<p>This is total BS. I would never want my kids to be educated in Asia. </p>
<p>Just look around why would families from the rest of the world send their children to US, paying big bucks, to get an US education? That pretty much speak for itself, and yet our folks in education keep looking for reforms and breaking the system that worked well by wasting money on a lot of non-education related expenses…</p>
<p>The answer is not more time for school, but getting the kids motivated in learning. The learning and the gratification will perpetuate. Anyone can be turned into super-achiever, once he tastes success, the confidence grows, there is no turning back.</p>
<p>The public school system is a useless place to educate children, and I am currently of the opinion, after some recent reading, that is entirely misguided to put kids into a useless system for MORE time than they are already wasting there.</p>
<p>Even the teachers think kids succeed or fail based on parental involvement:</p>
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<p>Obviously teachers have little to offer. What we really need to do is to find an entirely new system which actually gives the kids what they “need.” But, it’ll never happen.</p>
<p>I agree. I mentioned the article to my son and he asked,“Why don’t they just move through the material 20 percent faster?” There is an awful lot of repetition until the dumbest member of the class sort of “gets it.” In most other school systems, at least by high school, the ones who don’t get it are off learning a vocation or otherwise no longer in the school system.</p>
<p>If we just extended the school year, the current material would simply be stretched so that it’s presented even more slowly. The entire K-12 curriculum would have to first be changed to have any positive impact.</p>
<p>poetgrl: Parental involvement is very critical. It is hard to reach kids who have high rates of being absent or who come to school too tired to focus because of problems at home or lack of supervision or they are not getting to bed at a reasonable time. I will have kids miss school because of a fight with mom or dad that led them to move out to live with someone else. I have kids miss school because parents decide to take them on vacation during the school year. It isn’t easy to come back to school after an extended absence and have to get caught up before whatever is going on in class makes sense. </p>
<p>Second. Parents need to provide an environment conducive to learning, like a quiet place to do homework. And even teenagers need enough supervision to make good choices regarding school. “Do I go out with my friends tonight even though I need to finish a paper due tomorrow?” Many teenagers are not mature enough to make the right decision, but guidance by a mature parent could encourage that. </p>
<p>Last. You knock down public school. Ask a private school teacher how much they would accomplish with students who are frequently absent or have so many concerns outside of the classroom that they struggle to focus in the classroom. In public school we can’t hand select our “clientele.” We accept all students and we do everything we can to help them succeed. I don’t know of a teacher who doesn’t want all of their students to succeed, but we have to accept we can’t fix the world. </p>
<p>Look at any study out there and it will consistently show that kids from stable homes that encourage reading and learning succeed academically far more than kids from unstable homes. This instability is not created by public schools, but by the adults in homes.</p>
<p>Many public schools do offer accelerated programs for academically stronger students. IB, AP are two commonly known ones, but the majority of students do not fit into these programs. Personally, I think many more would be able to handle harder curriculum if they had had proper educational emphasis at home from day one. </p>
<p>I also get a number of public school students every school year who are from private schools. I still haven’t had a single one of them stand out above the sharp kids who have always been in public. And, many times the private school kids are behind in important areas because the private school was too small to offer the same classes. One can’t say private or public is better. I think the intelligent comparison would be between individual schools.</p>
<p>I’m simply agreeing with you Proud Mom. Public schools can’t offer students anything parents can’t offer. If the parents are doing a good job, the teachers don’t make a difference, and if the parents are doing a horrible job, the teachers don’t make a difference.</p>
<p>proud_mom
They are not talking about spreading out the current number of school days with breaks. The article talks about adding more school days.</p>
<p>Also studies show that students do not necessarily retain more information with breaks.</p>
<p>WHO is being measured in these countries? Some do not have universal high school education. Some do not have democracy, and have no need for universal high school education. Many have alternatives to high school education, such as vocational programs. So there is selection bias, and we are not comparing apples to apples. Some of these countries also do not have immigration with students learning the language, and do not have socioeconomic diversity (despite not having universal high school education). Some do not have the unbelievably ridiculous nomenclature that we have for numerals that do not imprint math conceptually through the language of math.
My non-scientific hunch, though, is that when kids were helping with agriculture in the summer they were not losing as much ground. Why? Because they weren’t watching TV. I am convinced that TV suppresses reasoning.
