<p>The idea that US schools will ever go to year-round schedules in large numbers is a fantasy, because it would be destructive to too many industries (travel, campls, agriculture). It isn’t going to happen.</p>
<p>Never mind, found it :)</p>
<p>Hunt, you just hit the nail on the head. For as long as anyone could remember, each Texas school district had control over its school calendar - could start and stop when they wanted, as long as they got in the number of days the state required. The tourism industry decided it wanted a state mandate to start later in the year, as many districts were starting in early August. They lobbied and they lobbied. The produced “survey results” showing that this was what the “people of Texas” wanted, but no one involved in education (parents, kids, school teachers or administrators) seem to have been polled. The tourism lobbyists introduced bill after bil changing the school start date. Their efforts kept being defeated until a few years back…the governor called a Special Session for the sole purpose of dealing with school finance. The toursim lobbyists snuck their later start date into the bill while no one was looking. </p>
<p>Of course, the funny thing is that I think the LAST place people would want to vacation in mid-August would be Texas. But the point is that the tourism lobby was able to get a very imporatant change made to the Texas school calendar that parents, teachers and administrators didn’t want.</p>
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<p>Yeah, those are the homework projects that we pass around the family to do…I remember one WORD SEARCH that D was doing for 7th grade science…it was taking forever…all 5 of us spent time working on the word search and there was one word none of us could find. There was nothing in the assignment that made sure D understood the scientific terms…she was just supposed to be able to find them across, down, diagonal, backwards, etc. ???</p>
<p>MP–my D had a psycho fifth grade teacher. After about three hours of meaningless homework, she still had a health “word search” to do–same thing–no definitions or concepts, just find the words. I did it while she finished up other stuff. With no qualms; it had nothing to do with education.</p>
<p>I remember one very fun (truly!) evening when Son had to do a large “mosiac” for freshman Art…he had to cut hundreds of pieces of colored paper from magazines…it could have been an all-nighter for him…D and I sat at the table and cut tiny pieces of paper and chatted with Son while he glued.</p>
<p>I remember one project that older D did–a a 5 stanza limerick about the destruction of Pompeii!! The whole family had to help with rhyming words. It was fun.</p>
<p>I don’t know why the author says foreign countries have more school days and longer school hours. Is there any fact about this? And what do we do with more than 180 school days per year? Don’t we already waste enough kid time? Have we seen enough complaint from the kids on CC that they don’t do anything after the AP exams in May? Plus horrible stories about senioritis?</p>
<p>At least as of four years ago, countries with the shortest school years, including Hong Kong and French-speaking Belgium, had the highest math and science test scores.</p>
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<p>Yes but people don’t want to come back to Texas early/mid August either. I live in South Texas and just about everyone I know goes to see relatives or camp somewhere north of here for as long as they can in August. </p>
<p>The year that school started the second week of August nearly caused a riot. Our district is starting school a week earlier than last year and there has been a lot of complaining about it. </p>
<p>At least some of those lawmakers are from my part of Texas and, believe me, we’ve made our wishes known. It’s just ridiculous to let the kids out before the serious heat kicks in in May and then put them back into school during the worst of it in early/mid August.</p>
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<p>Must not be a public school. By law, the public schools have to start the 4th Monday of August.</p>
<p>Sounds like your community would have liked the start date to be as late as possible - maybe post-Labor Day? Whether your community liked early or late, the point is that the toursim lobby was able to persuade the legislature to take the decision out of the hands of the local districts.</p>
<p>Is that what it is? Well darn our luck this year. I do think it’s funny to imagine that people are coming to my part of Texas in August. </p>
<p>Considering how early our district was making the kids come back, I’m glad it got taken out of their hands. And, yes, I would like if we went back after Labor Day but I’ll take anything after August 20 as a welcome improvement.</p>
<p>We could make kids stay in school 18 hours a day year round and still have them graduate out as ignorant, if not more, as they are now. </p>
