Wasting Time: The Hidden Public School Crisis
The battle for the hearts and minds of Americans over the future of public education, of its very existence, rages. There is, however, one issue on which just about anyone concerned about education can agree. It’s an issue that actually affects every student in America, and a real problem that can be fixed on the local level without state or federal involvement. It’s also an unexpected, nearly invisible, problem: rapidly diminishing class time.
Teachers’ most valuable commodity is time, yet each year state and federally required testing, mandates, and data production add increasing demands on their time, as do other demands. Students are getting much less opportunity for learning than most realize.
Imagine Anytown High School, which has a state-mandated school year of 185 days (37 weeks). Its school day begins at 8:00 a.m. and ends at 3:30 p.m. Eight classes are scheduled, plus two half-hour lunch periods, and each teacher teaches seven classes each day and has one period — about 50 minutes — as a conference/planning period. The school works on a six-week grading schedule with three more-or-less equal six weeks in each of two semesters.
At AHS, five minutes are taken from every class to establish an extra study hall period of about 30 minutes for extra instruction with hopes of raising state test scores. The math: 5 minutes x 185 days = 925 minutes per year. Divide that by 45 minutes (the time remaining for each class period) and that’s 20.6 days per year. Remaining class days: 185 – 21 = 164.
AHS has an optional class schedule that removes five minutes from each class to create an assembly period for pep rallies, assemblies, and other diversions. Let’s say there are 25 of these a year (a conservative figure). The math: 5 minutes x 25 days = 125 minutes per year. Divide that by 45 minutes, and that’s 2.8 lost class days per year. Total: 164 – 3 = 161 days. When these assemblies run long — as they often do — additional class time is lost.
State testing mandates cost about 20% of the AHS school year: 37 lost days. The estimate comes from Thomas Ratliff of the Texas State Board of Education. There’s a link to his original article in my recent series on problems and solutions in contemporary education (click here for the entire series).
The math: 161 – 37 = 124 days remaining.
Anxious about state test results, the school board has imposed internal testing mandates. “Benchmark” tests are required one day per six weeks for each discipline tested by the state. The math: 124 – 6 = 118 days remaining. AHS students have only 64% of the school year available for the possibility of learning something other than how to pass high-stakes tests or how to cheer at pep rallies and to sit through assemblies.
But that’s not all. The state mandates the daily recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance, the state pledge, and a “moment of silence.” AHS also reads announcements at the same time. This takes five minutes per day from first period. This amounts to 21 days per school year, so on top of the 66 days already lost, every student will lose 21 additional class periods from their first period classes. That reduces their learning opportunities for first period classes to only 98 days, or only 53% of the school year.
AHS, like most schools, offers the full range of sports. Students playing a single sport have the opportunity to be out of school for away games on at least six days. Their learning days are down to 113 (61%). If they play three sports, they’ll probably miss 20 days, so their learning opportunity is down to just 99 days (54%) for six of their classes and 77 days (42%) for their first period class.
A student absent due to illness or for other legitimate reasons eight days during the year is down to 111 days, 60% of the available school year. This doesn’t include out-of-class disciplinary placements, students being called to the office or to counselors for any one of 100 hundred reasons, going to the nurse, medical appointments, shopping, family vacations, or a multitude of other disruptions. This also doesn’t include hundreds of yearly interruptions to classes by announcements about events and activities, bus route changes, and similar issues that may take only a minute but can cost three minutes while the teacher restores order and focus.
It is possible for substantial portions of the AHS student body to have less than 50% of 185 days available for actual learning.
Even students who aren’t discipline problems and who are not involved in sports, music, or other activities may have the opportunity to attend only between 54% and 64% of their classes where something other than learning how to take mandated tests is being presented.
Demands on class time come from within schools and from the community. All manner of groups covet large, captive audiences of students: abstinence organizations, sex-ed organizations, anti-drug organizations, Christian strong men, political groups. Internal pressures can be even harder to resist: clubs that want to put on fundraisers like powder-puff football games, theater departments that want to put on plays, choir and band performances, and many more. When one internal or external group is allowed to take class time, how can others be denied?
Some have suggested lengthening the school year, but would that actually result in more learning opportunities? With the best intentions, most schools are wiping away as much as 56% or more of the opportunity to learn anything meaningful, even more in some cases.
