Is it a good idea to have longer school days?

Great Debates
1

http://azstarnet.com/news/310869

"Obama says American kids spend too little time in school, putting them at a disadvantage compared with other students around the globe…

"The president… wants schools to add time to classes, to stay open late and to let kids in on weekends so they have a safe place to go.

““Our school calendar is based upon the agrarian economy, and not too many of our kids are working the fields today,” Education Secretary Arne Duncan said in a recent interview with The Associated Press.”

I have to say I like this idea. I think it is a mistake to have these 3 month long summer breaks because the kids forget so much that the teachers have to spend at least a month at the begining of the year reviewing what they learned last year.

What do you think about this proposal?

2

I think more school days is fine.

I think longer school days is not fine. Kids need more sleep and I wouldn’t want to reduce their days to school and homework. They still need to squeeze in time to just be a kid, after all.

3

They talk in the article about KIPP schools that do very well and have very long days. But most of the kids who attend the KIPP schools come from poverty stricken backgrounds and I think staying a long time in school keeps them away from drugs and gangs.

But for other children who are less at risk, I don’t see very long days as an advantage. It is more taking away time from basketball practice and piano lessons. Or just handing out and playing with water guns or legos.

But I think a shorter summer vacation would be a large benefit.

4

They talk in the article about KIPP schools that do very well and have very long days. But most of the kids who attend the KIPP schools come from poverty stricken backgrounds and I think staying a long time in school keeps them away from drugs and gangs.

But for other children who are less at risk, I don’t see very long days as an advantage. It is more taking away time from basketball practice and piano lessons. Or just handing out and playing with water guns or legos.

But I think a shorter summer vacation would be a large benefit.

5

The article is all over the place, and it’s confounding several distinct points:

  1. A trying to improve the U.S. “national advantage” over other countries.

    Many countries, especially developed ones in Asia, may not have more hours of official public school time, but if a kid in Korea, for example, wants to get into a university of any stature, he or she must take all kinds of supplementary classes later in the day with tutors, etc.

  2. Longer days vs. longer school year. None of this means anything, nor can they be compared, unless you stipulate what is done in the extra time. In many ways, for instance, you can consider summer camp as a form of school. It socializes children and teaches them problem solving skills.

  3. The value of having a physical plant available to school-aged children simply as a safe place to be and develop outside of the home or neighborhood streets. This is very important in lower-income areas, and generally, simply being around books and other printed material improves academic performance, whether there are classes or not.

  4. The socially prevalent notion that school is a form of “punishment” which all children by nature wish to avoid. This, of course, has a lot to do with how many–if not most–schools function, but it might go back to the “agrarian” economy mentioned in the article–i.e., school is where you learn how to behave, whether you want to or not.

Until you look at these things, the question is pretty hard to answer, and even more so since public schools in the U.S. are mostly locally governed.

6

I’m not even sure that the premise is true. My boss is Russian, and she says that school days in the U.S. are much longer than in the rest of the world.

7

Canada has pretty good schools. My daughter is in grade 7. She starts class at 8:50. She gets 40 minutes for lunch, two 7-minute ‘nutrition breaks’, six minutes of ‘locker breaks’, and school ends at 3pm. She gets exactly 5 hours a day of instructional time per day.

How does that compare to US schools?

8

I think less summer would be fine even if they had the same number of days as now. Just distribute the vacation more evenly.

More time in school? No. Kids need time for sports, sleep, friends and family.

One of the major problems I have with this article is pounding in that other countries have better test scores than the U.S. and therefore we need to increase our school time. For one thing how honestly are their test scores reported?

And so what if their test scores are higher. Kids who do well in math and science go into careers that need math and science. Forcing every child to do well in all subjects is pointless when they will naturally gravitate away from jobs doing what they hate. Once kids have a good knowledge of a variety of subjects they can find careers they’re suited for.

Is America lacking in doctors, computer programmers or scientists because our schools supposedly aren’t good enough?

What America needs isn’t to keep kids in school longer it’s to use the time there more efficiently and to not try trendy new curriculum that often don’t work and get kids behind.

I also think the schools should be funded differently so there isn’t such a huge difference in quality of schools in different areas.

9

No, I am very uncomfortable with the notion of decoupling children from family life for the sole purpose of making the state more competitive in the global market.

Sure Chinese children do better but they are also under an insane amount of stress. Competing for global capital is not the only reason for life. Children deserve to have a childhood.

10

What schools really need to do is stop with this ADHD bell system where you spend 5-10 minutes getting the kids to calm down, get them into the curriculum and by the time they are engaged the bell rings and off to another class. Instead of having say five or six classes a day, how about two classes a day with subjects staggered around?

There are lots of things that could be done to improve schools, taking away more of their childhood is not one of them.

11

On the other hand…a lot of kids DO need that break from school. I would have gone NUTS had I been in school year round…and I actually liked school!
Stuff like summer camps and “just being a kid” is important too. Besides…a lot of the rankings are kind of arbitarty. Korea and other countries are really good at testing well…but they’re not good at creative thinking etc.

