Effective Year Round Education Associated With Comprehensive Educational Reform

It is my contention that if we do not incorporate the concept of Year Round Education and Extended School Year into the comprehensive school reform movement it cannot be successful.

What then should this total approach to educational reform be like? Before    answering; I must clearly establish the basic assumptions upon which my approach to educational reform is based. They are as follow:

·      Tenure, compulsory education, teacher evaluation, the length of the school day and year are outdated and require major overhaul. In their current format they are impediments to the overall improvement of education.

·      More money is not the solution to the ailments of our current educational system. Indeed it has been all too easy for many to accept fiscal shortcomings in the system as an excuse for doing little or nothing about our problems. Truly unique thinking, innovation, creativity and hard work are what we need. The system intentionally, or unintentionally, does all that it can to restrict these.

·       An effective use of Technology must be an integral part of every aspect of the Educational program.

·       We also need a return to the mindset that the Education Profession is much more akin to a VOCATION OF SERVICE than CAREER PATH TO WEALTH AND Power.

·      Current teacher certification practices create an illusion of highly qualified teachers because the assumption is that certified and qualified mean the same thing. They do not! University and college teacher education training programs are outdated and unprepared to train teachers and administrators for the requirements of the new age. In many instances, at the highest levels of this training, it is nothing more than legalized copying and thus lacks by its very structure any sense of reality or creativity.

·      Administrative and teachers’ professional associations need to change and begin to play a greater role in the policing of their rank and file members via professional standards and ethics committees at the local levels.

·      The academic content of the college prep track cannot serve the needs of all students. Standards of instruction and student performance for students outside the college prep track are grossly inadequate. Another area of focus for school-wide reform must be our mindless love affair with the notion of tracking or ability grouping. Curriculum must be integrated and then taught, learned, and assessed in a much more diverse manner. Profoundly different modes of instruction and materials are needed. Student motivation must be heightened via a curriculum which assures academic rigor while being versatile enough to adapt its' content to that which permits the student to see relevance and application. . For all students to be successful we must be able to vary the time for instruction.

   The measure of success of a high school cannot be its graduation rate.

It should be its ability to demonstrate meaningful post-secondary

Experiences for its students. Artificial time constraints cannot be the

Measure of a Students success or failure.