Some kids will do well no matter how much class time they miss, but even they will miss an enormous amount of information and growth. There simply won’t be time to present it to them. They’ll read less, write less, and develop more slowly, and these are the kids in honors classes.
What about those kids that aren’t as focused, that aren’t as smart? What they learn in high school may be the sum of their formal education, and 54% and more of that opportunity is being wiped away in the name of “accountability” and for a multitude of other activities and programs.
In many ways, our schools are very much like our federal government. They’ve taken on far too many tasks and diversions unrelated to their actual mission: providing the best opportunity for learning that their resources and abilities can manage. The more they take on, the more constituencies are created demanding that those activities continue and expand. The more testing they do, the more testing must be done to produce even more data to prove the validity of the testing. More money spent on these distractions means more political power is created, and then more money is spent.
The testing craze is not only materially contributing to the bankrupting of our states and schools, it’s killing 20% — in many places, much more — of each school year. While it’s true that local schools can’t ignore state and federal testing mandates, they do have substantial control over other matters. Ensuring that students spend the maximum amount of time in their classes is a logical, necessary first step in any “reform” scheme. Parents in each and every school district in the nation do have the power to deal with this, if they are aware and interested.
Even though I have paid a very substantial sum in property taxes over the years to support the local public schools, I could not, in good conscience, send my children to them but rather paid another substantial sum to privately educate them.
The public schools in this nation are a disgrace and an embarrassment. But the biggest problem facing schools today is not to be found in the school system but in the broken, dysfunctional families, the low expectations of disinterested parents. We will always have the quality of education that parents demand. And they aren’t very demanding these days.
As a retired public school teacher I have to agree with luscomberflyer, the public schools in the American State are a complete waste of time and money. To argue that the problem is that the youth of America need to spend more time in boring inane classes and not testing is a fools errand. The average American public school is anti intellectual at its core; the goal of education in America as proposed by John Dewey and the progressives is to make the American youth democrats in the generic sense of that word; they must learn the great lesson of equality and fairness. There is no real intention of creating thinking rational beings but rather the push is to create an audience for the idiotic tv reality shows and CSI non sequiturs. Americans also want sports and activities in their schools; they must prepare the next generation of sports morons who will fill the coffers of the sports/entertainment complex. The American schools are also big supporters of the “ribbon panacea crowd”;this is a group that believes that any disease, inconvenience or tragedy can be overcome by forcing citizens to wear some colored ribbon to help “raise awareness”. The very stupidity of the people running the multi billion dollar education industry in America is stunning. quo usque abutere patientia nostra?
The axiom in business is “you get what you measure”.
What is the primary measure used in Public Schools? Attendance.
What is the primary measure used to advance in a meritocracy? Ability.
What do schools always strive to avoid measuring? Ability
If a business faced the disaster that is Public Schooling it would likely adopt TQM (Total Quality Management). The author thinks TNQM (Total Non-quality Management) is the way to go and he may be right. If you have no quality to measure then measuring quality is futile. The solution, however, is simple – competition. But we can’t have competition because that would demonstrate that the students aren’t the problem, and if the student’s aren’t the problem then there can’t be a problem. Right? It’s just an imponderable conundrum that can only be solved by doing a lot more of what has consistently failed in the hopes a miracle will happen. But, prayers aren’t allowed in Public Schools so a miracle is unlikely.
School is all about washing out a certain number, identifying failures and successes. Too, in the high school level it is still all about which part of town you come from. You want to here a lot about how test scores are meaningless, trying doing well but not being from the rich part of town.
By contrast, Business is all about making your employees successful (or firing them if you fail) and making your competitors failures.
Thank god school ends and we get to go to work.
Actually, business is not about making your competitors failures unless that is a side-effect of your success. There’s no point in tearing down the competition if doing so expends more resources than the increased sales will generate. Indeed, a ruthless enough competitor might find his reputation so damaged by destroying his competitor that he actually loses sales over it. If your gain is the competitor’s loss, that’s just how the game is played, but if you are maliciously seeking to ruin people, it usually comes back to bite you.
My own experience as a public school teacher has destroyed my earlier belief that statewide testing would improve education by means of greater competition and accountability.
There are some widespread misconceptions about federally-mandated tests. First, the results we all see reported are primarily indicators of how many students reach basic competency, not measures of how much all students are learning. In my district, administrators don’t care about how the top two quartiles of student achievers are scoring; they only care about the percentage of students who make it into the third quartile. That’s the number they talk about to the public because that’s what NCLB measures. It’s not an accident that nearly all of our district- and building-wide efforts at improving instruction are geared to moving those kids who almost passed into the group who barely passed.