<p>It’s not TIME spent in school that determines how well children are educated. It’s many tangible and intangible things: curriculum, societal attitudes towards learning, teacher training, work habits – that’s just a few that come to mind. Looking for one solution, one magic bullet, to solve America’s myriad issues with k-12 schooling is pointless.</p>
<p>But there are many unintended consequences. Because they want to be done before winter break, practices for the fall sports (football - and thus band, cheer and drill team- and volleyball) start when they always did…so with school getting out later, the kids in fall activities get a shorter summer break than they used to. And now, TAKs is the week before AP exams…so when the kids should be having AP review sessions, they are out due to TAKs. (I don’t know if the schedule will change due to End Of Course exams replacing TAKs in HS.) And there is more summer homework for the AP classes because the AP test dates did not move back when the school start date did. Again, none of this was considered…the tourism lobby made the rules. That’s what Hunt was saying…too many industries are invested in the long summer vacations for things to change in the US.</p>
<p>I would vigorously protest all efforts to lengthen the school year or school day until changes are brought about to make schools more efficient. </p>
<p>A Constitutional amendment to forbid all art projects in non-art classes would be a good start.</p>
<p>My kid has wasted time doing art for English, History, Science, and Spanish class. All through elementary and middle school, and well into high school.</p>
<p>Mind you, I have nothing against art. I would have been happy to let her attend actual art classes taught by art teachers.</p>
<p>The author completely missed the true (IMO) problem - too much wasted time in school: too much repetition and busy work, way too little appropriately challenging work. Classes would have to be stratified by skill/ability level to fix that problem and with today’s focus on egalitarianism at all costs, it’s not likely to happen. A longer school day/year would just exacerbate the problem the author explores, without fixing anything. Too many kids hate wasting so much of their time in K-12 as it is; the last thing they want is a longer school day or school year.</p>
<p>DD’s kindergarten teacher moaned that in her “half day” kindergarten, she only had 13 contact hours with the students. but not this week because of two staff meetings during class hours. And you wonder…how about having your meetings after school…duhhh…</p>
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<p>That is so true.</p>
<p>As long as all you folks bemoaning all the hands on, tactile projects aren’t also the folks lobbying for more inclusive education, experiential learning for kids with “learning differences” and special needs, etc. then count me in.</p>
<p>But it seems to me that once you mandate that kids with learning disabilities and/or some form of processing difficulties get educated in the same classroom, at the same time, as kids without those difficulties, then what’s the poor teacher to do? That’s where the Arts and Crafts comes in. </p>
<p>But I don’t just blame the parents- I blame the Ed Lobby, the Ed Universities, and the Ed credentialing business as well. My cousin just finished a master’s in education and she gleefully reported on the number of inane classes and projects and workshops she sat through teaching teachers how to incorporate all of this “experiential learning” into their classrooms (i.e. cut and paste, for the kids who have LD’s or processing limitations).</p>
<p>The repetition and busywork is the symptom, not the problem. And the teacher’s unions should be villified for having spread the canard that smaller class sizes lead to better educational outcomes (smaller class sizes equals more teachers, not better outcomes.) They have managed to hijack the learning while maintaining the size of their membership to the detriment of kids in the class.</p>
<p>Okay, I looked up the numbers on a study of productive time spent in school. though the data are a little old, I doubt much has changed. It implies there is a lot that can be done in the time currently allocated.</p>
<p>Elementary School
**Low SES<a href=“social%20economic%20status”>/b</a>, nonacademic 4.4 hours, Academic 2.6 hours, time “engaged” in actual academic work 1.3 hours.</p>
<p>High SES, nonacademic 4.3 hours, Academic 2.7 hours, time “engaged” in actual academic work 1.7 hours.</p>
<p>Middle School
Low SES, nonacademic 4.7 hours, Academic 2.4 hours, time “engaged” in actual academic work 1.1 hours.</p>
<p>High SES, nonacademic 4.6 hours, Academic 2.4 hours, time “engaged” in actual academic work 1.3 hours.</p>
<p>Though the differences don’t appear large for Low versus High SES kids, it amounts to a difference of 1.6 years in educational experience through middle school.</p>
<p>(Greenwood, C. R. (1991). Longitudinal analysis of time, engagement, and achievement in at-risk versus non-risk students. Exceptional Children , 57, 521– 536.)</p>