Politicians, Get Your Act Together!

Posted by Nikhil Goyal ⋅ December 21, 2011 ⋅ 8 Comments

A little more than a month ago, a deal was reached over the length of the school day between the Chicago Teachers Union and Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s school board.

We can only pray the real winners are Chicago’s schoolchildren. Unfortunately, that was not the case.

Under the agreement, the Chicago Public Schools won’t ask additional district-run schools to lengthen their day this year beyond the 13 elementary schools that already voted to do so. Emanuel had pressured the unions with financial incentives to agree to adding 90 minutes of classroom time.

Still, in the grand scheme of things, the agreement ducks the real issue at hand.

The United States obviously needs a longer school year. The standard six-hour, 180-day calendar including a three-month summer vacation is derived from 19th century agrarian society. No other facet of our society, let it be government or business, considers its year to be composed as such.

Our system is structured around farming and harvesting, even though less than 1% of our population claim farming as an occupation. I like how Arne Duncan, Secretary of Education, put it: “Our children are no longer working in the fields. And Mom isn’t waiting at home at 2:30 with a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich. That just doesn’t happen in many American families anymore.”

Typical proponents of this calendar change cite the reason that additional learning time will ensure more instruction in reading and math to students. That’s a fallacy. In his book Education Nation, Milton Chen writes, “Restructuring time doesn’t mean merely adding more of the same kind of hours to a traditional school day. Simply extending the school day with rote memorization and drill and practice will not increase higher levels of student learning and may well decrease motivation.”

Now, this is where quality over quantity comes into the debate. Extending the school year without making drastic changes in the curriculum, is utterly useless. We need to transform our curriculum into a global curriculum grounded in 21st century skills. Until we accomplish this, lengthening the school year will only subject students to more days of lousy test prep in classrooms.

The question that remains is the cost of this proposition.

In the Carolina Journal, Terry Stoops, an education policy analyst at the John Locke Foundation in Raleigh, North Carolina, explains:

“The Expanded Learning Time Initiative in Massachusetts increases instructional time by as much as 30 percent and comes with a price tag of an additional $1,300 per student per year. In my 2007 John Locke Foundation Spotlight report titled “Better Instruction, Not More Time,” I calculated that, at the Massachusetts funding level, it would cost taxpayers an additional $656,500 yearly to implement a longer school day at a typical North Carolina elementary school. A modest pilot program at five of North Carolina’s 1,800 elementary schools would cost nearly $3.3 million per year. This estimate does not include the increased energy costs required to cool an otherwise vacant school building during the summer or the increased maintenance costs required to keep the building operational for additional weeks or months.”

Education is essentially the economic growth engine. But to my dismay, our nation’s politicians believe that cutting education spending is the silver bullet to solving our fiscal woes. In Illinois, about $200 million statewide was cut from education spending compared with this year. The cuts will affect how much in general state aid payments schools get.

Our politicians don’t get it.

Children are the future of America. I wish that statement was nailed to every desk of every congressman and congresswomen in America. If the United States can spend billions bailing out the Wall Street fat cats, they are entitled to spend billions revamping our education system.

In sum, it’s a do-or-die moment. It’s time for our politicians and teachers unions to get their act together.

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About Nikhil Goyal

Nominated for the U.S. Secretary of Education by Diane Ravitch and lauded as an “emerging voice of his generation,” at age 17, Nikhil Goyal is the author of One Size Does Not Fit All: A Student’s Assessment of School by the Alternative Education Resource Organization. His work has appeared in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Fox and Friends, Fox Business: Varney & Co., NBC Nightly News, and Huffington Post. Nikhil has spoken to thousands at conferences and TEDx events around the world from Qatar to Spain and has guest lectured at Baruch College in New York. He is leading a Learning Revolution movement to transform the American school system. A senior at Syosset High School, Nikhil lives with his family in Woodbury, New York. To contact, email him at ngoyal2013 at gmail.com.

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Discussion

8 Responses to “Politicians, Get Your Act Together!”

You touched on some good points here… it is not just about more time, but want we with it. Yet it comes down to change the whole purpose of education, not just playing around with the pieces. We don’t need more seat time. We need more community time, more community spaces that are safe, we need more wrap around services to help children and community members deal with life, to create engagement, to create direct democracy. Honestly I am not sure I trust any of the people in charge to help provide that… cost is not my concern, it is who is making these choices…

Keep digger deeper and pushing farther Nikhil. Thanks for sharing your voice!

David

Posted by dloitz | December 21, 2011, 10:03 pm

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It seems that K-12 is viewed somewhat like a day-care center for parents who are unable to earn a living but for having their children safely occupied.

Nikhil, Is it a matter of K-12 students needing more time at school, or simply needing the time to learn in their own ways and at the pace they need as individuals?

Posted by Brent Snavely | December 22, 2011, 8:33 am

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I’m all with you about better instruction, not simply more time. How would you define the ethos of the new school and its purposes Nikhil? What would this better instruction look like?

Kirsten

Posted by Kirsten Olson | December 22, 2011, 8:34 am

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Nikhil, what would happen if we radically transformed what we do now and looked less at hours and more at learning in safe, community-based learning environments inside and outside school? Does increased time in school equal increased learning?

