9486 in the collection
A Longer, Costlier School Year?
What seems significant here is how the distortions and outright lies produced by charter PR pass so easily out of journalists' computers: These schools serve mainly disadvantaged kids and get good results.
Indeed.
So of course the editorialists' solution is to create more charter schools--and presumably get longer days on the cheap.
Editorial
Education: The Obama administration wants to increase the time that students spend in class. Would they learn more? The record isn't clear on that point. What is clear is that schools would spend more.
President Obama came into office with proposals on education that bucked his party base a bit. He endorsed at least a couple of ideas — merit pay and the expansion of charter schools — that teacher unions view with deep suspicion.
But we haven't heard much from Obama or his Education secretary, Arne Duncan, on these subjects. Instead, they've chosen at this point to promote an idea that is far less controversial in union quarters — lengthening the school day and school year.
One of their targets is the traditional long summer vacation. As Duncan put it in a recent interview with The Associated Press, "Our school calendar is based upon the agrarian economy, and not too many of our kids are working the fields today."
They also want schools to operate later on weekdays and be open on weekends, as much for safety as for learning. Duncan again: "Those hours from 3 o'clock to 7 o'clock are times of high anxiety for parents. They want their children safe."
The natural questions are: Why this and why now? It might be that education (like nearly everything else) is caught in the gravitational pull of Obama's health care agenda. Unions like the National Education Association can't be happy that the reform plan emerging in the Senate would tax their gold-plated health plans and deny them a government-run option. Talking up merit pay for teachers would not be prudent at this point.
More instructional time is a different story. Every extra minute added to a teacher's day would surely be compensated. So time is money for the NEA.
Politics aside, an argument can be made for adding minutes to the school day, days to the school year or doing some combination of the two. Three summer months away from school can take an academic toll, for instance. And most of America's economic rivals have more days in their school years.
But some of the countries that routinely beat us in math and science, such as Singapore, Japan and Taiwan, have shorter years as measured by instructional hours. And time is only as good as what you do with it. That goes not just for added time but also for the 1,146 hours per year that American students, on average, spend in school now.
One study has found that 10 extra minutes of math instruction per day raises test scores in math. But the research doesn't settle the question of whether 10 minutes be added to the existing day or taken away from some other activity that is less productive.
Such choices aren't trivial. School time is not cheap, especially in public systems controlled by state and federal red tape and union work rules. Many charter and private schools have the flexibility to offer extended school days. In a typical public system, every minute is expensive.
Massachusetts is paying some $17.5 million just to add 300 hours of school time in fewer than two dozen schools (that comes to $1,300 per student).
Expanding the school year for all students in a state is a daunting challenge. Minnesota found that it would cost $750 million to add 25 days to its school year. A study done for the nonpartisan Education Commission of the States in 2007 estimated that, based on the instructional spending per day in public schools, adding just one extra day would cost nearly $2.5 billion nationwide. California alone would pay $292.8 million.
The message in these numbers is that expansion of school time is just not going to happen, at least not at any significant scale and not in the foreseeable future. Public school systems don't have the budgets or flexibility for such an experiment.
Charter and private schools are another story. Many of them offer much longer school days than their district-run counterparts. The 82 charter schools of the Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP) are open from 7:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. Some schools are open even longer. Washington (D.C.) Jesuit Academy has a day just shy of 12 hours, with a large part of it devoted to studying.
These schools serve mainly disadvantaged kids and get good results. But getting the conventional public schools to imitate them would be like getting an elephant to dance.
The surer route is to create far more charter schools and — as Washington D.C.'s own Democratic political leaders urge — expand vouchers. The president seems to have chosen instead to take the political path of least resistance. Too bad for the kids.
— Editorial
Investor's Business Daily
2009-09-30
http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/ArticlePrint.aspx?id=507605
INDEX OF OUTRAGES
Pages: 380
[1] 2 3 4 5 6 Next >> Last >>
