still allowing those who choose to excel despite home choices to do so. If little Johnny wasn't encouraged to do well in school then little Johnny doesn't get to be placed into the classes where his sheer presence gets to drag others down to his level if he is inclined to do that. He doesn't get college prep classes as he's probably not going to college. On the other hand, if he does well in school, for whatever reason, he'll be placed to where it's expected that his education will continue past secondary school.
Lastly, for hellions, boarding school. Uniforms, curfew, mandatory attendance, the works. Put a fence around the place if necessary. We do not serve them by letting them get away with outright bad behavior. Boarding school is expensive, but as a whole, is it cheaper to let them disrupt normal school and keep them there?
Wrong... I have a different take.
Children need structure. They need parents who take an active interest in their achievements and to help them through the child's encounter with course difficulties. To many homes have two working parents, with not enough energy to sit with their child to insure that the child is doing OK.
Another major problem is that a teacher is given a course outline, is given a state or provincially supplied curriculum, and has to follow the outline. If the teacher takes ill, a substitute can continue. That outline is very well thought out, but one size does not fit all.
Another problem is motivation. A teacher who can motivate a student is a gem, and gems are rare. Many teachers, after graduation start out with energy and motiviation, but the system beats the enthusiasm out of them. Teaching and motivating students is very difficult, and produces brain fatigue, and in rare cases, depression. The teacher tries hard, but the student hasn't turned on. And the parents don't help, they blame the teacher. Oh-no, it is not us, is the parent response.
Many teachers are required to take summer courses as a way to get monetary promotions and as well, training courses explaining how to teach to exceptional children. Make the school day longer or the school year longer will not work. Students need time to burn out energy, with Baseball, soccer, bike-riding, etc. Teachers need time to mark homework, to plan the next days work, and to prepare suppers. A teacher is also a parent, and must devote time to her siblings.
Another problem is the dumbing down of the school curriculum due to the desire to get the student out of it without his/her repeating a grade or subject. And the problem is compounded with the for-profit universities, who take any student, as long as the money is provided. So, the under qualified student is in university, when he/she should be in a trade school where aptitudes are matching interests
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
"And you only need five minutes of sun light to completely restore vitamin D levels in the body. kids stand outside waiting on the bus longer than that."
I know that is what we have all been taught in school in past years. The problem is it is not true. Following that advice will lead to severe health problems. Here are better recommendations:
http://www.grassrootshealth.net/recommendation
The following is closer to the truth, based roughly on what Dr. John Cannell writes on his website:
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/about-us/our-staff0/john-j-cannell-md/john-cannell/
For a light skinned adult human in a (skimpy) bathing suit under peak noon-day sun, that person will produce about 20,000 IU vitamin D (about 30X the US RDA) in about twenty minutes. For someone with dark skin, that will take two to four hours in a bathing suit. Any excess vitamin D beyond that will be broken down into other compounds that we don't yet fully understand the significance of (but may have health value). Meanwhile, the body slowly charges its fat soluble stores of vitamin D. But you may need to do that for months to saturate the body to the point where it will have a six to nine months supply (maybe longer or shorter) where you could go the winter without supplements.
For about half the year in more Northern latitudes, your body will not make any vitamin D at any time of day because the angle of the sun through the atmosphere means too much UV-B is absorbed for it to have much affect on your skin. Similarly, outside of peak sun hours, there is much less vitamin D produced.
So, while I was taught the same thing you said growing up, that even in winter your face or hands would produce enough vitamin D to get by, it just is not true. And that has serious implications. For example:
"Blacks more likely to die from cancer because of vitamin D deficiency, study finally admits"
http://www.naturalnews.com/036181_blacks_vitamin_D_deficiency_cancer.html
And also:
http://www.vitamindcouncil.org/health-conditions/neurological-conditions/autism/introduction/
And on top of that, dermatologists and those who would sell cosmetics and sun screens scare people about sun exposure without telling them to supplement with vitamin D if they avoid the sun. And even if they told them to supplement, the US RDA is about ten times too low for adults (and in any case, you need a blood test to be sure of levels as different people respond differently to supplements). For children the RDA is also fairly low. For infants the RDA is OK. Basically, the RDA is almost the same for all these ages, but since vitamin D needs correspond somewhat to weight, that is why the child and adult levels are too low.
