Chicago mayor Richard Daley argued again Tuesday for a longer school day as the city prepares to renegotiate its contract with teachers. He packed all the red-meat essentials into the appeal: he plead international competitiveness with kids in India and China, poked fun at the antiquated school calendar dictated by farming seasons, used city pride and compared Chicago to New York, and played emotional with an appeal for children’s safety.
What he didn’t do was talk directly about what the additional time means in schools. The research is actually quite mixed on the subject, mainly because adding more time often doesn’t address issues of quality. A 1998 study by the Consortium of Chicago School Research found that planned events like Halloween parades; standardized testing; assemblies; and dental, vision, and hearing screening cut a significant portion of time available for actual instruction. When added to teacher inefficiencies, almost half of a child’s time in school is wasted by poor time management. Daley’s plan of adding more quantity of time does nothing to alleviate issues of quality. And his efforts at year-round scheduling for urban schools make sense policy-wise, but it appears he’s pursuing those changes for financial reasons (and to great parental furor).
It should be interesting to watch the mayor’s pursuit of extended school days as he negotiates a new union contract for the city’s teachers. The current contract, signed in 2003 and set to expire at the end of the month, gave teachers four percent annual raises in exchange for 15 minutes more per school day. Daley seems to be pushing for something similar this time around. Next time he shoots from the hip, it’d be nice to see him aim at a pay scale rewarding teachers for boosting student achievement, serving as mentors, or volunteering to work at struggling schools, as they’re already implementing on a small scale.
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