Second, the statewide tests and the methods used to score them violate nearly every principle of assessment and statistical analysis that educrats all learned in graduate school–and they don’t even care. The tests are so arbitrarily scored as to make them totally unreliable.
Don’t confuse the accountability generated by federally-mandated tests with the kind of accountability that producers in any free market face.
Thanks for estimating the time value of education.
Hundreds of million of “non-recoverable” student/hours/year wasted, every year.
A couple of nights ago, Lou Dobbs was reading an 8th grade exam, from the late 1940′s.
First question: name the seven rules for capitalization. The objectives were different then, no?
One cannot sustain a living simply by feeling good about oneself. I read on another blog that we’ve taught our younger generations how to “network”, but not how to be “productive”.
Another huge and costly student time-sync is labtime. It’s the most expensive sq. footage per student hour. Each lab is deteriorating before our eyes; ever begging for replenishment/update/refurb. We have no hope of ever supplying a real electron microscope for a group of highschoolers, no less for each individual. Much of lab has become stand up lecture, not doing.
The cost of implementing eye-wash stations and fume hoods and safe storage and water/gas plumbing and waste removal cosumes much of the budget, yet have not one iota of scientific value; ie, they contribute nothing to the learning experience. Despite all the regulations, lab work can be dangerous. But over on the tech school side, using a radial-arm chop saw/lathe/drill press..(tools).. is exepected behavior.
All these issues go away, simply vanish, if the lab experience is simulated; synthetic and captivating. Kids entering hischool can use any “game controller” as easily as this old guy slips on a mitten.
Here’s the issue: physical lab space can never deliver an increasingly higher- level/quality of skills-transfer at ever-lower cost. Only high quality, hi-res, interactive scenarios can. Today, labspace apparently costs taxpayers about $20B/year, including rehabs. 80% of our 120,000 labs remain deficient, over 40% in disrepair.
Think about it. The latest, most powerful game console is cheaper to buy and use than an installed sink with faucets/hardware and equipped with water, gas and sewer lines. And the physical space is permanently susceptible to fires, quakes, floods, tornados, hurricanes and assault forces, coupled with normal wear, breakage, vandalism, explosion and consumption. Demassify this problem.
Sorry for the rant,but I spent years designing sims and watching young (18-24) military folks learn quickly how to do a task and retain and transfer those skills to real life environments. Absent the capability to practise, many would be dead. Ask pilots about Flight Simulator et al. It works, irrefutably.
Kinethetic feedback – actually going through the physical motions (eg, grasping the scalding test tube, or getting splashed with acid, or, or) – is not the governing criteria in science experimentation at the high school level. It shouldn’t be a dexterity test that excludes the handicapped.
Watching water boil is a learning experience, one time. Afterwards, it wastes 7 minutes of a lab session. Lining up for supplies/equipment/chemicals wastes another 7 minures. The return queue wastes more. Unrecapturable time. Setup and breakdown are repetitively boring tasks for the lab instructors.
What’s wrong with that picture?
The highest quality lab is a waste on a student who is incapable of understanding what is going on, and that describes a majority of students.
Quality labs at the High School level are not economically justified. The numbers do not work with regard to the number of students who actually profit.
Much can be taught at the High School level by demonstration. The bright ones get it, the others will not profit from greater exposure. We need more vigorous weeding out of those not capable of higher level work and better exposure and education for those who can profit from same.
My family made sure I went to private schools because the public schools in my home town were notoriously bad even back then. They may be even worse now.
My first experience with public schooling was when I went to the local junior college. Most of the students there were from public schools. It was a real case of culture shock. Even though the professors tended to be excellent, most students failed their classes. Partly it was because they spent class time socializing and their free time partying, but they also didn’t know jack. I was really amazing how they didn’t know things that were considered important at private school. Just basic history, economics, even geography, they didn’t know it. It was really depressing.
I had a very similar experience a few years ago, when I took a few courses at a local Community College. It was so bad, I took to referring to the place as “Hip Hop High,” because taking over the lounges, talking trash, and expressing attitude was all most of them were capable of.
