Frugal Café Blog Zone

Posted By Vicki McClure Davidson on September 28, 2009

Attention, American students. Your lives may be impacted by Pres. Barack Obama more than you ever realized… more school. LOTS more school.

And don’t let the increasing teacher shortage in our country concern you, or the lack of budget money for adding more manhours/energy hours to our nation’s public schools. Once the president returns from his campaigning in Denmark for the Summer Olympic Games in Chicago (he leaves Thursday, and his baffling involvement in Chicago’s bid for the 2016 Summer Olympics is believed to be the highest-ever White House profile in lobbying for the international event… natch), he’ll offer tax-increasing, liberty-robbing solutions.

How about more mandated SERVE/GIVE teacher volunteers from millions of American adults! Maybe ACORN, with their zealous battery of get-it-done-no-matter-the-cost activists, can step in to pick up the slack! SEIU, too! Especially now that Obama is using school kids during valuable school time to be junior lobbyists for the Olympics.

In line with Obama’s obsession with “green jobs” efficiency, in this proposal, schools will likely be forced to stay open longer and on weekends, when electricity demand nationwide is lower and when some teenagers, having more free time, will tend to get into trouble or far, far worse, as witnessed in Chicago this past week.

Obama’s solution to the complex problems of some teens getting into trouble and scoring poorly on academic tests? Take away all students’ free time, including those who are doing well… take away free time reserved for homework, for family, for church, for friends, for jobs, for college prep, for hobbies, for relaxing. There is also the theory that longer school hours will make children do better in school.

In theory… famous last words.

On the surface, this sounds like a reasonable, plausible idea with some credence for improving test score results, closing up the achievement gap, enhancing deeper learning. However, before the Obama administration again jumps willy-nilly into something that will cost families so much in terms of quality time with their children and additional taxes, let’s take a deep breath and do some honest-to-goodness review of other nations’ school programs, some bona fide non-partisan studies on children’s school scores and find out what directly impacts them, both positively and negatively.

Someone please tell me how, if so many schools in America are indeed so crappy, why would extending their hours make them any less crappy? Without fixing problems with poor parental involvement and tenured teachers who don’t give a damn, I don’t see how longer hours = quality education.

If, as some government officials are saying that summer vacation negatively affects the learning process of students who are in economically poorer homes, how about just require THOSE lower-income students to attend school through out the summer and on weekends? Just kidding… or am I?

Obama also wants kids to have a “safe place” to go on weekends and during the summer months. Mr. President, my kids already have that. It’s OUR HOME.

We need to know much more about this before stupidly glopping two or more weeks onto a school year (Kah-ching! Add billions of dollars more to that, get more skin in the game). Let’s not flit like crazed moths into the flame as this administration has done on so many countless other programs.

As usual, Obama wants to turn everything upside down for everyone in order to put a limp band-aid on a problem that exists for a fraction of the country’s student population. No word on how he proposes this expanded school scheme will be paid for with our nation’s climbing deficit.

Yep, looks like more socialist micromanagement from The One, with no concept or concern about the cost or the fact-based likelihood of success. Who, as I mentioned earlier, is planning to increase his carbon footprint again by flying out to Copenhagen to lobby for the Olympics in Chicago. No teleconferencing is good enough for our POTUS…

FOX News
Obama Proposes Longer School Day, Shorter Summer Vacation
September 27, 2009

WASHINGTON — Students beware: The summer vacation you just enjoyed could be sharply curtailed if President Barack Obama gets his way.

Obama says American kids spend too little time in school, putting them at a disadvantage with other students around the globe.

“Now, I know longer school days and school years are not wildly popular ideas,” the president said earlier this year. “Not with Malia and Sasha, not in my family, and probably not in yours. But the challenges of a new century demand more time in the classroom.”

The president, who has a sixth-grader and a third-grader, wants schools to add time to classes, to stay open late and to let kids in on weekends so they have a safe place to go.

“Our school calendar is based upon the agrarian economy and not too many of our kids are working the fields today,” Education Secretary Arne Duncan said in a recent interview with The Associated Press.

