With a longer school day now being consistently sold as a key education reform solution, the Minneapolis Public Schools has decided to add more time to the school day for most middle and high school students in the district.

Minneapolis parents found this out in true Minnesota fashion, through passive-aggressive, after the fact letters and Twitter messages, so as not to needlessly upset or antagonize anyone ahead of time. Some messages, like the one below, are best delivered quietly, even subtly, it seems, without community input.

I mean, how many middle school parents are monitoring the school’s Twitter feed? There’s a good chance a fair number of them won’t realize, until school is about to start again in August, that their kids will be gone longer than they were last year (by about 45 minutes). 

Yay! For some people, this will undoubtedly be good news. Most parents work, and some extra school time for their kids can amount to one less problem to solve (what to do with that in-betweener kid who is too young to be alone every day but too old for a babysitter). 

For other parents, having their kids in school longer will amount to another stepping stone in the Race to Nowhere. More time at school will mean 6-8th graders can now take 7 classes a day, instead of 6! Wow!! That’s such good news, because Junior can now do college level quadratic equations and become fluent in a foreign language all before getting to high school, where he or she will bypass all traditional coursework (a.k.a. High School for Dummies) and head straight to Rigor U. 

The array of options and courses and advanced this and that available in today’s public high schools, in Minneapolis at least, is astounding. I should know. I once attended a Minneapolis high school, and “minimally” graduated, even though all we had were Math, English, Science, Foreign Language (levels 1 and 2), and a few awkward gym classes that seem to have included floor hockey. I am pretty sure we only had six classes total, but I was much more interested in dissecting Replacements songs than frogs, so I could be wrong. 

According to middle school parents I know (my own kids go to a K-8, where the school day will stay pitifully short), Minneapolis school officials have an interesting grab bag of reasons why extending the school day is a great idea, such as:

• More middle school kids can now follow their interests. Huh? In middle school, my interests were cheap novels, taking the bus to the mall, and trying not to fall asleep in English class, as the teacher read Watership Down out loud to us. I’m not clear on how extending the school day will cover this but perhaps today’s middle schoolers are far more advanced than I was. In fact, I know they are.
• Middle school schedules will now be aligned with high school schedules. I guess this is convenient in some way, although I thought autonomy, not alignment, was our new guiding principle. I am easily confused, though.
• The International Baccalaureate program–which has an elegant global ring to it, meaning, if they’re doing it around the world, we better do it too, or we’ll be left behind–is most commonly used in MPS schools and apparently really requires kids to take 7 classes a day. 6 is just not enough.  Okay. Besides, with less free time to worry about, kids can take STEM and STEAM classes, and Advanced Geography, along with their other hard-core classes. This’ll be good. Or…will it? Have the kids been asked for their ideas?

I think this whole plan has lengthened the day just enough, but not too much, so that no breach in the teachers union contract was required to make it happen. I think the teachers will just be working more (direct face time with students, unless the school tries out a blended learning model, in which the teaching will be partially outsourced to a computer screen), and praying that their prep hour falls during that fab new 7th hour. 

I have two teenagers. They are nowhere near hyper or super active kids, but still, they complain about having so little free time and access to the outdoors. They miss recess. They miss taking a break during the day. They could be slackers (but they are definitely not), considering my track record, yet even Maria Montessori recognized that, developmentally, young teens are not like everybody else:

Now that sounds cool. In doing some research I discovered that Montessori-style middle and high schools have been around for almost 100 years, and that they don’t need to be located on a farm to be successful. (There was even one in Amsterdam, which Anne Frank attended until the Nazis shut it down.) Could we not dream big, give our kids some real work to do, and make them not want to leave school? We don’t even have to call it a Montessori school.

Until that happens (?!), maybe a longer school day will have its advantages, in some way. More kids will be occupied and in a safe space until they can be home with an adult. Some kids love being at school. Some kids will apparently be allowed to follow their interests better and take high school classes while rushing through middle school (really?). 

But let’s also be sure that we are not pushing kids and teachers into a longer school day and school year because we somehow fear “The Poor Are Too Free,” as writer and teacher Paul Thomas put it. Or because we assume that a longer day will keep them engaged in the work we have decided is most acceptable for them.

All kids need access to their own thoughts, even if they start by diving deeply into the lyrics of a rock band. Will a longer school day provide this?