Our spring cleaning project for education requires brooms and a high tolerance for dust that has accumulated over generations. We want to sweep away the outmoded agrarian calendar that severely limits student learning — at least for those kids who persistently underachieve.
The basic structure of the U.S. school calendar has been around for more than a century. In its time, the calendar made sense. The U.S. was an agrarian society, and kids needed free time in the summer to lend a hand on the farm.
Obviously, that’s no longer the case. But long-held cultural beliefs and varied interest groups — affluent parents who want to take lengthy summer trips, underpaid teachers who see summers off as a fringe benefit — make it difficult to change the calendar. And, yes, it will cost more money.
We are not outliers on this topic. When U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan visited Denver last month, he stood before a group of students and delivered a similar message, which, while not popular with kids, is eminently sensible: American kids need more time in school, particularly for those so far behind. In Colorado, that turns out to be at least one-third of students.
More time does not mean a bit of extracurricular tutoring a couple of afternoons each week. It means longer school days, the occasional Saturday class and, most important, a longer school year.
The typical U.S. K-12 school holds classes for 180 days each year. (Denver schools are holding just 172 days of class during the 2008-09 school year.) Many other industrialized nations top 200 days per year, with some Asian nations hitting 240 days. As President Obama pointed out last month, a Korean high school graduate has spent a year more in school than his or her American counterpart.
Research proves that low-income children enter kindergarten far below middle-class kids in early literacy and language development. Equal doses administered in the same ways will not catch these kids up.
Many children lose ground over the summer unless they have access to a rich education/learning program. For this reason, learning gaps grow over time when the time and instruction are fixed in the 20th century factory model.
No one would design the current calendar or school schedules based on a modern economy. So why do we continue to tolerate it?
Van Schoales is program officer for urban education at The Piton Foundation. Alan Gottlieb is editor of Education News Colorado (www.ednewscolorado.org).
