Obama Makes a Push To Add Time To the School Year 1073
N!NJA sends in a proposal that is sure to cause some discussion, especially among students and teachers. Obama and his education secretary say that American kids spend too little time in school, putting them at a disadvantage in comparison to other students around the globe. "'Now, I know longer school days and school years are not wildly popular ideas,' the president said earlier this year. 'Not with Malia and Sasha, not in my family, and probably not in yours. But the challenges of a new century demand more time in the classroom.' 'Our school calendar is based upon the agrarian economy and not too many of our kids are working the fields today,' Education Secretary Arne Duncan said in a recent interview with The Associated Press. ... 'Young people in other countries are going to school 25, 30 percent longer than our students here,' Duncan told the AP. 'I want to just level the playing field.' ... Kids in the US spend more hours in school (1,146 instructional hours per year) than do kids in the Asian countries that persistently outscore the US on math and science tests — Singapore (903), Taiwan (1,050), Japan (1,005) and Hong Kong (1,013). That is despite the fact that Taiwan, Japan and Hong Kong have longer school years (190 to 201 days) than does the U.S. (180 days)."
Re:Wrong solution (Score:5, Informative)
How is the amount of time in school measured? (Score:5, Informative)
In South Korea, after going to "normal" school, a lot of students go for additional studying/tutoring. These are called "Hagwon" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hagwon [wikipedia.org])
I believe Japan has something similar with their cram schools [wikipedia.org].
Not trying to say more amount of time in school is either better or worse, but it'd probably be useful to look at how the total amount of time in school was determined before relying on it too much.
Some people criticize these other school systems as stressing memorization and test-taking abilities over individual/creative thought. Of course, that's an anecdotal statement, so take it for what it's worth...
Re:Waste MORE time!? (Score:3, Informative)
They are discussing both extending the length of the day and the number of days.
Re:The real problem with education (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Waste MORE time!? (Score:2, Informative)
Does The Simpsons count? That seems to be about a typical working class family. Of course, it's a cartoon, but you just said, "name one show",...
Re:The real problem with education (Score:1, Informative)
Why not allow parents choose where to send their kids public, private, charter, etc and let that school get the funds a city/county allocates per student. Because the taxes levied to fund an educated populace are limited to only one option the free market for primary education basically does not exists. Most parents either cannot afford the limited non public choices or cannot justify paying for school twice, once in taxes and once in tuition.
Re:higher test scores with a simple sacrafice-NCLB (Score:3, Informative)
LEAVE SOME CHILDREN BEHIND
sorry- is that too callous?
It is callous, but my bigger problem with it is that it's stupid.
drop the ten% worst performers results from the US kids "math and science tests" and you may find that they don't suck after all.
First of all, unless you're going to be executing that 10%, I think you'll find they create problems. The chinese are willing to take the necessary steps to keep their dropouts in line, we are most definitely not.
Second, that goes against something intrinsically american. And for several good reasons, not the least of which being academic performance in grade school and high school doesn't exactly correlate with academic performance later on in education. Some of our best and brightest have been terrible middle schoolers. Dropping them would be a huge waste of talent.
How to make the school system better (Score:4, Informative)
For starters, how about we repeal that idiotic, asinine "No child left behind" act, that does absolutely nothing of the sort. The only reason this passed is because of the name. Everyone thought, "Oh, that sounds like a good idea!".
Know what this thing really did? It penalizes those schools with the lowest test scores. If your students can't make the grades, it means you lose some of your funding.
My ex girlfriend teaches at a school that serves the lowest income demographic in my area. She had recently graduated from college and this was the only teaching job she could get anything remotely in the local area, and she still had to beat lots of other applicants. Kids come into the school not knowing how to read basic words or do any arithmetic from families with parents that are spending more time selling drugs in the evenings then they are with their kids. The school, surprisingly enough, was already one of the lowest funded schools in the area, and had some of the lowest scores in the area before it passed.
When "No child left behind" passed, know what it did? It cut the schools funding even further, when they already didn't have enough money for books and other things. The school is so overcrowded that several classrooms are actually "temporary" buildings that have been present for years. The principal started yelling more at teachers about bringing test scores up and having less money to do it with, upsetting the faculty. They didn't have enough money for school supplies. My ex started having to buy (some) of her own paper to use for class projects and other things because funding was so short. Some of the few decent teachers the school had left decided on early retirement or other career changes because they became so fed up with it.
The net result, of course, is that the students scores have not improved, they are losing good faculty left and right because everyone is tired of the crap, and their funding isn't getting any better because neither are the scores. Nice, big, circular cluster-****. Last I had heard, morale was at an all time low and things aren't getting any better.
"No child left behind". Right. As one semi-famous teacher would put it, "Crack is bad, mmmmm'k?"
Re:Not More Time, Better Use Of Time (Score:3, Informative)
Re:The real problem with education (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Trade school needs to be a real option (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Waste MORE time!? (Score:4, Informative)
in a country that's already socialist, with full corporate sponsorship.
You have the most amazing case of bipolar view I've ever seen. Make up your mind, please! Are you worried about socialism or capitalism? Most people agree these are nearly opposites.
Maybe he's a real leftist in the Gore Vidal sense who defines "corporate sponsorship" as what we have in the USA: government-backed socialism for the rich and dog-eat-dog capitalism for everyone else. Maybe he says we should move to a different plutocracy.
