We need a longer school year | Hacker News Reader

We need a longer school year

cnn.com

25 pointsrelation49 comments

    students are most likely to outperform peers, 
    both in traditional district schools and at 
    other charters, if they attend schools that are 
    open at least 10 days more than the conventional year.

I have a hard time believing it was those 10 days that made a difference.

Anyways, I was fortunate enough growing up to be part of the middle-income demographic, so didn't share the struggles of the article. The already-long, unchallenging, insulting school days/semesters were a struggle as it was. Extending that awful experience would've been gravely detrimental.

This article makes the common mistake of confusing correlation with causation. Some data points might correlate but that doesn't imply they cause each other.

Exactly right. Did they actually compare students from same school districts but different income families?

I would think that what is most likely is that good income family students (who can afford summer schools) probably go to better school, which is by itself self-reinforcing.

I don't think you'll get that kind of in-depth analysis and research from a "a nonprofit that promotes expanding learning time to improve student achievement".

It's easier to just run a couple of surveys and pick the stats that make your case stick.

Plus, "Most likely to outperform peers" at what? I suspect at stuff that won't help them much in their adulthood.

Time once again for Kubrick:

“I think the big mistake in schools is trying to teach children anything, and by using fear as the basic motivation. Fear of getting failing grades, fear of not staying with your class, etc. Interest can produce learning on a scale compared to fear as a nuclear explosion to a firecracker.”

This is like wondering if painting the walls green will help. There's so much else wrong that needs fixing first that this is a silly triviality. Like treating the sniffles when the patient has terminal cancer.

This makes sense. If you're very interested, it doesn't feel like an obligation, so a longer school year is like "more time doing what you like".

The problem is, like someone has already pointed out, schools fail to do this. So you end up with what we have here in Brazil. We've been making the school year longer every few years. When I was a kid, I used to have 3 months of vacation in summer and 1 month in the winter. Kids now have about a month in summer and 2 weeks in the winter, and education has never been worse here. Longer school years, by themselves, do absolutely NOTHING.

(EDIT: Grammar)

Except that interest doesn't work on a large scale. Schools exist to educate all their students to roughly the same level. Teaching by inspiring interest is a great idea, but one teacher does not have the means to teach the unique interests of 30 kids. To make that plan a success, you'd have to abolish the entire school system.

Schools exist to educate all their students to roughly the same level. How does that seem to be working out for them? Simply doing more of what we wish would work, but doesn't won't help.

I don't know how, but I think that interest is the only thing that can work on a large scale. If society churns out kids that are only interested in guns, drugs, and proving they're "thugs 4 life", you might have a problem bigger than a school system can ever hope to solve.

Abolish the school system? You might be on to something.

Edit: Yeah, I get it. It's one of those, strong, unpopular opinions I hold loosely. I don't believe all school systems are unworkable, or even that this one has never been so. But I sure do think it is now. We're paying hugely for it and it's not working for us. Turn it off.

Here's an idea. Make school a low burden, free, for basic math and writing skills, etc. Basically what we have but lower-key. Then let everyone who really cares homeschool or pay for private school. Even if you don't abolish the requirement to go to school, lax requirements for homeschooling would have a similar effect.

Homeschooling is not for everyone, but personally, being homeschooled in high school was one of the best things that ever happened to me, in terms of learning, social interaction and even career opportunities.

How did homeschooling help you in terms of social interaction? I thought that was one of the arguments against homeschooling.

In short, while homeschooled, most of my socialization was with nice peoeple. Most of my social issues are from the jerks in public school.

We knew a few other families who homeschooled and met weekly; "The Moms" and occasionally Dads talked about parent stuff and the kids, around 20 of us in our heyday, just played whatever. We eventually took martial arts and rock climbing classes together. For the most part they were all pretty nice. They're still the best friends I've ever had.

Besides that, a lot of homeschoolers (like us) are religious, so we have religious gatherings we go to. I know a lot of my homeschool friends' friends from church, too.

My homeschool friends eventually led me to my last couple years of internships, including this summer at Google. It didn't hurt that homeschooling had given me lots of time to concentrate on programming.

> We should expect our schools to furnish today's students with the education they will need to excel in our global society.

Problem is, schools don't do that in the first place, for the most part. So a longer school year may make things worse. For examples, schools don't teach negotiation, setting up a basic business, what to do if police ask to search your car or home, credit card management, and many other things arguably more important than today's school subjects. I need my kids to have less time in school so that I can teach them those more important things. I don't want them to be educated only to the level that they can toil away in a cube farm for MegaCorp. I also want my kids to have plenty of time to not be concerned with excelling in a global society; e.g. exploring national parks.

