Resolved: We need a longer school year

BTW: A debate over whether teachers should make more money annually through higher rates or more paid time might be very interesting.

Wow! I had a meeting this morning, then spent all afternoon painting my house, taking advantage of the good weather before fall closes in, then sat down to my computer to catch up and found 40 replies to my thread. I hope no one thinks I abandoned it.

Just in case anyone doubts, I am proposing an increase in total school hours per year, not just a distribution change.

It would seem that teachers should be paid more if they do more work, and students would spend more time in class, and there would be more learning overall. I think that might be a good thing. The days are long gone where a 8th grade education is all you need to get by. Heck, 50 years ago I had a college roommate, a farmer, who was at the university for a degree to become a better farmer. He was certainly ahead of the curve. Just knowing how to slop the pigs isn’t enough to compete anymore.

My mom was employed as a teacher 10 months a year, and had a choice of receiving her salary in 12 chunks or 10. The annual salary was the same, just the payout changed.

I would imagine a 12 month school year would be about a 20% increase in pay, which would put a serious strain on school finances. Our local school district could not afford it, as the state puts a cap on the tax levy increase, so something would have to give.

Well, that’s me too, but as I am divorced, my ex can watch them for the times I am not available to.

The UK doesn’t have the immense summer holiday that the US does, and I’m glad - as a former teacher and a parent I’d hate it. We basically have six or seven weeks at school, then a week or two off (roughly, depending on when holidays like Christmas and Easter fall), then 6-8 weeks during the summer; one year it was only 5 weeks 5 days for my daughter, one year it was close to 8 weeks.

That leaves enough time for the kids to do long summer projects, have a long time to just hang out and chill out, go to visit parents or other family who live too far away, etc. But it also means you have two weeks at Christmas and Easter, plus a week in October and June, which I think is probably good for said parents who live far away.

Of course, this does depend on things like local childcare being available, but there is local childcare available in the holidays here, except, annoyingly, at Christmas (even outside Christmas Day and Boxing Day).

Ontario: PDF!

9 - 10 weeks off in the summer
2 weeks at Christmas
1 week in March
Plus every other holiday that some get and some don’t.
Ottawa:


Category                  2010-2011             2011-2012
                          Minimum Maximum     Minimum Maximum
1                         47,190    75,397    48,606   77,659
2                         48,886    79,688    50,353   82,079
3                         51,991    86,229    53,551   88,816
4                         53,764    91,892    55,377   94,649

I’m unclear what the categories mean, but it’s not a bad living. Could you teach grade 1 kids, coming right out of teacher’s school, for $48K per year?

Would you be able to handle grade 12 math for a paltry $94K?

Even if we accept that this is true, why is that bad? Would you work 20% more for the same pay and benefits? Especially since it’s not just more hours, but more commutes, fewer days off, etc.

The real problem with doing something like this is the same as with other seemingly sensible things like converting to the metric system or having readily accessible alternative automobile fuels. The is an huge cost to doing this. It’s not just paying teachers, bus drivers, etc. 20% more, it cost much more to run a school during the summer in most states.

You also prevent many kids from getting jobs or internships, and employers from having cheap, temp workers. You basically destroy the bottom line for many other businesses too. Some are obvious, like summer camps. Others, like movie theaters, hotels, theme parks, beaches, etc. are less obvious.

That’s not to say you can’t extend the school year, but there will be plenty of consequences that need to be weighed beyond upsetting teachers for a marginal upside.

And this is often given as a reason why CPS (Chicago Public Schools) can’t switch to the year round calendar at all of its schools - although it has at some. We have a lot of ~100 year old buildings without air conditioning, and without the proper kind of ductwork to put in air conditioning. These buildings were built with no intention of keeping them cool during the summer, because of course you’d close your schools in the summer. So opening windows isn’t even always an option, and when it is, there’s no cross-ventilation. My daughter’s classroom has two very large fans going (which is pretty noisy) and the poor things are still sweating up a storm…and it’s only been in the 80’s this week. One kid passed out from the heat today, and they sent home a note requesting no long sleeves and allowing water bottles at the desks! It would be truly unbearable in July and August without running expensive window unit AC in each classroom or major renovations to the whole building.

