Are We Wasting Too Much School Time?
From Forbes.com
To students, the school year may seem interminable. To teacher, it may seem brief and inadequate. To policy makers, it may seem infinitely flexible, able to accommodate the addition of one more mandatory program about an important issue of the day.
Critics of public education, going all the way back to the Reagan-era “A Nation at Risk” have often echoed that proverbial restaurant critic (terrible food, and the servings are too small) with calls for a longer school day or school year.
Required hours in the year vary from state to state, with Arizona mandating 720 hours and Texas requiring 1,260. Eight states currently allow four day weeks. States set minimums, but many local school districts choose to exceed those. U.S. schools tend to run under 7 hours a day, around 180 days a year.
Internationally, there is considerable variation. Top-ranked Finland has a roughly five hour school day that includes break time and lunch. China’s school days for high school students can run 10-12 hours.
New research from Matthew Kraft (Brown University) and Sarah Novicoff (Stanford) creates a more detailed picture of how America uses its school hours (full paper is here behind a paywall, but the working paper version is available here).
Some of their findings are clear and useful. Kraft told Cory Turner at NPR, “Four-day school weeks are harmful for students learning and don't appear to be beneficial for teacher retention.” Four day weeks appear to result in considerably fewer instructional hours for students.
The interruptions that bothered me the most were hour-long assemblies about how to sell fundraising junk! There has to be a better way to fund schools than pressuring low-income kids to sell things.
5-hour a day, four day week, year-round school.