More hours, better education?

S chool principal Robin Harris used to see the clock on her office wall as the enemy, its steady ticking a reminder that time was not on her side.

But these days Harris smiles when the clock hits 1:55 p.m. There are still two more hours in the school day - two more hours to teach math and reading, art and drama.

Harris runs Fletcher-Maynard Academy, a combined public elementary and middle school in Cambridge, Mass., that is experimenting with an extended, eight-hour school day.

"It has sort of loosened up the pace," Harris said. "It's not as rushed and frenzied."

The school, which serves mostly poor, minority students, is one of 10 in the state experimenting with a longer day as part of a $6.5 million program.

U.S. lagging behind

While Massachusetts is leading in putting in place the longer-day model, lawmakers in Minnesota, New Mexico, New York and Washington, D.C., also have debated whether to lengthen the school day or year.

In addition, individual districts such as Miami-Dade in Florida are experimenting with added hours in some schools.

On average, U.S. students go to school 6.5 hours a day, 180 days a year, fewer than in many other industrialized countries, according to a report by the Education Sector, a Washington-based think tank.

One model that traditional public schools are looking to is the Knowledge is Power Program, which oversees public charter schools nationwide.

Those schools typically serve low-income middle-school students, and their test scores show success. Students generally go from 7:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. during the week and for a few hours every other Saturday. They also go to school for several weeks in the summer.

That amounts to at least 50 percent more instructional time for students in such programs than in traditional public schools, according to the report.

The extended-day schedule costs on average about $1,200 extra per student, program spokesman Stephen Mancini said.

Massachusetts is spending about $1,300 per student extra on its extended-day effort.

Most of the extra cost goes into added pay for teachers. At Fletcher-Maynard, senior teachers can make up to $20,000 more per year for the extended hours, Harris said. Not all of the school's teachers have opted to work longer hours.

Meeting benchmarks

An important impetus for the debate around extending school hours is the federal No Child Left Behind law.

The five-year-old law requires annual testing in reading and math for grades three through eight, and again in high school. All students are expected to be working on grade level by 2014.

Schools that fail to meet annual benchmarks are labeled as needing improvement and have to take steps to address the problem.

Up against such a tough requirement, extending the day makes sense, Harris said. "If you want kids to read, and you want to teach them how to read, they have to have time reading," she said.

Kathy Christie, a policy analyst at the Denver-based Education Commission of the States, said that law "has put enough pressure on more people to realize that the traditional school day is not enough to catch kids up."

Schools that are experimenting with longer days are adding more down time and enrichment courses, as well as reading and math.

Creative enrichment

At Edwards Middle School, an extended-day school in Boston, students are staging musicals, designing book covers for favorite novels and coming up with cheers to boost school spirit - an activity favored by 13-year-old Janice Tang.

"This is a class where I can express myself, be active," Tang said one afternoon after she pumped her arms in the air during a girls-only class that incorporates cheering with topics such as sex education and discouraging smoking. "It's very cool, and I have fun a lot."

Massachusetts's education commissioner, David Driscoll, said the classes get kids excited about a longer day.

"Once they're engaged, they'll learn other lessons," Driscoll said. "I think the big mistake that everybody makes is they think that education is all about the academics."

The No Child Left Behind law is due to be updated this year, and the lawmakers involved are eyeing the Massachusetts model.

U.S. Rep. George Miller, the chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee, said he likes the way schools in Massachusetts have invited community organizations to help with some enrichment courses.

"If you're just extending the day to bore the hell out of the child, why don't we all just all go home and save the overtime. You've got to rethink these models," said Miller, a Democrat from California.

U.S. Sen. Democrat Edward Kennedy, chairman of the Senate committee overseeing education, is considering allowing schools that fail to meet annual progress goals to extend their day as a possible solution.

Kennedy, a Massachusetts Democrat, also is considering putting AmeriCorps volunteers - recent college graduates who can help teach - into schools that adopt a longer day.

Extending the day has not been tackled extensively in high schools where many students have after-school jobs or play sports.

The idea is not always applauded by parents, at least initially.

Dawn Oliver was so apprehensive about a plan this year to expand the day at her daughter's middle school in Fall River, Mass., that she considered pulling 11-year-old Brittany out.

