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George Orwell Less is More Award: Schools moving to a 4 day school week to save money
George Orwell Less is More Award: Schools moving to a 4 day school week to save money
Today's NYT has a story about rural schools moving to 4 day school week to save money. In Colorado, 36 of 180 districts have gone to four days. This has set me off, as the whole topic of how education is underfinanced tends to.
<RANT ON>
This is nuts! Why is our society no longer willing to invest in educating our children? We are eating our seed corn again. This doesn't make sense on so many levels:
- According to the articles, cost savings are actually fairly minimal: figures quoted are from $10K to $70K per year.
- And just from an accounting point of view, this make no sense. If just one kid ends up in jail or in the hospital because s/he wasn't in school on a Friday, that would probably kills a whole year's savings.
- Education is an investment. While you can invest foolishly, and not gain much, investing less is a guaranteed way to lose.
Most of a school's costs are personnel - always have been, always will be. How much school costs is basically a function of how well we pay our teachers (so what kind of teachers we attract) and how many kids we make them teach at a time. Nobody wants to face that fact. If we want our children and society's children educated by well educated professionals, then it is going to cost us. Teachers care about autonomy, working conditions and good leadership, but if they can't support a middle class lifestyle, they are going to get out of the profession (and fewer will join it). If want children to get individual attention, then it is going to cost us. And as a society we seem less and less willing to pay those costs. Or we have a political system that isn't translating people's willingness to pay into actual results. I'm not sure what to do about it, except on a very personal level in my own community.
What really gets my goat though is when people advocating these changes try to pretend that the changes are for the good of the students: the article says some districts claim that they get better attendance and morale; less time lost to extracurricular activities, teacher training and doctor's appointments; and longer class periods. The hypocrisy is nauseating.
And I haven't even started talking about the testing fad.
</RANT OFF>
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