Chicago Schools: Common Core Standards

Nearly 20,000 students across the United States are about to see their classroom time get significantly longer. Five states are participating in a new project to improve the state of education in the U.S. At the core of the project is 300 additional hours of school time each year, which will be designed to improve learning outcomes and provide students with a wealth of supplemental learning opportunities. While many are hopeful the additional class time will bring U.S. students up to par with students across the globe, others are skeptical that simply extending the time students spend in school will really bring the quality of instruction and learning to the next level.

About the Time Collaborative

The new program, dubbed the “Time Collaborative,” is indeed a collaboration between the U.S. Department of Education, the Ford Foundation and the National Center for Time and Learning. According to CNN, the three-year initiative will involve 40 schools in the states of Colorado, New York, Connecticut, Massachusetts and Tennessee. Each school will be responsible for adding the additional 300 hours in daily classroom time and number of days on the school calendar. For a school on a typical 180-day calendar, 300 hours breaks down to around 90 minutes of additional classroom time daily.

Reuters reports that funding for the new project will come from a variety of sources, including federal and state government. The National Center on Time and Learning and the Ford Foundation have also pledged around $3

As more interested parties weigh in on ways to raise the bar on the standard of public education in the United States, a notable equal-rights organization has now found its voice. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) has recently issued a report that focuses on four primary areas of improvement that should be addressed by the public education system today. The recommendations focus primarily on what it will take for the students of today to succeed in the global marketplace of the 21^st century.

This video reports on one of the NAACP's initiatives to reform public education.

About “Finding Our Way Back to First”

The NAACP report, titled, “Finding Our Way Back to First: Reclaiming World Leadership by Educating All America’s Children,” identifies some of the solutions necessary for providing high-quality education to all children in the United States. The report was drafted in response to concerns that the U.S. is losing its competitive edge in the education spectrum on a global scale.

“If America is going to lead the world in this century the way we did the last, we must lead the world again in education,” the website for the NAACP states.

The Miami Herald lists four basic areas of focus outlined in the NAACP report, including:

• Improving kindergarten preparedness through effective preschool programs
• Improving teacher training for more effective classroom instruction
• Longer school

Fairfax County Public Schools, located in Fairfax County, Virginia, is one of the largest and oldest school districts in the United States. Founded directly after the Civil War, this district serves more than 181,000 students in nearly 200 schools. The district boasts a long, sometimes controversial history and is currently known for high student spending and a tradition of academic excellence.

Early History of Fairfax County Public Schools

According to Wikipedia, Fairfax County Public Schools was formally established in 1870, after the Civil War. It was the same year that Virginia was readmitted to the Union and boasted significant economic growth directly in Fairfax County. The Fairfax County Government website lists Thomas Moore as the very first superintendent of Fairfax County Public Schools, with his appointment dating September 18, 1870. This was the first free public school system that was available to students in that area. Prior to that time, students could only attend private institutions.

Like other school districts in the country, Fairfax County Public Schools was a segregated district from its creation to the middle of the 20^th century. The Supreme Court ruling Brown v. Board of Education changed segregation laws in this country in 1954, but Fairfax County did not participate in desegregation until 1960. Two years later, in 1962, the largest high school in the county and the state, W.T. Woodson High School, opened its doors.

This video offers a look at the history of the

Dallas Independent School District is one of the largest school districts in the United States. In recent years, it has received plenty of publicity regarding its high dropout rates, which reached the seventh-highest figures in the country in 2008. The numbers are even more concerning since the districts with higher dropout rates than Dallas tend to be in much smaller cities. Since those numbers were released, the district has been implementing programs to reduce the dropout rate, and thus far, schools are seeing a measurable amount of success.

A Brief History of Dallas Independent School District

Schools in the Dallas area were officially coordinated into the Dallas school district in 1884. This came at the same time a statewide system for public schooling was established, breaking the state into individual school districts, each assigned a unique number and system of governance that was accountable to state overseers.

Like other southern school districts, the Dallas Independent School District went through an extended period of segregation, designating some schools for black students and others for white students. Desegregation began in 1960, according to Wikipedia, six years after the Supreme Court’s ruling on Brown v. Board of Education. The desegregation process was completed in Dallas in 1967. In 1996, the Dallas Independent School District went through a major rezoning upheaval that again moved many students into different schools based on the new zoning boundaries.

Since then, the number of white students in Dallas has slowly and steadily