Education reform is a hot topic these days, what with documentaries and reverse commencement addresses from the U.S. secretary of education filling up the newsfeeds.
Adding to the clamor, President Barack Obama said Monday that the American school year needs to be longer than the current 180 days.
“I think we should have longer school years,” Obama told Matt Lauer on “Today.” “We now have our kids go to school about a month less than other advanced countries. And that month makes a difference.”
Obama reiterated the age-old attacks against excessively long summer breaks, citing research that shows students do not retain much of what they learned from the previous year.
Worse, poor students retain even less than their more affluent counterparts because they don’t have access to supplementary educational activities, like camp, and generally don’t have books lying around the house to read.
The achievement gap —between economic classes within America, as well as between all of the U.S. and other counties — widens as American students sit on their living room floors during the hot summer months and watch “SpongeBob SquarePants” reruns while guzzling Freeze Pops.
For years it’s been abundantly clear that U.S. schools are falling behind their global competitors. Worldwide, we rank No. 21 in science and No. 25 in math.
The question we’ve been unable to answer, though, is who’s to blame?
Disputes persist between teachers’ unions and the feds, between teachers and administrators and between students and parents. Blame is heaped on pretty much everyone when it comes to our failing public schools, but all the finger pointing hasn’t led to any solutions.
Yes, everyone involved in education shares part of the responsibility of students’ success. But if Obama is right about the length of our school years, there’s a systemic problem going on across America.
This might sound like really bad news, but it should offer some encouragement. As bad of a problem as the dog days of summer might be on a student’s mental acuity, it’s a problem that can be easily and measurably corrected.
Extending the school year is not going to be a popular proposal for most parties, nor an inexpensive one. Obama conceded in his interview that funding longer school years remains the biggest obstacle to making the change, and the recession certainly hasn’t helped. Some school districts have even been forced to cut school weeks down to four days to save money.
Students are also going to hate attending school on more days out of the year, but they’ll be thankful when they grow up and can find a job in an increasingly competitive global market.
Forcing students into the classroom won’t make them want to study more or appreciate the importance of becoming educated, but it’s a first step, and will reinforce the idea that school is an important part of life and not something students are forced to sit through while Mom and Dad go to work all day.
Many teachers will desperately fight such a change, too, concerned that working more than three quarters of the year will cramp their lifestyle. But if you’re going into teaching for the three-month summer breaks, you shouldn’t be teaching at all.
In a nation where the average student spends 900 hours a year in the classroom and 1,500 in front of the TV, according to “2 Million Minutes: The 21st Century Solution,” a documentary on global education, something has to change. We need to shift that balance to the other side, or we’ll be faced with the reality of a generation of globally uncompetitive and unprepared Americans.
Discuss how many days you think a school year should be at dustin.volz@asu.edu