My children went to private boarding schools. My good students benefitted immensly from the experience. My poorer students might as well have stayed home and in public school. Some private schools are far better than public schools. Others are poorly run and may even have some agenda other than the best interest of the student. But the one advantage that private schools have that public schools can never enjoy is the ability to reject students that do not meet their standards and to expell miscreants. If your child is a serious scholar then by all means get him or her into a good private school, but choose well and be willing pay the extra cost for an excellant school.
Your conclusion about schools wasting time may be correct, but this article certainly does not support it. Throughout, your math is incorrect. You routinely equate a class period of 45 minutes with a class day. This allows you to multiply 5 minutes of a 7 1/2 hour day into 21 days of a 185 day school year. Those proportions are clearly not the same (5 min/day roughly equates to 2 complete school days, not 21). Perhaps you need to go back to school and learn both math and rhetoric.
It’s 5 minutes FROM EACH CLASS, not 5 minutes out of a day.
The quote below is directly from the article:
“The state mandates the daily recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance, the state pledge, and a “moment of silence.” AHS also reads announcements at the same time. This takes five minutes per day from first period. This amounts to 21 days per school year, so on top of the 66 days already lost, every student will lose 21 additional class periods from their first period classes.”
I think he is referring to 5 mins x 185 days = 925 mins. divided by the 45 min class day = 20.5 class periods, which he rounded up to 21 class periods. If there are an average of 7 class periods per day, then this would be the equivalent of 3 full days lost in a 185 day year. It makes sense, although he misstated it in the beginning of the last sentence of the quote.
Like poster no. 1, I pay exhorbitant school taxes but pay out another equally exhorbitant sum to send my boy to parochial school. The term “wild indians” comes to mind whenever I”ve had the opportunity to see those local public school kids assembled. Still, those state testing mandates have found their way into any private school that takes a dime of state or federal money. In the ever increasing pervasiveness of Big Brother in education, the homeschoolers are the last frontier of educational freedom.
We sent our kids to parochial school K-8, then a good public high school. Look around, see what provisions exist for sending your kids to better schools if you live in a “poor” school district. Kokomo, Indiana and Fairfax County VA, for example, give parents the ability to send their kids to a higher-performing school. Once there, put your kids in the honors/pre-AP/AP courses, and the most rigorous foreign language the school offers (German, Chinese, Latin).
I don’t have a problem with the testing; I want to know whether the history teachers, for example, are teaching history or are just badmouthing Dead White Men. And mathematics? I do want to know if my kids learned trig.
The amount of time a student is taught is not all important. What is more important is for a student to be encouraged to think – to ask questions and to look for answers and solutions. Even with far fewer hours of teaching schools should be getting far better results. The 18th century English painter Sir Joshua Reynolds understood the importance of thinking in education when he stated that, “There is no expedient to which a man will not resort to avoid the real labor of thinking.”
Two centuries later the writer Dorothy Sayers revealed a profound insight into education in her 1947 essay, “Lost Tools of Learning”:
“I am concerned only with the proper training of the mind to encounter and deal with the formidable mass of undigested problems presented to it by the modern world. For the tools of learning are the same, in any and every subject; and the person who knows how to use them will, at any age, get the mastery of a new subject in half the time and with a quarter of the effort expended by the person who has not the tools at his command. To learn six subjects without remembering how they were learnt does nothing to ease the approach to a seventh; to have learnt and remembered the art of learning makes the approach to every subject an open door.”
For effective education, teachers need to be consciously thinking through their subjects and the process of learning of their students. When the focus is on thinking, the testing will be concerned primarily on the ability of the student to read and think through information and proceed to answer questions after the hard work of thinking. Learning a huge amount of material by rote simply to regurgitate it requires little understanding. It is a largely wasteful exercise. The discipline of thinking carefully and applying this to understand and solve problems is, however, of great value.
You are right about the importance of using problem solving exercises to promote critical thinking, although memorization is also related to higher order learning.
However, for the past 20-30 years studies have consistently shown that “time on task” is a major determinant of all forms of learning.
The author of this post is correct in arguing that the diminution of time on task has a detrimental impact on learning. Thus, the length of the school year, the number of instructional days, and the organization of teaching and learning are significant structural factors that should concern all of us who care about student achievement.
