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 Obama believes that our "agrarian centered" school calendars are outdated and we should spend more time in school because students are falling behind other countries.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.