...is everybody really that obsessed about working more, learning more, doing more and wants to drive this onto our children too?! wtf?! why can't we use technology in ways that allow us to work LESS, to do LESS, to have more of "free time" for both us and our children?

paraphrasing a late wise man: the little buggers should have MORE time to just play with a stick in the mud! (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h6wOt2iXdc4)

what about "FREE TIME"? children especially should have MORE of it, not less. and maybe this way, we, the adults would finally understand the cruelty of having less then 2 months vacation a year! I know, it's America, where everything is overdone, but for fuck's sake, don't do this to your children too (...'cause afterwards everyone else will take your example)!

> ... maybe this way, we, the adults would finally understand the cruelty of having less then 2 months vacation a year!

But then how are we going to compete with the Chinese?! How will the children survive when they're competing with 15 billion other people in the world (and more people is always better)? Or let's skip to the real point: how will they make rich people as richer?

Those are the words of a man who works on that which he does not also love.

Editor's note: Jennifer Davis is the co-founder and president of the National Center on Time and Learning, a nonprofit that <promotes expanding learning time> to improve student achievement.

-- There so many articles written by people that are the CEO of XYZ company w/ vested financial interest.

A side motivation for Ms. Davis is that it promotes kids learning just enough to work for her company for cheap, taking little vacation.

Since she's the co-founder, I assume this is at least a little different than someone pushing an ideology for profit. Presumably she really believes that a longer school year would benefit children, and both writing the article and co-founding the non-profit are meant to further that goal.

Instead, say, someone being hired to be the CEO of the non-profit, and then suddenly discovering a passion for doing whatever it is that helps pay the bills.

http://aqpq.org/2011/06/13/the-met-and-moma-nonprofit-luxuri...

TL;DR MOMA paid its CEO $1.95Million 2008; non-profit != no financial interest.

Edited: for clarity.

Keep in mind that non-profits have no practical cap on salary for CEOs. Their money motivation can still be very strong. I'm convinced that many non-profits exist mainly to provide a nice living for the staff.

The problem not time in school, the discussion should be about motivating students. As long as the student is motivated to learn on their own, then more time in school might result in less learning, in the same way that continual 80 hour work weeks result in a drop in productivity.

My wife taught school in a lower income area. For students that could care less about learning, the parents treat school like free day care, and the students forgot a lot of their newly acquired knowledge over the 2 week winter break.

If they are losing the knowledge over a 2 week break, are they really keeping that knowledge with them over the course of a school year?

No.

Having them learn on their own is the opposite goal, I think. For the most part they're being taught by rote, by design.

not to mention that students that dont care about learning negatively affect those that do care.

I'm looking for a reference for the point, and my keyword searches on Google have yet to take me to the right place, but I recall that research has shown that gifted students actually have learning GAINS when they are out of school during summer, but then the school year begins with review of the material that other students didn't learn even during school the year before. So one strategy to make the time that children spend in school more worthwhile would be to let learners advance at their own pace, and not put all learners into lock-step grades in school by age.

http://learninfreedom.org/age_grading_bad.html

We don't group students by height, or by weight, or by social maturity, or by sports skill, so there isn't any good basis for grouping them by age when we could group them by achieved subject-matter level, and have each class in each subject proceed through the lessons just as rapidly as learners can with the best matching instruction.

Meh, I don't think a longer school year is the solution to the "summer slide." It would be better to find a way to ensure that kids are motivated to learn on their own, even over the summer, and to encourage them to engage in beneficial activities... and, of course, we need to find ways to promote the creation of more summer activities for kids that are both fun and educational, and to make sure kids have access to books, Internet, etc. over the summer.

Now that I think about it, I just realized that - for those cities with hackerspaces - this is a role hackerspaces could help with substantially. Timing some fun, educational opportunities to correspond with "summer break" could give kids a chance to do something like a "learn to solder" session, "electronics kit building", maybe some "intro to computer programming" thing, etc., etc.

Note to self: talk to the other SplatSpace'ers and see if we can cook something up for next summer...

I've gotten to the point of beyond jaded when it comes to articles damning how fucked up the US public education system is. Not because people are constantly beating a dead horse but because these articles will often be about one glaring facet which is obviously a problem but is, from a mile-high view one of the MANY problems that afflict public education.

