Do We Need a Longer School Year? 729
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.'"
Alternate hypothesis (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Alternate hypothesis (Score:5, Interesting)
That absolutely is a factor, but this is far from the first research I've seen (as an educator myself) that indicates three weeks is the longest break the average student can take before skills start to regress. This is why some schools use the "happy medium" of year round schooling. The number of school days is the same as a ten month school year (standard here in Canada) but no break from school exceeds three weeks. Instead, there are more frequent and longer breaks during the school years. (Three weeks at winter, a week at Easter, four days off instead of three for most long weekends, etc.) Academic results are higher (on average), students usually like it once they've tried it because of the more frequent breaks, and working parents enjoy it more. The true test, however, needs to be comparing two otherwise comparable private schools. As you have correctly pointed out, any private system should be able to outperform the local public system on average because the parents who really don't care and produce students who don't respect the need for education send their kids to the public system.
Just say No! Obligatory John Taylor Gatto quote (Score:5, Insightful)
http://johntaylorgatto.com/chapters/16a.htm [johntaylorgatto.com] "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 [chrismercogliano.com]
"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 [sourceforge.net]
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/ [educationrevolution.org]
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 [newciv.org]
"Look again at the seven lessons of schoolteaching: confusion, class assignment, dulled respon
Re:Alternate hypothesis (Score:5, Insightful)
Cambridge and Oxford may not be entirely typical, but they only have 20 weeks/academic year of lectures. Yet they don't seem to have trouble teaching people things.
The problem, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, nor in our school years, but in ourselves.
In order to make kids do well, live long, and prosper, you only need one principle: Ensure they are better off if they work hard and succeed than they will be if they don't and fail. We use the principle in football and basketball, and have lots of good football and basketball players. We use the principle in teaching performance music, and we have lots of good performers.
It's mainly in things like mathematics where - on the average - we just don't seem to care. The Chinese use the principle in everything, and that's why they increasingly run circles around us.
Re:Alternate hypothesis (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Alternate hypothesis (Score:5, Interesting)
My parents were divorced and I came from a family of blue-collar workers and immigrant farmers. I hope that you are not suggesting that they sent me to public school because they didn't care or respect the need for education. My mom held down a job while attending night school and still managed to get me to school on time with my homework done. In the US, in the 80's and early 90's, our school years were constantly shortened to deal with budget cuts. It had nothing at all to do with the quality of education, it was all about screwing over poor kids and the "if you're poor it's because you didn't work hard enough" philosophy that Reagan popularized.
Theoretically all my "wasted" summer months were a big drag on my education, but I contend that the measure of the performance of a kid with respect to schooling is not a measure of future success, nor is it the most important aspect of a child's life. Summer Break offers opportunities to learn other useful life skills. When I was very young, I would spend Summer with my grandparents, who lived in another state (and who weren't poor). They sent me to a great summer camp, where I made friends, performed in skits, played field hockey, swam, etc. One summer I even went to baseball camp. Once I was 12 or so, I would work (under the table) all Summer and when I turned 14, I started working real jobs, with a paycheck. I'm sure I forgot a few proofs from Geometry or some SI units, but I learned so many other skills that are important to success (not the least of which is how much minimum wage sucks).
After many years of state college, I wound up studying at an ivy league university, surrounded by upper-class kids from private schools. Their teachers had PhDs and their schools boasted all kinds of fancy education models. They had all been pushed by their well-educated parents to succeed right from the womb. Many of them actually knew each other from way-back, because they had competed at the same "science competitions" (I still don't know what those are). None of them had jobs--instead they volunteered at soup kitchens, or whatever, because that is the sort of thing fancy-pants universities like on applications. All of them had better educations that I, and all of them retained far more of it. They could talk about literature and sound generally smart and educated. But they were also high-strung and sheltered. Not one of them had ever done a day of real manual labor. Their definition of "hard work" was wildly different from mine and they all expected "hard work" to translate into success automatically. I prefer my rich patchwork of life experience and realistic expectations to their sterile bubble of self-indulgence and I credit my long, budget-induced summers with much of what makes me unique.
