When less is not more

An interesting article about the benefits of an extended school day -- with a nice plug for KIPP Ascend in Chicago.  My view is that extra time is one of a handful of critical ingredients to success.  To me, educational success on broad scale is, when you boil it all down, simply a function of quality x quantity.  In other words, the brain is like a muscle: the more it is exercised in a rigorous and careful way, the better developed it becomes.  Thus, educational progress comes from the number of hours spent "exercising" the brain, combined with the quality of that "exercise" -- in other words, the quality of the teaching and the curriculum.  I have a hard time thinking of ANY successful school -- public or private, elementary or college -- that isn't rooted in a sound curriculum, taught by excellent teachers, and a whole lot of hard work by everyone involved.

Chicago has one of the shortest school days in the country: 5 hours and 45 minutes. That compares with 7½ hours in Evanston Township and seven hours for Austin and some schools in New York.

 

To be sure, there's no automatic correlation between more hours and higher achievement, but giving Chicago students the equivalent of one day less of instruction a week is a handicap no one can afford...

  

Meanwhile, Chicago's charter schools, which can create their own schedules with non-unionized teachers, are showing they can achieve the seemingly impossible with extra time. KIPP Ascend Charter School on the city's Far West Side requires students to spend 9½ hours in school on weekdays and come in for four hours every other Saturday.

 

When its current eighth-graders arrived as fifth-graders, they were reading at the second-grade level and doing math at the third-grade level. Now they're reading at the eighth-grade level and doing math at the 11th-grade level.

 

"There's no way that would have been possible without the extended day," the school's Principal Jim O'Connor says.

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 Crain's Chicago Business
"When less is not more"

By Samantha Stainburn

January 1, 2007

http://www.chicagobusiness.com

For the current crop of students in Chicago's public schools, the system has always been in reform mode. Mayor Richard M. Daley took control of the schools when this year's high school seniors were first-graders. How are they doing?