Afternoon Announcements: July 10, 2012

It really feels like a Tuesday today, and guess what? It is! Funny how that works out sometimes. Conveniently, it also feels like there are some announcements to make in the world of education policy and research today, and there are! Two for two on a Tuesday.

Two reports released recently detail the alarming cuts slated for the Department of Education (along with the rest of the federal government’s agencies) if sequestration (or across-the-board spending cuts) isn’t avoided by Congress. Education Week has the report on these reports from the American Association of School Administrators and the National Education Association.

Friday Report Round-Up

Here is this week’s report round-up:

Washington State High Schools Pay Less for Math and Science Teachers than for Teachers in Other Subjects by the University of Washington 's Center on Reinventing Public Education. This report finds that the Washington state salary system fails to attract qualified educators from the science, technology, engineering, and math profession and retain them in the field of K-12 education.

Better Benefits: Reforming Teacher Pensions for a Changing Work Force from Education Sector. This report examines teacher pensions and details the problems facing current state pension programs-both the fiscal problems, which are severe, and the educational consequences of these retirement plans. It also offers a specific set of policy recommendations designed to improve the fiscal solvency of state pension plans while also making the new plans more attractive to teachers.

The Status of Childhood Weight in Massachusetts from the Massachusetts State Department of Health. According to this analysis, more than one-third of Massachusetts students evaluated during the 2008-2009 school year were overweight or obese.

Time is of the essence

There has been much discussion in Washington, as well as in school districts around the nation, about how time can be used to provide expanded learning opportunities for students (especially those who are low-performing and at risk of dropping out).  With a high school dropout rate that should keep all of us up at night and U.S. students underperforming their international counterparts, there is good reason for educators, communities, and policymakers to be thinking about how time is being used (or misused) in schools.

At this point, I am going to resist the urge to discuss at length the agrarian calendar.  Truly, we have heard about U.S. reliance on an outdated agrarian calendar so much this summer that I for one am starting to feel resentful every time I visit the local farmers’ market. Let’s just say the majority of schools in the U.S. follow a calendar that may be in need of revisiting and/or updating.  Right now the traditional U.S. school calendar consists of 180 six-hour days. According to an Education Sector study, this translates to 799 instructional hours. By comparison Finland has 861 hours in their school year; Netherlands, 911; Japan, 926; and Korea tops it with 1,079 instructional hours. It is also worth noting that students in these countries continue to outperform American students on the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), an international assessment of the reading, science, and mathematical literacy of 15-year-old students.   

Experts agree that if increased time is going to positively impact achievement it must be time well spent. Simply adding instructional hours that are more of same will not do much. The National Center on Time and Learning has done much to forward the discussion about expanded learning time, but how expanded learning time can make a difference at the high school level is still wide open for discussion.