>>keep schools open until 6
>Sounds great, how do you fund it?
Reduce the "defense" budget. I wouldn't be surprised if you did the calculations and found out that schools could be open 24/7 with minor tweaks to the budget allocation.
It is not a matter of funding, it is only a matter of priorities. Education and research should be first on the list.
I don't have hard numbers, but I wold like to point out that Japanese students spend more days per year and longer hours in school, as well as hours of cram school on top of it for most of them, than Canadian schools, and yet Canadian students overall end up ranked higher on than Japanese students on every ranking I've ever seen.
Canadian schools also spend more than $3000 per student per year on average than American schools.
What American schools need is more quality, not more quantity.
That study seems to draw all its conclusions from inner city / low income. I would submit it is not a model for the rest of the country unless further testing is done in other environments.
story: A couple of decades ago I used to work on grants and educational programs. One group came to ND to give a lecture on risk factors. In Minot ND, they told the crowd that "firearms" automatically means more violence. "It has been proven in studies" they said. One member of the crowd asked how many people in the room owned firearms. The poll came back at about 90% with many (40%) owning 3 or more. No history of violence in that crew. They were all social worker types who liked to hunt or in the case of one, target shoot. I got ahold of their source data for studies and found two things. A specific firearm study was never done and all the data came from CA or NY cities.
The USA is a large and diverse place, I am a little cynical of best practices taken from urban environments and applied to suburban and rural areas without add research and being a little more specific on why stuff seems to be working.
I'd contend communities with a large number of handguns (but no rifles) probably does have a crime problem, it's just likely the guns are a response to it, less than a cause.
Well, ND gun ownership and murder rates by means would seem to make your contention false. ND which has a large number of handguns per capita, had 2 murders in 2008 and both were stabbings.
Its not the guns or any other object, its the conditions and attitudes that make a place dangerous. Dangerous people will use the weapons they have or improvise weapons (IED) if they have none.
You misunderstood my statement I think: I'm saying 1> Handguns with no rifles is a situation you get when people feel they need personal protection, aka, high crime. I'm saying they are an effect, rather than a cause 2> North Dakotans probably have a large number of rifles as well, so don't fit that profile.
A cynical perspective: schools are prisons, and some lower income gang-joining students are criminals. An extra hour in school corresponds to a criminal spending an extra hour in prison instead of out wreaking havoc. The next question is forcing such students to stay in the school to begin with...
I think "schools are places that give people of a certain age something to do without giving them the option of leaving" is a perfectly valid sentiment and a good description of why more 10 - 14 year olds would perform less crime.
Calling them prisons implies the entire population of students would commit said crimes.
I have no idea if the math works as you say but the federal government doesn't fund primary education. That is all done at the local and state level and so it isn't just a matter of tweaking the federal budget (as if that itself was easy).
I think the bigger problem is that teacher's unions have created a calcified public education system that is risk and change adverse. Hard to experiment with new ideas in that environment.
> teacher's unions have created a calcified public education system that is risk and change adverse.
Child from the 80s here. I've had just about every teaching method crammed down my throat through the 90s. This includes more homework, more lectures, socratic desk arrangements, independent study, peer review, group work, class review, and many others I care not to remember. I have never heard any teacher say, "my union asked me to do this." And, usually, it was some teacher or principal working on their MA or Ph.D that had to invent a new teaching method.
So far the only thing that works consistently is listening intently, sitting down quietly and banging out the work, and raising a hand for assistance when your stuck.
And that is how it's been done for 100 years. It may seem calcified to you but the rest of the world uses it while the US tried all types of new-age teaching methods.
I would wager the bigger problem with schools is bad, obnoxious students. The classroom bully that disrespects the teacher, disrupts the students and gums up the educational experience for everyone. They used to be kicked out of school but that became illegal, then they were put in detention, but a chaperone costs money. Now it's left to the teacher to be educator and babysitter to some asshole.
The rest of the world does not teach that way, and particularly the countries that have good results in education -- e.g. Scandinavia -- don't. What's with the American exceptionalism? But (as you also hint at) good teaching methods are just one tiny piece in a much larger puzzle.
In fact if anything, my personal impression is that the teaching method itself is among the least important factors; if everything else is in order, kids are going to learn no matter what teaching method you employ.
Why does everyone defend the unions so much here? They are the reason we have a sub-par education system in the US. Teachers get automatic raises not based on merit and it's very difficult to fire a bad teacher. Until this problem is fixed (which the unions likely won't fix on their own), the other things you try aren't really going to help.
Reduce the "defense" budget. I wouldn't be surprised if you did the calculations and found out that schools could be open 24/7 with minor tweaks to the budget allocation.
It is not a matter of funding, it is only a matter of priorities. Education and research should be first on the list.
I believe Jobs was right, once again.