Chicago Public School Case Study

Chicago Public Schools should focus on Quality not Quantity

Next year, the school day for all Chicago Public Schools will be longer. The majority of the students that will be attending a public school next year have been complaining and oppose this extended school day. On the other hand, Mayor Rahm Emanuel is determined to extend Chicago’s short school day due to the ridiculous dropout rates. Mayor Emanuel, as well as many parents, believes that the time a student spends in a class should directly correlates to the student’s knowledge and education. However, the mayor’s plan of extending the school day by two hours has many flaws. The entire plan of extending the school day by two hours already has flaws and is the wrong approach for
The majority of students will participate in extracurricular activities after school or hang out with their friends, as most teenagers do. They will already be dismissed at around five o’clock, and, after their post-school activities, they will have less time to finish their homework but also get a good amount of sleep. Being a senior in a public school, I can easily say that the majority of my friends have a Facebook, and spend their time on Facebook while doing their homework. Facebook only serves as a distraction. Imagine yourself in a class, where you sat next to your best friends. Do you think you’d get anything done or get as much done as you would sit next to someone you don’t talk to? As a student, I know every student that would say yes, would be lying. It takes almost twice as long to finish an assignment when on Facebook, compared to being off of it. With the technology we have in today’s society, up to two more hours in the classroom is unhealthy for any student. On average, they will get less time to sleep. My fellow students, and even teachers, can easily differentiate the students that did get enough sleep the night before form the ones that didn’t based on their participation in the
Ideally, the more time a student spends in the classroom, the opportunity to obtain knowledge increases for that student. But did anyone take into account the resources, or the teachers, or the students themselves into account? First off, if students will be spending more time in schools, shouldn’t schools have the materials and resources to help that student achieve more in school? If the schools did have enough resources or actually well trained teachers, the mayor wouldn’t be fighting for a longer school day. The majority, if not all, of neighborhood schools do not have the same resources as selective enrollment schools have. These schools neighborhood schools account for the big majority of the dropouts in the Chicago Public Schools, while the selective enrollment schools have a very tiny dropout rate. Why would spending more time in a school with not enough resources to achieve or graduate decrease the dropout rate? Spending more time in a school could actually be a new motive for students to dropout at these neighborhood