This was in our newspaper. Just thought it was interesting. http://www.cantonrep.com/opinion/x2085755609/Year-round-school-Your-kids-will-love-it
Very interesting. I am enjoying the comment section after the article, too. Such a wide variety of opinions.
I love the idea of the original article. I agree year round school would be a great benefit for our societies children.
Interesting article. While we do school year round, and I think that year round schools should be the rule and not the exception especially for public schools. I do worry about a comment made by Duncan. This sits uneasy with me and I'm a bleeding heart liberal. I do not agree with this at all, it would cut too much into family time and I think no matter how you slice it, family time is more important then school at least in our life.
I think the plan laid out in the article would be great for the children as far as it can be. The schedule would be better but I don't really see it improving education that much by the simple fact that when I was in school I didn't do anything while I was there anyway. It was a boring waste of my life and I was a high honors student. We had to go to Pep rallies and ended up in classes where there was nothing to do. At least they could have left me in the library then I would have gladly read everything in there on my own. Well, maybe not everything. Now if you happened to have a great school and teacher then yes this schedule would be beneficial. I also really disliked that quote about going to school 7 days a week, 24 hours a day. :roll: As though there is nothing more to life then school. Parents are still the child's main teacher even if your child is in Public School but I'm thinking he would like to change that somehow. What would be the point in having a child if all's you did was hand them over to the state and visit them once in awhile at recess.:roll:
A five or six week summer break isn't really that drastically different from what our local PS's do. They take off all of June and July, which is what, eight or nine weeks? When I was young, we were off June, July and most of August. So it was a longer break back then. From what I've observed from my WOHM friends, their kids are basically "institutionalized" all year round anyway because they have to put them in daycare for the summer. So I guess the question would be, how do teachers feel about this? How much more would it cost in gov't dollars to keep PS's open more days per year? Based on the fruits of what they're doing so far, I am hard pressed to see how throwing more money and time at the schools will actually improve anything. But I'm sure working parents would like a "free" alternative to pricey daycare during the longer break. I just hope that if they increase the number of days that PS kids are required to go to school, they don't impose that on us HS'ers as well. We're doing just fine with our required 180 days per year, thankyouverymuch. If we were required to teach even more days, that gap between most HS'ers achievement levels and PS'ers will just widen further, IMO. On a similar note, I heard a news story this morning about how Obama wants to make national standards instead of letting the states decide for themselves. Not sure how I feel about that, either!
Personally I think a national standard is the best thing. It shouldn't matter where a kid is uprooted from, NY and moved to SD, the standard of schooling should be the same. I would think if the government required more hours of homeschoolers that Homeschooling parents could finangle a way to meet the requirements. I mean if we really counted everything we did with our kids we would be so over what the requirement is. Our state of ohio only requires 900 hours. If you calculate that out it would equal to a little under 3 hours a day M-F for year round teaching. Most parents do that in a blink of an eye. I don't think it would be a bad problem. I think PS should just manage what they have properly.
Great, if you want to pay with it from your own pocket The state should not educate children at all, but it does, so here's my 2 cents. Year round school is good for kids in general, they don't lose momentum, forget everything they ever learned, etc. The program the author of the article puts forth sounds wonderful. I would love to have my kids in such a program, but I seriously feel it is morally wrong for me to expect the rest of the people to pay for my kids education and what the author is suggesting would be EXPENSIVE. It seems to me that the real reason parents tend to love these programs is because they never have to figure out what to do with their kids when the school isn't babysitting. National standards in education are not good. National standards means national controls and that further and further removes the control from parents, where it belongs. The more local the standards and therefore the controls, the better for parents who wish to have any say in their kids education at all.
But since the government controls PS would a national standard be the best? It wouldn't be fair if a child in OH has better standards of government education then a child in FL. If the schools continue to be government ran then all children should be given equal standards. It is not fair to a child who currently is in a state that has lax standards to have to compete with a kid who goes to a school with extreamly high standards. I mean even at state level the schools are still government ran.