Many people love the idea of “sin taxes” to fund the consequences of the “sins”, for example, taxes on tobacco to fund health care. My fantasy would be that we would all have devices installed in our TVs that would measure the amount of time that the idiot boxes are on, and that we would be taxed accordingly to fund education.</p>
<p>TV is an antiquated technology. If you were to tax its use, you’d find you don’t raise all that much, but maybe you’ll put cable and satellite TV providers out of business. Further, I imagine students lost less because it wasn’t expected that they’d forget everything you learned the previous year over summer break. In America’s agricultural days rural children did not often graduate high school. Though I do realize you weren’t really serious.</p>
<p>And to some in the thread, it solves so many problems if we track the “dumb” students into vocational work or phase them out of school early on. And I’m sure you’d all be happy to have your kid be tracked into a vocation or out of school while you subsidize the kids who get a full education, right? Perfect! Hey, it works in a homogeneous communist republic of 5 million people, should work here. </p>
<p>I’ve always been of the opinion that people afraid of being poor will try hard to avoid it. What do you tell poor kids if they don’t get an education? They’ll be exactly as well off as they are currently? Not scary, especially when they have the option of selling drugs or themselves. What do you tell rich kids if they don’t get an education? They can’t buy new clothes or cars like their parents do for them? Maybe school is important. </p>
<p>Ultimately though, the reason why we care about an educated populace is because an educated populace leads to higher productivity. As a country America does very well compared to other industrialized nations in this regard. As long as we don’t see ourselves slipping in productivity, education is doing its job.</p>
<p>I do think it takes both good parents and good teachers. My husband and I have done everything we could to provide a loving stable home that supported learning. Lots of books, lots of reading and vacations filled with museums and historical locations. But, we didn’t teach our children chemistry, biology, economics, math, Shakespere, etc… We left that to the teachers and we were very fortunate to have wonderful public school teachers who taught those subjects well. Our job as parents was to send them to school ready and willing to learn. The teachers’ jobs were to present material that they are experts in and facilitate our children’s mastery of the subjects. My strong belief is that it is a two part system.</p>
<p>Getting back to the topic. I don’t think yearlong schools will be a magical fix like the original article seems to suggest. I do understand it is just spreading the same days out over a longer time period with shorter breaks between school days. I do think it will help with retention for many students, but it is minor compared to the other problems out there.</p>
<p>My S was one of those who sighed every fall in math class. “Why do they have to teach the same stuff over and over?” He “got it” the first time and was ready to move on. And didn’t forget it over the summer.</p>
<p>I probably should have homeschooled the poor kid but he would have been ahead of ME in no time too.</p>
<p>OTOH, for some kids school is the ONLY safe, sane, stimulating place in their lives. No support at home, even negative pressure to stay home and take care of siblings. Meanwhile, their friends tease them for wanting to do well in school, and the drug dealer on the corner offers them a job running drugs. Easy money, right?</p>
<p>Teachers I know in poor school systems say the schools should be open more hours, and not charge for extracurriculars, because the parents can’t/won’t provide what some of our kids get as a matter of course.</p>
<p>Saying that better support from parents is the solution to low performance for poor kids is about as useful as saying that the solution is magic unicorns. The only solution for poor kids is much more time away from home, which is why things like KIPP are effective.</p>
<p>That’s the sad problem. I’m sure we all could think of examples where, because of the parents/home environment, the kids have little chance of being successful students. The solution with the highest probability of working (taking the children out of the environment – permanently) is not acceptable.</p>
<p>Time off for different learning experiences is great. Family time is great.</p>
<p>Time off so I can nag my kid about some assignment is not.</p>
<p>Once, we didnt have time to visit a special event at the National Museum of the American Indian - because DD had to trudge through a research report on American Indians.</p>
<p>You laugh, till you cry. </p>
<p>since everyone is posting links, I will post one to this dormant website - I never read it much, but my wife did</p>
<p>Right? I can’t even tell you the number of hours I spent sitting with a kid who was doing the most useless rigamarole called “homework.” 35 one page essays for a health class, for example, plus they had to write an introduction and a conclusion.</p>
<p>I have an endless list. One year, my dyslexic math genius daughter spent writing in sentences in her math class because “that’s the way it’s supposed to be done.” Math. She was graded on grammar. :rolleyes:</p>
<p>That’s when we moved to private school and never looked back.</p>
<p>"Saying that better support from parents is the solution to low performance for poor kids is about as useful as saying that the solution is magic unicorns. The only solution for poor kids is much more time away from home, which is why things like KIPP are effective. "</p>
<p>Bravo. Post of the year on this topic. Most of these “homes” are chaotic running on TV, sugar loaded sodas and some brand of salty chips. There is little sense of time as when you are not working every day is pretty much the same. No sense of urgency or commitment either. Appointments are regularly missed or forgotten. Instructions might as well be written in Hebrew. Removal is the only real solution–and not politically possible.</p>
<p>Things like KIPP work for poor parents who want better lives for their kids, but who don’t have the resources (personal or financial) to provide enough support at home. Programs like that still won’t work for parents who don’t care.</p>