Longer School Year Urged as Education Aid : Legislation: Bill to add 20 days to school year has many backers who say it will improve education, but a lack of funds is likely to stall the idea.

Hoping to make California’s 5 million public schoolchildren more competitive with their counterparts around the world, Assemblyman Steve Peace (D-Chula Vista) has asked state lawmakers to gradually extend the school year by 20 days.

Peace’s rationale for the proposal is rooted in a growing belief among some educational reformers that American pupils simply need to work longer at catching up with their academic--and economic--rivals in Japan and Western Europe, where students spend up to 243 days in public school.

Gov. Pete Wilson’s Council on California Competitiveness also jumped on the idea in its April 24 report.

“When we have the classroom and teachers, we make too little use of them,” concluded the council, chaired by former baseball commissioner Peter V. Ueberroth and charged with finding ways to keeping jobs in the state.

“Our 180-day school year is among the shortest in the Western world. Our school day is short. When we have the pupils in our grasp, we should take the time to teach them,” the report said.

But the sobering reality is that adding 20 days to the school year would cost an extra $2.2 billion in salaries and operating costs. In San Diego alone, four extra weeks would cost city schools an extra $62 million and the outlying 43 suburban districts a combined $185.4 million.

Those kind of numbers have been enough to douse reformist ardor in cash-starved Sacramento, where lawmakers are already facing a $109-million budget shortfall by mid-1993.

Meanwhile, School Supt. Bill Honig, the California Teachers Assn., the president of the National Education Assn. and leading California lawmakers are either opposed or merely lukewarm to the idea.

“This (educational) system is dysfunctional enough that it seems to me we ought to make it work better . . . than adding to an already dysfunctional or inefficient system,” said Sen. Gary K. Hart (D-Santa Barbara), who chairs the Senate’s Education Committee.

“If you want to put another billion dollars into the system, having more of the same for a longer period of time is not high on my priority list.”

As originally written, Peace’s bill would have required the 200-day year all at once. However, an Assembly committee amended the measure last month to take a more gradual approach, adding five days a year starting in 1994--and only if there’s enough money in the state budget to pay for it.

Few give the measure a chance to survive the Legislature this year, but Peace says he will continue to press for the change.

Why?

‘The answer to that question comes in a letter that I got from a high school sophomore,” Peace explained recently. “She was very unhappy about the notion that she might be required to spend more days in school, and, in arguing her case, she pointed out that school isn’t everything . . .

“Unfortunately, in her letter, she managed to have 11 misspellings and failed to construct a single sentence correctly. It was really sad.”

Conventional wisdom says the 180-day school year is a carry-over from the country’s agrarian past, when children were needed to tend the family farm during summer. Others suggest the three-month break had more to do with sparing students the rigors of reading, writing and arithmetic during the summer heat.

Whatever the origin, the school year has become so ingrained in the American psyche that public opinion polls have noted overwhelming opposition to adding days to the calendar, even at the height of the Sputnik hysteria in the late 1950s.

The reason for such resistance is America’s deeply rooted belief that aptitude--not hard work--dictates scholastic success, according to Michael J. Barrett, a Massachusetts lawmaker and advocate of longer school years.

Parents also don’t want to take away what they believe to be the childhood right to an “idealized” summer vacation, Barrett wrote in a 1990 Atlantic Monthly article.

But a blue-ribbon federal panel knocked that idealized notion with its landmark 1983 report “A Nation at Risk.” The scathing indictment of America’s schools blamed the relatively short school year in part for leaving the nation in economic peril.

California immediately responded by adding four days to its calendar, and eight other states did likewise. But standardized math and science tests, including those given in 1991 to 175,000 students in 30 countries, continue to show American students lagging behind those in industrialized nations.

Critics say more time with the books is needed, that academic success depends on hard work and that students forget too much during the long summer break. They point out that Japanese students attend school for 243 days; students in the former West Germany for 226; South Korea for 220; Israel 216; and the former Soviet Union for 211.

“Every industrialized country spends more time in school than we do,” Peace said. “ . . . The reality is that the (American) school system was built around an agrarian society, in which less than half of the students would be in jobs that directly applied to their learning. . . . Those days are gone.

“I don’t think anybody argues that they (students) need more time in the classroom because society has changed and the job market demands more education.”

There are indications that those kind of arguments are taking hold in a populist way. For the first time since 1949, a 1991 Gallup Poll showed a majority of Americans (51%) in favor of adding days to the school year.

“The idea has a life of its own, and it’s gathering enormous momentum,” Barrett said in a recent telephone interview.

“Nationwide, we’re going to see a totally different school year by 2000. The progress will be uneven, but the pressures are inexorable. . . . We’re going to do this because the economic future of our kids demands it.”

Oregon became the first state to take that step. In 1991, lawmakers there approved a far-reaching package of educational reforms that include extending the school year to 220 days by 2020.

On a local level, the 9,600-student South Bay Union Elementary School District in San Diego County is in the second year of a program that allows pupils to voluntarily extend their schooling to 225 days.

