Shouldn’t summer vacation be over already? Our kids have work to do.

Do kids really need a three-month summer vacation? Or a puny six-and-a-half-hour school day? For some kids, sure, free time is great: Every moment is packed with camps, museum visits, picnics, tennis lessons and trips abroad. But for most, life is way duller. Hard times mean that ever more Houston kids are stuck home alone, unsupervised, their brains marinating in video games and cable TV. If ever there were a time to discuss extending school hours, this is it.

In March, President Obama started that conversation. He called not only to extend after-school programs, but to increase the number of hours in the school year. “We can no longer afford an academic calendar designed when America was a nation of farmers who needed their children at home plowing the land at the end of each day,” he said. “That calendar may have once made sense, but today, it puts us at a competitive disadvantage. Our children spend over a month less in school each year than children in South Korea. That is no way to prepare them for a 21st-century economy.”

Extra school time particularly helps minority and low-income kids. During summer vacation all kids tend to forget what they’ve learned. Academics call that well-documented slide “summer learning loss,” and studies show it’s greatest for the kids who can least afford it.

More school time is among open secrets behind the success of Houston’s KIPP and YES Prep charter-school systems, both of which have shown remarkable ability to propel low-income and minority kids into college. KIPPsters typically attend school from 7:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. each weekday — plus go to school some Saturdays and for a few weeks each summer. During those extra hours, KIPP provides its students not only with more classes, but also with sports, art and field trips — the kind of enrichment that upper-class kids get at home.

Could the Houston Independent School District try something similar? The question strikes home for school board member Natasha Kamrani: She’s married to Chris Barbic, the founder and head of YES Prep, and she’s seen the effect those extra hours can have.

Kamrani is quick to point out that longer hours are expensive — teachers have to be paid — and that they aren’t a cure-all: Good stuff has to happen during those extra hours. In classes with the worst-performing teachers, Kamrani notes, students actually lose ground as the school year wears on. “Kids in those classes,” she says, “might be better off if they spent less time at school.”

But what if HISD were very careful in its approach? Kamrani is appalled by HISD’s dropout rate: Roughly 40 percent of HISD’s freshmen fail to graduate from high school. She notes that the district’s data shows that most dropouts have something significant in common: They start falling behind in fifth grade.

What if, she asks, the district made an all-out push to stop their fall as soon as it began? What if, in sixth grade, kids at risk were assigned the district’s most talented teachers? And what if those teachers had more hours to work their wiles? Would that be enough to turn the kids’ entire lives around?

The idea needs to be tried. And it needs to be tried immediately, before another class of sixth-graders slides out of reach.



source : http://www.chron.com