Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: FRIDAY, June 24, 1994                   TAG: 9406290003
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A-11   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: RICHARD RILEY
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

THERE'S NOT ENOUGH TIME TO TEACH KIDS WHAT THEY NEED

But when it comes to how we teach our children, we seem fixed on a time schedule from another era. At the last turn of the century, young people spent six hours at school nine months a year learning the three "R's." Some in the cities actually spent up to 192 days in school.

Today, our children spend no additional time - some actually less - in school, yet we expect them to learn much more. We want them to learn computers, foreign languages, advanced science and math so they can become productive members of society. We offer courses on consumer awareness, AIDS prevention and personal safety so they can learn to cope with the demands and pitfalls of modern life.

The result? To receive a high school diploma, a typical student needs to devote no more than 41 percent of his or her school time to core academic work. Into the same six-hour day we try to cram a full academic load with various electives, nonacademic classes and extracurricular activities. Fifty-one-minute blocks of chemistry and literature get sandwiched between gym and driver's ed. Core academic subjects increasingly become a footnote to the school day, and homework in too many communities is virtually forgotten.

Compounding the problem, the same school schedule that was devised to accommodate a 19th century calendar now consigns millions of young people after school and during the summer to a "time gap" of idle hours, empty homes, mean streets and latchkey lives. This is time neither well-planned nor well-spent.

Sometimes it takes years of staring at something until one realizes the answer is right in front of us. A report released recently by the National Education Commission on Time and Learning has issued a wake-up call to Americans about our misuse of time in schools. The six-hour day and 180-day year, the report says, is the "unacknowledged design flaw in American education." It "should be relegated to museums, an exhibit from our education past."

According to the report, our schools have become structured around time, not learning. Students, teachers, principals and parents are held hostage to a school clock that constricts in-depth learning, stifles good teaching and lesson planning, and no longer fits the rhythm and needs of the American workday and family.

The report issues a stern warning that if we do not use time wisely and rethink the American school day, we risk undermining the new Goals 2000 education reforms recently signed into law by President Clinton that are designed to bring our students up to world-class standards of learning.

According to the report, American students spend less than half the time on core academic learning as students in Germany and Japan. American children are a talented bunch, but to expect them to master a world-class curriculum in half the time is to ask the unreasonable of them and to set many of them up for dashed hopes and unmet expectations. Nor can we realistically expect to squeeze the extra hours of academic learning into the current overcrowded school day.

The problem reaches beyond the amount of time students spend in school. It also goes to the quality of time students spend. We must ask if the unyielding and relentless drum roll of 51-minute periods best serves children who learn at different rates and in different ways. Under the current system, kids who need extra time to master subjects don't get it and end up penalized and discouraged with bad grades; gifted and talented children lose interest and get bored.

The American school calendar, as we have known it, has been a constant for generations. But we may be at the point where our attachment to it must yield to some new thinking about time. The fact that surveys indicate increasing public support for a longer school year shows Americans understand the relationship between learning time and educational excellence.

Every community has its own particular needs, and there is no simple national solution to the time problem. The only constant should be school days and school years of whatever time and length that help each community reach the highest standards for all its children. As the report says in its last line, "American students will have their best chance at success when they are no longer serving time, but when time is serving them."

Richard Riley is U.S. secretary of education.