Seems to have some serious merits.
I think one of the biggest changes in 21st century education would be the elimination of a summer break, converting ALL schools to year round schooling and the institution of a four day school week for high-performing schools.
Too many schools are day care centers for working parents or holding pens for teenagers with essentially no job skills.
Objections, off the top of my head:
- In the linked article at least, they’re only extending the school day by an hour per day. That means they must be losing a few hours per week.
- Assuming that the average 5-day/week school has a 7 hour day, increasing that even by an hour brings it to an 8 hour day. Fine for an actual workplace, but for most kids, that’s a really long time to be sitting in class.
- What happens to sports? Practices are going to get pushed back an hour, plus, students will be more tired to begin with. When I played soccer in school, it was a pain practicing from 3-5. If you start an hour later or more, it’s going to start to get dark, and parents will get pissed off about it.
- I don’t know how universal this is, but I’m assuming tht my school district was hardly the only one to allow students to take an extra class in lieu of a lunch hour. You may or may not get a chance to eat in class, depending on your teachers and schedule. Eight hours is probably not a healthy amount of time for a 16-year-old to go without food.
That’s not necessarily a problem.
If it works for that school district than OK. But I don’t think success in some small districts can just be applied to the entire country.
I wonder what the parents at work do about kids not in school?
I think one of the major problems in the U.S. today and in the Southern States in particular is too much education. When it starts costing more money to educate kids the sensible businesslike solution is to stop sending them to school so much.
And what where would you rather kids with working parents and few job skills be?
That was exactly my reaction! <3
Here’s my favorite. My district came up with a brilliant plan to deal with the low test scores of students: let them go home early and make teachers go to meetings. Why? The problem with schools are the teachers.
Yes, those students displaying low test scores are doubtlessly the offspring–of the same gene pool–of parents pulling down less than six figures. So fuck 'em. They’re going to end up the same galley slaves whether taught four days a week or five. And teachers are better employed going to meetings–they only teach, afterall, because they can’t do .
The sooner we purify the gene pool, boil off the riff-raff, the sooner the rest can get back to playing the back nine. We can always import a few cockroaches from south-of-the-border to carry our clubs, then wash our cars. In the event they expect us to extract any coppers out of our pockets to educate their children, thus giving them a fighting chance of despoiling the gene pool anew, then fuck 'em. back to beanerland they go. They can easily be replaced.
In school, unfortunately. If you’ll read my comments, the four-day school option is one I’d rather see for top-performing schools.
The problem is that schools budgets are derived from the tax base of their community. In other words, there is a vicious/virtuous circle -
town has good schools -> people want to move there -> real estate prices go up -> only wealthy can afford to live there -> higher tax base improves the schools
OR
bad schools -> people with money move out -> tax base decreases -> schools worsen
The four day week thing just sounds like a fiscal band aid fix that doesn’t really address the problems of educating students so they are actually prepared for the real world.
Looks like many states (13 according to this article) are considering moving away from property tax based school funding and on to sale or income tax based school funding.
What in the Hell in my post implied that I felt this way! I was pointing out the irony that to get students to succeed in school was to have them spend *less /I] time in school?
And for your information, I work with students with disabilities - the same sort of students that Hitler and many American states tried to eliminate through eugenics. My daughter was disabled too, so don’t you EVER accuse me of wanting to “purify the geane pool”. I work extra hours trying to keep my students in school and not dropping out. So if you’re going to be an asshole and attack me for my viewpoint - at least be correct about how I feel.
But I don’t think that this is a causal relationship but more of a correlation. The real merits is to have school leadership willing to think out of the box and come up with novel solutions for their students’ problems. This could include 4 day weeks, block scheduling, Saturday classes, mandatory parent involvement, improved attendence programs, day-care on campus, etc.
I think the 4-day-week concept depends on what sort of responsibility the kids are given (or can accept) for their own education. The more homework is emphasized as a tool for learning on one’s own, the less important class time becomes. This is obvious in university, for example, when one’s class time rarely goes above 15 hours per week.
Back when I went to school in Kentcuky, the state set a lower limit fro the number of school days per year. I guess that must have changed.
The ultimate test of whether the 4-day week is a good idea comes when the test scores come in. If the scores go up, if students from that district become more competitive when applying for college, and if other means of assessing the district show success, then I’m all for it. On the other hand, the parents there should watch caerfully. If the indicators go down, they need to apply pressure on their politicians to go back to five days.
Logically curriculums are all designed around a five-day week. Switching to four days removes twenty percent of your in-class teaching time. To make it work, teachers would have to redsitribute the material. Presumably that means more material covered on a typical day, and less time for question and answer sessions. However there could be advantages from the long weekend. For instance, teachers could give more involved homework assignments now that the students will have three free days to work on them.
1 They might not be losing a few hours a week. My kids are currently in school from 8:15 to 2:30. In grade school it was 8:30 to 2:30. That’s six hours, or six hours and 15 minutes, depending on grade. By the time you account for lunch, homeroom, class changes and housekeeping issues (such as assignment and collection of homework), you’re down to five hours or less of instructional time. That means they lose an hour or less per week, which may turn out to be meaningless with the longer class periods.
As the economy becomes more global and our kids are being asked to compete with a larger pool for the same jobs, do we really want to have them spendless time in school? Our ranking has already slipped dramatically. They need more time in school, not less.
This assumes that what they learn in school prepares them for the real world. The only thing that prepared me for the real world and has given me a much better competitive edge than my peer has been entering the real world, the workforce, marketplace, etc, earlier.
It’s in the real world that you realize 1) school doesn’t teach you much about the real world, and 2) education is not a ticket to success, but a tool you keep around to use for the right situations.
Again, education improves the chances of success in general, but there are upper limits - some uncontrollable! - that only insight, experience, and pure luck can surpass.