More school: Obama would curtail summer vacation


By LIBBY QUAID, AP Education Writer Libby Quaid, Ap Education Writer – Mon Sep 28, 12:00 am ET

WASHINGTON – Students beware: The summer vacation you just enjoyed could be sharply curtailed if President Barack Obama gets his way.

Obama says American kids spend too little time in school, putting them at a disadvantage with other students around the globe.

"Now, I know longer school days and school years are not wildly popular ideas," the president said earlier this year. "Not with Malia and Sasha, not in my family, and probably not in yours. But the challenges of a new century demand more time in the classroom."

The president, who has a sixth-grader and a third-grader, wants schools to add time to classes, to stay open late and to let kids in on weekends so they have a safe place to go.

"Our school calendar is based upon the agrarian economy and not too many of our kids are working the fields today," Education Secretary Arne Duncan said in a recent interview with The Associated Press.

Fifth-grader Nakany Camara is of two minds. She likes the four-week summer program at her school, Brookhaven Elementary School in Rockville, Md. Nakany enjoys seeing her friends there and thinks summer school helped boost her grades from two Cs to the honor roll.

But she doesn't want a longer school day. "I would walk straight out the door," she said.

Domonique Toombs felt the same way when she learned she would stay for an extra three hours each day in sixth grade at Boston's Clarence R. Edwards Middle School.

"I was like, `Wow, are you serious?'" she said. "That's three more hours I won't be able to chill with my friends after school."

Her school is part of a 3-year-old state initiative to add 300 hours of school time in nearly two dozen schools. Early results are positive. Even reluctant Domonique, who just started ninth grade, feels differently now. "I've learned a lot," she said.

Does Obama want every kid to do these things? School until dinnertime? Summer school? And what about the idea that kids today are overscheduled and need more time to play?

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Obama and Duncan say kids in the United States need more school because kids in other nations have more school.

"Young people in other countries are going to school 25, 30 percent longer than our students here," Duncan told the AP. "I want to just level the playing field."

While it is true that kids in many other countries have more school days, it's not true they all spend more time in school.

Kids in the U.S. spend more hours in school (1,146 instructional hours per year) than do kids in the Asian countries that persistently outscore the U.S. on math and science tests — Singapore (903), Taiwan (1,050), Japan (1,005) and Hong Kong (1,013). That is despite the fact that Taiwan, Japan and Hong Kong have longer school years (190 to 201 days) than does the U.S. (180 days).

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Regardless, there is a strong case for adding time to the school day.

Researcher Tom Loveless of the Brookings Institution looked at math scores in countries that added math instruction time. Scores rose significantly, especially in countries that added minutes to the day, rather than days to the year.

"Ten minutes sounds trivial to a school day, but don't forget, these math periods in the U.S. average 45 minutes," Loveless said. "Percentage-wise, that's a pretty healthy increase."

In the U.S., there are many examples of gains when time is added to the school day.

Charter schools are known for having longer school days or weeks or years. For example, kids in the KIPP network of 82 charter schools across the country go to school from 7:30 a.m. to 5 p.m., more than three hours longer than the typical day. They go to school every other Saturday and for three weeks in the summer. KIPP eighth-grade classes exceed their school district averages on state tests.

In Massachusetts' expanded learning time initiative, early results indicate that kids in some schools do better on state tests than do kids at regular public schools. The extra time, which schools can add as hours or days, is for three things: core academics — kids struggling in English, for example, get an extra English class; more time for teachers; and enrichment time for kids.

Regular public schools are adding time, too, though it is optional and not usually part of the regular school day. Their calendar is pretty much set in stone. Most states set the minimum number of school days at 180 days, though a few require 175 to 179 days.

Several schools are going year-round by shortening summer vacation and lengthening other breaks.

Many schools are going beyond the traditional summer school model, in which schools give remedial help to kids who flunked or fell behind.

Summer is a crucial time for kids, especially poorer kids, because poverty is linked to problems that interfere with learning, such as hunger and less involvement by their parents.

That makes poor children almost totally dependent on their learning experience at school, said Karl Alexander, a sociology professor at Baltimore's Johns Hopkins University, home of the National Center for Summer Learning.

Disadvantaged kids, on the whole, make no progress in the summer, Alexander said. Some studies suggest they actually fall back. Wealthier kids have parents who read to them, have strong language skills and go to great lengths to give them learning opportunities such as computers, summer camp, vacations, music lessons, or playing on sports teams.

"If your parents are high school dropouts with low literacy levels and reading for pleasure is not hard-wired, it's hard to be a good role model for your children, even if you really want to be," Alexander said.

Extra time is not cheap. The Massachusetts program costs an extra $1,300 per student, or 12 percent to 15 percent more than regular per-student spending, said Jennifer Davis, a founder of the program. It received more than $17.5 million from the state Legislature last year.

The Montgomery County, Md., summer program, which includes Brookhaven, received $1.6 million in federal stimulus dollars to operate this year and next, but it runs for only 20 days.

Aside from improving academic performance, Education Secretary Duncan has a vision of schools as the heart of the community. Duncan, who was Chicago's schools chief, grew up studying alongside poor kids on the city's South Side as part of the tutoring program his mother still runs.

"Those hours from 3 o'clock to 7 o'clock are times of high anxiety for parents," Duncan said. "They want their children safe. Families are working one and two and three jobs now to make ends meet and to keep food on the table."

