Sounds Like Detention To Me

I was listening during the campaign, but I didn't give it my full attention because I really wanted Obama to win for a whole lot of other reasons. His views on education and its reform were fairly low on my list of national priorities, which is odd since that's where I make my living. Since he won, I have to pay attention: "Now, I know longer school days and school years are not wildly popular ideas," the president said earlier this year. "Not with Malia and Sasha, not in my family, and probably not in yours. But the challenges of a new century demand more time in the classroom." Sheesh.
"Our school calendar is based upon the agrarian economy and not too many of our kids are working the fields today," Education Secretary Arne Duncan said in a recent interview with The Associated Press. I know that Arne. I wrote a very eloquent paper about just this very subject back when I was in school getting my teaching credential. At the same time, I was working as a teacher-intern at a year-round school. We were year-round because of the massive overcrowding we experienced because of the number of children in our neighborhood. Those kids didn't go to school the whole year, they just had one month vacations sprinkled throughout the year, and everybody got a couple of weeks at Christmas. Taking a month off didn't do much for our test scores, especially for those who came back to school just in time to sit down at their high-stakes state-mandated multiple-choice assessment of their learning for the year. Most of what they had learned wouldn't reappear to them for weeks after, and by then it was too late. Would more time in classrooms help? Of course it would, but who is going to pay for it? Some of the proposed programs suggest that they could cost between ten to fifteen hundred dollars per student. Our school has three hundred and fifty students. That's another three hundred and fifty thousand dollars in a budget that is already bleeding red ink.
Then again, if there was adequate health care for every American, then children would not miss as much school, and teachers would be paid more because their paychecks wouldn't be siphoned off for the "benefit" of health insurance. Healthy kids and well-paid teachers might put a few more points on the bottom line of those test scores. How about fixing health care first, then taking a look at the state of education. I'm not ready to give up my summer vacation just yet.