TIME in school IS MONEY well spent

With all of the talk of shortening school days, moving from the traditional 5 day school week to a 4 day school week, even shortening school years to save money, one thing strikes me as odd: How can ANYONE in their right mind think that this is going to benefit students?

Consider this -

image - donmillereducation.com

• The average school day is about 6.5 hours long and  divided into anywhere from 4 to 7 blocks/periods.

• In some schools these blocks/periods rotate so that students who perform badly at a certain time of day have an equal opportunity to succeed in all of their classes, however, this means not every class meets every day

• Each class is either 60mins or 90mins in length (with some variation)

• Students generally take about 5 mins to get settled in each class and attention is typically lost for the final 5 mins of a class bringing the teachable total down to 50 or 80 mins

• This means in a school with 5 blocks per day, a student loses about 50mins of class time getting settled, that's 250mins (or just over 4 hours) per week.

If you shorten the school week to 4 days do you increase the productivity of students for the brief time they're there?  Most likely not.  While teachers might benefit from a long weekend every week giving them ample time to charge their batteries, get papers corrected and plan for their next lesson, students will be more likely to forget information and need to be retaught each Monday in order to prevent regression.  All teachers no that Monday mornings require them to be on their "A-game" as students will be lethargic from having two days off.  Now give those same students 3 days off and see what happens...

Understandably with budgets becoming increasingly difficult to balance, school districts are being asked to make hard decisions in order to preserve the quality of education for their students.  But making a decision that reduces the amount of time a student is in school consecutively sounds like a terrible plan.  If anything the school day should be longer (perhaps with a longer lunch period) so that students can have even more "teachable" time.  Low-income students would benefit from increased school time as their families wouldn't have to worry about spending as much on child-care and they would have less unstructured time which could get them into troubled environments.

The old adage "Time is Money" could never be more appropriate than speaking about educating the youth of America.  The problem we seem to be having is forgetting that time in schools, LEARNING, is money well spent on our future.

-MB