Should school time be extended? That is a question that many adults are keeping on top of their minds. They believe that 6 to 7 hours of school are not quite enough for a day, some suggest that school time should match the average of 8 hours of work every day. This divided the debate into two sides: “Reduce school time and extend school time”. However, it’s believed that most of us prefer the school hours to be left untouched and many other considered alternative hours could cause havoc to the schedule that the students are used to.
The school hours debate had been around since the school existed and there was no way to satisfy both sides. About one month earlier, a shocking announcement was made through the news source CNN addressing a bill created by Democratic presidential candidate and US Senator Kamala Harris that establish the intention of matching school hours with the traditional workday of the adult. This act named “The Family Friendly Schools Act” would accomplish to extend the school day by three more hours making the average school time now from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. Kamala backed her suggestion by explaining that the current school time may cause parents to waste time trying to find a way to take care of their kids while they are still at work and put low-income families at a disadvantage. Even Catherine Brown, a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress expressed that she fully supports this movement through an interview: “The misalignment between school and work schedules puts working families through unnecessary financial stress -- a burden we know is disproportionately shouldered by Black and Latinx families and families with low incomes,”(CNN.com). Another benefit of this act mentioned was it allows schools to keep going during many events like teacher conferences and also provides enrichment activities without any cost on days without classes through a $5 million dollars grant across five tears to each school district to help students improve in class and help the school achieve higher test average overall.
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Even with all the benefits stated above, many people were not moved by this bill and expressed their opinion about the bill and why it shouldn’t be official. The co-host of: “The View,'' Whoopi Goldberg, notified the act could guide to 'institutionalizing' of schoolchildren which means “not all schools have gymnasiums or spaces for the children to escape the classrooms,” (CNN.com) she said. A UK/US newspaper/online news publisher name “The Independent” interviewed many experts in regard to school and parenting and their opinion on the extension of the school day and here is some responses. Karen Whitlock, a secondary school teacher said: “...I see how older children get tired at the end of the current school day. Making children stay longer will not result in quality teaching and learning.” (Independent. co) and Siobhan Freegard the founder of a site called Netmums said: “Educational experts agree children need time to relax, to play and to wind down, it isn’t wasted time where they should be at school and cramming in more lessons – it’s a vital part of childhood. Extending the school day will also cause thousands of job losses as childminders and people who run after-school clubs like sports, drama, and music are forced out of business.” (Independent. co)
Further research also proves that a longer school day is not as needed in many ways. Because the act is pushing toward the convenience of parents’ schedules and helping better students improve in school, it may have some effect on how students adapt to their everyday schedule. Extending the school days may look like a good solution but in reality, it’s just a simplistic approach. In actuality, most problems can be solved by using time in school more efficiently. A study proved that students only make use of a third of their school day to do work, extending the school days most likely will not change the students’ study behavior as much. A more reasonable solution for this is to keep the students in check throughout the day, monitoring their behavior, etc. There are many reasons why longer school days will spark more opposite results of what it is intended to do, exceptionally long school days could result in extreme fatigue and lacking attention in class making studying ineffective. Consequently, when students are mentally exhausted to focus on the lesson near the end of the day, most of the information from the lesson becomes useless. Some students are prone to diagnoses of post-lunch attention deficit syndrome which totaled their mental power for class after lunch.
Another reason why students’ energy diminishes so quickly throughout the day is because of the lack of sleep. According to a chart created by Sarah McKibben named “Wake UP Call”, as kids, the average sleeps time for us is at least 8 hours a day. High school students are struggling to achieve the recommended time of sleep due to the excess amount of work they receive in school, some even start doing their homework as soon as they get home to finish their work in time. The decision to extend the school day could affect the students’ schedules to do their homework and cause their quality time with their families which sounds like a lose-lose situation overall. From here those struggling students may become too tired actually to learn in school; additionally, the charts also show: “33% of teenagers report falling asleep in school” (Sarah Mckkiben). Sleeping in class could lead to students missing out on important lessons that may be tested during the test in school and cause the test average to drop, which was one of the obvious reasons why some people want school time to be extended. However, a longer school day doesn’t mean that students could achieve higher test grades. A report showed that spending more time in school doesn't necessarily mean the test average would be higher. The United States students spent an average of 1146 hours of study in class while other Asian countries were shown to spend significantly less amount of time and were able to outperform the United States, especially in Math.
It’s understood that most of the students wouldn’t want to spend more time in class every day and are upset with the new act being introduced. However, senator Harris dropped the act due to the low amount of support from the people, this showed the result of someone who is trying to do something way out of the ordinary and fail to gain traction for the idea to go through. The current school schedule is already a perfect balance for the students to make room and improve in school, rather the best option is for the teacher to take action and help the students in many ways and support them until they succeed
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