<p>“and if you try and lengthen the school day and/or year you will have teachers saying they need to be paid more…” and adminstrators!</p>
<p>Unfortunately, the best education can’t be a one-size-fits-all scenario. S1 & S2 both graduated from high school with little problem. S1 was bored most of the time, far more mature than his peers, and learned to think critically at home. He was uninterested in schoolwork (not sure if this was due to personality or the school system itself) and a serious procrastinator but able to do the work well when he needed/wanted to or had an inspiring teacher. He also graduated from college without much changing. </p>
<p>S2 went to the same high school and survived. He was more interested in some things than his brother and did better in those subjects (science and math) but just got by in the other areas he was less interested in. However, he discovered music seriously in 8th grade and devoted all his spare time to that. He just finished freshman yr at a top-notch conservatory where he is again picking and choosing what will serve his goals and tolerating the rest. </p>
<p>I don’t think an extended day or school yr would have changed things for either of them except make them more bored by school than they already were.</p>
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<p>Perhaps if communities embraced the need for change they would make small investments in things such as air conditioning?</p>
<p>We are doing something very wrong as many countries with far less wealth and fewer resources pass us by. Is more of the same the answer? Probably not but we do need an answer.</p>
<p>pugmadkate said, “All children’s intellectual growth comes from exploration, play and idle time.”</p>
<p>Of course, you are right. I should have said that some make good use of those activities in their free time and therefore grow and learn on their own, whereas some must have classroom instruction in order to force them to learn. Or something like that. And furthermore it’s the parents who determine whether the child has an environment at home that’s conducive to learning. I imagine that just about every kid would learn better being home-schooled if their parents could pull it off. It’s too bad that not everyone has the means to do so.</p>
<p>Strange the article should trumpet the “long” school day so much. I just went and counted, and realised that here in Singapore, we have 191 school days here this year for secondary schools (7th to 10th grade), and I think 201 for primary schools (1st to 6th - though about two weeks of that is blown anyway, since nothing happens after the end-of-year exams). Maybe a three month holiday isn’t the greatest idea (ours is divided into four terms of ten weeks, with 1-4-1-6 weeks of holidays between each term), but I don’t think it’s the length of the school year. </p>
<p>And when I was in secondary school, classes ran 6 hours a day, with a 40 minute break, and maybe one or two afternoon classes a week (add 2.5 hours) - about 30 hours a week. In junior college (11th and 12th grade), let’s see… 32 periods of 35 minutes a week… oh dear, there must be a miscalculation. (I forgot to include PE!)</p>
<p>I must say it worked very well for me. In my school, at least, the focus was not on curricular learning per se - I guess the teachers understood that anyone could learn about something if you sat them down and gave them a pile of things to read, and also that that was not the point of schooling. The amount of leeway given to students to study the way they wanted was… incredible.* Almost all junior colleges give extended study breaks near the major exams, when the curriculum has been covered and students are essentially off school. During that time most teachers will make themselves available to go over anything students don’t understand, but they will rarely get an entire class together - if anything, students are expected to take the initiative to ask teachers for revision help, and consultations generally don’t include more than three students at once. Most students will get themselves in study groups, or study alone if they work better that way. I cannot remember how long my A Levels study break was (it was LONG) but we got three weeks off before the O Levels. </p>
<p>I’m looking at my school’s 2009 timetable now, and there are two weeks off before the preliminary exams, and six weeks study leave before the A Levels, which sounds about right to me. </p>
<p>'Tis not the length of the school day, or year… everyone has 24 hours a day and 365 days a year. How long you actually spend in school is irrelevant if you know how to learn anywhere.</p>
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<li>it worked well for me, like I said. However, some of my peers could have done with a lot more close supervision (primarily motivational issues rather than educational ones). I’ve sat down at a table and discussed educational systems and pedagogy with friends for hours and hours, and still we have no consensus.</li>
