Name: ____________________________________________
6B- _____
Date: ________________________________
ELA: ELA Practice  SAMPLE ESSAY
NYT’s Room for Debate: Extend the School Day?
Directions: Use the sample planning page and essay below to help you write your
own plan and essay.
Essay Question: Using IBC form, write a well-written, well-organized, well-developed
essay in which you name the possible pros and cons of lengthening the school day for
American students, according to Geoffrey Canada and Vicki Abeles. Use specific, textbased details from both of the previous essays to support your answer.
After you’ve written your essay, use the boxes below to check your work:
☐ Named the pros of a longer school day
☐ Named the cons of a longer school day
☐ Used specific text-based details from both essays (Canada’s and Abeles’)
According to Geoffrey Canada, a vocal figure in the education reform movement, “The evidence
keeps mounting that America is no longer a leader when it comes to educating its children.”
If Canada is, in
fact, correct, then many people will likely want to change the way we educate our young people. But how?
In a recent debate in The New York Times, Canada, who wrote an essay called “Help Parents and Society,”
and Vicki Abeles, a documentarian who offered a piece entitled “Quality vs. Time in the Classroom,” express
their distinct points of view about longer school days as a strategy for improving the American system of
education. According to these essayists, there is a variety of pros and cons for a longer school day.
Specifically, Canada asserts that a longer school day could benefit students, administrators, families,
and even the country as a whole. In particular, Canada claims that an extension of the school day could
help poor and minority students “catch up” with their wealthier, more privileged peers. He adds that teens
who stay in school longer each day would be less likely to get into trouble or to get pregnant.
Meanwhile,
students could use the extra time to improve their “discipline, self-expression, and fitness” because
administrators, given an extended
(over)
schedule, could round out a child’s learning experience by bringing back classes like social studies, the arts,
and physical education. The advantages, Canada argues, would not only occur at school; they’d also reach
parents
at home. In fact, he believes working parents would feel relieved by the longer day
because they wouldn’t have to make arrangements for childcare during the later afternoon, when, in some
cases, kids come home to empty houses. His proposal solves this problem; kids could stay at school instead
of going home. Finally, Canada believes a longer school day could even help the United States, as a
country, because it would help American students compete with their international peers.
Despite the possible advantages, a longer school day might end up hurting students, without
promising to improve the standing of the United States on the international playing field, according to Vicki
Abeles. Fueled by the belief that an impressive resume of scholastic achievements will lead them to college
and success, students exhaust themselves with hours of homework, tutoring, and extra-curricular activities. As
a result, Abeles claims, they become anxious, unhealthy, and disengaged from their schoolwork. Forced to
spend even more time in school, these students, Abeles implies, would feel even more depleted than they
already do. To complicate matters, these same students, already burned out and broken down, would miss
out on valuable after-school opportunities if their school days were lengthened. For example, students would
not be able to volunteer in community affairs, play with friends, or spend quality time with their families. And
all this sacrifice for what?
To be more competitive?
Abeles notes that she has “found no compelling
research that supports the proposition that a longer school day improves educational outcomes.” In fact, on
the contrary, Abeles offers a counter-example: In Finland, where students have less instructional time, they
boast the highest test scores in the world, suggesting that a long school day would possibly be more of a
problem than a solution for American students.
Basically, Canada’s plan for a longer school day is not the clear-cut solution he makes it out to be
because an extended day might solve some problems while creating others. In essence, the debate over the
length of the school day indicates that perhaps something as complicated as education reform demands an
equally complex solution. After all, when we reform our schools, we change not just the time at which a bell
rings; we reform what it means to be a child, a child with friends and a family, with deadlines and dreams,
with limitations and with lives not yet completely their own.