Should school year and school day be longer in East Iowa?

The school bell rings, and millions of Iowa students - just like their parents and grandparents before them - start a 6.5- hour learning day in their public school.

Once they graduate, those students likely won't experience a schedule like that again - a day ending at 3 p.m. or so, with summers off.

That fact is causing an increasing number of people to question whether the time U.S. students spend in school is sufficient for a competitive education.

The current 180-day, 6.5-hour-day schedule is a holdovers from an era when the majority of Americans were farmers. Children were needed to help with farm work, so schedules were set to allow children time at school with time to also help at home.

The United States is no longer primarily a nation of farmers. Instead, it is a nation in economic competition with countries that have longer school years.

Cedar Rapids Superintendent Dave Benson notes that many industrialized nations, such as Australia and Japan, have longer school years than the United States. Students in many of those nations also score higher than U.S. students on the Programme for International Student Assessment.

Although those scores cannot be attributed to any single factor, "we're being compared to countries that have more time with students in school,” Benson says. “The calendar needs to change because the world has changed.”

Benson proposes gradually lengthening the current 180-day calendar by two days a year over a 10-year period. That, he says, would alleviate the “sticker shock” of paying for 20 extra school days all at once.

Cedar Rapids currently has two elementary schools on a year-round schedule, though the number of days in school - 180 - is the same as schools on the traditional calendar.

The length of the school day is the issue for Cedar Rapids teacher Gretchen Price, whose idea for a charter school was rebuffed by the Cedar Rapids school board. As proposed, the hours at her Downtown School would have mirrored the traditional work day - 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Several schools that serve high poverty areas, such as the Knowledge is Power Program charter schools, have found some success with a longer school day.

Price's proposal has less to do with student economics and more with returning “special” subjects to a prominent place in the curriculum. She hoped to devote two hours a day to arts-related subjects, giving students wider exposure and teachers two hours of planning time.

“Kids are going to ‘specials' once a week for about 40 minutes, and we wanted to put that back in the curriculum,” she said.

Price admits the longer school day was one of the more controversial aspects of the Downtown School. Interested parents were worried they would lose time with their youngest children.

College Community Superintendent Dick Whitehead is not in favor of lengthening the school day. Instead, he prefers a system where students can receive credit based on their competency in subjects, rather than the time they spend in class.

Such a system would let students advance to more difficult curriculum. A student, for example, who takes ballet lessons could qualify for physical education credit and use that time to take an additional course.

“We have the shortest amount of time but the broadest curriculum to teach,” Whitehead says. “And we wonder why we're not doing so well in the narrow things we're measuring.”

Online learning also could expand the school day, but Iowa requires online teachers to have a state license, which keeps students from using courses from states with heavy online learning, such as Florida,

Both of Whitehead's ideas have reached the state level, where Department of Education Director Jason Glass said a working group on competency-based education will release its recommendations in October. He also said the state should rethink some of its licensure laws to be more flexible on online learning.

“Competency-based education can free up time and resources in ways we don't comprehend the possibilities now,” he says. “It creates so many options for what we can do with kids, and (it) expands learning and online possibilities into the community.”

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