Re:Waste MORE time!? (Score:3, Informative)
You have a really interesting idea of what constitutes a McMansion.
Re:Waste MORE time!? (Score:5, Informative)
Ah, the misplaced hatred of standardized tests. Never mind that such a label is also applied to psychological profiles that are beneficial in classification and therapy decisions, or that those "other countries" who are supposedly so far ahead of the U.S. use standardized tests with higher stakes than Americans could imagine. (When was the last time someone committed suicide for failing their state tests?)
The effectiveness of an assessment is largely independent of its format. I've seen rote-recall essay and practical (lab) assessment tasks, and I've seen critical thinking restricted-response items. But good items take work to develop - work that most states are not willing to invest. The typical method is for the state to contract out the development of their tests to a textbook publisher - who will often sell the tests as a loss leader for textbooks. My state (NY) releases the technical reports for the publishers, but then doesn't do anything about low reliabilities (alpha of .50 on the CR items on the 3rd Grade Math in 2006), inaccurate placements (only 90% of 8th graders were accurately classified pass/fail on the English/Language Arts test in 2006), or other bizarre psychometric stats (only 24% of the variance in the student scores being explained by the dominant factor).
Rather than blame an inanimate objects (standardized tests), why not blame the policy makers who use them inappropriately and in violation of the 1999 Standards for Educational and Psychological Testing put out by AERA, APA, and NCME?
Oh, and the issue of testing 1 day out of 180 - Assessment people have known about that for almost a century. It's called Classical Test Theory and error due to occasion sampling. There are techniques to establish and mitigate its effect on test scores, but, again, states don't really care about the quality of the assessments.
I dont' believe the numbers (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Waste MORE time!? (Score:4, Informative)
You make it sound like athletics dooms a person to depressive mediocrity.
It does. A minute number of high school athletes make professional careers out of it and are successful, the rest end up working in construction or a similar career and spending the rest of their life thinking about how great high school was.
Re:Waste MORE time!? (Score:2, Informative)
I agree. The only alternative I'd agree to is if the program were self-supporting, i.e. ticket sales at the games entirely paid for the programs. However, while some college sports can achieve that, I seriously doubt any high school sports could (even football).
Band is a joke, too; it's just like the cheerleaders: something to glorify the stupid football team. I was in band in middle school, where it was just a sit-down affair in a room. I played alto sax; it was fun. We did one marching stint downtown (not associated with any sports) in my last year, and it was freezing cold, and I was miserable, but that was the only time we did any kind of marching. When I got to high school and found out that the band there was only a marching band, and not something done for its own sake, I declined to enroll.
Re:Waste MORE time!? (Score:5, Informative)
Depends on where in Asia. I've taught at 19 Japanese schools over a 7-year period, and two of those were high schools of differing levels. While the kids here excel at math and science, it's only in the areas where rote learning is emphasized. They really are at a disadvantage when it comes to original thinking. They think the teacher is responsible for telling them what's right. Also, they really hate trying to extrapolate an answer based on previous knowledge, because they might be wrong.
As for advancement through school, the boards of education are encouraging the "no child left behind" idea; even if you don't participate in class you receive a 55%, and 90% of your grade is based on the tests, not the classwork. This means that you only really have to cram for about eight weeks out of the year to do a decent job. For those who still manage to fail despite all of these measures, a single make-up test is offered every year for each subject failed, for which the student is rigorously coached (using the actual test questions) beforehand.
Japan and the US share a serious problem in common: a lot of bureaucratic interference from people who have no education credentials and are ham-stringing the teaching process to the point where everybody passes but nobody actually learns anything. Spending more time being taught badly isn't going to resolve the issue; we need to revamp the teaching system and eliminate the pandering cruft that is bogging down our schools.
Re:Waste MORE time!? (Score:1, Informative)
He was referring to corporatism. Corporatism != capitalism. Corporatism is when you have corporations getting laws passed that benefit them, and harm competition.
The USA is corporatist and socialist, they aren't mutually exclusive. The corporations make money with exclusive contracts, and subsidies, and import taxes on overseas products that would offer fair competition.
Re:Waste MORE time!? (Score:4, Informative)
Yeah! I was wondering when my old television knowledge would would come in handy. Uncle Phil went to Harvard Law School, was a federal judge, and was also on the board of the NAACP. And on the Cosby Show, Cliff Huxtable was an OBGYN and Clair Huxtable was a partner at a large law firm. So their lifestyles might actually be fairly accurate, at least as far as sitcoms are realistic.
Re:Waste MORE time!? (Score:1, Informative)
Homework is a useful way of monitoring if your teaching methods are successful. It provides instant (daily) feedback on how effective you have been, and allows you to adjust accordingly.
As any proper techie will tell you, monitoring is essential for a sustainable system.
Re:Waste MORE time!? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Waste MORE time!? (Score:3, Informative)
It depends on the person. In my case, yes, I'm flat out telling you practice made no difference in how well I did in school. How many times do you need to add numbers to understand addition. For me - just once. Homework was a waste of my time, and I did as little of it as I possible could, so far as even not doing it at all if the teacher told us what percentage of the final grade it would be and I felt it worth the lower marks for skipping it.
"Practice" via homework is called learning by rote, but where the teacher is too lazy to do so in class. Excessive homework has ALWAYS been my first indicator of a BAD TEACHER. I've never had a good teacher who assigned a lot of homework.
Re:State Rights Anyone? (Score:2, Informative)