Here is an article that talks about the history of our
school year.

http://www.slate.com/id/2170230/

There is no question in my mind that a longer school year is
certainly being considered by many as the panacea of what
ails public education. I am not so sure and am quite
skeptical about all of the unscientific research and
assertions that are being made as if they are facts. It
happens all of the time. We see it with mainstreaming,
differentiated instruction, grade inflation, homework, etc.
So far, none of these programs have created sustainable and
far reaching improvement in educational performance. What
does work is smaller classrooms, deeper teaching, less focus
on tests, more hands on and long-term projects, holding
students accountable for behavior and performance. But
unfortunately, these fixes take money and there isn't. So
we will continue to search for superficial fixes to the 25:1
or 30:1 classrooms that don't work.

It seems intuitive that longer school days and more of them
should improve performance. Well definitely maybe! But
there are a lot of variables involved and one must determine
if changing one of them (distribution of school days
throughout the year) will overcome all of the others. It is
difficult to answer, especially when money is involved and
different groups all have their own agendas. The homework
myth is a great example. It is intuitive that more homework
will help a child learn more in less time. Really? There
has even been some research fabricated and twisted to try to
prove this out. But when one really looks at all of this
research, one finds that the conclusions being perpetrated
upon us just aren't supported.

If your assertion is true, we must ask, "Why did students of
the past supposedly learned more and did better when they
too had summers off?" The response is first, "Are we sure
they did?" If we find this to be true, we must then ask,
"What changed to make today's students perform worse under
the same conditions?"

There are numerous variables in play here. We all seem to
agree that the state of public education is dismal and that
students are not leaving public education with the basic
skills and knowledge they need. OK, if we accept this, we
must ask ourselves why and what can we do about it. My
theory is simple: Children today are not growing up with the
cognitive development stimulation they were in the past.
They no longer have parents reading to them. They no longer
help dad work on the car, mow the lawn, farm the farm, build
things. They no longer cook with mom, do the laundry with
mom, sew with mom, feed the chickens and milk the cows with
mom. These activities are what helped students early on
develop "common sense" and cognitive skills about how the
world works and how things fit together. This lack of
fundamental skills is what creates difficulty for students
when we attempt to link concrete skills to abstract
concepts. These connections are simply lacking along with
the moral values, self respect, and work ethics.

So your assertion is that if we lengthen the school day or
school year or parse it up differently, that we will
overcome all of these issues and our students will learn. I
happen to disagree. Unless the extra time in school is spent
overcoming the gaps in moral values and cognitive skills,
nothing will change. And invariably, nothing changes in the
way we instruct our kids. We rely on the same old
philosophies that if we spend more time in math class,
students will learn more math. If we spend more time in
reading class, students will read better. If we spend more
time cramming 30 kids into a classroom with a single teacher
doing the same old things, that our students will develop
better moral values. In my opinion, this is as ridiculous
as saying if we double the amount of mandatory professional
development time for teachers, they will automatically
become better teachers. Not true!

We can debate AYP, NCLB, and standardized tests all day
long. And you are right about one thing - if we don't make
AYP (Which I predict most schools will not) something will
happen. We can count on that. But the changes will not
result in something better and will not do anything to
improve the condition of our children. They will simply be
changes based on pseudo-research that gives the perception
of doing something. All schools are tasked with assuring
100% of students are passing minimum standards by 2014 (I
believe). It ain't going to happen! And I am not talking
about just the poor inner city schools. Even the so called
"finest" schools in our district are struggling around the
90% mark. So we will see what will happen. You can bet
something will. And it probably will not be good.

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