School Days or School Daze?

There is a real threat to education in California, and it is has nothing to do with the largely symbolic battle over who is superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District. The real danger is hiding behind the catchy title of “calendar reform,” another innovation that will impact our students’ ability to learn and compete with others lucky enough to be educated elsewhere.

Calendar reform shortens the amount of time students spend in the classroom each year. For the past few years, L.A. students have been shifting to a program where they attend school for only eight months of the year, instead of nine. To make up for the time lost, they spend an extra 40 minutes or so in class each day. These extra minutes are supposed to compensate for the month of reading, homework and writing that they will no longer be having. While our Japanese counterparts expect their children to study for 10 1/2 months out of the year, we are satisfied with an eight-month schedule.

I teach at an inner-city college in Los Angeles, where the union is trying to force similar changes on our campuses. Our leaders are negotiating to shorten our 18-week semesters to 15 weeks or less with the argument that condensing the time spent in school will bore our students less and reduce the dropout rate. Schools like Santa Monica Community College have already done this, and the idea is catching on all over the state.

Although the union and administration talk publicly about raising standards by making our students read, write and think far more than they do, they actually want to give them shorter time to do it in. This is absurd.

As an English teacher at East Los Angeles College, I have my students read difficult texts from anthropology, sociology and science as well as literature in order to prepare for the challenges they will face at the university and in their jobs. They need more time, not less, to reflect on and absorb the bodies of knowledge that grow more complex every year. Shorter semesters will force me to assign fewer essays and research papers than I do now, thus shortchanging them further.

What makes this so frustrating is that many good things are happening with our schools. Gov. Gray Davis, perhaps embarrassed by test scores that place our students below the state that elected a wrestler for governor, has put some wonderful changes in our system. Incentives to increase teacher accountability are being considered, instructors are being sent to summer school to learn new ways of teaching and technological innovations are helping us connect our individual classrooms to museums and libraries throughout the world.

Shortening the school year will undo these positive changes. Most community college students work and have families, and can barely keep up with the assignments we give them now. Yesterday a student came to my office to ask for an extension on his essay. When I asked why, he explained that he was being forced to work overtime, and that he had just put in a 50-hour week. This is more often than not the reality of our community college students, who struggle to balance jobs, families and school.

The union is counting on the lure of having six weeks more vacation time in the summer to make many people happy. But are administrators so naive as to think that we won’t start to water down our curriculum to match the shorter semesters?