Let's Have a Longer School Day and Year

New organization to promote an extended school day and school year.

Comments:

Michael Fiorillo, chapter leader Newcomers HS

Now that Corporate America has essentially succeeded in eliminating the forty-hour week and the two-week vacation for most adults, it is embarking on its next campaign to make children as miserable and stressed as their parents, with their education as crimped and de-skilled as the work most adults do. And as usual, in a propagannda flip that would make any totalitarian state proud, they claim to do it in the name of equity and racial justice. It's all of a piece with the underlying propaganda behind TFA: somehow the children of privilege, acting as missionaries on two-year assignments - why does no one comment on how fundamentally patronizing it is? - are to "close the achievement gap." (itself a rhetorical constuct that is intended to mask the increasingly vicious racial and class disparities in the country).

Of course, those of us who've been struggling to provide guidance and education for our students all along are an impediment, and must be de-regulated out of existence.

Perhaps they'll succeed - although I still am idealistic enough to believe that evil ultimately thwarts and destoys itself - but let's not go quietly.

Leonie Haimson, class size matters on the nyceducationnews listserv:

And guess who it’s being funded by? Our friends at the Broad foundation.

I love that it’s being pitched as providing “research and support for efforts to increase academic and enrichment opportunities for students.”

Ellen

Between hours spent in school and on homework, many kids already spend more time per day on schoolwork than adults do at work. Why isn't it obvious that that's really not the problem?

National Center on Time and Learning is Launched

A new organization is being launched today to promote an extended school day and school year.

The National Center on Time & Learning will provide research and support for efforts to increase academic and enrichment opportunities for students, which some experts say can help improve student performance and close the achievement gap between disadvantaged students and their better-off peers.

There is currently a bill in Congress to fund district-level programs for expanded learning time, and the strategy is included in the discussion draft for the reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Act that was released by House education leaders last month.

The center will be co-chaired by Paul Reville, the president of the Rennie Center and director of the Education Policy and Management Program at Harvard University, and Chris Gabrieli, an entrepreneur and venture capitalist. It is being funded by the Eli and Edythe Broad Education Foundation, the Nellie Mae Education Foundation, and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.