Larry Ferlazzo comments on the big new idea of the Ford Foundation: longer school days to get higher test scores.
The research isn’t strong on this, and teachers don’t like the idea (according to the Gates-Scholastic survey of 2012 and the recent TeachPlus survey called “Great Expectations”), but anything goes.
At least, there are no carrots and sticks. That’s good.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Well, at least they’re funding it. Emanuel/Brizard expected Chicago teachers to do it for free.
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It’s only partially about higher test scores. It’s primarily about training young people for an endless work day and work week – the education reform euphemism is “career readiness” – in the future, with the employer’s digital leash on them 24/7.
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The first thing I’d do with that extra time is add the arts back into the curriculum – not as an afterthought, or as a vehicle for providing planning time for classroom teachers (although planning time is GOOD!), but to have DAILY exposure to the arts, so music and visual art and add in perhaps dance and/or drama twice a week at least, more time for creative writing, more in the earlier grades. And oh, wow, much MUCH more time especially for the younger kids to be physically active, especially in unstructured ways.
Ditto middle and high school: more time to be truly creative, to learn to think outside the boxes of standardized testing and do some real-world stuff, things they really WILL need once they graduate.
I don’t see that happening, but hey, a music teacher can dream. 🙂
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Good Morning –I just saw a News report that Governor Cuomo is visiting Buffalo today. I wish a representative of the Buffalo Teachers would be able to speak with him about standardized testing and the outrageousness cost it entails and request that testing be suspended and monies be applied to disaster relief instead. Calling all Sabrinas!!!
Marge
A caval donato non si guarda in bocca!
Marge
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A NYC charter school has an extended day & what’s the outcome?
They suspend 6 yr old kids at 3:30 PM. The day ends at 4:30 & begins at 7:30 AM. They suspend 6 yr olds for acting like children after having been told what to do for 8 hrs. Eight hours in school seems to be the time limit for 6 yr olds.
That 9th hour in a particular NYC charter school doesn’t seem to be in children’s best interest based on the school’s suspension affinity.
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I wrote a blog post on this yesterday describing my personal experience with an extended school day. I’m not sure that carrots and sticks are going to be off the table. If this is imposed on teachers it will look a lot like a stick and the money provided won’t nearly compensate for the cuts schools have experienced over the past several years. See
: http://waynegersen.com/2012/12/03/300-more-hours-proof-of-insanity/
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One of the universal attributes of really great teachers is that they work long into afternoons and evenings on lesson plans, grading papers and tests, talking and meeting with students and parents, plus supervising the myriad of valuable after school extracurricular programs.
The problem may not be the length of school days, or the length of school years, as much as it is what goes into those hours and days already provided.
We can continue to defund public education with everything from fewer net dollars in state and federal education budgets. And this process definitely includes the old legislative slight-of-hand “Well, your education budget’s 10% greater…never mind that our unfunded mandates are 30% greater.” The public school defunding process also includes public tax-dollar robbing charter and voucher programs…a great many of which have appallingly little public oversight or accountability. A great many of which are, minimally, not as good as the public schools…and, more inexcusably, thinly-veiled end-runs around our Constitution.
Too often what this defunding and underfunding results in are classes too large to teach effectively. Educational materials from books to technology simply not available.
Crumbling, unsafe facilities. Teachers becoming the public whipping-scapegoats of governors and legislators for too many failed fiscal policies and political partisanship.
And, worse, underfunding is often the result of the rise of faux educational theories-du-jour trying to convince us that larger classes with an increasingly wider diversity of learning readiness is just fine because we’ll throw in an aide or two here and there to help kids who are struggling.
Achievement gaps grow for our children at times because our political-correctness-substituting-for-sound-educational-policy gaps keep growing in adults who should know better.
Want a real “Head Start” in educating all our youth?
Start by demanding that 100% of our public education tax dollars wind up in our public schools. Not someone’s for-profit or parochial religious school.
Start insisting that our state and federal governments stop using public education as an easy target for budget cuts.
Because maybe, just maybe, the real, root problem is not that too many of our children aren’t making AYP…but that too many of our legislators aren’t.
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And what about the needs of working teachers? When do I get to be a mom and help and be with my OWN kids? Do my children have to go to after school care because I have to be at an extended day? Why are my children being punished for my decision to be a teacher?
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Jennifer, the fact that you have a family of your own, and would dare question an endless school day, is powerful evidence that you hate kids and are a cause of the Achievement Gap.
Isn’t that the subtext of the TFA/charter ideology, that only temp missionaries from elite colleges have the commitment to be teachers?
In their Through the Looking Glass worldview, your years of teaching are irrefutable evidence of your ineptitude and indifference to children, while enthusiastic temps with five weeks training will save
poor and minority children.
Are you ashamed of yourself yet? Wendy Kopp and the Ford Foundation think you should be.
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Yep. Real ashamed! I even went through a traditional university program AND have been teaching for 12 years. I’m the old guard now. (:
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The Carrot is gone due to budget cuts. However, the Stick is present. I feel it on my back every day. And it’s getting larger. Right now it’s the size of a baseball bat.
Teaching is a job that entails a minimum of forty hours a week to complete. None of which can be accomplished with students in the room, however. Now anyone about to compare their job with mine (“In the real world…”), consider first this simple scenario: imagine needing to do all that you need to do in order to meet the expectations of your job. All the responsibilities. Everything. Now imagine being unable to do any of it for about six of your “working” hours per day. Per day! Times five = thirty hours a week. After working those thirty hours, only THEN do you get to work on the other forty. Now imagine someone-who doesn’t even do your job-recommending more time be given to students.
You feeling the Stick yet?
You see, disregarding time for meetings (all which add even more responsibilities and expectations, while some meetings are simply about out meetings themselves!) and professional development (own time/own dime), as well as duties, planning, grading, communication of all kinds, preparation and cleanup of materials, etc., etc., freaking etc., is a complete disconnect and lack of respect for a teacher’s time. Unless you are in this job, you just don’t seem to get it. It’s not bitching and whining. It’s reality. I can’t get any of this work done with kids in the room. Problem is, the kids are why I’m here.
The sum of this asinine equation is simple: adding more time for kids to be in the room just equals more time I have to take away from my personal life (read: family) to get all the other shit done.
Here’s an idea: let’s keep the kids until 6:00 pm. Think of the gains! How about 7:00?
Again, you don’t get to do all the other stuff until kids actually leave your presence. Don’t forget that. It doesn’t go away, and the time must come from somewhere. Already told you where it will be.
Please answer this or shut up–why are all of these solutions to ‘fix’ my job coming from people who not only don’t do my job, but also are in no way affected by the effects of such damn suggestions/decisions?
Responding to Diane’s corresponding thread (https://dianeravitch.net/2012/12/04/a-problem-with-the-longer-school-day/), Ed Darrell, actually did the math on this one. I appreciate that! Remember folks, every single minute added to your day adds up to another hour, another day, another week to your school year. And the money to pay for this is coming from where? The budget you just cut? The raise I haven’t received for more than four years now? How does that work exactly? This is, of course, presuming you’re in it for the money. To me, time is so much more important. And I’m wise enough and experienced enough to know it cannot be invented.
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There are huge sticks involved in all this longer day stuff. Teachers are not being hired unless they promise to do all this after school tutoring on their own time and money. A lot of teachers are not paid for this longer day but expected to do it anyway. We have to come in early to tutor and stay late. The kids that need it are the ones that least want it, so there is huge discipline problems. They hate it, teachers hate it.
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