Pay to Stay

Paying for Longer School Days

So some parents came up with an ingenious idea, raise money to pay the staff at their local schools to keep the kids an extra hour. The effort has been made since the Obama administration has stated that longer school days are needed. This push from the article is occuring in Chicago at the Disney II magnet school. The idea is to lengthen the school day in comparison to other cities elementary hours. The magnet school runs just over 5 hours a day for K-5 while other cities average 6 hours or more a day of instruction. Now, I am a proponent of just about any significant change in education because over the past 10 years, there has been a sharp decline in the pursuit of knowledgeable, well-educated, and literate students/citizens. There has been a huge transition to the struggle to make "AYP" under the NCLB act. The days of worrying about what a kid will become when the graduate has ended and it has become more of a focus on what will they score on the end of the year test? Say what you want, but this is the truth. Already in my school, they are doing CRCT remediation for students who scored low last year. Great way to motivate students to do better, take them out of connections (specials, PE, CTAE, fine arts, etc.) and slam them with more Math and Lit once a week. They already have 90 minutes every day of Math and Lit each and only see Science, Soc Studies, and Connections every other day. If they can't get it with 180 min every day, 15 hours a week, they won't get it with extra help. I say we restructure the way we teach the curriculum, take the focus completely off a test and focus on what students should know by certain times, say pay attention to the standards more and you'll make it easier to pass the test. It stresses the kids out enough to be in school, at my school they pretty much shut down around 1 or 2 and they have to stay until 4. Everyone thinks more time in school will do students better, no it won't, not for everyone. Shorten the time in school by at least 2 hours, go from 8 to 2, condense lessons down to important things, restructure the day so students benefit more out of it. There are easier ways to teach these kids and we are not doing them. I love the fact I teach Tech Ed, I would absolutely go crazy if I were a math teacher and my administrator was down my neck every day making sure I am teaching what will be on the test. Let's give these kids something they can take with them for years to come and it will bode better for them on these AYP tests. If all we say is, "addition, subtraction, division, and algebra is all on the test, and you MUST know them" students will not care. However, show them they need it to be an engineer, accountant, McDonald's employee (lol, its still a job though), entreprenuer, financer, investor, and we bring meaning and understanding to our teaching and they score better. End of story.

Who wants to be in school longer?

More School: Obama Would Curtail Summer

I know many have posted about it, but I was very concerned about the report that came out Monday discussing Obama's plans for lengthening the time spent in school. Obama believes that our "agrarian centered" school calendars are outdated and we should spend more time in school because students are falling behind other countries. In the article, the AP states we spend more hours per year in school than students in Asian countries who frequently outscore US students in math and science. The problem has become that time addresses everything, which it does not. We should begin to look at several factors affecting our school systems. This includes the concept of "highly qualified teachers", how instructional time is spent, and the inconsistencies in our national views of education. With the NCLB act, school systems are being forced to comb through massive amounts of applications to find highly qualified teachers. I am amazed at some of the people these systems hire. Just today I went to a meeting on obtaining full certification for my county and was amazed at some of the questions people were asking about how to become a fully certified teacher. They had never taken the time to do research on their own, email our HR department, or had never made the connection between passing a teaching test in Georgia with the Professional Standards Commission. It befuddled me to see adults so lost in their own responsbilities. It made me wonder who is really teaching these students in the classroom if the teacher can't take care of their own business. Secondly, a lot of questioning has come of how we are spending instructional time. There has been a massive movement towards teaching with standards and to restructure the way we teach students. In this comes how we spend the allotted time with them. In my classroom, I do everything I can to maximize the students' LEARNING time and minimize transitions, breaks, or lulls in activity because I only see students for 90 minutes every other day, effectively seeing them for 21 or 22 days out of a 9 weeks period. I see other teachers constantly struggle to have enough work for their students to do all year and I am trying to pack things in right after another. Adding 3 more hours to our already 8 hour day will do nothing but tire teachers out quicker, lull the students to sleep or carelessness faster, and ruin the way we provide effective education. I am personally not going to work an extra 15 hours a week, when I already do that without the students to prepare my room, and not get paid 10 to 15 thousand more a year and ruin my already short summer vacation. In Georgia, we do not go to school from labor day to memorial day. About 95% of schools start around the first week of August and we go until the last week in May. This works out to be 10 months of school with intermittent breaks throughout the school calendar. That is a lot of time spent in school! The 180 days drags out to be about 280 when all weekends and breaks are taken into account. Lastly, when looking at other countries' educational systems, they are all nationally standardized. In the US, we have 51 different systems, rules, and standards. How do we expect to be successful as a whole of millions of students when they have to follow 51 different sets of expectations. It simply cannot be done and be expected to compete at an international level. We are simply wasting more time by adding hours to the school day. If things were done effectively and efficiently, we could probably wipe out about an hour of school a day and be more intelligent that we are now.