Should we have a longer school year?

School year round, with one week off each quarter.

All students are not made equal, either by desire, motivation or skill. Therefore not all students need to be mainlined into the same scholastic curriculum. Offer different disciplines and honor vocation, apprenticeship and mastery. Not all learning is done in classrooms.

In trying to become a leader, United States students, instructors and educational administrators have proven to be followers. It’s time to rethink the long term vision, mission and goals of an education system.

I’m an instructor (higher education, not union, not full time).

I’m wondering how many of these respondants have EVER spent an entire day at a childs school, perhaps helping with math and reading…

I have, and I must say the parents are a huge part of the problems in the public schools. They need to understand it is NOT just daycare!!

I’m convinced a longer school year is required, to keep the students “on task.”

The world’s average school year is 200 days per year. In the United States it is 180 days; in Japan it is 243 days.

Seems pretty obvious why they’re better at math and science.

It is a good idea but the tourism industry would freak out. Just look at the trouble schools get into starting before labor day. Parents would freak out over loss of summer vacations. and kids are not widgets the business model and free market capitalism is not a good idea for children. I assume teachers would be expected to work 2 more months a year for no more pay. Teachers are NOT the source of all evil in the universe. If you think it can be done better quit your corporate job and go get a teaching job and show us how it it done.

As usual, ill-considered fixes to imagined problems in education utterly miss the point.

The point is that our public education system is fundamentally sound right now, and whatever issues exist are all related to money.

Suppose we had paid to implement a longer school year 20 years ago. Since the state has been issuing IOUs instead of money to schools, how would that look now? Would the Great Recession have been avoided if only we had implemented a longer school year?

Or, imagine that we graduate a state full of math and science whizzes this coming spring. That’s an awful lot of eager and freshly “competitive” new workers. What are the names of the Minnesota companies that are prepared to hire every one of them? There is no subset of Minnesota companies saying “we’re prepared to hire all of these kids, and more, if only their school year had been longer, or had focused a little more on math and science.”

A lot of people throw out buzz-phrases like “competitive in a global economy.” What, exactly, does it mean to be “competitive?” Would new workers, who presumably benefited from our “reformed” educational system, be the exact thing needed to stop companies from shipping jobs to elsewhere in the global economy where workers cost less?

What assurance do we have that, should we “fix” an education system that isn’t really broken, prosperity for us all will magically appear?

The teacher-bashing that has become so popular has got to stop. I just don’t believe the notion that there are too many poor-performing teachers that need to go.

That’s not to say there aren’t things that could be better; there always are.

I might start with the salaries that administrators make. Administrators and principals routinely make six figure salaries. One principal job costs the same as three teachers. Isn’t it reasonable to wonder, by making administrator salaries so high, to what extent do we attract short-term, career-centric ladder-climbers more than people who will better lead and motivate their teaching staffs?

A benefit of lowering administrator salaries could be more teaching jobs, which could mean lower class sizes. In a smaller class more kids who struggle could get the additional attention they need to help them be successful in school.

Right now there is a glut of unemployed and underemployed teachers. That glut will grow bigger still in the spring. Numerous school districts are already considering additional layoffs. In such an environment, it’s hard to justify such high administrator salaries.

It’s also hard to understand how alternative licensure, which would add to the already-large quantity of unemployed teachers, would do anything other than lower teacher wages. A better idea might be to make school districts focus their recruiting efforts among the state’s already licensed teachers, and grant license variances to already-licensed teachers for any areas the districts feel are hard to fill.

Other problems that could be addressed include putting less focus on math and science and more on social studies and language arts. Math and science are great, but most of the world’s problems are social or cultural clashes.

At the moment what we have is high-paid management, and too many unemployed workers competing for too few low-paying teaching jobs. That is the American story.

By the way, economics is a social studies discipline. A little more focus on social studies might include more focus on economics. A better understanding of economics actually might have helped us avoid the Great Recession.

I don’t think it would be unwise to consider a longer school year. Our traditional educational schedule was initially implemented to accomodate farmers, so that kids were available in the summertime to help out on the farm and with the harvest.

Thanks to big agriculture, that’s no longer an issue for most American families.

Tony makes a GREAT point about placing more emphasis on language arts and social sciences, and I also agree with his stance on administrators. My parents are both teachers (well, one was, until his job was cut way back and he was essentially forced into retirement after spending his entire teaching career at a single school) , and had very different experiences at their schools based on what the administrative leadership was like.

I think school should be year round with periodic breaks throughout the year. Students lose too much knowledge during their summer vacation and teachers are forced to reteach material that the student should already no. This causes an even shorter amount of time for new learning. The system we have no is outdated. The long summer break was for the farming student to be able to help their families during the busy summer season, but now most students live in urban areas that negates the need for the long summer break.