Fifth-grader Nakany Camara is of two minds. She likes the four-week summer program at her school, Brookhaven Elementary School in Rockville, Md. Nakany enjoys seeing her friends there and thinks summer school helped boost her grades from two Cs to the honor roll. But she doesn’t want a longer school day. “I would walk straight out the door,” she said.

Domonique Toombs felt the same way when she learned she would stay for an extra three hours each day in sixth grade at Boston’s Clarence R. Edwards Middle School.

“I was like, ‘Wow, are you serious?”‘ she said. “That’s three more hours I won’t be able to chill with my friends after school.”

Her school is part of a 3-year-old state initiative to add 300 hours of school time in nearly two dozen schools. Early results are positive. Even reluctant Domonique, who just started ninth grade, feels differently now. “I’ve learned a lot,” she said.

Does Obama want every kid to do these things? School until dinnertime? Summer school? And what about the idea that kids today are overscheduled and need more time to play?

Obama and Duncan say kids in the United States need more school because kids in other nations have more school. “Young people in other countries are going to school 25, 30 percent longer than our students here,” Duncan told the AP. “I want to just level the playing field.”

While it is true that kids in many other countries have more school days, it’s not true they all spend more time in school.

Kids in the U.S. spend more hours in school (1,146 instructional hours per year) than do kids in the Asian countries that persistently outscore the U.S. on math and science tests — Singapore (903), Taiwan (1,050), Japan (1,005) and Hong Kong (1,013). That is despite the fact that Taiwan, Japan and Hong Kong have longer school years (190 to 201 days) than does the U.S. (180 days).

[...]

Summer is a crucial time for kids, especially poorer kids, because poverty is linked to problems that interfere with learning, such as hunger and less involvement by their parents.

That makes poor children almost totally dependent on their learning experience at school, said Karl Alexander, a sociology professor at Baltimore’s Johns Hopkins University, home of the National Center for Summer Learning.

Disadvantaged kids, on the whole, make no progress in the summer, Alexander said. Some studies suggest they actually fall back. Wealthier kids have parents who read to them, have strong language skills and go to great lengths to give them learning opportunities such as computers, summer camp, vacations, music lessons, or playing on sports teams.

“If your parents are high school dropouts with low literacy levels and reading for pleasure is not hard-wired, it’s hard to be a good role model for your children, even if you really want to be,” Alexander said.

The Tech, New York Times, 2007: Study Compares State Scores With Other Countries’

American students even in low-performing states like Alabama do better on math and science tests than students in most foreign countries, including Italy and Norway, according to a new study released last week. That’s the good news.

The bad news is that students in Singapore and several other Asian countries significantly outperform American students, even those in high-achieving states like Massachusetts, the study found.

The American Prospect: Are U.S. Students Behind?:

The fretting over American schools’ international performance became a national pastime during the 1950s, when there was a real source of anxiety: the space and weapons races with the Soviet Union. Some cold warriors were famous educational worriers, such as Admiral Hyman Rickover, who looked at European schools and without a lot of evidence declared them more rigorous than our own. More serious for Rickover were the numbers supplied to him by CIA director Allen Dulles showing that the Soviet Union would produce far more scientists, engineers, and mathematicians than the United States would. Rickover repeatedly admonished his audiences, “Let us never forget that there can be no second place in a contest with Russia and that there will be no second chance if we lose.”

[...]

The 1980s saw a replay of the same alarm, this time with “competitiveness” as the worry and Japan, Germany, and Korea playing the role of educational heavies. In 1983 the widely publicized report A Nation At Risk put the schools in an unremittingly harsh light and announced a virtual state of national siege. “If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.” In the 1990s, the going wisdom persists that our schools are awful. American students “come in last or next to last in virtually every international comparison,” wrote Louis V. Gerstner, IBM’s chief executive, in 1994. In October 1997, Chicago Tribune columnist Joan Beck was so certain of the outcome of national testing that she declared, “Testing fourth graders in reading and eighth graders in math will only tell us what we already know. The United States lags behind most industrial nations in educational achievement.”

[...]