The schools in the district are already on a year-round calendar, during which students spend 60 days in class, then 20 days on vacation. The district’s voluntary program allows students to sign up for 15 days of extra classes each vacation period, said Assistant Supt. of Instruction James Tarwater.

To date, the response has been so enthusiastic that there’s a waiting list of 250 students. The district estimates that 70% of its students--many of them poor and from minorities--have taken extra class days during at least one vacation period.

“When we first started this, no one thought the kids would do it,” Tarwater said. “But they (students) said, ‘Hey, it’s January. There’s nothing else to do. We like being with our friends.’ ”

Adding to the attraction, said Tarwater, are the rules of the extra school days, aimed for a student population that is 72% minority, 52% below the poverty level, 40% likely to leave during the year, and where English is a second language for many. The rules are simple: no homework, no dittos, no work sheets.

Instead, the district emphasizes in-class writing exercises and oral language skills. “They think it’s hot stuff,” he said.

So do the teachers, who have been signing up as well to work the extra days at a reduced salary of $20 a day. In all, the extra schooling costs $700,000, much of it paid from the district’s federal funding for poverty students, said Tarwater.

The result?

“What we found is that our bilingual students and monolingual students made an average gain of 6% in academic growth and reading,” said Tarwater, adding that more gains are expected the longer the program continues. Peace said the district’s program helped inspire his bill.

In New Orleans, the school board has also instituted an experimental program to add 40 days to the year of two city elementary schools. A Kansas City, Mo., elementary school won a private foundation grant to add 46 days, according to Barrett. The superintendent of the New Jersey schools is pushing a longer school year.

But these programs hardly represent the tidal wave of change, concedes Barrett.

And the same kind of objections now hampering the Peace bill in Sacramento have held back widespread conversion to a longer school year, say other education experts.

“Generally, that notion has gone nowhere,” said Chris Pipho, director of state relations for the Education Commission of the States, a Denver-based information clearing house on scholastic matters.

Case in point is what happened in two North Carolina school districts that rushed to lengthen the school day and extend the year to 220 days after “A Nation at Risk” was issued, he said.

Within two years, parents rebelled, first filing an unsuccessful lawsuit and then voting out the board to end the program.

Yet a lack of money appears to be the most immediate threat to extending the school year, Pipho said.

In Massachusetts, where Barrett is now pushing to gradually extend that state’s year to 220 days by 2008, the lawmaker concedes his measure will probably be shredded by the budget buzz saw and left to die.

The bottom line becomes even more acute in California because the state’s 8,000 schools are struggling just to keep up with the surge of 200,000 new students a year.

Faced with that, crowded districts in San Diego, Los Angeles and other urban areas have been forced to put their buildings to continual use, in many cases juggling several tracks of year-round schedules just to get in the normal 180-day year.

“We’ve boxed ourselves in with what was such a creative and efficient use of school buildings,” said James W. Guthrie, a UC Berkeley professor of education and co-director of a think-tank on the public schools. “We were really smart, but now we’re impeding our ability to extend the school year.”

Even if the money and space were available, many in the education Establishment say there are other reforms they would rather undertake first.

Honig’s list, for instance, includes some already approved by the Legislature in concept but lacking in dollars--reduced class size, updated teacher training, performance-based assessment tests, pairing businesses with schools.

“Watch out for the one-idea panacea,” said Honig, stressing that he supports a longer school year in principle.

“In Japan, Asia and France, it’s not just the fact that they go longer,” he said. “It’s a lot of things. It’s the parents who think that effort is more important than innate ability. It’s the parents who set aside time (for their children) to study at home.”

Keith Geiger, president of the National Education Assn. in Washington, agreed.

He said California and other states would better use their money to prepare children for the traditional 180-day year. Teachers could do a better job if students had early childhood education, health care, proper nutrition and a safe place to sleep each night.

Geiger also maintained that it is unfair to compare school years with Japan, where official time includes many more field trips as well as club activities and sporting events considered to be extracurricular by American standards.

“My wife teaches second grade in Fairfax County, Virginia,” he said. “In 180 student days, she spends as much time with her children on the academics as do the early elementary teachers in Japan, who work 240 days.”

Peace dismisses objections from Honig and other educational professionals, who he claims are “disconnected from the real world,” and said his proposal to lengthen the school year will actually help the front-line teacher faced with a daunting task.

“In part, because the job has gotten tougher, you need more time to do the job,” he said. “The students themselves are tough to deal with, society has gotten more complex, and it’s unrealistic to accomplish that goal in really what’s a part-time exercise.”

Peace said he was surprised that his bill even survived its first committee last month.

Peace said he will continue to pound away for a longer school year because it takes a while for new ideas to gain acceptance in Sacramento and because he’s worried that the trend toward multitrack, year-round school schedules will soon preclude the chance of adding days sometime in the future.

“There is no one suggesting this is a panacea,” Peace said of his proposal. “But the question is: Should this be done? You’re running straight in the face of people’s vested interest and what their pet thing is.”