Sadly, this “thinking” is not new. I found ‘How to Study and Teaching How to Study’ (1909) by F. M. McMurry, Professor of Elementary Education, Teachers College, Columbia University, referenced by so many writers in the subsequent years. But the simple concept of teaching students how to do their job, study seems to have been lost. There is so much hand wringing I read but it is evident, these educators have never heard of McMurry or the idea of teaching kids how to study. There was a time, when in the Rhetoric classes, they concentrated on teaching “school skills”. But Rhetoric is so old fashioned and the English majors needed some reason to be employed in the university when it went research-centric.
McMurry proffers his factors of studying, not only proves elementary students can learn them but explains how. The first 4 will be recognized as “thinking,” which comes before memorization.
The factors of studying:
1. Provision for Specific Purposes
2. The Supplementing of Thought
3. The Organization of Ideas
4. Judging the Soundness and General Worth of Statements
5. Memorizing
6. The Using of Ideas
7. Provision for a Tentative rather than a Fixed Attitude toward Knowledge
8. Provision for Individuality
Show of hands, how many here were actually taught how to study? Or did you work it out as a survival tactic on your own? And were you taught before college? Sadly, what we see is students dropping out as their ability to muscle through the material is exceeded.
“One of the most important functions of the class period is the development of initiative and self-reliance in pupils. These qualities are fundamental, not only in proper study, but they lie at the very basis of a democracy such as ours, and it is important that the school make provision for their development. In these days of hysteria it is essential that the future citizen be trained to stand on his own feet and to think for himself.
….
How is initiative developed? Certainly not by having the teacher take all the initiative and responsibility in the conduct of the class period. To develop initiative, the pupils must exercise initiative, and the class period must provide this opportunity. To secure this initiative, there must be a change in the conduct of the class period.”
That is from ‘Teaching Boys and Girls How to Study’ (1919) by Peter Jeremiah Zimmers, Superintendent of City Schools, Manitowoc, Wisconsin.
I taught my kids how to think so that they could absorb the material they needed to learn in school. This essay should not be so much a “schools waste time” article but instead should get parents to realize that they are the primary educators of their children whether or not they pay others to supply information to their kids.
I’m afraid that the amount of class time is very important indeed. I agree that teaching kids how to think is our ultimate goal, but we must remember that learning is a process, as you’ve suggested. One learns, whether it is the correct way to throw a baseball or to analyze literature, through correct practice. That practice involves not only initial instruction in terms, methods and application, but putting those ideas and skills to work under competent, engaged guidance. All of this takes time and repeated practice. Remove 20 class periods–that’s 20 days–from any given class, and they have far less time for practice, correction and learning.
I suppose the ultimate point of this essay is to ask parents to think about what is truly important. Are they aware of how much time is lost? Are they comfortable losing entire books and the opportunity to learn the lessons and skills those books provide in exchange for pep rallies, practice tests, or similar things? What do we really prize? The ability to think and analyze the world around us–that takes real time and practice, and I need every minute–or the results of a single, high stakes test?
I think there are several flaws in your argument.
First, you assume that the state mandate of 185 days is intended to be the amount of classroom time. More likely, the people generating the mandate were intended a certain, smaller, number and then began adding on time to account for the things you mention.
Second, you assume the 20% of time spent on test-prep is wasted. While I agree that the time might be spent more efficiently it is hardly a total waste. Students taught to the test still learn something, especially if the test is well written. It may not be your favorite way to teach, but this isn’t about you.
Thirdly, I think it’s a mistake to categorize extra-curricular activities as wastes. High school is about more than simply reading, ‘riting, and ‘rithmetic. As an English teacher I doubt you consider time in math class wasted. Things like the Pledge, athletics, and theater teach students things that you cannot get in a classroom environment.
Finally, I think that 35-45% of the school year being devoted to overhead is absurd. Absurdly low. In my experience anything important is going to have anywhere from 70% to 90% of the time spent on the task devoted to overhead. Is it wasteful to spend 8 hours isolating a valve for a 2 hour overhaul? Yes, but it is less wasteful than recovering from what would happen if someone disassembled that valve with hundreds of pounds of steam behind it. Is it wasteful to devote 20% of the school year to standardized testing? Yes, but it is less wasteful than having high school graduates who cannot read or solve simple math problems.
Greetings:
Every time that I come across a new analysis of how our our public education industry is failing its students and its mandatory funders, I can’t help but think, “How the heck does that Catholic parochial school system do what it does?”
And then almost immediately, I think, “And why is that so very uninteresting?”
