re: New state model for education

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My kids public elementary school pretty much does this already (not counting lunch, recess). They have 6 periods a day. 2 are ELA (English/Reading). 2 are Math. 1 is enrichment (2 days a week PE, 1 day a week Library, 1 day a week PBIS (positive behavior class), 1 day a week art), and 1 period either Science or Social Studies (they do 2 weeks of Science, then 2 weeks of Social Studies, etc).

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So, your kids go to school for about 7 hours. They have lunch and recess, let’s say 1 hour. If for each period they leave the room (either for recess, lunch, enrichment, or subject change) that is 5 minutes to put up their books and get their stuff together and another 5 minutes to settle down and get ready for class when they return. In this case they blew another hour of instruction time. I have not even allotted time for them to physically move from place to another. Chances are each period is only 55 minutes in the best case scenario, which would blow another 30 minutes, so at best your kids are in school for 7 hours and get 4 and a half hours of instruction, and a third of that is not spent on Arithmetic or English. This is the controllable wasted time, we aren’t even counting stuff like behavior issues wasting time. The amount of time wasted is insane.

Now people want computers in the classroom so we can waste more time with computer issues. We want to do standardized test on computers for weeks in computer labs and waste more time. You just can’t keep adding non-essentially things to elementary schools and go the same amount of time without losing instruction time of your core subjects that build the foundation for a person’s ability to learn for the rest of their lives.