Must be the silly season. Anyway, yesterday the fishwarp ran a front-pager about IPS’s plan to toe-dip into year-round schooling. The claim is that this will make things more efficient by not having to re-teach the things that the kids forgot over the summer.
I suspect the reason that kids have to be re-taught the things they forgot over the summer is that the lessons that taught those things last year were not particularly memorable. Funny. I don’t remember having that problem back in the day, but on the other hand, I suspect our schools and teachers were a lot better overall back in the day.
Part of the current problem in education may be due to unmemorable and incompetent1 teachers with bad lesson plans, but other factors may include the use of generally-useless, politically-correct state-approved textbooks, and starting too early in the year and ending too late in the year when the weather is hot and most IPS schools are not air-conditioned2. None of these factors are conducive to teaching mush-filled brains in either the beginning or the end of the school year. Oh, and dare I mention all of the short weeks when teachers take days off for union indoctrination vacation teacher development meetings?
The fact is that IPS is really looking at year-round daycare with an alleged educative element. It actually makes me wonder if the real purpose is to keep inner-city youth off the streets during the summer months.
Look, whether or not the concept of summer school breaks is based on the agricultural need for kids to be out in the fields helping with the crop during the summer3 and is thus no longer necessary, particularly in the cities, at the same time that three-month break gives kids a chance to blow off steam, have some fun, and just be kids. The time will come soon enough when summer break is just a fading memory. Why not demand quality teaching and accountability from our teachers (see the Pournelle musing footnoted below) rather than forcing our children into educational drudgery 12 months out of the year because our teachers and schools aren’t good enough to make education memorable?
———-
1 With the understanding that not all teachers fit this mold. Certainly there are still good teachers out there. The problem is that they are not the vast majority. Too many teachers are time-servers. See Jerry Pournelle, here (scroll to the bottom section). Key grafs:
Meanwhile the Los Angeles Times has a series about schools: they found, as the Gates Foundation has found, that the school doesn’t matter. It’s the teachers by an enormous factor. Good teachers get results, and they get them in the awful districts as well as the classy ones — and bad teachers get bad results, and they get them in the classy districts. And bad teachers collect in the classy districts. Wouldn’t you? If you want to retire on salary, you don’t want to do that in some horrible place.
The best way to improve the schools would be to fire the worst 10% of the teachers. Everyone knows who they are. That would improve the schools by a factor of two, and probably more. If we terminated “tenure” every five years, the schools would improve enormously.
2 Yes, I have railed before about the non-need for air conditioning in schools, given that my schools were not air conditioned until high school (and I argue that neither Westlane or North Central qualified as air conditioned schools, because in my recollection only the interior rooms without windows were actually so equipped, and I don’t remember the air conditioning ever working particularly well when I was there). On the other hand, we didn’t start till after Labor Day and we were out by Memorial Day.
3 Which I don’t buy anyway, since planting is done in the spring and most harvesting is done in the fall…and while I understand that there are other things that happen between planting and harvesting, it doesn’t seem like school would get in the way of those things.
These idiots love to project their power and don’t have a clue how to pay for it.
They need to be hung.
Your comments about teacher quality are certainly on the mark. However there are two things that matter more than teacher quality. The most important factor is whether the parents care about their child’s education or not. No teacher can make the parents care.
The second is that teachers have lost control of the classroom. Students need to have it explained to them in no uncertain terms that actions have consequences. Marginal students need to be told that if they don’t shape up, they will spend their summer in school. The failing students need to know that if they don’t shape up they’ll be retained in their current grade when their friends move on to the next grade.
Reason two is literally the fault of the teachers, because their union lobbied to abolish the policies which made it possible to control the classroom.
Good points. Thanks.