Re: (Score:3)
I didn't mean to imply that manual labor is more virtuous or harder than mental labor. What I meant is that people who have had to do manual labor growing up--or really who had to work at all--have a different definition of "hard work" than those who had the luxury of spending their summers volunteering or interning to bolster their college applications. In my experience, the latter tend to adopt the notion that hard work = success, in contrast to people who dug ditches all summer for $4.00 and wind up blow
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OK, so explain something to me. When I was a kid, school started in late September and let out in early May. Now, they start in mid-August and don't let out until June. Yet my generation knows the difference between their and there, and knows when and when not to use an apostrophe, can do arithmetic without a calculator, etc.
If the longer school year is so beneficial why are the twentysomethings so ignorant?
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True, but there's a little more to it. If a skill is truly mastered, it doesn't regress. (Riding a bike is the standard example.) The skills you are exposed to on Monday that you don't really grasp until applied on Tuesday or Wednesday fade if Monday was the last day of school. For example, I did two physics degrees before my move to education. I can still solve most high school math problems by reflex, and probably always will do so. Things I learned in graduate studies or junior high social studies
Re:Alternate hypothesis (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Alternate hypothesis (Score:5, Interesting)
Riding a bike is not the same kind of skill as solving algebra equations.. Biking is kinesthetic and math is intellectual. The brain treats these skills very very differently. Nevertheless, ALL skills regress over time. It's a drawback to neurology that can adapt. Old cruft gets thrown out.
Perhaps the real problem is that some large percentage of what's taught in school is cruft. How it's taught can also be 'cruft' as well.
Re:Alternate hypothesis (Score:5, Informative)
Moreover, they note that the issue is more complicated than just throwing a couple of extra days into the mix.
Re:Alternate hypothesis (Score:4, Interesting)
Saturday school? Seriously? Is nothing sacred?
Not when your goal is to train up kids to be drones, ready and willing to fall in line and slave away 80 hour work weeks to make their employer rich. That's why they don't teach critical thinking skills or financial education either.
Re:Alternate hypothesis (Score:5, Insightful)
This, a thousand times. I'm fairly far removed from the educational system now, thank $diety, but this "must be competitive no matter what" crap has got to stop. Here's an idea: why don't the people in charge NOW stop our insane "free trade" policies that make it necessary or desirable for kids to worry about their economic futures when they're 10.
Our society is totally batshit crazy, and we blame everyone and everything except our own economic system and the people in charge of it. Here's a free clue: you can't live on $2/day in the US, and no amount of "adapting" is going to fix that.
Here's another free clue: cognitive dissonance works. Kids are much better than adults at figuring out when somebody is pulling a bunch of BS on them. They get told when they're young that if you work hard you'll be successful, and then they see evidence to the contrary on a daily basis--lots of times in their own homes as a parent is laid off when their job is outsourced. They see people who preach family values go do things politically and in business that make Scrooge look like a nice guy. They see dumb but well liked people getting rewards while the competent but quiet are ignored. They see liars go far and straight shooters go nowhere. They learn, and what they learn is that our society sucks, so they tune it out.
Kids aren't broken. They way we run our world and look on each other as economic prey is.
Re:Alternate hypothesis (Score:4, Insightful)
If everybody is a business man, who is left to do the work?
OK, not everyone will succeed. In fact, the vast majority will fail. So, in your dream society there's a little bunch of successful business men and a vast majority of frustrated, miserable losers who hate what they do because they all wanted to be business men. And they receive shit pay because they have "failed". Can't you see a systemic problem with this model?
Re:Alternate hypothesis (Score:4, Interesting)
In my country the expensive schools have shorter terms and achieve better academic results. I don't think it's a simple case of how much time you spend, but how you spend it.
Re:Alternate hypothesis (Score:5, Insightful)
Yet in other countries (UK for instance) the better off folk send their kids to private schools that have longer holidays, and still achieve brilliant results.
You're right (IMHO) that the kids and parents caring is a big factor. I'm not convinced taking away the summers of youth is a good idea though.
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simply isn't as acceptable as it used to be for any number of reasons.
Paranoia.
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Summers off? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.]
Re:Summers off? (Score:4, Interesting)
Schools were out during the summer so that children could work in the fields. How relevant is this now?
For some people here in rural agricultural Ireland, very. Ditto elsewhere in the countryside. But that's maybe 5-10% of the population. If school isn't going to be a year-round thing, then cut some of the summer holiday and add it to the other breaks. Or make the timings entirely local, as you described.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Summers off? (Score:4, Informative)
I'm glad I got summers off... neither my elementary nor my high school had AC. (Both do have it now however)
Re:Summers off? (Score:4, Informative)
Schools were out during the summer so that children could work in the fields. How relevant is this now?
