"Thousands of schools across the nation are responding to the reading and math testing requirements laid out in No Child Left Behind, President Bush's signature education law, by reducing class time spent on other subjects and, for some low proficiency students, eliminating it."If you spend more time on something, you spend less time on something else. I know JFW readers do not need to be told this, but apparently NYT readers do.
Sunday, March 26, 2006
the ruthless math of time
Startling news from the NYT :
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3 comments:
maybe they all thought that students were staying in school for more hours in the day.
Yeah, maybe. I'm just continually amazed at the way in which you can present an obvious trade-off as being news, as if it would otherwise never occur to people that if you push schools to increase the time they spend on math and science (and don't increase length of the school day), you'll be decreasing the time they spend on something else.
I think the point is that these requirements could have already been integrated into the curriculum...which to a certain extent, they probably were. However, teachers will coach students how to deal with questions that are in the format of the standardized test, like you would in an SAT prep course. That is what takes time away from "normal" curriculum
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