09.30.09
Mr. President, Leave Our Schools Alone!
President Obama wants to Extend School Year
Peppi is worried that more kids would drop out instead of staying in school.
“We don’t want that,” Peppi says. “We’re trying to put back in to school. To stay out of poverty and hopefully keep the college rates going up.”
George says there’s one positive to President Obama’s idea of having schools in session on some Saturdays.
“We’re providing food and safety and having them here as opposed to having them out where we don’t have control of them,” George says.
But George says the process would take a lot of time and planning to extend the school year.
George says the President should look at all the options before proposing the idea of shortening summers for kids.
He says they should look at test scores throughout the nation before coming to a decision.
Mr. President, I appreciate what you are trying to accomplish, but you are going about it totally bass-ackwards. The problems with our schools are not caused by students not spending enough time in class. You yourself should know that our thirteen year school program covers subject matter that most students can probably absorb in seven years. Making it the equivalent of fifteen or sixteen years to cover this content isn’t going to help much.
Instead, we need to ask ourselves why high school graduates cannot count back change, but they are fully versed in the pseudoscience of humans’ activities destroying the planet. We need to ask ourselves why we insist on trying to make every student’s education identical, when our job market demands that students be given individualized and specialized training. We need to ask ourselves why so many educational decisions are being made in Washington DC and in state capitals like Sacramento, when the people who best know what children need are his or her parents and teacher(s).
I submit that our present “make students meet a certain score on a standardized test or we punish the school” environment is doomed to failure. Up until the 1950s and 1960s, most students that finished school were going on to a factory somewhere. They were not individuals, but were instead more or less identical cogs in the wheel of the factory’s production mechanism. Schools were really good at supplying the identically-trained laborers that this set-up needed.
The national and world economies changed since those days. Asia is our “factory district”, where large numbers of identically-trained graduates can be employed. Americans have historically not been into docilely accepting the dictates from on high, which is why factories spawned unions here. You will no doubt have noticed that China’s factories do not seem to attract organized labor. Nor does their society tolerate the little bit of resistance that may spring up. So when Asian nations spend longer days, six days per week, all year long in school learning, they are not learning to be inventive or creative. They are learning to be interchangeable parts of a machine. Since the United States is long past that stage, we need to let the whole idea of top-down, standardized, near-identical instructional programs die a well-deserved death.
These days, there is really not even a reason to have students congregate in classrooms beyond fourth, fifth, or sixth grade. Students should be pursuing their education through individualized online instruction, including a very prominent Internet research component. About the only reasons for on-campus meetings are physical education classes, team sports, and performing arts programs. There is therefore no need for uniforms, for anti-cell-phone policies, for repressive policies about hair color, or for overpaid administrators such as “assistant deputy superintendent for student discipline”.
We could even get rid of most homework. It isn’t like homework helps with learning. After you’ve sat in the classroom for six hours, taking the pain of schoolwork home just does not help for most subjects. I remember MJ spending his entire after-school day doing homework. All it did was frustrate him, until I decided that it was time to stop spending all our time chasing an unattainable goal. We got a book, a long one, and spent most of his after-school time reading (he still did some homework). By the end of the year, he was getting kudos as “most improved” student in his classes. Why? Because we stopped burying him in the homework that was sent home and focused on the area where he was having problems.
And you see, that is what is wrong with most homework. The student and the teacher is buried in frustrating busy-work. Some students already get it, and the homework bores them with unending repetition. Other students don’t get it, but the homework keeps them from having the time or motivation to focus on the things they are missing. Reading and math I concede should be assigned, but history? Science? “Language”? Get real. You know better.
Let me make it clear that I like history. Yet, I have to be honest. Most school history is taught as a series of events and explanations that come down from the mountain. If the students don’t understand or absorb it, assigning homework is not going to help. Science, unfortunately, is taught the same way, through guided reading in a text book, followed by “study questions”. Taking more of the same home does not make it stickier.
If we want to help improve our schools, we can start by getting the federal and state governments to minimize their involvement, including funding, and letting local parents and teachers have most of the say in what is taught, how it is taught, and how that teaching is funded. Fire almost all educrats (the parasitic educational bureaucrats that stifle teachers and resist parents’ input into how their children are instructed) above the level of principal (and get rid of assistant principals and other unneeded hangers-on), and make that principal directly responsible to a committee of parents. Make parents and local residents aware that schools cost them money, so they’d better seek the highest return on investment they can get.
In this way, parents are fully-invested in their children’s education, and will not hesitate to prescribe additional study or to enforce school-assigned additional study. Parents will not hesitate to assist with student discipline problems. Parents will get involved in school “parent night” events. Parents will seek to motivate their offspring to achieve and accomplish.
Look, Mr. President, I know you’ll never read this. I really wish you would, because you could really help the country if you listen to what I am saying here. I know how much the federal government wants to help with every conceivable problem. But the truth is, education is necessarily a local issue, as local as the school little Johnny attends and the home or apartment where little Johnny and one or more of his parents lives. There is no “one size fits all” solution, and this means that the closer that a solution gets to the local level, the better it can fit the need. Every town and city in America needs to understand that schools can’t be fixed on the cheap, but that we can’t pawn off the responsibility to far-away state and federal agencies that don’t even know the individual parents, teachers, and students.
Hammill is a dad of two kids in the Davenport School District. He’s also a cook and works weekends. As is, he feels he doesn’t have enough time with his kids and does not want them in school longer.
…
Hammill says after-school time is also education, but with mom and dad, and he’s not the only one who doesn’t want the school day lengthened.
“For a parent who works full-time, we struggle already. We maybe get two hours a night together. By the time we’re done with showers and homework the night’s already over with,” Kerri Baumer, a mother of one said.
In our Southern California district, students who weren’t doing so well were required to take Summer school classes to make up what they missed. I never understood the reasoning: the school had students for most of their waking hours for about nine months. If they couldn’t teach the subject in nine months, stealing the kids’ relax and enjoy time isn’t going to make a difference. And sure enough, it didn’t.
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