Budget makes extending school time unlikely

Athens Banner Herald:

Budget constraints are eating into school calendars in Georgia at a time when laws like No Child Left Behind are pressing educators to meet tougher and tougher achievement standards.

A state law passed last year relaxed a requirement that students attend school for 180 days, and instead allows schools to make up the time by lengthening each school day.

Every year, schools are expected to meet stricter academic performance benchmarks, but only have a limited amount of time to prepare students so that they might pass.

"I don't think anyone could argue that if we had more time with kids that we could do more," Clarke County School District Superintendent Philip Lanoue said Tuesday.

While Georgia schools go from 180 days to 176 days or fewer, students in competing, higher-performing countries like South Korea and Japan require students to attend nearly 200 days of school.

Several other countries that rank above the United States in terms of academic attainment also observe longer school years, and some think the schedule could have the same impact on American students.

But a longer school year is only one of many possible ways to improve student achievement, Lanoue said.

"Certainly, there's a reality there. But I would say this first, just adding more time isn't the answer. The answer is, 'What are we doing with the time we have?' I think it's got a lot of prongs to it."

Some of the strategies may involve better planning schedules and teacher class loads to maximize student learning time, as well as better identification and intervention when a student shows signs of struggling, he said.

President Obama is calling for schools to expand their hours and the number of days they're open during the year to help the country catch up to its foreign competitors.

Last week he told NBC's Matt Lauer that the current school calendar is too short and about a month behind other advanced countries.

Low-income students especially could benefit from more time at school and a smaller summer break, because they typically are the most likely to fall behind when school isn't in session, according to education researchers.

Six years ago, Gaines and Chase Street elementary schools ran an extended school year, in which students attended school for 11 months out of the year for a total of 195 instructional days.

The additional days and the schedule, which contained a shorter summer break, helped students retain skills and left them better prepared the next year, according to Gaines Elementary School Principal Phyllis Stewart.

"Students were able to retain the content because of the shorter time we were out," Stewart said. "With the shorter break, it was very easy for students to get right back into the rituals, into the routines."

But the extended school year only lasted for about two years, when in 2004 the school district was forced to cut the budget. Eliminating the extra 15 days worth of salaries for teachers and staff at the two schools saved the district $300,000.

"My teachers loved it, and I did, too, but we understood about the fiscal part of it," Stewart said.

To fund one additional day of school for all Georgia schools would cost an estimated $80 million, according to a 2008 report from the Education Commission of the States.

"The bottom line is money," said Herb Garrett, executive director for the Georgia School Superintendents Association. "School district budgets are really heavy on personnel, so if you want to have more time, you have to be able to pay people more in salaries. It's almost like an insolvable dilemma.

"Like everyone else, we hear the rhetoric, but the rhetoric bumps up against reality."