Posted on 07/30/2009 5:13:40 AM PDT by Kaslin
No, really. If you think I’m being hyperbolic, you need to read an article in the latest issue of Time magazine, titled “Summer School: What? No More Vacations?” If Obama’s Education Secretary Arne Duncan has his way, your kids will be in government schools eight hours a day, twelve months a year.
Liberals will no doubt portray this as another altruistic “Save the Children” plan, as well as a taxpayer-funded babysitting service for low-income women and moms who have better things to do than raise their own kids. (“Mom isn't waiting at home at 2:30 with a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich. That just doesn't happen in many American families anymore,” Duncan says in the article.) They’ll recite the pointless factoid that summer vacations are an outdated product of America’s farming culture.
Don't be fooled. There are two reasons Democrats want your kids to spend more time in public schools. First, it comports with their ideology that “the village” (aka government) should raise children. Second, it’s a political payoff for the Democrats’ greediest and most power-hungry constituency: the teachers’ unions.
It’s also nothing new. In her book Feminist Fantasies, the always-brilliant Phyllis Schlafly analyzed a similar liberal scheme from the early 1970s, which proposed government-funded daycare and public schooling for all children beginning at age three. The American Federation of Teachers explained that herding toddlers into government schools was “a vehicle to help teachers in a shrinking job market.”
Its proponents were also clear about their larger goal. “Day care is a powerful institution,” Democrats Walter Mondale and John Brademas wrote to constituents in 1970. “A day care program that ministers to a child from six months to six years of age has over 8,000 hours to teach him values, fears, beliefs, and behaviors.”
No wonder liberals have tried to criminalize homeschooling, as a California appeals court did last year. They want to make it illegal for parents—not teachers' unions and their political minions—to act as children’s authority figures.
And they’ll demand higher salaries to teach your kids a whole lot of nothing. In elementary school, American children hold their own in international comparisons. By ninth grade, having spent several more years in public school, they sink to the bottom. On the 2006 PISA exam, which measures the academic proficiency of students in 30 countries, American 15-year-olds ranked 21st in science and 25th in math.
That would concern teachers’ unions if academic achievement was their goal. It’s not. Their goal is to earn more money for shaping your kids’ “values, fears, beliefs, and behaviors.” This will no doubt include lessons in America-hating (in 2006, a Colorado tenth grader secretly taped his Geography teacher ranting about American terrorism for the entire class period), racial grievance-mongering (Seattle public schools have dictated that teachers present Thanksgiving as “a day of mourning for Native Americans”), and revisionist history (earlier this decade, the New Jersey Department of Education tried to erase any mention of Washington, Jefferson and Franklin from history classes).
Worst of all, if union shills get their way, you won’t even have the option of homeschooling your kids. For children whose parents can’t afford private schools—you know, the type Democrat politicians send their kids to—public education will be compulsory.
And they’ll demand you hand them over at age three.
O rly? I’ll have to look into that when Tom is old enough. Bill will be headed into the community college culinary program next year!
I'm paid for 192 days of work. If asked to work 250, yes indeed I will expect a commensurate rise in salary -- wouldn't you?
Has Anoreth been deployed? Is she still in the states?
She’s still in training at Cape May. She was held up for several weeks with a stress fracture, but now she’s back in a regular company and expects to finish 8/28. She’ll find out about her next assignment about a week before that.
When she wrote a couple of weeks ago, she said she’s going to apply for a cutter based in San Juan, PR, and another in Hawai’i.
LOL!
My kids eat lunch all day when they can.
At least you acknowledge that you are paid for 192 days of work. THose I argue with insist they have a full-year job and deserve a full-year salary.
I have a degree in elementary education with emphasis in mathematics.
Teachers should NOT obtain education degrees. Nearly every class was a brain-washing in liberal ideology.
Elementary school teachers should have a BS or BA with double or triple majors in Math, Science, and History. Then they should take a class or two in how to teach what they know and go from there. All that “hierarchy” stuff was totally USELESS. It matters that the teacher knows the subject before he/she learns how to relate it to children.
Jr or Middle School teachers and High School teachers should have a Masters in their area of expertise to go along with those “how to teach what you know” classes.
Administrators should have additional education in Public Administration, but not necessarily a degree. State Education heads should definitely have school experience and a PhD in Public Administration.
Of course, EDUCATION should be under States Rights and should not be a Federal Cabinet position. Abolish the Federal Dept of Education. Cut taxes and let the States raise their own taxes for their own Public Schools.
The reason this will never happen is easy - money. School systems can barely afford to pay teachers for the hours they are working now.
__________________________________________________
Exactly what I was thinking.
No problem. In due time, the govt will make it compulsory, like paying taxes. Govt service...or you get no pension, no Soc Sec, no Medicare, no morphine with your dehydration.
With many boys,
letting them get their willies out in some activity,
then sitting them down for a 20 minute lesson
is way more productive than trying to force them to
sit still for a 3 hour stretch to get the same work done.
I like the idea of more schooling for kids. They turn into mushroom heads and then require a few weeks to get themselves back into learning mode. I know there is an agenda at play but still, would additional math, science and language development be such a bad thing?
Yeah, I’ve seen that statment and it’s pure BS. Actually, I just checked my contract, and it’s 196 days , as if that matters.
Nope I am not paid full year, I am not paid for vacation, I am not paid for holidays. I am paid to show up, and teach, for 196 days, with the length of the required school day to be no longer than 8.5 hours. I do have 10 days of sick leave and 2 personal day (sick rolls over from year to year, personal are use or lose)
As far as the school day goes, there is incredible variance even within my own school district. Elementary school teachers have duty lunch, and a 35 minute planning period daily. High school teachers have duty free lunch and a 90 minute planning period. Middle schools run the gamut from working during lunch to sometimes, to none and from 45 minute planning to 90.
Couldn’t pay me enough to teach elementary school.
Summer vacations should be spent reading books:
Atlas Shrugged
1984
Animal Farm
Liberty and Tyranny
Common Sense
Culture of Corruption
and so on...
What you describe is what Virgnia is transitioning to. All midde and high school teachers must major in a discipline and then earn their education credentials as a minor or as their masters.
I happen to agree with you on the uselessness of education degrees
Yeah, well maybe these Libs need to plan for the future: at the rate we're going we'll be living in that "outdated" farming culture sooner than later... mud huts and all.
I’ve argued that the money we pay our teachers locally, while it is low compared to other’s yearly income, is good on an hourly basis.
The problem I think for teachers is that if we do a full-year school, it won’t be many more days of teaching, because the students will still get time off, the time off will simply be spread around the year. But without a block of time off, the teachers who do get summer jobs to enhance their earnings won’t be able to do so anymore, and will want more money, even if the number of total days worked doesn’t increase much.
I think it would be perfectly reasonable for teachers to maintain the same hourly wage, and get paid for the extra hours if we did increase the school year. But I oppose increasing the school year, or changing the calendar. It’s hard enough to schedule family vacations as it is. It doesn’t help that my daughter loves taking summer school.
“run around the block
eight or nine times, if you must,
then do some work, bill”
(response to a post
that might have been attempting
to haiku with us)
You're trying to make sense of this desired policy.
That's your mistake, right there.
But did you read the next part of my post? That’s where the “sense making” comes it. That’s where I said it was just a ploy to raise taxes and teacher salaries! ;)
ping
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