Posted on 09/27/2009 12:00:35 PM PDT by Red in Blue PA
WASHINGTON Students beware: The summer vacation you just enjoyed could be sharply curtailed if President Barack Obama gets his way.
Obama says American kids spend too little time in school, putting them at a disadvantage with other students around the globe.
"Now, I know longer school days and school years are not wildly popular ideas," the president said earlier this year. "Not with Malia and Sasha, not in my family, and probably not in yours. But the challenges of a new century demand more time in the classroom."
The president, who has a sixth-grader and a third-grader, wants schools to add time to classes, to stay open late and to let kids in on weekends so they have a safe place to go.
"Our school calendar is based upon the agrarian economy and not too many of our kids are working the fields today," Education Secretary Arne Duncan said in a recent interview with The Associated Press.
Fifth-grader Nakany Camara is of two minds. She likes the four-week summer program at her school, Brookhaven Elementary School in Rockville, Md. Nakany enjoys seeing her friends there and thinks summer school helped boost her grades from two Cs to the honor roll.
But she doesn't want a longer school day. "I would walk straight out the door," she said.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
Change you get sick of....
More time in public schools to sing praises for the messiah! LOL
DEFINITELY NOT PC!!
Barack Hussein Obama is THE ONE.
Just ask your government schooled child!
Under 3 minute video depicting how the Obama cultists resemble the cultists that worshipped that other guy 70 years ago in Germany:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7u0GJSZttZE&feature=channel_page
I smell another unfunded mandate.
Indoctrination Centers don’t have your kids long enough already?
And how is this a federal issue?
Many nations in Europe have long summer vacations. It is what takes place in the classroom that determines how good an education a kid will get. If the kid is stuck in an American classroom a few weeks longer each year I doubt it will do them any good.
More time with teachers teach 0bama songs > more time with parents who undo the propaganda filling their child’s head.
Makes perfect sense when one indoctrinates rather than educates.
Schol kids unite!! If that doesn't get the bum thrown out of office, what will??
More time to practice hymns of praise to the Messiah BHO. Parents ought to be taking their children out of public schools, instead of letting the Left incarcerate children for an ever-larger portion of their childhood.
One more reason to home school and find ways to reduce our property taxes. Any ideas?
JoMa
The more time the inmates spend in government schools, the more we will get what government schools have always given us.
Here are a few more ideas. Why not do away with lunch? They can eat during class. How about doing away with restrooms and attaching portable toilets to the desks? They’ll get plenty of class time that way.
Is this about education? Nope. This is about helping the teacher unions get more pay. If this was about education then Obama would realize spending more time in dysfunctional schools won’t change a thing.
mmm...mmm...mmm...
Suggested update - More time with teachers
This is another union pay off.
It’s NOT the QUANTITY of time the kids spend milling around in these indoctrination centers. It’s the QUALITY and RELEVANCE of the instruction they DO get. The average student spends 2 to 3 hours actually learning things about how the world works, history, language. What are they getting the other 4 or 5 hours?
Why, they’re learning to LOVE THE STATE AND IT’S FUNCTIONARIES.
Here’s a classic example:
DEFINITELY NOT PC!!
Barack Hussein Obama is THE ONE.
Just ask your government schooled child!
Under 3 minute video depicting how the Obama cultists resemble the cultists that worshipped that other guy 70 years ago in Germany:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7u0GJSZttZE&feature=channel_page
I believe that a past Japanese PM pointed out that American education is on par or better than anyone else’s in the world, if you remove “urban” schools from the equation.
This guy could render the stomach pump an antique.
Teacher formation and curriculum need to be addressed FIRST. Then STANDARDS, which students MUST achieve, should be second.
The most important prerequisite of any of this: Remove all affiliation with the NEA.
if the teachers are any good the kids do not need longer days or more weeks in class.
If our schools were teaching people *how* to think, instead of *what* to think, they wouldn’t need to be there as long as they are now.
Abraham Lincoln, for example, only had a single year of formal education.
