According to the Associated Press, schools in Massachusetts, New Mexico, DC, New York, and others are experimenting (or considering experimenting) with an eight-hour school day. Here is a key section to the article:
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An important impetus for the debate around extending school hours is the federal No Child Left Behind law.
The five-year-old law requires annual testing in reading and math for grades three through eight, and again in high school. All students are expected to be working on grade level by 2014.
Schools that fail to meet annual benchmarks are labeled as needing improvement and have to take steps to address the problem.
Up against such a tough requirement, extending the day makes sense, Harris said. “If you want kids to read, and you want to teach them how to read, they have to have time reading,” she said.
Read the rest of the article here.
7 responses so far ↓
Julie K in Taiwan // Feb 25, 2007 at 6:46 am
I’m interested in seeing the comments that result from this post. I’m a teacher in Taiwan and the students in my jr/sr high school start at 7:30am and go to 5:05 Some of the 1st and 2nd year jr students have elective classes that keep them until 9pm while the sr students stay that late at least three times a week.
t-bird // Feb 25, 2007 at 9:17 am
hmm, not sure on this one! In the UK an awful lot of kids go to “breakfast club” before school and “homework club” afterwards in order to fit round parent’s schedules and if the idea of extending hours was on that sort of model (more relaxed times at either end of the day with “edutainment” laid on rather than full on for the whole time) then I can see it would work. If however it’s jut going to be a few more hours of making the “less able” kids feel like **** by banging on and on with more and more torturous reading practice etc then I can see it just fouling up things more than they are now sadly.
Meg // Feb 25, 2007 at 2:20 pm
When can a kid just be a kid? When can they build forts and ride bikes and learn to swim? How about family time?
My girlfriend’s kindergartener was attending a public school that was considered year round. They got the month of July off.
What’s next?
That being said, I love the idea of more specials and interesting classes. When will policy makers identify these as true learning opportunities and build them into the existing school day?
mcewen // Feb 25, 2007 at 3:21 pm
It’s a balancing act that I would care to juggle with, however I would like to extend the school day by one period or unit [depending on their timetable system] to include the following;
art, music, PE [daily, and long enough session to play a match game], computer clubs because despite our affluent society their are pockets of poverty and I can think of a few others………….
How come most of of these activities used to fit INTO the school day, and now they don’t - that’s a math problem I’d like us all to figure out.
Cheers
InTheFastLane // Feb 25, 2007 at 3:24 pm
I think it will be a difficult sell. Kids these days already have a lot of things they do after school. And then there are the kids who already don’t enjoy school all that much. Forcing them to be there even longer, doing something that they do not enjoy, does not seem to be the way to bring them up to grade level.
I think the problem is the unrealistic idea that all kids can work at grade level if given the opportunity. The fact of the matter is that some kids will Never be at grade level, no matter how great the educational system is. And in the U.S. we teach and test these kids with the same standards that we teach and test the average and above average kids.
In fact, in my state, we were required to give grade level state tests to kids who have IQs in the 60s. And we were also required to give these same tests to students who did not speak English because they had only been in the country for 4 months.
To me, the biggest problem is the fact that we educate everyone at the same level just because of their chronological age, whether it makes sense or not for that kid,
Steve Sherlock // Feb 25, 2007 at 8:12 pm
All good points but let me take a little different tack. What if we considered year round schooling? The current calendar was built to accommodate the farming community from years ago. There are different versions of year round calendars but the one that makes the most sense to me is 9 weeks on, 3 weeks off. There are so mnay benefits possible to this, the comment is too limiting.
Whitney // Feb 26, 2007 at 11:03 am
I agree with Steve that the farm scheduling makes little sense- there’s another proposal that would do an 8 on 2 off type of schedule, that in the 2 off, kids who needed extra help could be re-mediated.
What this would do, while matching up education to the rest of the world’s calendars, is really mess up summer camps, beach houses, and the communities and economies that depend on seasonal business, at least until they, too, adapt to a changing schedule. I think this is probably the biggest hurdle in places like NJ, that have active “shoreline” based communities with significant inflow of summer residents from all over.
The Bottom line issue is that education, from the curriculum to the calendar, has been created in a “one size fits all” framework that does little to respond to the special needs of students, whether that’s gifted students, students in need of specialized education, or ESL.
Ok- you guys have given me the kick in the tush I need. Anyone interested in participating in a new, open format podcast on education, called “Partners in Education” - bringing educators and parents together to talk and learn from each others perspectives, please email me at ldpodcast@gmail.com. We’ll get a list together and try a new service called talkshoe, that can let people participate in a podcast like a call in radio show- It’s cool!
Whitney Hoffman
The LD Podcast
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