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In Our View: 180 Days At Least; Washington State Students Need All the Classroom Days They Can Get

Posted on: Thursday, 11 August 2005, 18:00 CDT

The Washington State Board of Education has made the correct decision to grant 69 school districts waivers to the annual minimum of 180 class days for students. But it's good that not one of Clark County's nine school districts is on that list. If those two statements seem contradictory, here's a quick explanation:

In this and many other cases, local control of public schools is better than mandates that are handed down by monolithic bureaucracies hundreds of miles away. If officials at these 69 school districts feel that taking class time away from students will allow teachers to better plan and prepare, and that students will actually learn more and/or better as a result, then they should have the right to make that change and examine the consequences.

By the same token, however, it's becoming increasingly difficult to convince modern parents and educators especially those with a global perspective that reducing the number of classroom days for students will benefit anyone, least of all the most important faction, the children.

That belief is likely what led officials in Clark County's nine school districts to avoid applying for waivers to the state- mandated 180-day minimum. Another possible factor locally could have been fallout from across the Columbia River, where reducing the number of school days has been viewed as a highly controversial solution to school districts' budget woes.

Reasons for the waivers in Washington state vary. "Districts are recognizing the value of planning time," Larry Davis, state board executive director, said in an Associated Press story. "As long as students learn what they're supposed to, it doesn't matter if they did it in 175 days as opposed to 180 days." But consider this alternate view: Students should not be expected to "learn what they're supposed to"; they should be expected learn as much as they can in the allotted time. If meeting minimum standards was all that mattered, that same logic could be used to allow a highly intelligent child to attend school 50 days a year.

And the global perspective provides even more compelling evidence that students in Washington state and across the rest of America should attend class 180 days a year (or even more). William L. Bainbridge is a professor at the University of Dayton and president of an education research firm. In a recent article for The Columbus Dispatch, he wrote about these troubling statistics:

n On average, American students attend school 180 days a year, compared with 190 days in the United Kingdom and 190 to 208 days in eastern Asian nations.

n Even more discouraging is the disparity in hours spent on core academic work (math, science, language and social studies). In the United States, the estimated average time spent on these core subjects in the four high school years is 1,462 hours per student, but it's double that elsewhere: 3,190 hours in Japan, 3,285 hours in France and 3,628 hours in Germany.

In the ever-increasing global economy, how can American students be expected to compete when they're receiving no more academic emphasis than that?

Whether the number classroom days should be extended beyond 180 is another topic, complicated by side issues such as tax revenue, negotiations with teachers' unions and availability of buildings. But for now, the safe assumption is that American students should make the most of those 180 days.

The most widespread benefit our state provides to children is to educate them, yet those children attend school fewer than half of the days in each year. Reducing that number is counterproductive. That's why it's good to see no Clark County school district on the list of 69 districts applying for waivers to the 180-day minimum.

Source: Columbian

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