At the risk of violating your hospitality, there was an item on the “Outside the Beltway” web site about a DC school that was putting on a “Trayvon Martin Day”, no doubt, to produce more fully rounded citizens. Unfortunately, the school’s miserable performance standards seem to prognosticate a degree of future doom for its students. I know the Commies’ had their “re-education camps”. Apparently, our version is a kind of “de-education school” in which politicization is a bit higher on the agenda than the “3-Rs”, if anyone remembers to what that refers.
De-electing President Obama will not correct what has happened to our schools and our government.
No, but it will help.
Well – the TM Day might have been a true enlightenment if there was also a “Devil’s Advocate” presenting the case for Zimmerman. A trial after all is a court battle, not a political rally.
But – Nasty Me – I would wager that school is 80-90% “Deprived Minority”. i.e. Afro- (or whatever) American.
Small chance if any of a presumption of innocence.
I attended Catholic elementary schools in the 1950s and 1960s. Class size from grades 1 to 8 was never less than 50. Literacy was 100%. Numeracy was 100%. Writing skills 100%. Teachers didn’t do complex lesson plans. The lesson plans were incremental mastery of the chapters of our textbooks. We had textbooks for every subject. Sometimes our book bindings were held together with duct tape, but our mothers covered our books with cut up grocery bags and no one noticed or cared.
When my children got to public school in the late ’80s, early ’90s, “reforms” had deemed English, Spelling, and Arithmetic textbooks as unnecessary and possibly subversive. The “new” way to teach these subjects was the lecture method with student’s roles primarily passive. There were occasional, not regular, homework assignments. If I am not mistaken, this is the primary education method in 3rd world countries: teachers lecture and students sit there with no materials.
Needless to say, my chldren do not add, subtract, spell, or use grammar as well as their grandparents who attended very impoverished schools in the Great Depression.
America’s fascination with new education concepts has led to our students being used as test rats for utopian ideas by US professors. If you ever hear your child’s principal say the new curriculum incorporates “best practices”, start looking for a new school.
(cont) Remember the new Math of the 1970s? US public schools are on their 40th version of New Math, none of which requires students to MASTER independent calculations, ratios, conversions, calculations of areas of squares and circles, compass use, graph skills, heights and angles within triangles. My children were taught math as a lecture subject. They were typically passive recipients of words.
In the 1950s/60s Arithmetic was a “do it, check it, prove it” subject and out teachers took turns having us go to the board to write the solution to one of the homework problems. This was a little like the game show Jeopardy and we compared the “answers’ our hapless classmates chalked up to see if they made a mistake in which case the class would giggle. It was a little like performance art, and even if a kid got the wrong answer he might smirk and bow.
There is another problem in some western countries: students who are not able to match the language or skill levels of their age group.
I don’t know if your school system is receiving new students ages 5 to 18 who lack English mastery, but this is becoming very common in cities in Great Britain and the USA due to large populations of foreign-born parents and families.
Many schools, ill-equipped to address this influx, are stuffing these kids into classes where the “on-schedule” students are given busywork so the teacher can devote half her time to teaching remedial English to the newcomers. California is a case in point where some parents have given up and either moved to a further-out school district or enrolled their kids in private schools.
Adding six 12-year olds who cannot speak any English to a 7th grade class means the teacher must trigger the busywork routine for the other 20 :”on-schedule” students. So those 20 students get half an education, not what their tax-paying parents expected from the school district.
If the federal government is going to allow massive numbers of families from all over the world to settle here, then they ought to provide the money for these kids to get separate instruction until their English, Reading, and Math proficiency catches up and they can operate with the other “on-schedule” students.
(cont) Remember the new Math of the 1970s? US public schools are on their 40th version of New Math, none of which requires students to MASTER independent calculations, ratios, conversions, calculations of areas of squares and circles, compass use, graph skills, heights and angles within triangles. My children were taught math as a lecture subject. They were typically passive recipients of words.
In the 1950s/60s Arithmetic was a “do it, check it, prove it” subject and out teachers took turns having us go to the board to write the solution to one of the homework problems. This was a little like the game show Jeopardy and we compared the “answers’ our hapless classmates chalked up to see if they made a mistake in which case the class would giggle. It was a little like performance art, and even if a kid got the wrong answer he might smirk and bow.
