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 They’ll recite the pointless factoid that summer vacations are an outdated product of America’s farming culture.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.
I homeschool year round.
But we work maybe, three hours a day?
Cut the schoolday or cut the time they are in there.
thats amazing considering the schools can’t afford to stay open as it is now....many schools are cutting back hours to save costs....well i guess they can just tax the upper class a little more to pay for it...after all they seem to think they are an endless cash cow...
More unemployed people will make it easier to homeschool.
In theory I support extending the school year from 9 to 11 months — if the time to get a high school diploma can be reduced from 12 to 10 years. But that would never happen, under the current system, which is run for the sake of the teachers unions. Fewer kids in school would mean fewer teachers. So I am opposed to a longer school year.
It will never happen. In fact, the new thinking is to reduce school to 4 days a week with longer days to save money on utilities and busing
The reason this will never happen is easy - money. School systems can barely afford to pay teachers for the hours they are working now.
However, it makes for good shock value
Me, too ... especially with high-schoolers, who are always behind in my experience. (Where is Bill, anyway? He's supposed to be finishing the 9th grade!)
I could record every day on my state attendance chart, since there's not a single day on which we don't conduct "academic instruction or educational activities." Bill can have Beginning and Advanced Child Development Studies on his high school transcript, just like Anoreth did!
My ex-employer ran a 4-day work week. I liked it.
If our local elementary school had a 4-day week, I'd open a "Friday school" and pick up some extra cash.
Democrats want our kids in year round school/indoctrination, and many, many working parents want the summer-long free babysitting.
>>Bill can have Beginning and Advanced Child Development Studies<<
LOL! Smart!
I can see them wanting to do this. What better way to stop dangerous activities, like Boy Scout Summer Camp!
In fact, there’s no statistical evidence linking longer school days or longer school years lead to across-the-board increases in student learning.
This is all about raising teacher salaries and school taxes.
The courses are offered in the county’s public high schools.
This person is hopelessly out of touch.
It makes a lot of sense to go to a 4 day school week, with the day off most commonly being Monday. The downside is, of course, a LONG day those 4 days, especially for the little guys
In our area, we have 2 private schools that do a 4 day a week during their second trimester of school. The day off then becomes the ‘skiing’ day where the majority of the school gathers on the slopes
The parents seem to like it and sense the schools don’t have to worry about federal regulations of # of days in and # of hours taught, or being involved in testing, it makes for a pretty fun school.
Of course, it is quite expensive
Those courses are in our school too. In fact, the kids that take it for 2 years can take the state exam and leave school with a child-care certification.
Those courses are in our school too. In fact, the kids that take it for 2 years can take the state exam and leave school with a child-care certification.
Teachers often say they deserve full-year salaries for their jobs, and get mad when you suggest they are well-paid for the number of hours they work.
But I’m betting they will all expect a big pay increase if they have to teach year-round.
I wonder why he thinks the kid would eat lunch at 2:30 in the afternoon, when they serve lunch at school?
Yeah but it’s so much better when a child you care about is involved.
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