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<p>STAMFORD, Conn. — Sixth graders at Cloonan Middle School here are assigned numbers based on their previous year’s standardized test scores — zeros indicate the highest performers, ones the middle, twos the lowest — that determine their academic classes for the next three years. </p>
<p>But this longstanding system for tracking children by academic ability for more effective teaching evolved into an uncomfortable caste system in which students were largely segregated by race and socioeconomic background, both inside and outside classrooms. Black and Hispanic students, for example, make up 46 percent of this year’s sixth grade, but are 78 percent of the twos and 7 percent of the zeros.</p>
<p>So in an unusual experiment, Cloonan mixed up its sixth-grade science and social studies classes last month, combining zeros and ones with twos. These mixed-ability classes have reported fewer behavior problems and better grades for struggling students, but have also drawn complaints of boredom from some high-performing students who say they are not learning as much.</p>
<p>The results illustrate the challenge facing this 15,000-student district just outside New York City, which is among the last bastions of rigid educational tracking more than a decade after most school districts abandoned the practice. In the 1960s and early 1970s, Stamford sorted students into as many as 15 different levels; the current system of three to five levels at each of four middle schools will be replaced this fall by a two-tiered model, in which the top quarter of sixth graders will be enrolled in honors classes, the rest in college-prep classes. (A fifth middle school is a magnet school and has no tracking.)</p>
<p>More than 300 Stamford parents have signed a petition opposing the shift, and some say they are now considering moving or switching their children to private schools. “I think this is a terrible system for our community,” said Nicole Zussman, a mother of two. </p>
<p>Ms. Zussman and others contend that Stamford’s diversity, with poor urban neighborhoods and wealthy suburban enclaves, demands multiple academic tracks, and suggest that the district could make the system fairer and more flexible by testing students more frequently for movement among the levels. </p>
<p>But Joshua P. Starr, the Stamford superintendent, said the tracking system has failed to prepare children in the lower levels for high school and college. “There are certainly people who want to maintain the status quo because some people have benefited from the status quo,” he said. “I know that we cannot afford that anymore. It’s not fair to too many kids.” </p>
<p>Educators have debated for decades how to best divide students into classes. Some school districts focus on providing extra instruction to low achievers or developing so-called gifted programs for the brightest students, but few maintain tracking like Stamford’s middle schools (tracking is less comprehensive and rigid at the town’s elementary and high schools).</p>
<p>Deborah Kasak, executive director of the National Forum to Accelerate Middle Grades Reform, said research is showing that all students benefit from mixed-ability classes. “We see improvements in student behavior, academic performance and teaching, and all that positively affects school culture,” she said.</p>
<p>Daria Hall, a director with Education Trust, an advocacy group, said that tracking has worsened the situation by funneling poor and minority students into “low-level and watered-down courses.” “If all we expect of students is for them to watch movies and fill out worksheets, then that’s what they will give us,” she said. </p>
<p>In Stamford, black and Hispanic student performance on state tests has lagged significantly behind that of Asians and whites. In 2008, 98 percent of Asian students and 92 percent of white students in grades three to eight passed math, and 93 percent and 88 percent reading, respectively. Among black students, 63 percent passed math, and 56 percent reading; among Hispanic students, 74 percent passed math and 60 percent reading.</p>
<p>The district plans to keep a top honors level, but put the majority of students in mixed-ability classes, expanding the new system from sixth grade to seventh and eighth over three years. While the old system tracked students for all subjects based on math and English scores, the new one will allow students to be designated for honors in one subject but not necessarily another, making more students overall eligible for the upper track.</p>
<p>The staff of Cloonan Middle School decided to experiment with mixed-ability classes for the last eight weeks of this school year. </p>
<p>David Rudolph, Cloonan’s principal, said that parents have long complained that the tracking numbers assigned to students dictate not only their classes but also their friends and cafeteria cliques. Every summer, at least a dozen parents lobby Mr. Rudolph to move their children to the top track. “The zero group is all about status,” he said. </p>
