It seems like every time I turn around someone is promoting the “solution” to the current educational situation in Michigan and throughout the country. Many of these solutions have become common in today’s schools (high stakes testing, the Michigan Merit Curriculum), and all of them seem to share the same goal of making teachers and/or students miserable.
My favorite proposed change is the extended school day. A longer day is being hailed as the perfect solution, the one change that will make students learn more, teachers teach better, and America an educational powerhouse.
My question is: if we can’t teach sufficiently in the amount of time we already have, how is adding hours going to help at all? Will the students who are already so worn out by the end of the day suddenly going to find the strength to focus for another hour or two? Will teachers who are burnt out by lunch find the patience in that extra hour? What is going to go into that hour, more reading and math?
I recently worked in an inner-city first grade classroom. The school day started at 8 and ended at 3:30. Breakfast was served at 7:30; the bus ride for most of the students took an hour each way. So six-year-olds were starting their days at 6:30 and were lucky to get home by 4:30, a ten-hour day in which they were expected to learn, pay attention, and stay out of trouble. As you can imagine most students failed in each of these goals; by the end of the day the room was chaotic, students were paying little attention to what the teacher said, and the teacher had little energy left to make the day interesting.
More time might be the answer to the “problem” so many see with education in America today. But adding that time to the end or the beginning of the school day will only serve to create more headaches for teachers, and decreased motivation for students.
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