Mathematics and science are generally considered disaster zones in American schools. Many people have heard, for example, that only the top 1 percent of American students score as high in math as the average student in Japan. This statistic comes from research conducted by Harold Stevenson of the University of Michigan and has been widely disseminated by respected journalists. But the publicity given Stevenson’s work illustrates how data showing America’s schools in a poor light are accepted less critically than are favorable data. Stevenson’s methods violate two cardinal principles of research: The samples of students must be representative of the nations being compared, and they must be comparable to each other. Stevenson’s samples meet neither of these criteria. (His American sample contains a large number of poor families, 20 percent of whom did not speak English at home, while his Japanese sample contained many more well-educated parents than the country as a whole.) If American students had finished ahead of Japanese students, the study’s methodological flaws would probably have been quickly spotted and the research never published. (I am convinced that if a study comparing American and Japanese students found the Americans finished ahead, the headlines would read: “Japanese Students Second; Americans Next to Last.”)

There is no doubt that Japanese children do better in mathematics than do Americans at the same ages, but Stevenson’s data exaggerate the gap…

More related links on schools, education, and the government:
And so it goes in Shreveport: Longer School Days and Weekends, Too!
Strollerderby: Obama Wants Longer School Days
Mommy: Obama Wants Kids to Spend More Time in School
Nobama Blog: The Associated Press — More School: Obama would curtail summer vacation
Vets On The Watch: How Much Do You Love School
Chicago Sun-Times: Fenger honor student killed in mob attack was just ‘a kid going home’
Greg Gutfeld, Big Hollywood: Daily Gut: Obama’s School Plan
Politico: Right blasts Obama speech to students
Gusano, Babalú Blog, an island on the net without a bearded dictator: No Such Thing As A Free Lunch
GayPatriot: Had Rightosphere Not Raised such a Ruckus Would Obama’s Speech to Schoolkids have been so unobjectionable?
Doug TenNapel, Big Hollywood: Found Art: Dear Leader Addresses the Children
Frugal Café Blog Zone: Not So Far-fetched: If There Had Been No Attention Paid to Obama’s September 8 School Speech… (update) and Gov. Tim Pawlenty Speaks Out Against Obama’s Sept. 8 Televised School Address, Many Schools Say They “Opt Out” and Obama Peeved, So Escalates Media Attacks vs. “Love Is in the Air” (video): UPDATE – School Propaganda on Sept. 8, “I Pledge to Give Service to Obama” and Obama vs. Bush: Speech to School Kids Controversy, Dems Attacked & Investigated Bush
Adam Baldwin, Big Hollywood: Mr. President Goes Back to School: A Controversial Issue?
Michelle Malkin: Indoctrination Watch: How your tax dollars are training students to be union organizers and Why parents don’t trust the Educator-in-Chief and his comrades and I repeat: It’s not the speech, it’s the subtext and “I pledge to be of service to Barack Obama” and Operation “Hall Pass on That”
Obi’s Sister: The Obama Overreach
National Review Online: Krauthammer’s Take
Washington Post, Post Politics: Obama’s School Address, Politicians and Profanity, More
Ztower: Carroll County Times unhappy with the “far right.”
The Christian Science Monitor: Obama school speech suddenly a prickly topic for educators
The Political Fish: Gibbs: Opponents of Prez starting “food fight”
The Underground Conservative: The Speech
Fire Andrea Mitchell!: Obama Youth – Obama to indoctrinate kids on Sep 8
Goodtimepolitics: Barack Obama’s speech to school kids draws fire
Mama Winger’s Kitchen Table: Obama: No Child Propaganda Left Behind
Traction Control: Letter to the Principal, My Child’s September 8 Absence
Jim Geraghty, National Review Online: Department of Education Deletes Line About How Schoolkids Can Help Obama
Right Soup: Obama Wants Your Kid In His Cult
This Ain’t Hell, But you can see it from here: I pledge?
HillBuzz: KEEP PUSHING BACK, PEOPLE. WHITE HOUSE ON THE ROPES OVER SCHOOL INDOCTRINATION PLAN
Tarpon’s Swamp: Indoctrination of School Kids

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