Educating Minnesota

Harold Stevenson, the late University of Michigan developmental psychologist, studied both the American and Asian school day and discovered that the latter makes a lot more educational, not to say common, sense. Why? First, in most Asian schools, there’s a fifteen-minute recess after every class so students can stretch their legs and proceed to the next class refreshed and ready to learn. Asian schools also give kids a full hour or more for lunch. Lunch break in most American schools is twenty-three to twenty-eight minutes, which supposedly includes time to eat, play, and move from and to class. The situation is worst in our junior and senior high schools, where students eat and run back to class with barely enough time for a rest-room stop, much less a break for the mind and some exercise for the body. That’s bad for them and bad for learning.

Furthermore, let’s take a page from the fancy boarding schools: Following afternoon sports or other extracurricular activities, let’s add a late-afternoon study hall staffed by volunteers so students can complete their homework before they go home. Then, when they get home, they can enjoy their families and the TV, computer, or Xbox that now pulls them away from unfinished schoolwork.

Another idea for an enhanced school day: Make students responsible for the routine cleaning of their school grounds and facilities—another common Asian practice. There’s nothing quite like cleaning a restroom to concentrate the mind and exercise the body while building a sense of responsibility for the space around you.

Cost: No new expenditures would be required to add more study time and lunch and break times, though volunteers would have to be recruited to monitor the late-day study halls and cleanup activity. Afternoon buses would sensibly run two hours later on a schedule that more closely mimics a parent’s workday.

3. Increase Resources for Schools With Large Numbers of Poor and Immigrant Students

Remember the kids in your class who sat in the back of the room, said little, and then disappeared from class before graduation day? They still exist, though nowadays we track them like hungry lions to make sure they stay in school, and we threaten to penalize their school if it fails to teach them. That strategy might be acceptable if schools were given adequate resources and encouraged to be creative in finding ways to help such kids succeed instead of just prolonging their academic failure.

Most kids in public schools do just fine. But an alarming number don’t—and many of them come from poor or immigrant families, have learning difficulties, and are in one way or another ill equipped to learn by conventional methods. The ridiculously large class sizes common in many schools today only make the individualized attention required for those students to learn harder to achieve—and that’s bad for everyone. Duane Benson, former head of the Minnesota Business Partnership, says that employers complain that too many students are not prepared for the world of work. Nor are they ready for college. According to Benson, who serves on the board of the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities System, one-third of college freshmen require some remediation.

Carolyn Light Bell is a veteran teacher who has been substitute teaching this year at Tuttle Community School, a neat and clean K–8 facility in southeast Minneapolis. Eighty-three percent of Tuttle’s students live in poverty and some are recent immigrants who have been here only a few months. “I am humbled by the breadth of the crisis,” Bell says. “Too many kids flood the classrooms, [and] too few adults can address their social and emotional needs. Academic needs are lost. Those who are ready and willing are outnumbered and out-shouted. . . . Educators are worn to a thread by extraordinary demands.”