We should have a longer school year. Focusing on Minnesota for a minute (I realize Obama was addressing a national situation), at the very least we should require 180 days of school.

Ideally, we should have year-round school, although I think Rose’s suggestion that students receive only a week-long break every quarter is too severe. While many students couldn’t take advantage of longer breaks, some could use breaks of two to four weeks to spend unrushed time with a far-flung relative (including spending time with a non-custodial parent who lives out of state), join their family for a longer-than-normal vacation, immerse themselves in a foreign language or work full time to save for college.

We should but I don’t think the districts can afford it. Right now, I am paid for 183 days a year. If we raise that number, I’d have to be paid higher and the districts are too simply strapped for cash now. Local taxes would go up – state taxes possibly too. And at least one of the gubenatorial candidates wants to reduce money to schools. Ok, just one. Local communities are also strapped.

Many of our young teachers take a separate job in the summer to make it. Some of those jobs pay more than their teaching jobs.

Teachers don’t go into teaching for the money, but we do need to support ourselves and our families.

As to our administrators earning 6 figures? Not where we live and I’m in the metro area. And if they did, they earn it. They are here often 12 hours a day. They are in charge of teachers, cooks, janitors, support staff, STUDENTS, reporting to parents and the school board, dealing with the police and other agencies. You could not pay me enough to take on that job. I could not do my job without them.

The idea that we are beholden to the state fair makes me crazy. It is a private organization – it is not a state run company. It’s a FOR PROFIT. So why is the tail wagging the dog?

But if we are truly going to be competitive in the global economy, we need to be serious about more education. And we need to require a foreign language from elementary. We are so far behind other countries in language, it’s ridiculous.

Just my musings sitting on my prep….

Absolutely. My oldest child have the opportunity to attend year-round school when I was stationed in San Antonio. For every 8 weeks of instruction they got two weeks off and went to school for 6 weeks in the Summer. The amount of material they were able to cover was greater, Adam never sang the “I’m so sick of school” blues and they did not spend weeks reviewing material that was forgotten over the Summer. When he went back to a traditional school year he complained of being “bored” and missed his old school. Only Americans think we can get the same results others get with less work.

Yes, we need a longer school year and a longer school day. We need to make it a priority to figure out a way to pay for it. I would hope that those longer hours in school could be translated into more time for physical education, music, art, more time to use science labs, and do social studies projects, and be less high pressure and stressful for both students and teachers. Our neighbors the Canadians seem to make a longer school day and a 10 month school year work very well, and their immigrant children spend their summer vacations in immersion language programs.

I am old enough to have been part of a generation that spent 3 1/2 summer months working in the fields, and city children came to spend the summmer with grandparents or aunts and uncles and do the same, but those days are long gone. I see today’s parents scrambling to provide summer day care or worrying because they can’t and their kids are on the streets. I know of private schools for disadvantaged inner-city kids that have a longer school day and longer school year with very good results.

HECK YES!

I hated the fact that during the summer you forget most of what you learned during the year and would have 1/3 of the year recapping.

Summer breaks were for when we were all farmers.

And even the Farmers are more industrialized that they are not needing ALL THAT time off.

We should be year round and have 3 day weekends. Enough to either relax, catch up on school projects, or do our own thing.

The countries that are ahead of us have this as the cornerstone of their success. We keep saying its something else and refusing to face the facts.

And the reason is there are lobbyists who fight to keep the schedule the way it is.

Real school reform will not occur until removal of lobbyists and heavy regulations on their activities is finally put into place.

Yes! Asian schools don’t take three months off every year. If we are to compete, we can’t do it. It’s a throw-back to an agrarian society, and we aren’t anymore. They State Fair should be irrelevant to it all.

If we want to compete with the rest of the globalized world, we’d better start sending our kids to school more often than 9 months of the year and probably for longer daytimes too. There’s a reason why Japan and China and socialist nations like Norway and Sweden, continue to generate top scientists after scientists after scientists. Their kids stay in school pretty much most of the year. Meanwhile, we Americans act like children are still coming home to farm chores after a 5 hour day of arithmetic, reading, writing, and gym. It’s embarrassing. Trouble is, teachers, parents, conservatives, and child care providers will balk.

Many parents wait for the school year to end to travel as a family, this is part of the learning process too. Makes students stay longer in school during the day and develop more technology and science programs.

One other thing that I forgot to mention, it has been planted in our minds that as students we go to school for roughly 9 months out of the year. In reality, we only attend for about 185 days which is equivalent to just 6 MONTHS: not 9.

So for all of those people out there saying that there isn’t enough time for students to do things with their families like vacations, you currently have (not counting weekends) AT LEAST 4 months (summer vacation and holiday breaks) of time where students are not attending school.

I believe that we should get a choice (school vote-off) to individually decide what we want to do!!!! I have a dream…of no more school!!!!

hello, people

Damn it i hate school especially senior year of junior highschool….