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Longer School Day: Two Opinions

Ohanian Comment: By the rules of the game in this "debate," I did not get to see their argument and was allotted only 350 words for my argument. Their word count is considerably higher. That's the way the debate works.

It is interesting that they chose Thailand as the industrialized nation requiring schoolchildren to spend the most hours per week. As Human Rights Watch reported this past June,

A new surge of violent attacks on teachers and schools by separatist militants has seriously disrupted education in Thailand’s southern border provinces. Officials in Narathiwat province have been forced to close more than 300 government schools in all 13 districts this week after insurgents killed three teachers on June 11. . . On June 13, militants burned down 11 schools in Yala province’s Raman district.

Not to be unkind, but maybe when your education system is so seriously disrupted, it needs to stay open longer hours when it can open at all.

Of course the editors could not cite Finnish schools for their argument. The school day for students in Finland, who score at the top on international tests, is between four and six hours, depending on the school. Reading skills are not introduced until children are 7, and they get lots of recess.

You can weigh in on this issue at the USA Today website by going to the url below.

Our view on more time in school: Needs of new economy trump old school calendar
Experiments with extended days and year produce academic gains.

Editors

Our view on more time in school: Needs of new economy trump old school calendar Experiments with extended days and year produce academic gains.
Kuss Middle School serves students in Fall River, Mass., a former mill town that has struggled economically for decades. Students at Kuss have struggled, too, usually falling short of making the academic progress required under the No Child Left Behind law.

Then, last year, the school received a grant to experiment with extending the school day. Teachers got paid at a higher hourly rate.

Students weren't thrilled at first with leaving school at 4:15 p.m. instead of at 2:20 p.m. But the added hours gave them more time for physical education and let them select special interest classes, in which teachers bolstered student skill deficits as revealed by testing. By the end of the year, student scores had risen by enough to enable Kuss to make the progress required under the federal No Child Left Behind law.

The only surprise is that more districts haven't lengthened school schedules set decades ago to accommodate a farm economy rather the information economy of today.

New research suggests the time is ripe for a change:

* Matched against 39 other developed countries, the United States is near the bottom in think-tank Center for American Progress' rankings of average weekly instructional time in school. Measured over 12 years, students in the top-scoring countries spend the equivalent of a full extra year in school.

* Perhaps not coincidentally, U.S. students perform poorly on math and science tests compared with their international peers, according to a U.S. Education Department comparison released earlier this month. In math, American 15-year-olds scored near the bottom among the study's 30 developed countries.

* Most countries that boost the number of minutes spent on math instruction find payoffs in improved math scores, according to a study released this month by the Brookings Institution. Small increases in the school day are more effective than a longer school year, the report concluded.

Closing these learning gaps is critical. Today, even many blue-collar jobs require post-high school study.

Current K-12 instruction, however, is not preparing students for that challenge. In many states, roughly 40% of the freshmen entering state universities are forced to take non-credit, catch-up classes.

The most encouraging news about the benefits of extending the school day comes from Massachusetts, where an experiment with 10 schools, including Kuss, appears to be working. Those 10 schools lengthened their instructional days by 25% and boosted their state scores in math, English and science at all grades.

Perhaps the concept won't work everywhere. Certainly, it won't instantly be popular. But there's no denying that a problem exists or that adding class time seems to help.

The idea has even entered the presidential campaign with backing from two Democratic candidates: New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson and Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware. But school districts and states are where the primary responsibility lies, and so far, too few have been willing to change.

School days The USA ranks 36th of 40 industrialized nations in average weekly instructional time. Selected countries:
1) Thailand: 30.5 hours
2) Korea: 30.3 hours
7) China:26.9 hours
14) France: 24.8 hours
15) U.K.: 24.6 hours
16) Mexico: 24.2 hours
23) Japan: 23.8 hours
26) Canada: 23.6 hours
36) USA: 22.2 hours
40) Brazil: 19 hours
Source: Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development

Give Kids a Break
Children need diverse after-school activities, not incessant test prep.

By Susan Ohanian

Let's call the extended school day what it really is: ersatz child care. I'm all for quality child care, but putting four-year-olds in school for eight hours a day drilling for state standardized tests sounds abusive.

Understandably, parents desperate for quality child care and without budgets for after-school piano, hockey, gymnastics, etc., are apt to applaud the extended day. So, too, the police. Locked up in school, middle-schoolers aren't roaming the streets and the malls in the afternoon. Business folk are happy, too. Parents who know their children are safe at school can work longer hours.

But Joan Almon, coordinator of the U. S. Alliance for Childhood, worries that "without a guarantee that extra school time won't be devoted to more academic drilling for tests, adding yet more stress to children's lives, it would be much better to fund after-school activities with diverse offerings, especially for low-income children who need a safe place to relax, learn, and explore."

We can hope that extended days give back to children some of what was stolen under frantic attempts to skill-drill them into No Child Left Behind compliance. Many schools eliminated art, music, physical education and recess to make room for incessant test prep.

Extended day schools tell students, "Stay two hours longer, and you can have recess, and learn to play the clarinet." But the truth is that kids who score well get the clarinet; kids with low scores get more test prep. The standardized test score gap kicks off a huge curriculum gap that starves poor children.

We might do well to look at Finland, where children score at the top on international tests. Believing in play as essential to learning, the Finns don't introduce reading skills until age seven. In Finland's six-hour day, children get a 15-minute recess every 45 minutes. "The Finns," says longtime educator Marion Brady, "appear to know more about human nature than do we."

In Massachusetts, schools agreeing to an eight-hour school day get an extra $1,300 per student. Question: What if these public dollars went directly to families so they could buy books, take trips to the theater and museums, and plan other educational ventures with their children?

Susan Ohanian is the author of Why Is Corporate America Bashing Our Public Schools?

— Editors and Susan Ohanian
USA Today
2007-12-17
http://blogs.usatoday.com/oped/2007/12/our-view-on-mor.html#more

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