ITA with this. I don't pretend to know much about how local/state/national governments are involved in what happens at public schools, so I might be wrong, but...The way I understand it, it's our local property tax dollars that fund our local schools. And I agree that parents should have as much say in their children's education as possible. No Child Left Behind was a national "standard" type thing, right? And it doesn't seem to have helped anything at all.
It's not the standards that matter but whether the child actually gets an education. They don't really have anything to do with one another. Otherwise I would hold my child to really high standards. Every State has different challenges, different needs, and different resources. Every child has different needs, different challenges, and different resources. It is wrong to say that a one size fits all mandate is fair. It's like a one size fits all shirt. There are few people that actually fit the shirt and it's unfair to those on the ends of the size spectrum. Parents are the people who know their children best and what they need. Local people should work together to fix the specific issues in their community. I assure you that a low income school in Washington D.C. has to do things very different and the children might have very different needs then those who live in the bush in Alaska or in a Spanish speaking neighborhood in Southern California. The Fed's have only been able to mess things up. When the Department of Education was instituted our schools took a huge down turn. The No Child Left Behind act only caused our local teachers to wonder and vote whether they should even accept Federal Funds at least in my area.
The vast majority of funding for Public Schools comes from States and local counties or boroughs or districts (whatever you happen to have in your area). The Federal Government holds out little carrots of money to try and control local school districts. Every school gets allotments of Federal Dollars based on number of students and whether or not those students have special needs or are military. I can't give a percentage because it depends where you live and whether you qualify for extra money.
This plan while sounding good, reminds me of the United Nations Rights of the Child. It sounds good on the surfice but do some digging, especially in the countries where it has been ratified, and it is not so pretty. Very, very scary actually
wyomom, i have to agree profoundly w/your last post. the want more and more control, and that is dangerous. the founding fathers set our constitution up to give the most control to our local govts and the least to the fed govt. it is so backwards now, look what America has become.
Absolutely! As of now our schools have such "high" standards yet public schools are still graduating students who are lacking in many areas. Every year it seems that new and higher standards are added to the teachers list of things to teach. Yet our system is still crumbling. Our standards are also made so a child can pass the test. Being force feed standards is not the same as learning. Standards teach our children to act like parrots, mechanically repeating back everything yet having little to no knowledge about what has been taught. Hmmm! This sounds much like our school system today.
Maybe the standards need to be lowered and nationalized. Yes no child left behind didn't work but lets face it if you just throw something to gether without a plan it isn't going to work. Maybe they need to have a set bar that kids need to be over. Once they hit that low standard then everything else is a cake walk oh wait it is already like that and it isn't working. Kids need to be challenged. A bored kid is only going to disappoint themselves.
Lowering standards, raising standards, lowering funds, raising funds, and nationalizing standards will never solve the problems that our schools face. This is for one simple reason; people are involved. Where people are, there will always be different strengths, individual weaknesses, unique personalities, and special interests. Under a nationalized standard, our government would take what already is wrong with our school system, a one-size-fits-all education, and compound it. It has been said that about 1/3 of people learn traditionally. The others struggle and all the money in the world will not change the way these people think or learn because people are not cattle that can be herded into Obama’s education pen where they will be fed the same academic meal on a daily basis. …and why would I want my child to be equal with every other child when my child is unique? My desire is for people to have equal rights so they can determine what is best for them and their children. Forcing national standards does not offer equality by any means. It is oppressive and places us under the thumb of our government. If the government wants to do something for its people, it needs to stop using our children as its tool to compete with other countries. Education should not be a competition. I keep reading that our students can’t compete with other countries. Well if the standards of other countries is what some people want, they should go live in those countries and let the rest of America go back to the way things were before the government took a good thing and ruined it. I know, my last sentence is wishful thinking.
