Today, President Obama decided that our kids need longer school days, and shorter summer vacations. The President says that we need to do this because "...the challenges of a new century demand more time in the classroom." First off, I didn't think there would be any challenges once Obama was elected. But that's not important now.
This is the type of solution we've come to expect from this President. There doesn't seem to be any real in-depth thinking behind any of Obama's ideas. Everything is either more government spending, more taxes on people making over $250,000, more regulation, and now, longer school days. He's not taking on the institutional problems. I think of it as, America is bleeding profusely, and Obama is attempting to stop the bleeding with a Kleenex.
Now, I'm not a teacher, and I don't even play one on TV, but about 10 minutes of critical thinking poked a ton of holes in this plan.
- Education is not a federal government responsibility. It's a state responsibility. The federal government shouldn't be involved. The Dept. of Education is, technically speaking, unconstitutional. In fact, every time the Feds meddle in education, it seems to get worse...see No Child Left Behind.
- A constant complaint I hear from the left is that our schools are failing our children...especially inner city schools. So, spending more time in an institution that is failing our children would help? Perhaps we should look at improving our schools before we make our kids spend more time there.
- Our teachers are overworked and underpaid, even the liberal ones. A teacher works from 7-4, then maybe coaches or helps with an activity, then goes home and grades papers. Where are they going to find time to teach another hour or 2 each day? Did Obama even ask the Teachers Union about this?
- Longer days doesn't fix the problem of parent involvement. I think the statistics bear out that kids with involved parents do far better in school than kids who's parents don't take an active role in their schooling. Unfortunately, our welfare society has made it way too easy for one parent to be absent, leading to way too many kids who don't get the help they need from their parents.
- We need more teachers. Putting 30 kids with 1 teacher is not a recipe for success. We need more teachers with fewer students per teacher. Is putting that same teacher with 30 students for longer going to help? Maybe a little, but if the longer days burn out the teacher and the kids, that's not helping anyone.
- Our schools are "one size fits all". We need to figure out a way to better tailor our educational programs to a students needs. Perhaps we need to have schools with a more diverse set of programs for our kids that can be tailored to their individual needs and interests.
I'll admit, I'm an outsider. I haven't been in the public schools in a long time, and we homeschool, so we're not there now. But, it seems to me there are many institutional problems with our public school system that need to be solved before we can even begin to think about whether a longer day or less vacation will help.
4 comments:
Ha Ha Ha... I'm usually at school from 6:45am to about 6:30pm to 7:00pm. Yesterday I was at school from 6:30am to 9:00pm. Longer days are irreverent to me.
While I do have a standard curriculum that I have to follow, I individualize that curriculum to each student. That is what we do, each student is different…I’ve never seen a carbon copy student.
I think we have a pretty diverse choice of classes. However, the Visual Arts, and Arts in general are always on the chopping block due to budget cuts. Diverse classes = larger school budgets. There is a reason that smaller districts can’t offer the classes that our district offers. So if you are talking small districts, you are right, they should offer their students more…but it comes at a price. You can go to Burger King and get a good burger, or you can go to an upscale restaurant and get a GREAT burger- $6.00 value meal vs. $18.00+ meal (without the pop). What is your choice? What are you willing to pay for? I know, I know…sometimes that $18.00 burger is crap (dry bun, overcooked, etc.) and is going to be worse than value meal (I love BK). Yet, on average, that $18.00 burger is going to be better. Know that when I’m the chef…that is going to be one GREAT burger! You can take that to the bank!
Hope all is well in Iowa my friend!! :-)
MCD
Alright, Alright, Alright. I acknowledges points 5 and 6 are terrible. I heard that from a coworker yesterday. Points 1-4 are pretty good though.
A longer day for you would them be 5 am to 10 pm...you'd burn out. Of course, if you burnt out, maybe you'd finally open that restaurant and start making those great burgers.
I don’t think longer days at school are the answer either. (The question being how do we get American students more competitive with other nations’ students or even on top again.) No, forcing kids to spend more time away from family, away from soft furnishings, away from neighbors, away from free time, away from a chance to be alone and reflect, away from bikes, skateboards, and trampolines is not the answer. Not all students have caring families or bikes or fun waiting for them at home. Then let’s work on trying to provide that. We have afterschool care programs. The one I’ve seen smashes kids into one room and occasionally allows them to play on the playgroud they play at five day a week already. Let’s work on making these a phenomenal place to be for kids who need it rather than forcing all kids to be in an institution longer each day.
Let’s not force overworked teachers to be even more overworked. Anonymous wrote that he/she spends 11 ½ hours at school. We want to make teachers stay longer! Anonymous wrote longer days were irreverent to him. I wonder if the writer meant irrelevant, but they’re not. If you’re already putting in that much time, if you have to be monitoring or mentoring students longer, when will you have time to do all that you do at school when you’re not with students right now, not to mention the strain it would then put on families of teachers. I guess that would also be irreverent.
I think what we need are exceptional science and math teachers. That’s where American students are failing most if you look at the scores, and that’s where we have a huge deficit in staffing. Are you going to lure great minds away from cushy, high-paying, and interesting industry jobs to spend an even longer day teaching at a school that is overcrowded and doesn’t have the funds to supply the materials for interesting experiements or field trips important in developing science acumen and curiosity? Come on! Let’s work on making teaching middle school and high school math and science a priority. We need more qualified math and science teachers and we need to equip them to do a good job.
My comment was too long so I've had to continue in a new comment.
Once we get science fully funded, we need to get art and music back. Art is one hundred times more important to a 12-year old than being able to diagram a sentence!
A surprisingly high percentage of teachers quit after the first year and ACORN estimated that 40% to 50% of teachers quit within the first five years. They go to college for four years to prepare for their job and they quit after the first year. What kind of business can function successfully with a 40% turnover!? The Alliance for Education Excellence identified this as a problem several years ago. They said, “A conservative national estimate of the cost of replacing public school teachers who have dropped out of the profession is $2.2 billion a year.” And they quoted a 2004–05 MetLife “Survey of the American Teacher,” that reported new teachers reported being greatly stressed by administrative duties, classroom management, and testing responsibilities, as well as by their relationships (or lack thereof) with parents. Federal Government, you want to have your hand in education even though you have no constitutional right to do so, then give money to schoools who've developed teacher mentoring programs to help prevent this attrition.
And let’s stop putting so much pressure on teachers to get their students to score well on standardized test. Reward good teachers, not teachers of good test takers. Rather than exploring with kids, we’re programming kids so they’ll pass the bubble test rather than the life test.
What did Leonardo Di Vinci, Thomas Edison, and Michael Angelo have in common besides all being geniuses? They had freedom as a child. They prowled, explored, experimented (not in set-up classroom, but with their own devices) and played!! As a 10 year-old, they weren’t worried about multiple-choice questions and not going out of the lines for fear their answer would be counted wrong. A free childhood is common characteristic among most people the world consider very creative (see The Creative Brain by Nancy Andreasen). I just honestly don’t think keeping kids in school longer each day can accomplish that. If it could that would be great, but I just don’t think they can.
Schools provide a valuable and needed service to our country and its children, but they need help. They don’t need to keep students there longer. They need qualified math and science teachers, they need more art and music, they need mentor programs for new teachers for their first three years, they need more creative and flexible rubrics to measure student progress rather than standardized tests. As the blogger said, quantity does not equal quality.
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