Thanks, But No Thanks

Dear President Obama,

I see that you have proposed lengthening the school year as part of your education plan.

I believe that you mean well. Education in this country is a travesty, however, increasing the number of days our kids spend there is not the answer. Instead I propose you consider how the time in school is spent.

In my local school district, educators spend far too much time on what we will call "non-teaching" items - complying with state requirements for "seat time" but not really fulfilling any educational goals. Our state mandates 180 days of education for our children. But I wonder how many adults realize that this "day" of education is defined by only a few actual hours, meaning that you could send your child to school at 8:30 am and have that same child home after a FULL DAY of school by 11:00 am! It's not the number of days that's the problem - it's the definition of DAY itself!

And then let's look at those 180 "days" - due to union negotiation and district mandates, our teachers are required to complete, attend or in some cases just have time off for lesson planning or "personal" days. This means that we have an unusally large number of "sub" days - days in which a substitute teacher is there for some or all of the day. While many teachers do prepare a lesson plan for their subs to follow, I think we can all recognize that a day with a substitute is going to result, optimally, in less than a full day of education for these students and, more often, is a complete waste of a day while the kids spend time watching videos, dvds, reading or in study hall. The problem here isn't the number of days - it's the quality of the days spent in school.

Finally (at least for this post), let's look at the actual number of days in school. Because we typically start after Labor Day and have now had to allow for "snow days" (thank you globally warming!) our schools are "in session" until mid-to-late June. Everyone - teachers, students and parents - are ready for school to end by that time...or earlier. Teachers are only paid until the end of the day the last day of the school year. They aren't staying any longer than what they are paid for so in order to get everything accomplished to physically close the building, students are released after only 1/2 day (of course this still counts as their 180th full day of education).

Having those few precious hours without students is not nearly enough time to get everything done, so students are actually released the entire week after 1/2 day of education (and they are actually ENCOURAGED not to attend at all) while high school seniors are actually given a full week off before everyone else!

Still this is not enough time to get everything packed away for the summer so teachers collect all textbooks around the 1st of June! While I don't believe all learning must be done via textbooks, apparently the teachers do and so our students pretty much spend the entire month of June without any educational instruction taking place. The number of days isn't the problem - it's our expectations for the teachers in our schools that needs to be addressed.

President Obama, nobody could possibly agree with you more than I when you say that our schools are failing. We need a total overhaul of the system - not a cosmetic repair - to make certain that our children get the quality of education that is going to make them competitive, productive employees and innovators for the future. The education process demands the same focused attention and revision that is going to re-invent our economic system and our health care system. Anything else is merely a rearrangement of the deck chairs on the Titanic and is not going to stop this ship from sinking.

tw