Originally posted by Deokoria
After a certain length of time, people - especially younger children - just shut down. That's why there are so many breaks, recesses, whatever in school.
Originally posted by Cyrinne
I worry about how young children would handle such a long day. My first graders already seem tuckered out by 2:30, and they still have an hour to go.
I agree that an extra hour per day is rough. Frankly, I think they could easily just shave off the 5th day and not even worry about making it up.

Giving teachers a free day to plan, help kids that are falling behind, etc. probably adds enough efficiency to the whole process that the "lost day" is not really lost. Almost every public school teacher I have ever known laments the fact that the slower students have an extremely negative impact on the pace of the entire class. In public school, there is not much they can do about it.

There were three main reasons I raised the whole homeschooling issue:

1) It shows that it is very easy to do a lot more educating in half or even one third as much time.

2) It shows that piling on tons of homework is not the answer.

3) It shows that throwing more money at the problem is not the answer. Homeschooled kids get a better education for about 1/10th the cost. Every time I read this, it strikes me as a brutally harsh indictment of our fradulent public education system: "The average cost per homeschool student is $546 while the average cost per public school student is $5,325. Yet the homeschool children in this study averaged in 85th percentile while the public school students averaged in the 50th percentile on nationally standardized achievement tests."

Regarding testing:

I think testing is a poor way to bring accountability to education, but unfortunately it is the only way that the populace has been able to blast through the NEA juggernaut.

More bad teachers need to be fired. A LOT more bad administrators need to be fired. The whole concept of tenure in lower, middle, and high school is ridiculous. The reason tenure exists in college is to protect people from being fired for ideological reasons. Ideology should not even be a part of the K-12 education, so this should not be a factor.

If a teacher sucks, they should get sacked. Period. Why is teaching a magic profession where you work hard a couple years and are then guaranteed a job for life? That's lunacy.

Vouchers are a much better way to have accountability. It allows parents to make a decision based on the whole array of factors related to the quality of education they are receiving. It allows these decisions to be made on a case-by-case basis after analysis of all the details (including how the details pertain to a specific child).

I agree that it is impossible to analyze the quality of education solely by a bunch of test scores. This is particularly true when schools start focusing more on the tests than on an actual education.

What is really sad about the whole thing is that the reason teachers like yourself, Cyrinne, have to spend so much time on testing, is because the school districts know they are doing a shitty job of educating the children they are in charge of. They know that if they simply stuck to their normal curriculum, lack of discipline, and misguided methods, the kids would simply fail the testing like crazy. They can't have that happen, because then their schools gets NCLB failing grades, and parents are suddenly given the FREEDOM to move their kids to a good school of their choice.

The majority of teachers are probably very good. But it only takes a few crappy ones to completely ruin a school. Similarly, it only takes a couple of crappy administrators to ruin the school even more.

Give parents the power to vote with their feet, and the terrible schools will be revealed very quickly and a lot more accurately.