But when it comes to the young the situation is reversed. American children have it easier than most other children in the world, including the supposedly lazy Europeans. They have one of the shortest school years anywhere, a mere 180 days compared with an average of 195 for OECD countries and more than 200 for East Asian countries. German children spend 20 more days in school than American ones, and South Koreans over a month more. Over 12 years, a 15-day deficit means American children lose out on 180 days of school, equivalent to an entire year.
American children also have one of the shortest school days, six-and-a-half hours, adding up to 32 hours a week. By contrast, the school week is 37 hours in Luxembourg, 44 in Belgium, 53 in Denmark and 60 in Sweden. On top of that, American children do only about an hour’s-worth of homework a day, a figure that stuns the Japanese and Chinese….
I am very skeptical of the 6.5 hour figure, but in any case, home schooled kids spend less time doing school work and generally do better on standardized tests…
I’d also like to know where the citation of American children only doing 1 hour of homework per day comes from? My daughter spent 3 or more hours per night doing homework, and longer if she had papers or studying.
This article seems to be just another neo-con attack against America, as a rationale to justify outsourcing our jobs, and displacing our citizens through the importation of foreign workers.
The teachers’ union is in large part responsible for this deplorable state of affairs. It is so powerful few legislators are willing to stand up to it.
What I found is that in public schools (and some Catholic schools) my children spent their school hours doing “thinking skills” meaning sitting around drawing pictures of pilgrims and doing “research” meaning hanging out in the library, checking out books, and doing “science experiments”. All the drills were offloaded to home. If you wanted your child to read fluently, phonics drills, oral reading, comprehension exercises (and in my older child’s case) writing was done at home and was extra, not assigned by the school. Similarly, all math drills were done at home, study and discussion of the history and science textbooks was done at home. My oldest child spent several hours a day at home doing the stuff that my younger child (for whom we were fortunate to find a really great private school) did during the school day, and that I recall doing during the school day during my own childhood (in DC public schools, which were then the best in the nation, and are now the worst).
It used to be that teachers spent school hours actually teaching, with drills, in class essays, spelling bees, geography bees, math facts bees etc. Now they waste much of the day supposedly instructing the child in “the love of learning” rather than actually teaching anything.
Then, when, predictably those children who do not have parents who are willing to spend the hours between 6pm and 10pm (as we did) doing the stuff that should have been done in school the children are swiftly given some bs “diagnosis” like ADD or Aspergers or Autism so it is clear that the failure is the fault of the defective child rather than the incompetant and lazy teacher.
Unfortunately, America, by permitting attacks on the teaching profession by lazy parents, has brought this situation on herself. The teachers in private schools and those we remember from our own childhoods taught because they loved teaching. However we decided that we could improve on this by suing teachers and schools who enforced discipline, kept kids after school to make up homework and generally insisted that weaker students work harder to keep up rather than be passed along. We then insisted that teachers could be “forced” to teach unruly undisciplined and lazy students by stratifying the teachers by standardized test scores. Predictably, the good teachers went elsewhere. We got those who were in it for easy hours and a steady paycheck. The latter group of teachers realized that the best way of improving their students standardized test scores was to improve their selection of students. Thus, these teachers were swift to give a kid whose biggest problems were illiteracy and embarasment of the same, diagnoses of “bipolar disease and mild MR” that would follow them around like a heat seeking missile for the rest of their lives. The alternative, after all, would have involved working with them after school and at lunch every day for six months only to watch them make the teacher “look bad” on standardized testing. Only folks who do it for love would do that, and you will not make a teacher love their trade by suing them.
And now, the same geniuses who took the best public schools in the world and made them the worst, plan to do likewise with the automotive industry and healthcare.
Just remember, the best way for a physician to improve their scores is to not take care of the really sick patients. Just as difficult kids suddenly became too diseased to teach, watch as the elderly become too sick to help. I remember pediatrics 25 years ago when I was an intern. There were hordes of subspecialists, all of them top of the trees who were proud to place “treating adults and children” after their names. If your child had juvenile diabetes, there was a endocrinologist who saw both adults and children. If your child had a brain tumor there was a neurosurgeon in most medium sized cities. Now they are all but gone, thanks to medicaid and lawsuits. If your 17 year old kid has a benign brain tumor no different from the one ailing his 19 year old cousin (who has real insurance) the cousin will be treated by the regional hospital in your home town and the 17 year old will have to be driven 300 miles away. Most little kids with serious diseases spend months away from their parents stuck in some specialty children’s hospital far away. This is because all chronically ill children are swiftly dumped into Medicaid, which does not pay the costs of overhead (malpractice insurance and staff salaries), let alone the physicians salary. After a while, it becomes impossible for the physician to pay the bills unless he drops the “pediatrics component” of his practice.
Watch for this to happen to the elderly with the new medicare cuts. It is not possible to force a business to offer a service for less than it costs to provide it. Already more than 80 percent of the neurosurgeons I know have limited their practices to adult spine only (no head cases, meaning no head trauma, and no children). Pretty soon, instead of hearing, “I’m sorry, we don’t treat children, you need a _pediatric_ surgeon/ rheumatologist/ neurologist/ endocrinologist whatever” you will hear “I’m sorry, my practice is limited to adults. You need a “geriatric surgeon”. And guess what, there aren’t any around here. I’m not sure why. Maybe we should encourage more students to go into the field.” Further, after a year of not treating complex cases, the surgeon really will be unable to handle them. The infrastructure in pediatric neurosurgery is gone. Too many neurosurgeons have not seen kids in a year, they can never go back even if kids with head trauma were as profitable as adults needing botox. The infrastructure in treating complex adult illness will also dissolve, as it has for kids. But as it does, the “scores” will improve with this patient selection (just as they have to some degree in teaching, thanks to student selection). And the politicians will figure they need to do more of what they’ve been doing.
After a while, people will forget what a good physician used to be, just as they have already forgotten what a good teacher used to be.
It is not possible to sue and regulate a person into performing a task that can only be done for love. Teaching is one such task that has demonstrated this fact. Medicine will soon prove its universality.
I would hardly measure success by the number of hours a day or days per year the state is raising children and indoctrinating them. In our school district the push for All Day kindergarten is driven by the school district’s desire for more state money, and the two working parent’s desire to avoid daycare costs.
Feels more and more like Auldous Huxley’s Brave New World.
When I say “our school district” I mean the local one. We homeschool our kids.
Well, you know maybe the USA ought to revert to children working in the mines and factories. Kept them off the streets, and kept the economy humming.
One factor that often skews the public education discussion is that usually only total funding for education is mentioned. Rarely does anyone do an analysis of the composition of the education spending. My education sources tell me therein lies the problem. At least in CA much of education spending is committed to specific programs, leaving funds for “teaching” inadequate, even though the total funding for “education” is quite large.