<p>Jamiya Richardson, who is 11 and in the twos’ group, said that students all know their own numbers as well as those of their classmates. “I don’t like being classified because it makes you feel like you’re not smart,” she said. </p>
<p>The other day in Jamiya’s newly mixed social studies class, students debated who was to blame in an ancient Roman legal case in which a barber shaving a slave in a public square was hit by a ball and cut the slave’s throat. At one point, Jamiya was the only one in the class of 25 to argue that it was the slave’s fault because he sat there at his own risk — which the teacher said was the right answer.</p>
<p>Cloonan teachers say they had not changed the curriculum or slowed the pace for the mixed-ability classrooms, but tried to do more collaborative projects and discussions in hopes that students would learn from one another. But Joel Castle, who is 12 and a zero, said that he did not work as hard now. “My grades are going up, and that’s not really surprising because the standards have been lowered,” he said. </p>
<p>In a recent social studies class, the top students stood out as they presented elaborate homemade projects about Roman culture — mosaics, dresses, weaponry — while several of their classmates showed up empty-handed. One offered the excuse that his catapult had disappeared overnight from his bedside.</p>
<p>“A catapult thief?” questioned the teacher, Mimi Nichols, in disbelief before directing him to find his project by the next day. </p>
<p>Afterward, Ms. Nichols said that the less-motivated students had still learned from their classmates’ example. “That in itself is valuable,” she said. “For children to see what is possible.”</p>
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<p>This breaks my heart.</p>
<p>We homeschooled - an hour of day of academics, if that, was more than enough. If you avoid school-induced trauma, and provide a rich home and community life, most kids woudln’t require more.</p>
<p>I’d say that American schools need to work on reducing the amount of joke projects they make students do. Stuff like drawing a map of the town a book features, or draw comics representing a story just read, and other sorts of work that simply wastes my talents for very little actual learning. Give a test, an essay assignment or something. </p>
<p>And hell, train teachers better. My first teacher in the US, in the 6th grade was still teaching the order of operations, and taught it wrong (until I corrected her… something I learned in 1st grade back home). Just the fact that they were reviewing the order of operations in 6th grades demonstrated how horrible the system was. </p>
<p>And to be honest, I don’t like how American schools hold back their punches. So the kids are poor, boo-hoo. My old school was populated by the progeny of illiterate farmers who were far poorer and far more desperate than any lower-class children in the US. I wasn’t even close to being top of the class in that dilapidated school with crumbling walls, hand-made tables and a toilet so dreadful nobody has used in years, but apparently I learned more in 1 and half years in that school than Arizona schoolkids learned in 6. How dreadfully embarrassing.</p>
<p>My kids were also homeschooled. We varied between around 2 hours a day of structured learning to 0 hours. It was irregular and just depended on what else was going on that day, or how much energy or patience I had or the kids had that day. But, yeah, it was minimal and inconsistant. Both are in college now.</p>
<p>We tried regular school for K and 1st with my oldest, but it really was an immense amount of wasted time. I was a classroom volunteer 3 days a week, so I saw it. I also saw children learning to space out and be inattentive because of the diffuse focus.</p>
<p>When we left I was full of ideas about how education should really work, but like others have said, homeschooling isn’t going to be a realistic answer for the general public. I read and argued for this change or that, but now I am just resigned to having no clue how to REALLY reform education. I am certain that longer hours and more days and weeks in that institutional environment would not be something I would subject my own kids to. Even as it is, it was way too long.</p>
<p>I subscribe to the belief that success comes from creativity and having fun with learning; studying smart, not hard. Wasn’t there some study that found that toddlers with more unstructured play time were more successful as adults? It’s the same thing. </p>
<p>I don’t see why 6.5 hour school days, plus one hour of homework, on 180 days plus homework on weekends, isn’t plenty. Actually I think it’s too much. “Homework” shouldn’t exist. If we were more efficient with the time we had, we could accomplish just as much with half that time and half that stress.</p>