Spending more time on UN Day, physical education, environmentalism, Global Warming, Multiculturalism, Dewey-style group projects, interactive q&a bull-sessions, teaching the answers for standardized tests — simply is not going to build upon the intellectual capital of the American public.
To understand the meaning of this one must consider what it means for the unions affected (in this case teachers unions) and Obama himself.
More teachers, more control, more dues, more taxes.
Coming next, Obama will announce that he wants complete and absolute Federal control of all schools (including colleges).
You know who screamed the loudest and finally got the legislation killed?
The Teachers Unions! I guess those teachers like their summer breaks as much as the kids do.
If the schools were actually doing a good job teaching instead being glorified daycare, this might be a good idea. Its not like we need to let the kids out during the summer to help with the farm work and harvest.
I had the great good fortune to get sent to prep school when my grandmother left some money for schooling in her will.
We spent about a month less time in that prep school than I had in our public school (supposedly one of the best in the country). Yet I learned at least twice as much.
Since then, most public schools use up more time and teach much less than they did in the past.
Obama’s goal is, no doubt, to have school all year long but teach the kids nothing useful at all.
That’s the socialist way.
Heck, here in MA, the kids barely get two months summer vacation anymore! They get out the third week in June, if they don't have to make up any snow days, and they go back the last week in August, or the first week in September!
Is there nothing 0bambi doesn’t stick his fingers into?
He is so hellbent on picking a fight with Americans and controlling everything that when the backlash hits, it is going to really hurt.
This lengthening of the school day is continually brought up. Why am I not surprised?
The implication is that more time in school means improved learning.
The primary people pushing this agenda are naifs (rPresident) and teacher unions’ agendas to increase employment by getting more days for teachers.
Many studies have found no correlation between length of school days and performance.
Example, Finnish schools outperform US students and yet have less homework.
Swedish students go to school 170 days, US kids 180.
“In the United States . . . children go to school for six or more hours per day, five days per week, for approximately 185 days . . . The average times pent at school in the U.S. totals over 1,100 hours, almost double that of children in Finland. By the time children reach the age of 14 in Finland,they will have gone to school for 2,500 fewer hours than students in America (the equivalent of two to four years of schooling). Despite much longer school days, American students routinely score 10% to 20% lower than Finnish students on international tests of achievement (Baines,2007, p. 99)
See recent study
Extended School Year Fast Facts
Prepared by
Rebekah Bickford, Research Assistant
David L. Silvernail, Director
Center for Education Policy, Applied Research and Evaluation
University of Southern Maine, March 2009
Source:
http://usm.maine.edu/cepare/pdf/Extended_%20Facts.pdf
Some common sense quotes:
Improving the quality of instructional time is at least as important as increasing the quantity of time in school”
The issue isnt time per se, but how it is spent.”
Just like Hilter, get control of the youth, brain wash them, this is BS, if this passes and my kids have to go to school full year we will be looking for another country to call home. I have it with this BS communist @#$@#$!!
I bet the amusement park industry: Six Flags, Disney, etc. will just love this proposal. Vacation destination locations will embrace it too, re: Martha’s Vineyard/sarc.
If garbage is taught for the first 8 months, garbage will STILL be taught for the remainder....
This WET NOODLE has no freaken clue...HOW the fck did this guy get elected... I think this was an anti Bush vote...
The only good thing would be seeing Mausechewitz aka Disneyworld and -land go down the tubes. Not going to happen, however.
I wished I would have had the health to home school ... I give a lot of credit to families who do so ... our present school system seems to be about making robots out of kids and my children, for the most part, never really fit into their “mold.”
There are plenty of kids that do those things, and they are needed.
Parents (like me) like the summer breaks from school, too. After 9 months of never-ending fund raisers, parent meetings, etc., it's nice to find time to recharge.
I'll never forget the two years my two oldest kids were in HS together. My daughter was on the drill team, and my son was in the band. Both squads are world-class quality, and the beast had to be fed. The band traveled to Dublin, Ireland to march in the St. Patrick's Day parade...the cost alone to transport the instruments was nearly $100K.
I don't regret a minute of it, but there's no need to lengthen the school year. Focus on quality of time, not quality.
