More school: Obama would curtail summer vacation

A news story came out this week that bothers me. It was in the local newspaper earlier this week, and I had a student send me a link to the story on Yahoo News. President Obama apparently thinks that our students' scores are lower than students in other countries because we are not in school long enough. I have mixed feelings about these claims.

I had a conversation this week with our principal. One of the topics we discussed was the maturity level of our students today. There are a lot of things different with teenagers today than there was twenty or thirty years ago. We discussed several reasons for this, such as the increased number of single-parent households and the increase in two wage-earner households. Part of the discussion raised the question, "Are we pushing our youth so hard that they aren't allowed to have a childhood?" Of course, there aren't any studies that look at that as a possible consequence of increased teaching in preschool and all day kindergarten. I know I have read several studies that question if all day kindergarten provides an advantage to students over the traditional half-day kindergarten. Most studies agree that there is a temporary advantage, but question whether that advantage continues throughout elementary school.

I can see the value of having additional instructional time, but also recognize that students will struggle with the additional burdens of more work. I also know that as a teacher, it is difficult to keep up with the prep work and grading papers with the current schedules. Many of us use evenings, weekends, and summers to better prepare for our classes. Adding additional classroom time will lower the time we have to attend conferences, update our lessons, and keep up with updated technology. If teachers cannot better prepare themselves, how can they improve their lessons and bring in new material?

I also question the cost of adding more classroom time. As I negotiated our current negotiated agreement this summer, we added salary to the 2010-11 schedule for the additional day mandated by the legislature this past year. For the Mandan Public Schools, the cost of an additional day for teacher salary was over $160,000. President Obama stops short of saying how much time should be added, but schools in Massachusetts are adding 300 hours to some schools as part of a pilot program. That equates to somewhere between 40 and 50 additional days. That equates to between $6 and $8 million each year just in teacher salary. Where is that money going to come from?

Finally, the tone of the article led one to believe that this idea is as much about providing a safe environment for children in inner schools and to help parents not have as much child care as it is about sound educational ideas. I believe that educational reform should be about better learning practices, not helping the working class with daycare costs. I would be interested in hearing how others feel about this.