Longer School Year Plan Faces Test : Education: Assemblyman seeks a 20-day extension to help students catch up with pupils in other nations. But cash shortages and organized opposition appear to doom the proposal.

Hoping to make California’s 5 million public school children more competitive with their counterparts around the world, Assemblyman Steve Peace (D-Chula Vista) has asked 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 need to stay in school longer to catch up with their academic--and economic--rivals in Japan and Western Europe, where students spend up to 243 days a year in public school.

Gov. Pete Wilson’s Council on California Competitiveness also jumped on the idea in its report released last month.

“When we have the classroom and teachers, we make too little use of them,” concluded the council, which is chaired by Peter V. Ueberroth and charged with finding ways to keep 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 California an extra $2.2 billion in salaries and operating costs.

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

Meanwhile, California Supt. of Public Instruction Bill Honig, the California Teachers Assn., the president of the National Education Assn. and leading California lawmakers are either opposed or 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.

“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 a switch to 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 is enough money in the state budget to pay for it.

The Assembly Ways and Means Committee last week decided to hold off voting on the bill until after the budget is complete. Few give the proposal a chance to survive the Legislature this year, but Peace says he will continue to push on.

Why?

“The answer to that question comes in a letter that I got from a high school sophomore,” Peace said 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,” he said. “It was really sad.”

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

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.

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

Parents also do not 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 in part blamed the relatively short school year 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 other industrialized nations.

Critics say more time at 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 Japan sends students to school for 243 days; the former West Germany for 226; South Korea for 220; Israel 216, and the former Soviet Union for 211.

There are indications that reformists’ 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,” Barrett said. “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.”

But in California, there is the acute question of the bottom line. As it is, the state’s 8,000 schools are struggling to keep up with the surge of 200,000 new students a year.

Faced with this burgeoning enrollment, 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 tracts of year-round schedules to get in the 180-day year.

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

Honig’s list includes some improvements already approved by the Legislature but lacking in dollars--reduced class size, updated teacher training, performance-based assessment tests, and 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.”

Peace dismisses objections from Honig and other educational professionals, who he claims are “disconnected from the real world,” and said his proposal will help front-line teachers faced with daunting tasks.

“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.”