<p>We homeschooled for 1 year when work took us abroad. Our rule was 3 hours of academics per day. When my kids returned to school they were so far ahead we were left wondering what they did during the other 6 hours they spent at school most days.</p>
<p>I don’t need another article telling us that we to work our kids like Orientals in order to “make our nation succeed”.</p>
<p>When Oriental education systems churn out kids that can do more than recite things they’ve learned through rote memorization and plug and chug numbers, then I’ll be impressed by their way of teaching. This country doesn’t need any more cogs for the machine, especially since those cogs are clearly for the wrong machine. </p>
<p>Until then, how about we stick to our education system. You know, the one that actually sometimes creates self-actualizing people. </p>
<p>We’ve answered every issue by packing more work and more work on our students. Did anyone have to slave away like students today do ten years ago? No. Twenty years ago? No. We don’t need this. We don’t want it.</p>
<p>The desired outcome is quality work and efficient use of time. Lengthening school days or school years may or may not help get us there, but in any case, doesn’t seem to be a very popular idea.</p>
<p>Our balkanized school systems, like our helter skelter health insurance and our sprawling suburbs, suffers from an emotional aversion to thoughtful planning. One approach would be to adopt a national school curriculum. It could be designed to leave room for local interests, but still focus attention on core subjects and monitor progress by a common approach to testing and evaluation. Rationalize the confused mix of federal and local mandates to make more efficient use of the time available. </p>
<p>But there would be risk in doing this. If it were designed as a political consensus to satisfy teachers’ unions, textbook hucksters, and religious zealots, then we may as well stick with what we have. </p>
<p>Another approach would be to recognize that schools, like cities and health care, can be analyzed as ecosystems. By analogy, more and more Americans are overweight, but not the residents of New York City because they walk a lot. So instead of relying on national mandates on food labeling and such, you introduce changes to sidewalk design or the zoning of retail stores when you lay out new suburban communities. People start walking more. They slim down. How do we encourage more observation-driven change like this in our schools, so that quality improves within the schedule Americans know and prefer? The Cloonan experiment described DocT’s post sounds like a good example.</p>
<p>While longer school days may not be one of them, personally I think we can learn a lot from Asian cultures. See thread on why Asian/Jews/Caribbeans are ahead.</p>
<p>These presupposes that the purpose of education, and childhood, is to get “ahead.”</p>
<p>Not everyone believes that.</p>
<p>It has been a great experience to read these comments, and also the comments that follow the article itself. I am encouraged by how many people do not think that more school days or a longer school year is the answer to our educational problems.</p>
<p>The American education system, with less emphasis on rote, more time for extracurriculars and for free time, does encourage individuality and creativity. We see the biggest problems coming from teacher quality, to tell the truth, but that may just be in some schools.</p>
<p>I think that some of the real threats to education lie outside of schools: television, video games, computer games, Facebook and so on. Poverty (inability to provide books or activities) and parents who have to work long hours can also affect learning while outside of school. Also, many American students work at jobs after school.</p>
<p>The book “Outliers” mentions that during summer vacation, kids whose homes are “enriched” actually improve their reading skills, more than during the school year, while kids from homes that are not enriched (and this does not necessarily mean lower income, but can mean less interaction, fewer books around, more tv etc.) see their skills sink.</p>
<p>This points to a divide that exists everywhere, and that is influencing policy debates. A minority of parents gets very upset, for instance, when kindergarten goes full-day. These parents tend to take their children out at noon, until peer pressure among the kids ultimately forces most of them to go along with the 9-3 school day. These parents were correct in opposing the longer hours, because, according to studies, it is likely that their children would learn more with more time at home. However, educational policy is set to take care of those children whose homes do not have those benefits.</p>
<p>There is a similar divide in what educational philosophy parents want in their schools. I remember reading “Common Ground” about the Boston busing crisis, and there was animosity between the well-educated, “yuppie” parents in the South End, who wanted a flexible, creative curriculum, versus the residents of housing projects and lower-income housing who wanted “the basics” in a more rigid curriculum, more dependent on rote and memorization.</p>