Conflict-of-interest is one reason the US government RDAs and other nutritional recommendations are often (but not always) so wrong, as discussed here with the USDA's recent absurd recommendations to eat meat every day:
http://www.diseaseproof.com/archives/news-usda-dont-go-meatless-not-even-one-day-a-week.html
So that is why keeping kids indoor more will destroy their health (unless they take supplemental vitamin D, and even then, we don't fully understand all the supplementation issues). Many schools have already removed recess outdoors in order to have more time for in-chair paper-pushing academic work, and yet ironically the lack of exercise and sunlight may have decreased test scores as it decreases a child's general physical and mental health.
"Schools are not going anywhere. The need for social interaction while learning is common to all peop
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
No, you're wrong about sport. Football really was an incredibly valuable teaching tool. I can't think of anything that has come close to teaching me the work ethic, leadership, and teamwork skills I learned through competitive football. Maybe if I joined the armed services I would have something to compare it to. It's a truly exceptional game, nearly without parallel in world sport (rugby being the only real similarity).
It's really difficult to get teens to commit to that level of teamwork, discipline, effort, etc. in science class. I was a much better student in high school than I was an athlete, but I worked a hell of a lot harder at athletics. Eventually that work ethic I learned through athletics translated into my academics, but not until school became much harder at the university level. And it's more of an individual thing in academics, even when you work as a team. You never learn to sublimate your own individual desires and emotions the way you do in team sports.
It's not that your criticisms are wrong, necessarily. High school sports are often a very poor use of limited resources, and I agree that organize sport should not be handled by public educational institutions. But that doesn't mean there isn't a point.
Track and cross country are a lot smaller investment than other sports, particularly football. Track you just need a van, gasoline, and some fairly cheap uniforms. Occasionally you need hotels for overnight stays.
For a football program you're talking about buying hundreds of dollars of equipment for at least 50 kids. And that's for smaller programs. Larger programs spend a lot more than just equipments and uniforms, particularly in areas of the country where high school football is a big deal. There are shocking amount of high schools with six figure athletic budgets. Public schools too, not just private.
Not long ago I ran into a man who was a teacher of mine many years ago. He is now an education professor. He thinks that the schools are focused on the wrong issues. He says we need better teachers, more accountability and a more challenging curriculum. The length of the school year or the length of the school day is not relevant. He still backs summer vacations.
Considering the sad shape of education in this country...
9 months of poor classroom ratios, excessive homework and eliminating PT and focusing on rote learning standardized tests? No, we do not need more of the same, and yes - children do need time to be children.
These comments don't surprise me though. Competence isn't what seems to attract individuals to a career in decisionmaking in public educational systems.
"No good deed goes unpunished"
If the hypothesis is "students suffer after a two-month break", how do we explain the current post-secondary strategy of *four* month breaks?
Does anyone know of a university or college that runs a full-year curriculum (besides the "hey, we'll let you take a couple classes over the summer" that the ones I know about do)?
We need less time in school and time off to be more spread out.
http://www.educationrevolution.org/
Great points; thanks! That's why I feel we need something like a "basic income" so individuals and communities have the time and resources they need to bloom.
On competition and cooperation, from: http://www.shareintl.org/archives/cooperation/co_nocontest.htm
=====
"We need competition in order to survive."
"Life is boring without competition."
"It is competition that gives us meaning in life."
These words written by American college students capture a sentiment that runs through the heart of the USA and appears to be spreading throughout the world. To these students, competition is not simply something one does, it is the very essence of existence. When asked to imagine a world without competition, they can foresee only rising prices, declining productivity and a general collapse of the moral order. Some truly believe we would cease to exist were it not for competition.
Alfie Kohn, author of No contest: the case against competition, disagrees completely. He argues that competition is essentially detrimental to every important aspect of human experience; our relationships, self-esteem, enjoyment of leisure, and even productivity would all be improved if we were to break out of the pattern of relentless competition. Far from being idealistic speculation, his position is anchored in hundreds of research studies and careful analysis of the primary domains of competitive interaction. For those who see themselves assisting in a transition to a less competitive world, Kohn's book will be an invaluable resource.
