In response to No Child Left Behind, failing or almost failing schools are looking to lengthen the school day by as little as 30 minutes and as much as 2 hours. "Sen Edward M Kennedy is proposing $50 million-a-year increase in funding of No Child Left Behind to train corps of 40,000 teachers to help schools redesign academic content for extra hours." However, many people are not a fan of this legislation. Parents feel that their children are already in school long enough, teachers need to worry about getting paid adequately, and communities who do not get extra time feel that their students will be behind the other students who stay longer and receive more attention.
Personally, the time extension is a sad and poor response to the failing state of many schools after No Child Left Behind mandated a label for these "at risk" schools. In order to be effective in helping the failing schools, the federal goverment needs to get at the source of the problem, which is NOT that the 7 hours is not enough for students. Instead, the federal government should provide monetary aid to at risk schools who do not have the resources (textbooks, computers, blackboards, etc.) to give their students a chance at success. Other schools that do not have a resource issue most likely have adequate test scores. If teachers, though, cannot get through to their students because they do not have the resources to do it, then extending the time at school will not help! Longer hours will not give teachers more computers, better books, bigger budgets, etc. Only funding will do that.
My proposal for more government spending stems from the fact that failing schools, under NCLB, lose their government funding. Is this not unfair? How can failing schools pick up their test scores if they lose their funding? No offense, but the word "DUH..." comes to mind!
Let's see...longer hours + angry students + frustrated parents = higher test scores?
I am NOT a math major...but this equation is all wrong!
source: http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F10813FA39540C758EDDAA0894DF404482
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5 comments:
Yeah... longer school days DO NOT seem like an appropriate response to failing schools.... hmm, let's see... students hate school and are failing, so let's make them stay even longer, hate it even more, and fail even worse...
Yeah.
It seems to me that the reason kids, and subsequently their schools, are failing is not because of short school days but because of *ahem* crappy teaching... Maybe all those billions of dollars should be spent re-educating the failing teachers on how better to educate students?
Longer school days really does not seem like a way to improve test scores, or learning in general for that matter. Honestly, if people really want to increase student learning, class activities need to be more productive. Adding more time to the school day is a solution that would have endless results, as many teachers would just continue to waste time with meaningless classroom activities. Try workshops for teachers to use class time for wothwhile and meaningful activities that students can actually learn from--not expanding more time to the day so teachers can pop in more videos to put students to sleep.
Jami
This is a very interesting post and I am sad to report that the school that my mother teaches in has already begun this process. Some students are gettig picked up by the school bus as early as 5:45 to make it to school by 7 since the new reading program begins at 7:15 in the morning - prior to the full day of classes. This is the more absurd suggesstion I have ever heard of and the faculty and parents are LIVID about it. The students get to school at 7 in the morning, still half asleep, not in the mood to read of all things, and are probably still chewing their breakfast. I'm not math major either but your answer sounds 100% correct. How is this going to make test scores any better when student's brains aren't even functioning at that hour - let alone have reading lessons at that hour for the whole year? It's ridiculous!
Staci, important topic to take on for sure. This is one of the many suggested "reforms" that would improve test scores especially for children in poverty. I have mixed feelings about it. If extra time were spent on meaningful literacy activities I might support a longer school day. I don't know. Since I believe we waste so much time in school as it is--with meaningless activities--It would depend on how the rest of the hours in school were being utilized.
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