I don't know about where you live, but in my neck of the woods(Ontario), kids still work in the fields here. In fact, kids will still be working in the fields here until about the end of September and sometimes right up until mid-October. The provincial government doesn't like it, not a single bit, they've tried reallllly hard to piss all over farmers who have kids who do this. In most cases, the answer of parents have been to homeschool. It's gotten exceptionally bad in the last 6 years since the Liberals(left) have come to power over it, and they keep sloshing around the "try to ban kids from working on the farm" it keeps getting knocked down by the PC's(Conservatives who are right of centre) and NDP(far left).
Though I shouldn't be surprised at this response from the odd ball American. Especially since Obama dept. of agriculturehad tried to ban kids from working on the farm, and driving farm machinery.
Re:Summers off? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3)
Re:Summers off? (Score:5, Interesting)
children driving a tractor or whatever is NOT abuse.. While I did not grow up on a farm, I was driving the family 12hp workhorse to mow lawns and haul wood and such.. I was around 6 or 7.
Of course it's not child abuse. Only in the warped mind of some government nanny is it child abuse, and the worst offenders are big city liberals who've never spent a day working on a farm in their lives. I spent my summers working on my uncles farm, either getting into the typical farm type trouble and in turn getting myself out--such as just how do you get a field beater that you just got stuck in 6" of mud out(that's easy, you go get the dozer and hook up some chains and pull it out)--to yeah and now we go off and harvest the corn. Enjoy that there 12hr day kiddo, by the way this is the CB...enjoy talking with your nieces and nephews, and the truckers along the highway(the 401 was nearby).
I've cut myself, sliced my fingers open, gotten more stitches than I can count. Never broken a bone though. Meh I've been spit on by horses, pissed on by cows. Hit and smacked around by sheep and goats. Had a bull charge me, because I was walking by. I've been up at the crack of stupid milking just about every stupid animal you can think of that can make milk, I've sheared things, I've busted my ass and done hard work and learned a major work ethic doing it. And I learned how to make silo-shine as they called it.
And I wouldn't trade that time for anything in the world.
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And yes, I was brought up around farms and farmers, and I find it's mostly "big city" types who go all misty eyed about how fucking wonderful they are. They're not.
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Fine.. fix the QUALITY of the education first.. When that's done, we can talk about whether increasing the school year is worth it.
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Yes (Score:3)
Two weeks (Score:3, Funny)
Suggested by someone who has forgotten (Score:5, Insightful)
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'.
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I think we should be taking a much deeper look at how education itself is dispensed. In this information age, we should very easily be able to provide the brighter students with all of the tools they need to advance at their own pace, and rewards to encourage this behaviour, while ensuring that other students get a solid standard education. Its a truism to say that learning is entirely, in the end, up to the student, emphasising this by reforming the educational model could do a lot of good.
Ebook readers, t
Re: (Score:3)
Alternately, most people are going to end up as wage slaves for the rest of their lives, and just as many may be working too hard building a carrer to take a sizeable vacation until they're 30. Most of them will be lucky to take two full, consecutive weeks off in a row each decade for the remainder of their lives once they graduate from high school (or college, if they're lucky). A couple months of unemployment was a blissfully happy time for me. Three months a year of actual living before taking responsibi
Re:Suggested by someone who has forgotten (Score:4, Insightful)
Learning constantly for 12 years is hard.
This.
My son has his whole life ahead of him to have his soul crushed in a cubicle. He has only one chance to be a kid.
"We just sit there and watch TV"
That's the parent's fault, not the school system.
Re: soul crushed in a cubicle (Score:3)
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
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It is HARD. But 9 months on, almost 3 months off is stupid. It's an excercise in extremes. I envied my cousins in Germany growing up. Instead of being bored out of their brains for 3 months in the summer, they got a more moderate 6 weeks off, and then a more healthy 2-3 weeks at Christmas, and 2-3 weeks at Easter. It kinda mirrored what their parents got. Instead of Stateside, where we're all taught to be good little factory workers. Even the summers were orig
meh (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Minor corrections (Score:2)
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.
Break it up (Score:2)
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.
Not a longer school year; just better distribution (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re: (Score:3)
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.
2 months in one block might not be so good (Score:3)
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.
