Lengthening the school day for kids.

Is lengthening the school day the solution for failing schools? I think not. In fact, I think it is a morally wrong solution. It's bad enough that children are cooped up and physically restrained for as long as they are to get through a school day. To justify that physical restraint, adults owe children a lot. If the adults are now failing to do what they owe children to justify physically restraining them, it is outrageous to attempt to make up for their own failure by increasing the restraint. What makes it worse is that the solution is inflicted disproportionately on minority kids. Oh, but it's a benefit! It's not as if we're proposing to put them in jail during those long afternoons when they might otherwise be roaming the streets.

Side note: At the link, there is an adorable photo of two little girls looking at a worm. Since the newspaper article is presenting the proposal in a positive light, it would like you to picture cute young girls benefiting by hands-on science classes. Please don't picture older boys slumped in chairs.

UPDATE: The same issue of the NYT has this article about a study showing about the time spent in day care:

A much-anticipated report from the largest and longest-running study of American child care has found that keeping a preschooler in a day care center for a year or more increased the likelihood that the child would become disruptive in class — and that the effect persisted through the sixth grade.