With all these voices screaming from every corner and Arne Duncan clueless in Washington, it's like watching a sinking ship with the crew not rallying to save each other, but instead scurrying up to the crow's nest to save themselves, beating back others from trying to reach it first.

I'd say it's not necessarily the length of the school year but the size of summer break being several months. Teachers spend a lot of time getting kids back up to speed in the fall. Lengthening breaks during the school year and compensating by trimming summer break down would be wise.

I agree. My son just started kindergarten this year and they get 3 breaks of 1 week or more in addition to all of the national holidays & teacher work days. But they only seem to get about 9 weeks off during the summer.

Regardless of what changes are made, though, some people won't like the new schedule. It's just a fact.

In my experience, Teachers spend a lot of time in the fall teaching kids that never really learned what they were supposed to the year before.

Agreed. My grade school was year-round, repeating x weeks on, y weeks off. I would love my kids to be on that schedule. An extra benefit would be that travel wouldn't be so crowded and expensive.

As someone suggested I think that rather than having one really long break there should be more small breaks in between. When I was in middle school I remember one year we were taught how to write in cursive. Summer came and I forgot it completely. We can't expect children to practice and maintain skills they don't even understand the value of over breaks (not that cursive is particularly valuable).

>We can't expect children to practice and maintain skills they don't even understand the value of over breaks. //

Why not?

My eldest is 7 and I've done regular reading, spelling, writing and arithmetic with him over summer. A little science, lots of nature study, etc.. Sure the motivation hasn't really come from him, though he does like to read. One spends most of the time at parks or in the woods or whatever (for us it has to be anything free) but education doesn't end - or at least isn't somehow disallowed - when the school bell rings.

Schools are a service that you use to aid education (though some would say otherwise!) and not a place you go and have an education handed to you. I'll take one education please, make it snappy.

I wonder whether the break serves a function as far as spaced repetition goes?

Quantity != quality.

If poor kids need something to do over the summer, why not invest in some positive activities for them, instead of punishing everyone?

I don't even think it's about poverty necessarily; we're far worse off financially it seems than people we know on state benefits but I'd class what we've managed to do for free/low cost over the summer as being pretty enriching.

We do have a car which is essential for work but if we didn't have to run it then we'd still be able to make the trips we do - with extra arrangements and some extra time - and be no worse off financially.

No, we really don't. In fact, I would love to see the amount of time students need to put into school maxed at 8 hours a day. None of this go to school and then spend 3 hours on homework during the night. No adult would put up with that crud except under hard economic conditions or ownership stake.

All they will do with the extra days is add more grunt work. We need to rebuild the system and giving them extra days is just a poor excuse. Summer is the time for something else. Many kids still farm or go to summer camps. I learnt chemistry during the summer far better than what was taught later in school.

It's already common knowledge that not every child learns the same way - it's a product of both genetics and environment. My wife teaches in a district that has a good mix of middle-class and disadvantaged students. When summer is over, the teachers see huge discrepancies between the kids whose parents worked with them over the summer and the ones who didn't - and the economic class isn't what's dictating that discrepancy. It's unfortunate that some parents can't accept the responsibility of continuing their child's education outside of school, but if that's the case, maybe the best bet is to let the districts - not the state or federal governments dictate the curriculum and schedule.

This would put more responsibility on school boards, superintendents and administration. Underperforming administrators no longer can just sit back and play with politics and cronyism - they will have to accept the responsibility of creating and maintaining an environment that most reflects the community demographics, or they're gone. Blaming the teachers has to stop - it's the same thing that's happening with law enforcement - "We're going to pass more laws that make your job tougher and more involved, but you're going to have to do it with less money and support. Good luck."

"American educational system" is a misnomer, as it is currently only equipped to produce standardized test passers (in aggregate), not educated individuals.

However it has spawned a lucrative vertical market for NCLB grant specialists.

Teachers should be paid like engineers. The job is at least as important and at least as difficult.

If you look closely they're among the highest paid people already. By the time they retire at age 50, after just 25 years of service, they've got a lifetime pension that would cost you or me over $2 million (after paying taxes) to buy an annuity to cover. That's not to say they don't deserve it.

Average teacher salary in Massachusetts, one of the richest states, is $70,340. The lowest-paying town has an average of under $45K. Highest, $92.5K.

Massachusetts probably doesn't have an issue with teacher salaries.

Mississippi has a statewide average salary of under $42K.

Is it well-scaled to cost-of-living? No.

Average teacher salary in Hawaii, one of the most expensive states to live in, is $55K.

