Quality over Quantity

As I sit here on a snowy Sunday contemplating whether to shorten the school year one more day by canceling school tomorrow, my thoughts go to this article about our new Education Secretary's idea to extend the school year through the  summer. A dad from school sent me the link, and rightly pointed out that more does NOT equal better. What makes Secretary Duncan think that simply having kids spend more days in a broken system will help? Unfortunately, the "more is better" mantra seems to have taken over our country. So how does this apply to education, and specifically to summer? Well for children of families with economic means, summer is the time for true enrichment. My own children have traveled across country, gone to summer camp, been to foreign countries, sold lemonade on the corner, climbed trees, built forts, explored streams, and a thousand other things that are just as valuable, if not more valuable, to their lives than school. The types of things my children do outside of school cannot easily be replicated in a school setting. But what about children without economic means? For the most part, these are the children we should be concerned about, as they score consistently lower on academic assessments than their peers who are not in poverty.  This is where Arne Duncan could really make a difference. Rather than taking the joys of summer away from our kids, why not extend them to less privileged kids? I'm guessing that vouchers for summer camp would be a whole lot cheaper than keeping schools open. Not only that, the skills kids learn at camp would be more valuable than a few extra hours of academic instruction. Whether I cancel school tomorrow or not, my students will have a worthwhile day. They will go sledding or build fires or make cookies or read books or all of the above.  At my school, kids are guaranteed two weeks off at the end of December and a full week at Spring Break, and I will never extend the school year into summer. This is not because I want more days off, but because even though I am a teacher, and even though I love school, and think my school is a valuable place to be, I honor the time my students spend outside of school. It renews and rejuvenates them. It readies them for the "real world" outside. It is a sacred part of an American childhood. 

Had Any Bad Teachers Lately??

Good news today. I haven't had time to finish reading all the articles about Mr. Duncan but I do know this- he believes that school should be run like a business, and I agree.  He also believes that the key level of change at the school is the principal, and being one myself I KNOW that is true. At most schools you will hear parents say, "Well this year is great because my child got a good teacher, but last year was awful because he had a bad teacher..." If a school is structured properly, and run properly, "good" and "bad" teachers should never be an issue. There isn't any room for a "bad" teacher at my school. When a school is small, EVERY teacher must be top notch and as principal it is my job to make sure that every one of them is. But more importantly the structure of our school makes the CHILD the focus of the classroom, not the teacher. When children are given individualized work and are responsible for doing the work with the teacher's guidance, rather than the teacher at the board lecturing, you can imagine a completely different definition of  a "good" teacher emerging. Whenever a teacher presents a new topic to a classroom you have a similar situation. A third of the kids already know it, a third aren't ready to learn the new topic because they didn't get the last one, and maybe a third are actually willing and able to learn something new. Of course this model produces what two-thirds of the class would call a "bad" teacher. They are either bored or lost most of the time! Hopefully Arne Duncan has seen some of this first hand and hopefully he will be open to the suggestion that getting rid of "bad" teachers won't solve all of our educational problems.