<p>American public education, in theory, is all about equal opportunity, unlike some of the European countries. American schools are also, more recently, all about encouraging diversity, which makes standardization harder. Giving all kids equal opportunity by mixing ability levels, as in Stamford or Cambridge MA, and the parental protests that result, presents a good example of the tension between these ideals, and the realities needed for achievement. </p>
<p>I don’t know how this will all play out. I feel for the children who are so stressed, always in structured environments, and never get to just lie down and watch bugs on the ground for hours, or whatever.</p>
<p>I am glad my own kids had half-day kindergarten, and have not had much homework. They also grew up without a tv, until we got one a few years ago. I’ll always remember times when they would come home from school and actually continue learning on their own, through play. My son would practice letters when he tried to write signs for his Lego roads. My daughter would come home after learning about shapes, and make them all over again on the floor of our den, in some design of her own choosing. They are now in creative fields, and did fine academically.</p>
<p>But I do not think educational policy should be based on those experiences, because it is true that there are huge disparities in what kids experience at home, resources parents have, and obstacles to be overcome. It would be wonderful to have public schools that offer those kinds of individualistic, free-flowing experiences in the classroom, but I doubt that will ever happen.</p>
<p>Urban academies with long school days and years seem to be helping kids progress very well educationally, and from what I read, many of those students and parents are very happy with what those schools offer.</p>
<p>Clearly, there is no one-size-fits all system that will work well for everyone. But I do not agree that American children do not work- work can come in many forms.</p>
<p>In college, the school year is even shorter than it is in grade school, with fewer hours each day spent in instruction, and yet, we managed to learn the material, and not forget it over the summer.</p>
<p>In my ideal world, parents would have a choice between traditional-schedule public school programs and year-round public school programs. I think this could be implemented in many systems, but it would be hard to do in systems that are too small to support multiple options.</p>
<p>For me, year-round grade school would have been pointless and detrimental. Summers were when I got to live with my dad, the only really long block of time I got to spend with him all year. They were also my time to get in better physical shape - I spent many hours swimming and diving on summer league teams, and running around the neighborhood. And my parents were educated, well-off, and had the mentality and resources to make sure that I learned whether I was in school or not. For some kids, though, year-round school would clearly be beneficial. That’s why I would like to see multiple options available.</p>
<p>The idea that American children don’t work because they have shorter school days/years seems ludicrous to me. What about after-school jobs (and I note that the authors, so apparently concerned about poor children, don’t seem to have considered that lengthening the school day would make it harder for poor children who have to help support their families)? What about volunteer work? What about the students who run a club, and have to do organizing, event planning, keeping track of the money, etc? Are those not also work? Why aren’t they considered in the article?</p>
<p>Seems to me as if the problem is simply that one size does not fit all. There are kids who would clearly benefit from more school time, whether its extra hours in the day or or extra days in the year ( if that time is used wisely.) Other kids would benefit from less structured days. Some school districts across the nation provide parents with this choice. Most do not. Education is still run on that massproduction assembly line model. Sit 'em somewhere for an hour, pour in teaching, mix with text, remove from class, repeat…</p>
<p>There are also kids, especially at the high school level, who would benefit from a set up more akin to college–classes two or three times a week for major subjects, with most reading, studying etc done on thier own time and their own schedule. And some who need the traditional assembly line model because the structure it provides enables them to do well. But again, few school systems offer this sort of choice. And not every parent, sadly , knows their kid well enough to know which way is best.</p>
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<p>hmom5, can you link please?</p>