The Speciousness of Claims Concerning the Brevity of Time in Class

Among the many games that the K-12 public school establishment will run on you is the claim that there is just not enough student time spent in class in order to achieve various favorable outcomes. We have the claim by many school district officials that the school calendar should find students in class before Labor Day, so that they have enough time to prepare for a set schedule of standardized tests. We have the assertion by administrators of the Minneapolis Public Schools that there is no longer time enough to teach cursive handwriting. And we have the postulate in numerous quarters that more days should be added to the school year so that our students are not denied the amount of time in class prevalent in some European and many East Asian school systems.

All of this is a lot of malarkey. With regard to the need for an earlier start so as to properly prepare students for standardized tests, please understand that students are not being prepared for these tests anyway. I run a program of total academic support mainly for students living in North Minneapolis. My initial effort is to get students up to grade level, then with that achieved I make a permanent commitment to my students along a track leading toward and into colleges and universities. Most of the time, I have to teach may students everything that they need to know to fully meet Minnesota state academic standards, including skill and knowledge sets necessary to solve problems posed on item samplers given on the Minnesota Department of Education website. I am forever asking my students if certain skills that they will need to demonstrate grade level performance on the Minnesota Comprehensive Assessments (MCAs) have been covered in class, finding that as many as 80% of the relevant skills have not been covered. And the reason is time improperly used: time wasted with substitutes, on unfocused field trips, in assemblies, weeks when little math or reading is emphasized at all.

With so much time wasted, is there really no temporal space to teach cursive? There is plenty of time to teach cursive handwriting, a third grade skill that my first and second graders start eagerly anticipating during those early grades. It is the single most popular item on a generally vacuous Minneapolis Public Schools curriculum for young students, a skill to which students look forward to mastering in a display that they are growing up, that they are doing something that older siblings and friends can do. For years, teachers have been giving short-shrift to cursive handwriting, so that various adaptations of printing (often lacking aesthetic appeal and even legibility) are used. So this is yet another skill that I end up teaching my students that should have been learned in class.

And should we add class days in order to match the ambitions of educators in some of Europe and much of East Asia? We would do better first to aspire to the quality of education in South Korea and Taiwan before we worry very much about the quantity. The scholarly study of Taiwan is my specialty. I deeply admire many aspects of Taiwanese education, most especially the emphasis on math, science, and history. Students in Taiwan have skill and knowledge sets that put students in the United States to shame. But the reason lies in quality, not quantity. Class time is well-focused and effective in Taiwan. Class time in the schools of Minneapolis specifically and the United States generally is largely squandered.

So don’t let the public school establishment run yet another game on you. Keep those starts after Labor Day if you want to. By all means, go ahead and teach cursive. Don’t worry about lengthening the school year. But do get into those school board meetings, principals’ offices, and classrooms to demand that our precious children receive quality instruction, so that we need not fear the current level of ignorance that undermines their potential for citizenship and employment when, after 13 years spent in our wretched schools, they walk across the stage to claim a largely worthless piece of paper.