Best,
C

Posted by Chad Sansing | December 22, 2011, 5:11 pm

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Hey Nikhil,
I agree with so much of what you write here, but I do have to say that this part is not so “obvious” to me: “The United States obviously needs a longer school year.” I know each community is unique and that I live and work in one of relative privilege- heck, I bet some of my students even go home to moms with peanut butter and jelly sandwiches (make that wheat-free vegan tofu snacks) ready for them. For other students I’m sure that time in school is the safest and most meaningful part of their day. But for me, and I consider myself to be a damn fine teacher, I think my kids see more than enough of me as it is! They need time that is theirs. They need time to play (young ones that is); they need time to explore; they need time to work on projects that are of their own creation; they need time to climb trees; they need to stretch the boundaries of their own imagination, they need to learn to handle their own boredom, and manage expanses of time. They need to do all this without being assessed, without rubrics, without “accountability,” and once in a while, without “excellence.”

For me, the school day is plenty long already – tack on a couple hours of homework (WHY?) and there is no time left to just be. Now, I work with young kids in a rural community, and I understand that an urban high school scene is way different. That’s precisely why state standards, and movement towards national standards is so ass-backwards. I know my kids (I’ve taught many of ‘em for four or five years; their parents know them; they are beginning to know themselves – Arne Duncan does not know them…at all. I would like him and his ilk to stay the hell out of policy and curriculum decisions that affect these kids (read “any kids”.) Then what would he do all day? Maybe Arne needs some time just to play and explore too.

Unless and until the whole paradigm of what it means to educate is radically re-thought, I shudder when I hear of efforts to mandate even longer sentences for today’s youth already doing time in such utterly soulless places, as today’s schools. Let ‘em have their childhood! A couple of links to follow:
http://www.allianceforchildhood.org/
http://www.allianceforchildhood.org/sites/allianceforchildhood.org/files/file/decade_for_childhood.pdf
http://www.allianceforchildhood.org/sites/allianceforchildhood.org/files/file/Joint%20Statement%20on%20Core%20Standards_(418%20).pdf
http://www.amazon.com/Reclaiming-Childhood-Letting-Children-Achievement-Oriented/dp/0805075135/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1324614407&sr=8-1

- Paul

Posted by Paul Freedman | December 23, 2011, 12:31 am

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- I agree with Paul. Kids need time for themselves – time to daydream, run around, bike, draw, … Time to decide for themselves what to do next.
  
  I was surprised to see this opinion on this blog. Maybe I shouldn’t have been. I love learning and trying to help others learn. Classrooms aren’t the best way for that to happen, though.
  
  Posted by Sue VanHattum | December 23, 2011, 1:12 pm
  
  Reply to this comment
  - I am glad we have thinkers like Nikhil on this blog, we all need to be challenged, even those of us who think we have the answers. I don’t think the classroom is the problem, it is just space. there is no reason students can’t have time to daydream in a classroom, be alone among their thoughts, explore their own ideas. I think the problem we have is that it is so hard to see that happening in school. The problem is with us adults, not the children, or the environment.
    
    I don’t think schools need to be driven by adults, but I do believe schools should be open longer. I actually think they should never close. What happens inside them need to change dramatically. The times we expect kids to have focused learning, should change also. I would rather have schools that reflect the seasons, more then some Sept to June schedule that makes little sense.
    
    I would rather have some night classes, like Tolstoy did in his school. I would love to hours of free time every day, for no formal learning (what is formal learning anyway) I would like to push the walls out… and make the classroom the world without losing the safety and warmth of community that can happen in intimate spaces like Paul’s school. I think school should be more flexible with time. Why not make the curriculum more personalized and less finite, so time is less relevant.
    
    I hope Nikhal and all of us here need to start thinking deeper and more radical in our ideas of schools. More about what will make both school, and the world more humane, more enjoyable, more worth our time. I don’t want more seat time, I want idea that we only learn at our desks to disappear. I want us to see schools as just a place we gather together to learn as a community, not that it is the only place that we learn. I also want to have as many types of schools as they are ways to make community, as there are ways to live.
    
    To get us there we need to attempt that many people are just starting to wake up to the idea that more seat time is not the answer, that testing is wrong, that learning is not just about listen to lectures. We need to support that growth, and listen ourselves….because we might still be able to find more truth in our ideas and find truth in ideas that seem foreign or feel far from what we want for our children or our communities.
    
    David
    
    Posted by dloitz | December 23, 2011, 3:59 pm
    
    Reply to this comment
    - Hey David,
      
      As usual, I think we can get hung up on vocabulary and our vision can be limited by what we already know as familiar. I guess the open-all-night, multi-generational, exploratory kind of community environment that you seem to be talking about is hard to fit in my current preconception of “School.” But, hey, sounds cool – I’m open. What have you seen out there that most closely resembles the kind of environment/program that you’re talking about. Do you know anything about the Olympia Free School Community in Olympia, WA? http://dsame.com/freeschoolcommunity/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=2&Itemid=1
      What about Matt Hern’s Purple Thistle Center in Vancouver, BC: http://www.purplethistle.ca/
      Are there models out there, or is this something we need to invent together?
      
      Paul
      
      Posted by Paul Freedman | December 23, 2011, 10:45 pm