Longer school day should be priority No. 1 to improve education

Over at Kevin Drum’s post about the latest in school improvement attempts, a public school teacher agrees.

I partially agree and partially disagree with Drum’s take on the new story by Emily Bazelon over at the NYT about school integration issues in light of last year’s Meredith SCOTUS case.

Kevin’s take is that it’s fine to focus on getting a better class/income-based distribution of students in districts, whether or not racial integration is explicitly targeted along with that.

But, it’s about impossible to do in many central cities without mandatory suburban participation, Drum notes.

Bazelon’s original story notes that addressing the poverty of families, even more than having class-based integration, would be the No. 1 socio-economic issue.

So, what’s needed, then, is more public housing in suburbs. Kevin despairs of class-based redistribution. Except for the rich of both “liberal” and “conservative” persuasions who will dodge it, I think Kevin’s too pessimistic.

With high gas prices, middle-class flight is going to slow down more; it may even reverse in some cases.

But, is a direct approach the best way to tackle that, even? How addressable is that, even? And, are even schools in richer districts still open to plenty of improvement?

The single most important way to improve school performance, comparing individual schools to themselves, would be a school year of 200 days or longer, per almost all other Western countries. Better teacher pay for the longer year. That said, the type of money this would require would also probably address class-based issues.

Nationalizing school systems rather than balkanized local/state standards is also needed.

In other words, part of the problem with NCLB, besides its well-attested other problems, is that it doesn't go far enough.