Why lengthen the school year

Chicago's public schools extended the school day from 5 hours and 45 minutes to 7 hours last year after a heated offensive by unionized teachers and some parents. Mayor Rahm Emanuel, former chief of staff to Duncan's boss, President Barack Obama, initially pushed an even longer school day -- a major sticking point in this year's seven-day teachers' strike. He and other proponents argued that having the shortest school day among the nation's 50 largest districts and one of the shortest school years had put Chicago's children at a competitive disadvantage.

District spokesman Jack Brandais said the concept was initially intended to relieve crowding, not improve performance test scores. The student body and staff were divided into four groups, with three attending school at any given time.

Through decades of fine-tuning, Brandais said the district now runs both traditional and year-round tracks simultaneously. A study by Ohio State University sociologist Paul von Hippel found virtually no difference in the academic gains of students who followed a traditional nine-month school calendar and those educated the same number of days spread across the entire year.

Amid budget cuts and teacher layoffs, San Diego has cut five instructional days from both year-round and traditional schedules since last year. You make MPR News possible. Individual donations are behind the clarity in coverage from our reporters across the state, stories that connect us, and conversations that provide perspectives. Help ensure MPR remains a resource that brings Minnesotans together. Donate today. Share Twitter Facebook Email. In a May file photo, U.

Paul, Minn. A significant portion of instructional time in the school year is already taken away for standardized testing. Simply increasing the amount of time that students attend class each day can make up for that lost time and provide needed time to teach, reteach and assess. Sometimes plans to lengthen the school day include plans to reduce, by one, the number of days per week that students will attend school. If this is the case, teachers would have the opportunity to plan on the day that they are not teaching.

Adequate planning is a component in effective teaching. Providing a teacher with the opportunity for additional planning time may positively affect the quality of instruction and, therefore, contribute to increased student achievement. Even if transportation does not contribute to a significant demand on student time, if students begin their extracurricular activities later in the day, they will have even less time to complete homework or study for the next day's lessons. Moreover, an increase in in-school hours reduces the amount of time students have available for work, relaxation or other activities that might enhance personal growth.

Lengthening the school day may have a significant effect on a school system's budget in at least two ways. First, extending the school day would increase the number of hours that teachers work, therefore, increasing their pay. How would you like to see all children have this same opportunity?

Sound good? Then how do you feel about children in Grades K through 12 spending four weeks each summer in school? For at least a generation, we have been debating how to raise the quality of education.

More money. More equitable funding of schools. More computers. More graduation requirements. More choice. All these ideas have merit and are being tried. Yet policymakers have been reluctant to try the one idea that may make the most sense: more time in school. Schools have responded by requiring students to meet higher standards. However, most schools are asking them to meet these new standards in exactly the same amount of time they had to meet the standards of the past and in much the same way.

The more time students devote to learning, the more they learn. Research also indicates that how time is used is very important. We ought to stop denying these plain facts and find time for students to succeed.

The best time is during the summer. Not all summer, or even the heart of summer. Under this plan, the school year would run roughly from Aug.