Orleans Education Chief Advocates Longer N.Y. School Year

Today is the last day of class for public school students in the city, which is good news for students, but, according to one of the country's most decorated school superintendents, bad news for their academic performance.

The superintendent, Paul Vallas, said school should continue through the summer in order for students to perform their best.

"They're making gains here," Mr. Vallas said yesterday. "But if you're wondering how to sustain those gains and how to increase those gains, extending the instructional day and the instructional year is critical."

Mr. Vallas is the superintendent of the school system that has arisen in New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the Recovery School District. He also has led school systems in Philadelphia and Chicago and is on some school insiders' short list to run the New York City schools if the job opens up in the future.

Yesterday, Mr. Vallas was in New York City as the guest of the Center for Educational Innovation-Public Education Association, which invited him to speak at its annual luncheon in honor of the late educator Colman Genn, who was a senior fellow at CEI-PEA.

Mr. Vallas's lecture was an almost encyclopedic, point-by-point overview of how he plans to transform the New Orleans public schools into a top-notch "intervention department," from a system dogged by weak leadership and poverty that he said is in some cases comparable to Third World conditions. He said students are chronically overage and that many of them lead their own households because their parents have disappeared from their lives; one school has 76 18-year-old eighth-graders.

He listed ways he is trying to improve New Orleans schools that could apply anywhere, including universal free early childhood education starting before a child's first birthday; a proven, solid curriculum that scripts lessons across the school year; school choice to foster competition, such as through charter schools, and physically nicer classrooms (he added air-conditioning and SMART boards to his schools).

One particularly crucial ingredient, Mr. Vallas said, is "instructional time on task," which means a longer school day and school year. New Orleans public schools are in session between 8 a.m. and 4:30 p.m., and classes extend through July.

Later, he praised Mayor Bloomberg and the city's schools chancellor, Joel Klein, as two of the brightest education transformers in the country. But he said a longer school day and year are things that New York schools sorely lack.

Messrs. Bloomberg and Klein worked with the teachers union in 2005 to extend the length of the school day by 371/2 minutes for four days a week, making the average school day six hours and 50 minutes.