Category: Education

American Schools and International Comparisons

~ Laura ~ 19 Comments

Earlier in the week, I posted a couple of links to discussions about comparing time in school in American schools vs. schools abroad, and we had a great discussion about the benefits of a longer school day.

In the New York Times, Geoffrey Canada, the president and chief executive of Harlem Children’s Zone, wrote, "When you look at our (roughly) 180 school days in comparison with Japan
and Germany (about 240), you see how our children are underprepared for
competition almost from Day 1."

In Atlantic Monthly, Conor Clark provided a handy chart to show how far we lag behind Asian countries in terms of days spent in school and argued that we really need a longer school year in the US in order to compete.

School year by country

We may really need a longer school year in the US, especially for low-income children. Research does show that it helps lower-income kids, though there's no evidence that it would benefit other children. 

There may be excellent reasons to extend the school year, but comparisons with schools abroad may be misleading. Commenters on this blog really put some serious holes in these international comparisons of the school year.

Claudia writes,

Re the 240 days at school in Germany: hell, yes. Because my kids (1st and 2nd grade) come home at 11 am.

Yes, you read that right. They start school at 7:40 am. Those are
really short days. Both used to be in US-curriculum based International
schools and had much longer days (until 3 pm), longer vacations, and
they learned a lot more.

Blah. I'm not happy, no.

Amanda writes,

While
I can't speak for Japan, I teach in Korea where the students attend a
lot more days than North Americans. Like in Germany, they also get out
of school earlier in the day, though they do often have to go every
other Saturday.

That said, most students attend as many private lessons as they can afford because the education is fairly low quality.

Three cheers for the collective knowledge of the blogosphere.

Ever since the 1983 publication of the Nation at Risk, Americans have been very insecure about the comparative value of our schools. Tyack and Cuban's Tinkering toward Utopia: A Century of Public School Reform is a great book, which questions those arguments.