How do you make two parties who want opposing things happy? Well, if one party is a mayor who wants a longer school day and if the other is a teachers’ union that wants to keep their work day the same length of time, you can look to Chicago to find the answer.

Instead of forcing the current teachers to work a day that is 20 percent longer than the days they worked last year, the city has decided to hire more teachers to make up the extra time. The extra time in the school day will be filled with extracurricular classes, such as art, music, and PE.

Just where will these teachers come from? That’s another brilliant part of the solution: the teachers will be selected from a pool of teachers who were laid off since 2010.

However, the question still remains as to where the school district will find the $40-$50 million required to pay all of these new/returning teachers. Read the rest of this entry »

After the two-week long winter break, most students are not exactly excited to go back to school. However, the complete opposite was true in Ashley Tam’s third grade math class at Genevieve Melody Elementary School in Chicago. When Tam asked a question on the second day back from break, all twenty students immediately threw their hands in the air, begging to be the one to give the answer. What makes this even more surprising is the fact that the students were not only readjusting to being in class after their break, they were also adjusting to a longer school day. Melody Elementary School is the 13th public school in Chicago to lengthen its school-day to last 7.5 hours, instead of the traditional 5 hour and 45 minutes schedule.

“I think the kids have adapted faster than we have,” said Tiffany Tillman, the assistant principal at the elementary school.

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