Opinion: Want to Improve Education? Here's a Simple Fix

(Sept. 9) -- Back to school in America coincided with the release of another set of depressing academic results. A new report from the American Institutes for Research measures state and district student math performance against the world, and the results are shameful: U.S. fourth- and eighth-grade students show average performance, at best, in mathematics and could not keep pace with their counterparts in several Asian countries, including South Korea and Japan.

Later this month, David Guggenheim's new documentary, "Waiting for 'Superman,' " comes out, focused on the nation's dismal educational system. If our students cannot compete on an academic level internationally, how will they compete for a job when they graduate?

There is a simple solution, although not one that students and teachers might like to hear: Keep our children in school longer by shortening summer vacations and lengthening school days.

Lengthy breaks from school are a relic from a bygone era when children had to work on family farms. When was the last time you saw a child heading to work on a farm for three months? Over the past 200 years, we've evolved from an agricultural to an industrial to a technologically advanced society. Yet the school calendar remains stuck in the distant past, and our country is paying an increasingly high price.

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development reported that American secondary school students rank 25th in math and 21st in science compared with students in 30 industrialized countries. Here's the differentiator: Children in industrialized countries across Asia and Europe attend school between 216 and 243 days each year while American children attend a mere 180 days, with shorter school days compounding the problem. It is no coincidence that we are losing economic advantage to those very same nations.

Recently, some schools in the U.S. have lengthened the school day under pilot programs, and their students are performing better. Specifically, charter schools in Boston require 2.1 more hours per day and 192 days in school, versus their counterparts at traditional schools, and they consistently outperform most of their peer schools.

As a member of the Massachusetts' governor's office in the early 2000s, I saw the data -- charter school students were making performance gains while public schools were not, and they were doing it without spending more money. The results point directly to spending more time in the classroom to complete lessons and projects. It's a start.

Three consecutive months away from school puts children at an educational disadvantage, as they forget their lessons and teachers are forced to repeat material from the previous year. One study found that this was particularly true in math. And while middle-class kids held their own in reading, poorer students lost reading and spelling skills over the summer hiatus. The same study also found that summer learning programs have a significant positive effect. But families who don't have access to summer programs pay a steep price with poor academic performance.

The College Board issued a recent warning call: In a single generation, the U.S. has fallen from first to 12th place out of 36 developed countries in the number of 25- to 34-year-olds with college degrees. Students must realize that without spending more time in the classrooms in elementary and high school, even decent-paying factory jobs are no longer guaranteed.