When Labor Day and the opening of school roll around, there's usually a revival of the debate about the length of the school year.

The issue certainly needs to be looked at, but it's more complicated than advocates of the longer school year admit.For instance, they don't usually take into account the enormous cost involved. Thousands and thousands of schools will have the major expense of installing air-conditioning. Then, there will be big additional costs for running the schools and transporting students. And if we go with a 240-day school year, we'll be looking at a one-third increase in the salaries.

In other words, a total of $80 billion a year, not counting capital outlays.

Of course some school districts will try to get people to work longer without paying for it. But they will end up with confrontation rather than better education.

Let's suppose, though, that taxpayers are willing to dig into their pockets for the money we would need. Will an extended school year be a worthwhile use of these scarce dollars?

For some students, probably; for others, no.

One study shows that middle-class kids typically improve in reading over the summer - probably because they read on their own and are able to do things like go to camp or travel with their parents. But many disadvantaged youngsters, who probably end the school year below grade level, spend their summers We need to do what any industry does when it sees it is losing its competitive edge - rethink the way we are doing business.on dangerous streets. When a new school year begins, they have to start by relearning the stuff they learned last year. For students like that, extended school year - even school throughout the summer - would make a lot of sense because it would help them catch up and retain what they learn.

But there's a larger issue we need to consider. We are alarmed about poor student achievement and we are right to be.

A recent national mathematics exam that tested a representative sample of U.S. students in public and private schools found that approximately half of the graduating seniors still had not mastered seventh-grade math. That's terrible - and results of other national tests have been no more encouraging. But are we likely to raise student achievement by giving students a larger dose of what isn't working now - large classes, rigid curriculums and inflexible schedules?

A year or so ago, I asked Jack Bowsher, who had been head of education at IBM, what he thought about some of the school reform efforts that were going on. He answered that, if IBM had a factory where 30 percent of the computers fell off the assembly line while they were being manufactured and 95 percent of the finished computers didn't work most of the time, the last thing in the world IBM would do would be to run the assembly line another couple of months a year. They'd rethink the whole process. And that's good advice for us, too.

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Extending the school year for all students sounds like a good idea, but simply giving students more of the same is unlikely to solve our educational problems.

We need to do what any industry does when it sees it is losing its competitive edge - rethink the way we are doing business. Our schools should be figuring out ways to make better and more creative use of technology. They should be finding ways to help teachers and school staff experiment with new methods and materials.

Students who are not learning now are unlikely to start just because we keep them in their seats a couple of extra months.

(Albert Shanker is president of the American Federation of Teachers.)

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