How does this miss the only relevant issues? (Score:2, Insightful)
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 th
Works for us pretty well (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Missing part: family (Score:4, Insightful)
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>".
Re:Missing part: family (Score:4, Insightful)
The whole point of the education system is to make the square students fit into the round holes of standardized testing.
Re: (Score:3)
Not to mention summer jobs. This is only important from maybe 12-14 onward (I did stuff like mow lawns and do gardening for elderly neighbors when I was 12) but a summer job is a really important part of growing up and is at least as important in a teen's development as what they are doing in school.
Public schools fail, so give them more ? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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The problem isn't the teachers, or the administration, or the "system." It's the parents. YOU are the problem with the schools because you (and I mean the general "you," not necessarily you in particular) expect that the system will provide day care for your kids in the form of all the learning they can every need and you have no responsibility at all for helping, nurturing, teaching, and guiding them.
Yes, there are poor, unmotivated teachers. There are lazy, useless programmers too. A good set of parents c
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It's easy to fire teachers. Even those with "tenure", more accurately called due process. Plenty of districts do it. Districts that have poor teachers by definition have poor administrators. And since administrators are really easy to fire, if you think you have poor teachers, I suggest you take it up with your school board.
Huh? (Score:3)
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.
Terms and semesters (Score:4, Interesting)
no (Score:3, Insightful)
Who pays? (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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I don't necessarily disagree with any of this (much). I just want to know who is willing to pay for it, even if it's the best idea anyone has ever had. Ever talk to old people or the childless and hear them bitch about why their tax dollars are 'wasted' on schools?
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Coming from a family filled with nurses and doctors, I'm well aware of that. Those professions also feature much more annual leave, paid time off, time off for continuing ed, etc. I'm not saying it cannot be done. What I am saying is that there are costs, both hidden and visible, that make this an expensive undertaking that very few in the US are willing to do.
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Someone works for 10 months (+/- a bit). You ask them to work another two months, you pay them more. I knew plenty of teachers, both when I was one and when I was growing up who grabbed part time or seasonal work during the summer.
Summer is really boring... (Score:3)
What I like best about this entire article is not one person asked why the hell we'd want to work that hard?
What's the point? (Score:4, Insightful)
Again, it depends. (Score:3)
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.
nonsense (Score:3)
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Comment removed (Score:3)
Sure-- better training to be slaves (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
According to NCES [ed.gov], 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.
Re:Leave Summers Alone (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Re:simple answer: NO (Score:4, Insightful)
There will always be losers, layabouts, and lazy people. No school schedule will chance this.
Re:No (Score:5, Interesting)
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?
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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 t
That's terrible. (Score:3)
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 sca
Re:No (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (Score:3)
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.
Re:No (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re: (Score:3)
Forcing kids to go through that broken system MORE WEEKS PER YEAR isn't an "improvement", no matter how you want to slice it
Re:No (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:No (Score:4, Insightful)
Huh? Where is this happening? Maybe private sector teachers, but deficiently not public sector ones.
Here is a link [washingtonpost.com] 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.
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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 [businessinsider.com]) but that we're undermining the education of the next generation of citizens.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
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
Re:No (Score:5, Informative)
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 [britannica.com]:
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.
Re: (Score:3)
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 w
Re:No (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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It rang true to me and almost every other Slashdotter who read those words I'd wager. Rebuttal required.
Re:No (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:No (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:No (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:No (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:No (Score:5, Informative)
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 [go.com].
Re:No (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:No (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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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.
Re:No (Score:4, Informative)
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?
Re:No (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Indeed. I feel like this [digitalbattle.com] 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 ju
Re: (Score:3)
You could be scarring him for life you know. If he doesn't have an aptitude for math, this will not help him. If he does have an aptitude for math, this is a complete waste of time. Whatever the case, you are not helping him in any way, making him resent you, and causing who knows what kind of social problems / insecurities for him. Hopefully he will be strong enough to just laugh it off as something his crazy father made him do.
Also, maybe you should suggest he go play outside an hour in the morning and e
Re: (Score:3)
Actually, doing lots of problems is the right way to study math, no matter how much or little aptitude the student has. It doesn't matter if it is elementary school arithmetic, or high school calculus. I've heard so many stories of math students even in the college level come in not understanding even the basics of not only the math they should know, but how to study the material. The real galling thing? Is when the student who does not turn in their homework begs the instructor to let them pass, despit
Re: (Score:3)
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.