====
Still, it is also true that male college students are of an age where competition for mates is a big deal, whereas older males at least tend more towards cooperation. But like James P. Hogan talks about in the sci-fi novel "Voyage From Yesteryear", we can as a society at least redirect competitive urges into more socially productive ends.
http://www.jamesphogan.com/books/info.php?titleID=29&cmd=summary
My main concern (in my sig) is that modern day technologies of abundance (biotech, nanotech, nuclear, robotics) make such formidable weapons (used to fight over perceived scarcity instead of to bring abundance) compared to the scale of the Earth that we need to create a more cooperative egalitarian society just to survive the 21st century. As well as move into space to hedge our bets. :-) And even currenltly materially wealthy individuals will be better off for it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Spirit_Level:_Why_More_Equal_Societies_Almost_Always_Do_Better
http://www.livableincome.org/amillionairegli.htm
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Wrong.
We need several things. The end of the massive summer off. Take the quarters and put a couple of weeks between them. Second, the end of grade levels beyond sixth, or maybe beyond eighth, as important metrics. If proper feedback testing on their abilities and instruction was performed for the years leading up to this, the student gets placed in classes in each discipline relevant to the student's abilities. Allow parents to have one free "appeal" in the form of a test to re-place the student, but after that initial result, all further appeals cost the parent to prevent helicopter parents from abusing the system. For students that place at mediocre levels, offer practical electives so that when they get out of high school they have something that they can do for their income where they won't need a lot of further training. If anything, start with an intro to trades type of class where students get exposure to trades, and use that to place them.
Some may call this unfair, as it no longer gives each and every child equal opportunity. I would say that parents choose the path their child takes from the very beginning, and the school should accommodate that decision while still allowing those who choose to excel despite home choices to do so. If little Johnny wasn't encouraged to do well in school then little Johnny doesn't get to be placed into the classes where his sheer presence gets to drag others down to his level if he is inclined to do that. He doesn't get college prep classes as he's probably not going to college. On the other hand, if he does well in school, for whatever reason, he'll be placed to where it's expected that his education will continue past secondary school.
Lastly, for hellions, boarding school. Uniforms, curfew, mandatory attendance, the works. Put a fence around the place if necessary. We do not serve them by letting them get away with outright bad behavior. Boarding school is expensive, but as a whole, is it cheaper to let them disrupt normal school and keep them there?
=============
Here in Montreal, my grandkids attend public school from 8am to 4pm which includes an extra hour a day for enrichment. The extra hour per day is optional. The schools here don't pander to softening course subjects. Even without the extra hour, they follow a much tougher curriculum, along the lines of what you find outside of the USA. From kindergarten they study a second language, learn science and mathematics as essentials. My grandkids in grade 3 learn and practice to write coherently, and to think logically in two languages.
Some in our provincial government want the public school extended to 5pm, but keeping the summer vacation to the 10 weeks. During these 10 weeks, teachers are encouraged to take diploma courses in pedagogy, child psychology, etc. Each accredited course results in a bump in salary. The 5pm end-of-day will never come to pass, but if implemented would serve for enrichment, and for day-care for two income families. All teachers here must have a bachelor degree in education.
My observation is that with two languages being taught from kindergarten, children exercise different parts of their brain. They appear more alert, imaginative and creative. By the way, the second language includes time in gym, use of computers, and conversation/writing. They also have reading/writing in our mother tongue (English). This two language requirement is in the Public School curriculum.
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
Bumped start time UP to 9am? Wow, how early do US schools usually start then? 9am was standard start time for both primary (elementary) and high schools here in Australia when I was growing up (the 80s and 90s) and still is as far as I know. I couldn't really imagine having to start much earlier than that - as you say, kids aren't made to get up early.
Mind you we only get 5-6 weeks off for summer. Same total weeks off per year as the US though, as we have a 2 week Easter break, 3 week winter break, and 2 weeks spring break in there too.