New US plan to help students catch up
Tuesday December 04, 2012 09:09:54 AM,
RIA Novosti
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Washington: Faced with lagging achievement and growing evidence that American
school students are not keeping pace with kids in other
industrialised nations, five US states have announced their
participation in a pilot project that will give thousands of
students more time to learn, starting next year.
"Adding meaningful in-school hours is a critical investment that
better prepares children to be successful in the 21st century," US
Education Secretary Arne Duncan said.
Duncan, along with officials from the states of Colorado,
Connecticut, Massachusetts, New York and Tennessee formally
announced the "Time for Innovation Matters in Education" (TIME)
collaborative, which provides 300 hours of additional learning
time for reading, writing, arithmetic and other classroom lessons.
The three year test programme targets roughly 20,000 elementary
and middle school students at 40 schools in primarily lower-income
communities and will tap federal and state funding as well as
additional private resources.
Although other schools in the US have begun experimenting with
models for extended learning, the TIME programme is designed to be
a collaborative effort that will gradually expand to more schools
over a three-year period.
"To prepare students for college or a middle-class job in today's
economy, the conventional basics are not enough," said Jennifer
Davis, president of the National Center on Time and Learning (NCTL),
a non-profit organisation that supports expanded learning time for
students and is providing some of the resources for the project.
"For high-poverty schools, more time means more learning
opportunities for children to succeed in school and in life," she
added.
It's not that students in the US are learning less than they used
to. It's that students in other developed nations are learning
more.
A report released by Harvard University's Programme on Education
and Governance found US students lagging two to three times behind
students in developed countries around the world.
For school districts that are falling behind the rest of the
nation, "The additional funding we're announcing will allow for
the intensive turnaround models that will help us close the
nation's largest achievement gap," said Connecticut Governor
Dannel Malloy.
"The common theme is, we need more time with the kids," said
Colorado Governor John Hickenlooper.
"Especially the kids that are coming from difficult
neighbourhoods, broken families, this allows them to continue the
momentum from the day before, allows them not to slip backwards."
The five states in the programme have not yet decided if students
will have longer days, extended school years or a combination of
both to allow for the extra classroom time.
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