12

Oh, and don’t you think that changing the summer break would mess up our economy? I mean summer camps, places that depend on summer stuff etc…
Why not have a mixed selection…year round schools for kids who need it, and traditional school for kids who need it too?

13

I teach in Asia. Trust me, Asia’s schooling methods is not compatible with American values.

American school systems are designed to turn students into independent and well-rounded adults with a solid foundation in some basic subjects, critical thinking skills, writing skills and text analysis skills.

Asian schools are designed to get students to pass standardized tests. And yeah, they are awesome at standardized tests.

Chinese school children- especially high school children- often go to school until 8:00 at night or later. They study hard and are under enormous amounts of pressure, because their test scores determine their entire possibilities for life.

As a result, my students walk into college having never earned their own money, stolen a kiss, had a hobby, explored their town, traveled on their own, etc. They’ve never had time to do the things we consider standard markers of maturity- working, having boyfriends/girlfriends, developing your own personal interests, etc. They literally do not know what they like or do not like, because for the last years of their life they’ve never had more than one or two hours of undirected free time. College life comes as a blow to them- they have no clue how to fill their free time. Many of my students report they have “an empty feeling inside”- probably because they never had time to develop their identities as individuals. The general consensus is that our students are 3-5 years behind in maturity that the equivalent American students. I teach my college course to a low-high school maturity level.

Not to mention that untested skills- critical thinking, research, text analysis, even spoken English (students focus on tested grammar and vocab, and often could couldn’t care less if they can actually communicate with the language) are severely neglected.

Anyway, this works in China, because it’s collective culture means that people make very few individual decisions- for example, most of my students had no say in what major they took and many actively hate their major Even things like marriage and where to take vacations are not really individual decisions.

But it’s not a good plan for America, where we expect people to be independent and ready to be responsible for their entire life at age 18. Americans spend all day making individual decisions. We need high school graduates that are mature and ready for that.

14

This last post makes a lot of what I’ve read about China and online MMORPGs suddenly make a lot of sense…

15

Not in an significant sense really. Right now I think our district has about 10 weeks off during the summer. Even if we cut that number in HALF kids would still have a FULL MONTH to go to camp, go on vacations with the family, etc.

How would a kid NEED the summer off? Sure, some get jobs but I can’t believe that money is really needed in any significant way. And having the rest of them in school would mean even those that ARE ahead of the class will be learning more.

My change would be to move high school start times back AT LEAST two hours. I know parents that are able to drop their kids off then go back to sleep before having to go to work. “This will interfere with school sports”…SCREW 'EM. If they’re so dedicated to their craft, let them get their ass up at 6:30 in the morning. This has the added benefit of decreasing the dead time kids have after school where they usually end up finding a way to get into trouble.

16

My friends in L.A. are on year-long school which means three months on, one month off, so they have time for camp, vacations, etc. It works pretty well for them.

17

For a couple years I went to a private school that had a funky schedule … 5 or 6 weeks, then a week off [sometimes it was tweaked so that the week of christmas and the week of easter were vacation weeks] and it went all year long but because of the schedule it was the same amount of vacation time as was normal.

I adored it, as you never had time to forget everything you learned over the summer vacation, there was always a week off coming up shortly, and you could actually do stuff like go somewhere and ski, or swim, or whatever for a real amount of time. 3 day vacations like we normally have just do not let you have enough time to get away, all you can do is ‘staycation’ I also did some time out of the US in a school that had a half day of school on wednesday, and half a day on saturday [and a break at midday where the locals got to go home for an hour long lunch] so I dont think adding study time on a saturday would be a bad idea.

Maybe format the saturday schedule as a giant study hall, with access to the school computers and library for concentrating on homework and more private tutoring, and teachers office hours where they can sit in the rooms and grade papers and projects, and be available for questions like a university professor has hours.

18

My local school district does this. They have longer, but fewer, classes each day. The amount of instructional time is spread out over each six-day cycle, similar to a college schedule.

What I think would improve things is if there was less compartmentalization in secondary education. For example, history teachers can help reinforce reading comprehension and writing skills, but because reading and writing are thought of as “English”, a good opportunity is gone. This would also teach students that, yes, reading, writing and math are real world, and no, we’re not joking when we say they’re important.

19

Last week our staff was polled about extending our school day by 15 minutes. The vote was overwhelmingly against doing so. This probably has something to do with the three different kinds of pay cuts we’ve taken in the past six months.

If we’re gonna do this, we need to be sure to increase teacher pay correspondingly.

Extending the school year, however, is a fine idea IMO. Stagger the breaks throughout the year, but kids don’t really need two months break at a time. I’m assessing my students right now on their reading, and I’ve got a few students that have dropped over an entire grade level in reading since their end-of-grade assessments last year. It’s incredibly depressing.

20

The Netherlands education system has seen a lot of changes in the last decade. School hours are still (in primary/elementary school) 8.20 am to 3.30 pm.
And kids have 7 weeks of school holiday.

Most relevant to the OP is that schools are now obliged to offer some form of activity between school hours and parents coming home from work. Parents can choose to enroll their kids or not, as they please. The after school activty can be homework, but it can also just be a place where the kids can relax, but where there is supervision. Some schools have deals with sports clubs.