I suppose 1552–the number of hours I’m required to be at work this year–is “a little over 1200.” Add in an extra 183 for the minimum additional hours I put in during the year (I almost never leave before I’ve done less than a nine-hour day, and usually put in more), and we’re at 1735. On top of that add evening events, early-morning events, Saturdays I go in to work, Sundays I work at home, and pretty soon we’re talking some real hours.

So no, 1200 hours is not remotely accurate.

Hell, my daughter’s in school 1260 hours this school year. She’s 7. I expect her teachers put in at least a few more minutes each day. :wink:
My mom was a teacher. I have very few childhood memories of her that don’t involve her holding a red pen sitting at the dining room table for hours and hours every night…except all those memories of hours and hours in her empty classroom helping her put up bulletin boards, run copies, collate endless packets, and those hours in the teacher’s store where she’d buy classroom supplies (out of pocket, of course) and the hours at K-Mart’s Back to School sales where she’d buy folders, notebook paper, spiral notebooks and other school supplies for her students (likewise out of pocket).

Of course, she did have all those weeks off in the summer. Weeks when she worked as a tutor to make ends meet, and worked on cumm. folders for the past year, and cumm. folders for the upcoming year, and lesson plans and more damned bulletin boards… The time she spent with her students was, very literally, the least part of her job, time wise.

Yeah, what a slacker. It’s a shame someone didn’t make her work longer hours for the same pay with threat of firing hanging over her head.

That’s more than the scheduled time for teachers around here. You should certainly be paid commensurate with the scheduled hours. I still don’t know what the argument is though. Teachers don’t work as many hours as most salaried employees with the same level of skill and education, and I don’t see any evidence that their pay isn’t comparable. I’m not knocking teachers in any way. I’m stating the facts.

There’s no clear relationship between hours in school and real learning. There’s not even a clear relationship in test scores. The reason I make the distinction is that testing well doesn’t mean anything about real ability, as anybody who has studied education more than cursorily knows.

Finland has probably the best outcomes in the world, but they don’t even give regular tests, much less regular standardized tests. Teacher contact hours are lower than most countries in the EU, but their outcomes are better, probably because they do spend a lot of time outside the classroom on preparation and lesson planning. The teachers are trained well and paid accordingly.

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/people-places/Why-Are-Finlands-Schools-Successful.html?c=y&page=1

Some people point to Asia for examples of the opposite approach; lots of classroom hours and few days off. Japanese school kids spend (on paper) at least 40 days more in school than US schools. They go to school for half-days on Saturday. (Even though the Ministry of Education published guidelines that cut mandatory Saturday classes to give students time to develop lives and skills outside the classroom or to consolidate information on their own time, most public schools still have “enrichment” days on Saturday, and private schools just ignored the guidelines.) They also have shorter summer breaks than the US.

Do the Japanese test well? Yep. Everything in their future rides on a couple of tests. They prepare for those tests rigorously.

Know what, though? A passing grade on regular tests in Japan is 30%. The hard part is passing the entrance exam, after that, it’s almost impossible to fail. You have to test well to get into a good middle school, high school, and university. That’s it. The big test is the university exam. Entrance to Tokyo University (Todai) is the holy grail. If you get in there, you are virtually guaranteed to be among the movers and shakers in Japan. To get into a good university, the test is the main thing. They take a cursory look at discipline problems and participation in one of the virtually mandatory sports or cultural clubs, but both grades and extracurricular activities aren’t given nearly the weight they have in the US.

Guess where Todai is ranked internationally for quality of education. Twenty-first or 30th depending on the source. That’s supposedly the best university in Japan. If you look at published research, it’s even more dismal. Japanese do very little original research. Award-winning Japanese scientists are almost always part of an international team working outside of Japan.

