Yes! This is my last year of school.


Sorry RCT and j0

I really wonder how much more money that'd cost. We're already facing damaging school budgets that vastly outpace most other countries. So why is it that our education system sucks?

I think slightly more classroom time - less days off (they get so many for virtually every holiday it seems) would be beneficial.

However, there are a litany of problems for our schools, and more time won't fix all the woes.

- Bad teachers that don't care to teach students
- No competition to enforce better performance by our school systems
- Lazy parents that don't care to re-enforce proper values of studying
- Not as much time dedicated to learning & studies..Lots of down time
- Too many breaks from school. It seems that kids get about 4 weeks off during the Aug-May school year for various breaks....Think that really helps?

..Among other things.

I think the fastest, best, cheapest, fix would be to privatize the school system via school vouchers. Each school has a monopoly via districts. If you can enforce competition, standards will come up. More money doesn't fix the problem, either. Utah spends almost 1/2 of what New York does on education per student, yet scores are very similar.

I'm all for it since I graduate this year. I agree, kids don't take school seriously. They just do enough work to barely pass most of the time.....

Good luck. With this he will lose more youth vote. Btw, I like the title. Obaba makes Hussein look like a baby

I do not approve...

Part of the reason why private year-round schools (and/or schools with longer school hours) perform so much better is because parents who are looking for high results from their students seek out these schools; and if their child is performing poorly they hold the child accountable for the actions which led to their lower scores. Forcing students into school longer without changing the expectations for them at home will have fairly limited benefits in terms of higher performance in school.

The problem does not lie with the time spent at school, the problem lies with how that time is utilized.

Anyone who went through the grade system knows, there are several days where you do absolutely nothing of real importance, or several useless projects. If they devoted their 7 hours a day into meaningful teaching, we could probably cut back on school time.

Edit: I took several AP classes, and in each one the teacher used time so efficiently, that we were completely done with all the course material 3 months before school ended and just spent time preparing for the AP test, once that was over it was 6 weeks of fun, games, and movies.

And having kids sit in a desk for three more hours a day will somehow motivate them to do more work?  If anything it'll just make kids even more restless from being confined to one place all day, and make them even less motivated to do anything.

I agree with ph4nt.  What is important is to use the time available to us more effectively. 

After Katrina, over half the schools in New Orleans were all but destroyed.  As a result, my school essentially turned into two schools for a year, with morning classes for regular students and afternoon classes for students from other schools.  We had class from only 7:00-12:30, but we got rid of lunch, replacing it with a 15 minute break, and overall used our time much more effectively than before.  This was my Senior year in high school, and my Honors teachers still managed to get us prepared for our various AP exams in a timely manner, without adding to the regular number of days for a school year. We actually LOST days because we missed all of September and part of October, but we still managed to be done by early May.  Of course, keep in mind that this was a private school (half the schools in New Orleans are private Catholic schools).  I doubt a public institution would've performed as effectively.

By the way, that was the best school year of my life.  Getting off at noon everyday was awesome.

As a lifetime homeschooler (never saw a public classroom outside of SATs), I can attest to this being the case. It's not the quantity, but the quality. My school day was about 4hrs long of class time, with very little homework. The difference was that I studied 100% of that time, and it was instilled that learning happened inside and outside the classroom. My teacher never graduated from college, and taught from similar texts that schools use.

Ultimately (as I've stated before), schooling is a multi-headed beast. There's no one simple fix, really. Yes, classroom time is not utilized perfectly, but the pupils aren't usually attentive either, and that doesn't rectify teachers not teaching from passion or drive, but from lifeless material.

4 hours? lol I do about 2 1/2 hours of school. And my mom has a Bachelor degree so she can administer the test herself.

The only reason that I ever went to a public school was for my drivers permit. And I can tell you guys that there is a major difference, so much wasted time...