"We all had the same thought in our head, which was, 'Oh my God, these kids are going to have their head in a book for the same amount of time as working a full-time job,' " Oliver said.

She said her fears began to fade, however, when she saw the list of electives the kids could take in the afternoon, including cooking and forensics. Those reinforce core lessons, Oliver said.

"They're making a magazine. She's an advice columnist," she said of Brittany. "The kids get so involved in these things because it's not all book work."

Oliver said the real benefits showed up on Brittany's report card, which improved from straight C's to B's.

"I did not foresee honor roll," Oliver said, brimming with pride.

Governor losing on education-reform delay

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's ambitious agenda this year ignored perhaps California's biggest problem — and now it's haunting him and, in particular, kids in four Bay Area school districts.

The governor is wading through a legislative sea of 2007 priorities, including health care woes, prison crowding, political reform and global warming.

The work yielded him a favorable job performance rating this week in a statewide poll. But that survey also showed the public has grown gloomy about schools and gave him a poor rating on education.

Amid building pressure, Schwarzenegger's Education Secretary David Long issued a statement Thursday that acknowledged the state has "a broken system" as it relates to school funding and governance.

Long said ongoing studies by the Governor's Committee on Education Excellence will identify "necessary changes" without just pouring in more money.

Critics dismissed the comments as a stalling technique, saying there already are enough reports and recommendations to fill a library.

Long's comments echoed the governor, who saw summaries of existing reports last month that concluded the "system is fundamentally flawed."

Schwarzenegger then declared an overhaul of school funding and governance his No. 1 priority for 2008, the "Year of Education Reform."

Advocates of changing the overly complex and uneven funding system more swiftly, at least for the bankrupt districts in Oakland and elsewhere, were disappointed.

Advocates of change include virtually the entire education community — the California School Boards Association, the California Teachers Association, the California Federation of Teachers, civil rights groups, business leaders and a coalition of parents groups.

State schools chief Jack O'Connell said the bottom line, when funding and governance issues are hammered out, will be the need to spend more money on schools. "Today we spend on average of 30 percent less than the rest of the nation," he said.

With a $66 billion price tag already — and growing — that may be a tough move for a deficit-ridden state.

But the governor, who wants to make education finance reform his issue, has leaned on Democratic majority leaders in the Legislature to stop some Democrats from moving ahead this week with their school funding remedies.

Schwarzenegger did not want to have to make potentially embarrassing vetoes, analysts said.

The Assembly Education Committee forced Assemblywoman Loni Hancock, D-Berkeley, to shelve her AB1601 bailout bill for seven school districts, including Oakland and Vallejo.

The troubled school districts have been taken over by the state. Oakland remains under state control.

Despite the setback with AB1601, "we're still trying to find ways to help them," said Hancock aide Rebecca Baumann.

In Oakland's case, a separate bill is advancing to restore operational — not fiscal — control to local officials.

Hancock's bill would have changed the base for the funding of those seven districts from the longtime average daily attendance system, to average monthly enrollment.

AME is a better workload indicator, provides more stable and predictable funding and requires less paperwork, experts said.

The Assembly Education Committee this week also postponed consideration of another similar, but wider-reaching reform bill by Assemblyman Mervyn Dymally, D-Compton.

In the Senate this week, the education committee advanced SB 146 by Sen. Jack Scott, D-Pasadena, to the Senate Appropriations Committee, where it is expected to stay until next year. SB 146 would have applied AME statewide.

"Many school districts have been frustrated by an antiquated school funding formula that is based on how many kids are in class on any given day," Scott told the committee.

"This bill would streamline the attendance process by cutting down on the amount of paperwork and consequently saving school districts money and effort," he said.

Last year, state Senate President Pro Tem Don Perata co-authored a similar bill with Scott, which the governor vetoed, citing studies in progress. This week, Perata spokesman Alicia Trost said, "Sen. Perata has no plans for an AME bill."

Assemblyman Gene Mullin's education reform bill last year also was vetoed, with a similar explanation from the governor.

Where Radical Politics And Education Intersect

It came as no surprise to Sol Stern of the Manhattan Institute that a class of New York City public high school pupils took a spring break jaunt to communist Cuba. "Sure, they do it every year," Mr. Stern told me. He sees this as part of something much larger, a cadre of leftists and others caught in a time warp, promoting a 1960s type of radicalism. The problem is, according to Mr. Stern, that they are doing it in the public schools.