Meanwhile, a 50 yo who retires with 25 years of service gets 25% of the average of their top three year's salaries as an annual pension. To get the maximum 80% pension, you need to have at least 35 years of service at 57. Figures from Massachusetts.

> Meanwhile, a 50 yo who retires with 25 years of service gets 25% of the average of their top three year's salaries as an annual pension.

Good info. I believe that would still put the 50 yo at > $100K annually on average during their working years, considering the cost of the equivalent annuity. (The price of an annuity increases exponentially as age at purchase decreases. In retirement they also get health insurance worth over $12K annually.) For the ones with 35 years of service it would top $150K.

The teacher payscale versus engineers payscale is interesting. Negating cost of living raises, the pay for teachers is essentially linearly related to time of service. Again negating cost of living adjustments, the pay for an engineer increases rapidly in the first several years, flatlines, then rapidly increases again when a "senior" level is reached, then flatlines again. Changing jobs may result in another jump here or there, but otherwise pay is constant.

The end result of this is when you consider hourly rates a teacher just out of college makes more than an engineer just out of college(9 weeks vacation over the summer helps a lot). Five years though later the engineer makes more than the top pay for a teacher with 30 years experience.

Not sure what this means. Just observations.

Don't forget the teachers' pensions, which radically changes the equation. After considering that a teacher gets paid for ~25 years of not working, with health insurance paid too, whereas the engineer must survive on savings after taxes, the average teacher probably comes out ahead.

I would argue that the "summer slide" is, in fact, valuable. School teaches many skills beyond academics: social conditioning, conformity to inescapable bullies, observation of strict schedules for intellectual work, strict compartmentalization of activities, coping with a homogenous social environment of people of the same level of immaturity, and so forth.

Most of these are profoundly maladaptive in the adult world. We want them to forget most of that garbage. Students grow up to be civilized adults in spite of these teachings, and a large summer break is a great opportunity to reconnect with humanity and the adult world.

during the summer, they lose those gains while their more advantaged peers -- whose parents can afford to arrange for summer enriching activities -- maintain theirs.

A longer school year is not the answer. We need more parents stay home to raise their kids and educate/enrich them. The media and government lies to people telling them that they need to keep up with the Jones' to be happy. Give up that new SUVs, their cable tv with HBO ETC, new clothes, restaurants, new furniture, (bigger) house, expensive vacation(s), gambling/mad money, nickel and dime expenses that add up to thousands per year, yard service, nanny, convenience items ETC. Which requires two income families.

Here is the bottom line. Either both parents work these days and/or are divorced/split/one is out of the picture. This is especially true among minorities. If men an women made good decisions and planned well. This "gap" would never happen. Look at the quality of life for minorities now compared to what it was 50 years ago. Some call this an advancement - but I call mistreating their children and forsaking their parental responsibilities in exchange for more lavish living. This is selfishness.

People used to do the right thing and stay home to further educate and raise their kids. Sure they had less possessions, they had less greed too, and were happier and more self fulfilled (they took the responsibility of parenting seriously). Now people are not even raising their own kids. Child care has them for 10 hours a day and they have them for 4. After they are 8-9 years old, they just run amok through the neighborhood. Either this or momma stays home to tend to her drug/alcohol habit, soaps and latest boyfriend/pregnancy (instead of raising her kids the right way) all while collecting welfare.

How about instead of always trying to fix schools to help those lagging behind because their parents are incompetent - why don't we sink a bunch of money into educating minorities to make better choices to begin with. It is all about prevention. It is sad how progressives and liberals have tried to replace traditional morals (stemming from out country's traditional Judeo Christian beliefs) with Condoms, birth control pills, abortion clinics, divorces without even a decent attempt at restoration, live in boyfriends, degradation of marital value and commitment ETC. Look at all the trouble it has caused. The sexual restraint and careful courtship which was traditionally practiced was quite effective for producing lasting and committed whole families. Removing the constraints of religious values actually has created far more traps for people to fall into. Now Liberals want the Government to fix things somehow. Is it possible? Can government replace God and do as good a job?

Myself - growing up in a lower middle class family, in the summer my (stay at home) mom taught us extra things to prepare us the next school year and took us to museums and landmarks occasionally for enrichment and so we would have a leg-up (or at least keep stride) on the others. We did not have or need TV or video games. My wife does the same with my kids. I had friends whose parents both worked or were in a single parent situation. Lots of them ended up failing out of school and falling by the wayside.

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