When I was in 6th grade, virtually everyone in my class was reading at 12th grade level (public school). Class reading projects included The Count of Monte Cristo. We started the week after Labor Day, and ended in early June.
It’s just not increasing the quality of the teaching. It’s also increasing the accountability of the student and the parents for the learning along with the teacher. I am really tired of people (especially high officials who may never have been teachers) saying that I can entice, cajol, and motivate EVERY child to learn if I am the right kind of teacher. If there is no support from the home, and the student decides he/she does not want to learn, then the adage “You can lead a horse to water, but can’t make him drink.” applies. I am not a miracle worker.
Teaching in the public schools is a calling for me, and one that seems to be getting more and more impossible. I will not make it if the school day and year is lengthened. That’s not a lazy teacher talking. That’s one who puts her heart and soul into it with many many extra hours each week.
More time with ignorant, incompetent teachers? Yeah...that oughta help. Or is it just more opportunity to sing “praise to Hussein” songs?
Yep, I agree with that.

"No more trips to Disney in the Summer,
Turns out the Messiah is a bummer,
Mmm, mmm, mmm,
Barack Hussein Obama."
Here on Long Island you won’t see a demand for an extended year. The kids in Garden City, Herricks et al do quite nicely thank you very much.Summer is a time for sports camps, travel, and in some communites, sleep away camps. These districts graduate 90% of their kids. College placements run in the high 80s across the island. And none of this mentions the Catholic schools which have a slightly shorter school day, yet match their public counterparts in achievement. Once again a top down one size fits all federal solution.
~~~~~~~~ ~~~~~~~~~
I was too quick in my initial post, Ray's Beth.
There are many good and unsung teachers in the public schools and those good ones are in it because it is a calling, an avocation; and you are obviously one of them.
I empathize with your predicament and under no circumstances would I consider teaching in a public school, particularly an inner city school.
Lengthening the school day or year will not help your students when you are in contact with them 5 or 6 hours max and you have no control as to what they get exposed to at home or on the street.
Upstairs I was going to make a facetious reference to the quote of Lester Maddox, so will do so now :)
“when (Lester Maddox) asked what could be done to improve the abysmal conditions in Georgia prisons, Maddox replied that what was really needed was a better class of prisoner.”
Obama also said schools could be opened on weekends so they would offer a safe place. What does that tell you about the conditions that these children face at home? Perhaps in Obama’s fantasy world all children would be enrolled in 24 hour school dormitories.
Best wishes for continued success in your chosen field.
A lot of private schools have less than 180 days a year and their kids don’t have a hard time getting into college or doing well on SAT’s, ACT.
Take away the computers until 3rd grade....
“The president, who has a sixth-grader and a third-grader, wants schools to add time to classes, to stay open late and to let kids in on weekends so they have a safe place to go.”
WTF???? So now school systems are supposed to take care of the kids 24/7? Good God, why not just ship them off to government education camps? Wait, I better not utter that idea too loudly, someone may try it.
It isn’t summer vacation that is hurting kids..
Yep, the teachers will always argue that they work a full-time job, and that’s why they get a full-time pay.
But as soon as you offer year-round school, the teachers will expect their yearly salary to go up based on their hourly wages.
Well, now, why don’t we just run the schoolhouses 24/7/365, bringing in the kids and teaching crew on three shifts every day, on rotating times, selecting days of the week for one class, a different set of days for another class, and still different times for the third shift. Run right through the weekends and holidays, allowing the weekends and holidays to be taken on alternating intervals, and just keep it running every day of the year. Absolutely full utilization of the physical plant, the hours can be made into a routine to suit each of the teacher-student shifts. By careful scheduling as many as seven classes of children may be run through the same facilities on a round-robin basis, day and night.
Just saying. There are a LOT of schemes not yet tried.
I remember foreign exchange students visiting our high school about 40 years ago. The foreign students from Europe and Chile, had longer school days and took at least 2 or 3 more courses each semester than we did. As I recall, they spoke of 3-4 hours of homework a day.
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