Longer school day and year trials yield different results.

Longer school day and year trials yield different results. IS A LONGER SCHOOL DAY AND school year a ticket to higherachievement? Recent reports on 26 schools throughout Massachusetts and39 schools in Miami-Dade (Fla.) County Public Schools provide widelydifferent answers. The School Improvement Zone, an experimental initiative in M-DCPS,was a three-year, $100 million project designed to boost achievement inthe district's lowest-performing schools. It was the centerpiece offormer superintendent Rudy Crew's agenda for the district and wasnamed a Top 50 Innovative Program by the Ash Institute for DemocraticGovernance and Innovation at Harvard's Kennedy School of Governmentin 2008. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Little to No Effect The district's final report on the program, however, foundthat the district has very little to show for its investment. Releasedin late spring, the report compared the 39 schools in the SchoolImprovement Zone to another group of 39 schools within the district thathave similar demographics The attributes of people in a particular geographic area. Used for marketing purposes, population, ethnic origins, religion, spoken language, income and age range are examples of demographic data. . On the exams that comprise the FloridaComprehensive Assessment Test The Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test, or the FCAT, is the standardized test used in the primary and secondary public schools of Florida. First administered statewide in 1998[1], it replaced the State Student Assessment Test (SSAT) and the High School , students in the control group scoredhigher than those in the School Improvement Zone in math, science andreading. School Improvement Zone students outperformed their peers onlyon the writing exam, but even then the difference was small. The report characterizes the extension of the school day and yearas in fact problematic. Students and teachers alike reported exhaustion ExhaustionSituation in which a majority of participants trading in the same asset are either long or short, leaving few investors to take the other side of the transaction when participants wish to close their positions. from the extra hour per day, and many students stopped attending schoolaltogether once summer vacation Summer vacation (also called summer holidays or summer break) is a vacation in the summertime between school years in which students are off for 3 months, depending on the country and district. began at the district's otherschools. In addition, principals and teachers reported that"proficient pro��fi��cient?adj.Having or marked by an advanced degree of competence, as in an art, vocation, profession, or branch of learning.n.An expert; an adept. students felt stigmatized by the mandatory additionaltime, which was viewed as a punishment rather than an enhancement." Different State, Different Story A report by the Massachusetts Teachers Association, the AmericanFederation of Teachers American Federation of Teachers(AFT), an affiliate of the AFL-CIO. It was formed (1916) out of the belief that the organizing of teachers should follow the model of a labor union, rather than that of a professional association. Massachusetts, and Massachusetts 2020 was morepositive. In Listening to Experts: What Massachusetts Teachers AreSaying about Time and Learning and the Expanded Learning TimeInitiative, state teachers identified time as the most important factorin teaching. Fifty percent of teachers whose schools are part of theExpanded Learning Time Initiative, a statewide effort to expand schooltime by at least 300 hours per year, report that they have adequate timeto cover the curriculum, versus 34 percent of the teachers whose schoolsare not part of the ELT ELTEnglish Language TeachingELTn abbr (Scol) (= English Language Teaching) → Englisch als Unterrichtsfach . Despite the additional workload The term workload can refer to a number of different yet related entities. An amount of laborWhile a precise definition of a workload is elusive, a commonly accepted definition is the hypothetical relationship between a group or individual human operator and task demands. , teachers in the 26 ELT schoolswere more likely to affirm the statement "If I could start overagain, I would still become a teacher" than their non-ELT peers (88percent versus 80 percent), and 56 percent of ELT teachers answered yesto "Do your students take their schoolwork seriously?" whileonly 42 percent of the non-ELT teachers did so.