Although the city's education department has rules about nearly everything that goes on in our schools, when it comes to the manipulation of young minds for political ends, not only does there appear to be no effort to stop such practices, but the mayor and chancellor have become unwitting co-conspirators in promoting them.

The New York Post reported Monday that perhaps a dozen students from the selective Beacon School, a public high school on Manhattan's West Side, made the trip to the imprisoned island accompanied by their history teacher, Nathan Turner. Such a trip violates American law, and the participants face warnings or fines that could be as much as $65,000 each.

Mr. Turner is reported to have decorated his classroom with posters of such Cuban luminaries as the island's ailing dictator, Fidel Castro, and the Marxist Che Guevara.

Although Beacon's principal, Ruth Lacey, maintained that this year's trip was not school-sanctioned, it was promoted, according to the Post, on the school's Web site. And Ms. Lacey acknowledged that previous trips to Cuba in 2004 and 2005 had been approved. Travel restrictions have been in place since 1962 and were tightened in 2003, before the school's first trip there. Therefore, it is clear that the administration of the school cooperated in breaking the law in previous years even if the 2007 trip lacked official school approval.

Last year, the school trip was to Venezuela, presumably a show of solidarity with its anti-American president, Hugo Chavez.

It isn't just on the foreign policy front that radical activists have gained a foothold. Mr. Stern notes that the leadership of the Department of Education has accelerated the creation of schools with so-called social justice themes. Many of these schools were created using funds provided by Microsoft's founder, William Gates, the world's richest man. Mr. Stern believes there are at least 15 such new schools, almost all created during the current administration. Some of these are affiliated with left-wing groups such as Acorn and the Northwest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition.

Even after the New York City Police Department charged that the latter group "coached" students to falsely accuse police, at a City Council hearing, of maintaining order at Walton High School in the Bronx by setting off stink bombs, the education department approved the linkage between the Northwest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition and the newly created Leadership Institute high school. Solicitations for new teachers in that school have been routinely filtered through the Northwest Bronx group, presumably for political appropriateness.

Beginning April 27, a national conference centered on the New York City public schools, titled "Math Education and Social Justice," will take place. The conference will be held at El Puente Academy for Peace and Justice in Brooklyn, the first of Gotham's "social justice" public schools, described by Heather MacDonald in her article "An F for Hip-Hop 101," which appeared in the summer 1998 issue of City Journal.

How is math education radicalized? A typical "formula" might "prove" that the devastation to New Orleans resulted not from the natural disaster of Hurricane Katrina but came as result of racism is America.

Among the "expert" speakers at this event will be Cathy Wilkerson, an adjunct professor at the Bank Street College of Education. If the name sounds familiar to those of us of a certain age, it is because Ms. Wilkerson was a member of the Weather Underground who gained national prominence in 1970 after she escaped from a Greenwich Village townhouse that was destroyed when a terrorist bomb that was being manufactured there prematurely detonated. After resurfacing and serving a prison term, she became a high school math teacher.

The New York Collective on Radical Education is listed as a co-sponsor of the math conference. No fewer than eight hands-on demonstrations are planned as part of the three-day event at New York City public schools, using teachers paid by the Department of Education and New York City public school children as props. The conference has been brought to the attention of top officials of the Department of Education, who have refused to address the appropriateness of such a conference or the use of city personnel, facilities, and students.

The intersection of radical politics and education is not limited to simply the traditional political left and right. The Department of Education recently announced that it was permitting the creation of the Khalil Gibran International Academy for the study of Arab language and culture. This school will occupy the upper floors of P.S. 252 in Park Slope, much to the chagrin of parents there.

The public schools should not be used to advance the politics of any individual or group, whether it is the pro-Castro teacher at the Beacon School who is still fighting the Cold War, the math teachers looking to change societal priorities to something more to their liking, or Islamists who see the potential of a mini-madrassa in Park Slope.

My guess is that Mr. Klein understands that the Cuba trip shouldn't have happened. He's a former federal lawman, after all. Mr. Klein once told Mr. Stern: "Giving schools ‘leadership' or ‘social justice' themes is fine with me, as long as the teachers and principals do not bring politics and ideologies into our classrooms." The time has come for the chancellor to stand and deliver before the situation spins further out of control.