Eh, I kinda wish my school was year round. Never like summer. But extra long school days? bullsh*t. I'm sorry, but for even me (who school) that is just torture. You need that time to do all the HW and studying needed for that class, plus that time to just chill.

If I were still in school I would be really p!ssed right about now. I always hated school and adding time and days would of been torture for me, but being I graduated last June I don't mind. Also if it will help some of these kids that need help more then great.

I read this on yahoo. I have a problem with this. Kids today barely have time to do other things as it is. I mean if you read it, it shows right now americans are in school more hours out of the day then any other country. This is bull. Either shorten the days and make the weeks longer or don't do anything at all. We can't keep adding time to the school day with more days. One a healthy body needs rest. Two there is no way anyone in school would be able to get homework done and have a job and a social life. Those things are all vital for learning the material and keeping sane.

I know I went to school when dinosaurs roamed the earth but I cant help thinking that shorter Summer holidays would work well. Some terms over here are only 10 weeks long! How in Hades can you get your teeth into a subject in 10 weeks.

I have to add that I loved school particularly when I went to sixth form and the people who didnt actually want to learn left.

The teachers unions won't allow it.

I wonder where witchartist is, as a teacher I'd love to see his perspective on this...

^^A teachers perspective would be nice.

I think that If we got a higher standard of teachers, who acctually made us do work, would be more benificial than longer school days. At my school, teachers would pratically do nothing, just go over the material and then give us worksheets on it. I mean, hell It took us one whole semester in my senior English class to do 3 stories: Beowulf, the Cantebury Tales and we didn't even finish the third one (which I can't remember). It was because instead of cracking down on us, the teacher would just keep giving us more time to do it and extend the due date, so that we could finish it. So kids just goofed off and didn't learn. Most of my school was like that. If they would just say, you have one chance, that is it, kids would get the point, learn and do the work. They are just too leanent on us! Also, some better funding for the public schools would be nice. Are school didn't have enough text books for every kid because there were so many of us and the editions we did have were years old because they couldn't afford new ones. They need to fix these problems first before we start extending the school days.

If we are already going to school for more hours than countries that outscore us on tests, then how exactly will adding more hours help?

I think that more funding and more options for schooling is the way to go. I firmly believe that everyone has a different style of learning, and different interests, and the public schools today cannot accommodate that. They seem more like a daycare-prison hybird than anything. Teachers never put pressure on even the honors students to do much work, bringing the whole class down and boring those of us who wanted to learn to tears. We were always under someone's eye and routinely being punished for stupid things like forgetting our IDs at home or using electronics during our free period. Hell, I almost failed out because the school, being as caught up in rules and paperwork as they were, could not get it through their skulls that I had a documented medical condition that made me go over the number of absences and tardies we were allowed. I had long wanted out of the system, but given that my only other options were either Catholic or unaffordable, I grudgingly stayed. A few of my friends who did not do well in public school, and who had money to get out of it, did amazingly in other schools that were more accommodating to their learning styles and more responsive to their needs and concerns.

By more options, I mean creating schools with different environments that are responsive to different students needs. Rather than sitting and book learning, and prescribing all students the same teaching style, schools ought to figure out how each student learns and put them in classes responsive to those needs. Hands-on classes. Discussion-based classes. Visual classes. Options for alternative subjects (like "19th Century Russian Literature" or whatever instead of just the pain "Junior English" type class.) Also, changing the way staff treats students would likely be a huge help. The way faculty routinely treated students in my high school, condescendingly, disrespectful of students, acting like strict small-town cops, turned a lot of people off to schooling and bred an attitude of contempt towards the faculty. It never helped anyone learn. I noticed that in classes where faculty respected students, the quantity and quality of work that got done was so much greater than it would have otherwise been.

I'm seeing in retrospect how much better high school would have been, and how much I would have gotten out of it, if it had been like that. Feeling like I am respected by my professors, and being engaged in the hands-on studio work and discussion-based academics I've found myself in have made school so much easier, even if a larger quantity or more advanced work is required of me.


Once we have a school system that actually works for our students, then we can talk about extending hours.

^^I really don't want to start a big thing but I'm just sayen..... Michigan is at least one state that doesn't have money to give to those that need it. Michigan has been in a resession for the longest time. Now that the rest of the country is in a resession michigan is now in a depression. So we really don't have that money.

I mean for the love of god michigan has been on the breaking point of losing our state government for at least the past 4 years. So I could make this into a long and totally off topic thing but simply saying michigan doesn't have the money to help those kids let alone keep the state above water.

^^those gov't programs are great and all, but bloody hell, they try to squeeze the life outta ya before they give you anything. My mom is single, doesn't have a job and has 3 kids, (not including me) and they give her a hard time with just getting food stamps. Those programs are flippin ridiculous. Is usually just easier to get a job. It's a lot less time and paperwork (and stress).


back on topic:
Yes, it would be a money saver for parents. I think a year round school would be better, just keep the school days short.
I am trying to figure out where these federal grants would come from, we are so indebt to china already, they could just take us over if they really wished too. Not to mention all of the other gov't programs that are in need of money. Us citizens are bieng taxed enough already, I don't think they need to tax us more just to pay for better programs. We just need higher educational goals and kids need to take school more seriously, then we'd all be good.

While an extended year for school sounds good on the surface, I only get my daughter for the summer and the extended breaks like Christmas, so of coarse I think this plan stinks.