Why? No critical thinking skills. None. The whole education system rewards brute-force rote memorization and fact regurgitation. Of course they test well, it’s the focus of the system from first grade on. But even with all that time and sacrifice, they aren’t first in the world.

Ask a Japanese person what his or her hobbies are, and you will get a puzzled look and the correction to hobby — singular — since no one has time for more than one. And most of the time, you’ll get a response like, “I really like watching TV,” or “Shopping!” or “Playing golf,” (even though he probably hasn’t played more than 3–4 days in the last year).

The social cost of all that time in school and exclusive focus on testing is enormous. Businesses are the main source of technological advancement, which is why there are a relatively large number of patents coming out of Japan, but pure research lags severely.

If you want to revamp the US education system, I could probably put together a long list of changes that probably should be made, that would extensively change the entire system. Cutting summer vacations shorter would be somewhere around the bottom of the list in importance, because it really doesn’t matter compared to all the other things you could do to improve outcomes.

Students are the only ones who take summer jobs.

No, (you would have to pay me much more than that to control 25 first graders), and no (I hate math at that level).

I would guess the categories are related to their education. In Ohio teachers have different levels of pay based on their college degree; someone who has their Masters Degree with an additional 45 hours of classes can make more than someone who just finished their Masters.

Also, in Ohio (my location) teachers in public schools are required to have a Masters Degree by (IIRC) their 10th year of teaching. My wife (who just left teaching) finished paying off her student loans for her Bachelor’s and is now paying her student loans for her Master’s.

When my wife started it was for about 35k, and it was one of the richer districts in the state.

I do know a public school teacher who makes somewhere over $70k. She has her Master’s with an additional 45 hours of college classes and has been in the same school district for . . . hmm . . . she’s been there long enough that she is currently teaching a child of a student she had.

ETA - As far as the OP’s question, most teachers I know are all for year round schooling. Not sure as to increasing the actual number of days though.

Have you tried comparing teacher lifetime earning to those of other fields? That might be a good place to start.

One of the reasons I won’t teach is that you are stuck with a slow, inflexible salary schedule with a low ceiling. It may not be terrible at first, but it will never be great. Ever.

In most other educated professional fields, there is much more opportunity for valuable employees to be promoted quickly and often the sky is the limit as to how much you could potentially make. As a teacher, each small promotion takes years, and there are only so many of them.

That doesn’t have anything to do with my point. I don’t argue that teachers are disadvantaged because of the lower number of hours available to work. Or what you have added, that they don’t have the same opportunities for advancement.

I remember there being a debate over this very subject, back when I was in school… over 25 years ago.

Their time off is a part of their compensation package, just like everyone else’s.

It’s not like everyone elses, because teachers get much more time off. The typical white collar will start with about 20 days off per year from vacation and holidays. Teachers will get 50-60 days off. It’s ridiculous to compare anything but the hourly rate for scheduled hours because the situations are so different. And I don’t believe the claims that teachers put in more unpaid time in total or as a percentage than typical white collar workers.

I don’t know how much more clearly to state this. Teachers get paid an hourly rate for their work comparable to typical white collar workers with the same level of skill and education. It is an unfortunate problem in the system that they don’t get to work the same number of paid hours as in other professions, or have the same opportunity for advancement. And it’s also something that could be changed to comparable full time employment for teachers without extending the number of annual classroom hours for the students.

Here are Left Hand’s numbers:

Teacher starting salary - $30,377
Scheduled hours 1552
Hourly rate - $19.57

Computer programmer starting salary - $43,635
Scheduled hours 1920
Hourly rate - $22.72

That is comparable pay. It’s also more hours than teachers are scheduled for around here. Best I can tell at the moment it’s about 1350 hours here, which produces a rate of $22.50, very nearly equal to the computer programmer pay.

There is a difference between getting paid at a lower rate, and having less paid hours available. The rate of pay for teachers is not out of line with similar professions, the difference is in the maximum number of paid hours available. And that computer programmer will be putting in plenty of additional hours without pay also.