I'm not saying make every child the same I'm saying that all the goals should be set the same. Every kid should be able to add, subtract, etc. Just basic stuff every kid should know. I'm saying that nationalization could be good as a way to assist parents in educating their children. The big problem is that parents don't want to teach they want everyone else to teach their kids. If I could move to sweden I would at least I know my kid would get a better public education. If I knew they would actually help my child get a college education then I would move there, instead of our country which allows convicts to get a free college education but upstanding citizens have to rack up thousands in debt in order to pay for one simple degree. Nationalization is supposed to be a way to assist parents in educating their children. So parents have a way to ensure that their kids will be able to compete in this country for a job. Kids shouldn't be punished because a state cannot teach efficiently. The proper way to do it is to make sure that the bar set is broad and easily obtainable, not saying that all highschool students should be mandated to take Multivariable calculus but Algebra II. Or that all kids need to take world history/US history/State History, not know the history of every country in the world. These broad obtainable goals would help our students then at that point parents need to step in and help guide their children to reach other more complicated goals. Parents are the problem not the government, Parents don't want to do their job and want schools to do it. It is not the schools job to make sure your kid takes ballet but it wouldn't hurt if they offered a dance course in gym that covers more then the electric slide. Since the bar would be set broadly then teachers could help parents or keep parents more informed about what would be good for their child.
I am chopping this up in pieces if you do not mind. I tend to get long winded and do not want to confuse myself more than I already have. I agree that every student should learn to add, subtract, etc… But I fail to see how national standards would make this happen. Aren’t these already the basic standards of our schools? While I agree there are parents who couldn’t care whether their child graduates or not and they believe the school system is a daycare, there are many who fight with the schools because they can’t receive the help they need or their children are working above the bar that has been set and they need to be challenged more. So they bring the child home or homeschool from the very beginning or seek out other options. Being that this is a homeschool board, I am sure you will find a common consensus on this one. I am one of those parents myself. We had to jump through hoops with the school system regarding our older two yet received little to no help. So we decided to homeschool our youngest. We decided that as parents we are the ones who can offer a much better education than the public schools. If it the job of the parents to teach their children, which I actually agree with this to a point, then no amount of national standards will change a thing. Nationalizing education will not make it any better, after all nationalizing standards will also mean that criminals have a right to a tax paid college education, like they already receive in some cases. It would just make it easier to acquire. Nationalizing education will also spread the money so thin that I believe our children will end up paying more for a college education. Absolutely! No child should be punished because of a faulty system. This is why I homeschool because I do believe parents have a huge impact in their children’s lives in a way that the school system will ever come close to. Personally I think our bar is already too broad and this is why it can’t be obtained. Schools tend to teach in fragmented pieces, a little bit of this and a little bit of that, regardless of the subject. What I wonder is who sets the bar? Where will the bar be set? Will it be for the average student who just gets through school, the genius, or the student who struggles academically? No matter where it is set, it will not meet the needs of all the students. In fact it will exclude an even larger number than our system already excludes now. If parents are the only and complete problem with our education system, then the government can implement national standards until they are blue in the face and they will not see one positive result. But again, I have to agree, there are some parents who couldn’t care less. All they want is a place to send their children and I honestly believe national standards and longer days will sadly increase this tragedy. It is a non-caring parents dream come true. At the same time, if the government funded schools are going to be using tax payers money, then they better be prepared to answer up for the job they willingly took on. After all, they are doing a job and getting paid for it. What is ironic to me is that for a long time homeschool parents have been battling public schools, just read any teacher forum, because many teachers believe that parents aren’t qualified to educate their own children. They are the educated ones and they do qualify as educators because they have a degree and parents should leave education to them. So either a parent is qualified or they are not. If they aren’t then schools need to be ready to take the fall and full responsibility for a child’s educational lows. If parents are qualified to teach, which I obviously believe they are , then teachers need to back off and not come against homeschooling families for taking on the very role they are criticized for not taking on. Granted I am speaking generally. I know all teachers are not against homeschooling.