Seems like the public schools are spending more and more time learning how to take a government test rather than learning a subject. We all know that these tests determine how much money schools will get from the government, or how much they will lose if the kids don’t do well on the tests. But I wonder what would happen if the Department of Education gave education standards back to the states (where it belongs) and simply handed out grants for capital improvements and equipment to schools? Think about it, if the schools received money from the Federal government just for school repairs, construction, electrical and heating costs, and school equipment (such as modern computers), this would free up money in local school districts to concentrate on hiring (and maintaining) good teachers and to devise a curriculum that meets the needs of their local students. But all a cetralized Department of Education is doing is adding layers of bureaucracy onto the public school system which is preventing the schools from doing what they’re supposed to do, which is teach.
Everyone should remember two important facts;
1. The tests are intended to determine how well the students are learning the curriculum the schools are supposed to be teaching them.
2. For the most part, said curriculum is a nationwide standard created by the National Education Association.
If the schools need to set aside time to “teach to the test”, the next question should be, “Exactly what are you doing the rest of the time”?
The NEA campaigned long and hard for the power to set curriculums, to make sure everybody learned what they thought was important. And it appears they can’t even manage to teach that.
And keep in mind that we have the most expensive public schools on the planet. So money clearly isn’t a factor.
The only real solution would seem to be to identify exactly where, and why, the schools are failing to achieve the goals they have, to all intents and purpose, set for themselves. And to replace the personnel who apparently cannot get the job done with ones who can. Which of course is “merit-based”, and exactly the thing the NEA fights tooth-and-nail against.
But since they created the system, who else do they have to blame for its failure?
Yes, the NEA has taken careful aim- and shot itself precisely in the foot.
clear ether
eon
If you’re saying that the tests themselves should be dropped so that class time can focus on real learning, you’re talking about a reversion to the way things were done twenty to thirty years ago. I submit that would NOT be a step forward.
When I was in high school in the early 70s, all testing was local to the school. There were no standardized tests within the city or state. Each school composed its own tests and each school had its own unique approaches. In my school, English exams were always 100% essay-type questions like “Explain the use of imagery in Merchant of Venice”. The highest grades in the school by the handful of really smart students were perhaps 78%-80%. The vast majority of us got grades in the low 60s – and our class was the advanced class, specifically made up of the “best and brightest”!
My friends at a nearby high school had a very different experience. Their exams featured 25% of the questions consisting of true/false and multiple choice questions. Typical grades for English exams at their school were MUCH higher than ours. I never saw their exams so I can’t say if they were actually easier or if they were just marked with less rigor.
The net result is that it was absolutely impossible to compare two English students in the same city in adjacent school districts. Now, multiply that problem by the number of subjects taught in each school and by hundreds of high schools. Then try to figure out how a prospective college or employer is supposed to assess whether a given student is a high flyer or a dud.
I submit that you simply can’t compare two students in this scenario. EVERY comparison is an “apples to oranges” one!
At least standardized testing at the state level has the potential of determining how well a given student is doing relative to others in his state. That is certainly not the be-all and end-all of education but it is SOMETHING.
Seems like the public schools are spending more and more time learning how to take a government test rather than learning a subject. We all know that these tests determine how much money schools will get from the government, or how much they will lose if the kids don’t do well on the tests. But I wonder what would happen if the Department of Education gave education standards back to the states (where it belongs) and simply handed out grants for capital improvements and equipment to schools? Think about it, if the schools received money from the Federal government just for school repairs, construction, electrical and heating costs, and school equipment (such as modern computers), this would free up money in local school districts to concentrate on hiring (and maintaining) good teachers and to devise a curriculum that meets the needs of their local students. But all a cetralized Department of Education is doing is adding layers of bureaucracy onto the public school system which is preventing the schools from doing what they’re supposed to do, which is teach. And we can see that the system we have now is not working, so why keep it?
While it is true that our education system is ineffectual in the extreme, there are two upsides to the situation. While talk never ends about “reforming” education, which never happens, there are these benefits to accrue from running real bad classrooms:
1) Some instruction is delivered successfully, for example the political indoctrination of the kids, who are naturally gullible at that young age. So that’s a win. We know this cuz it is somehow conceded by even the RINOs nowadays that hey, it’s normal for high school grads to be socialist leaning. It’s the altruism in them.
2) Our national political economic policy self-identifies as being based on the Keynesian principle that gubmint spending is a net benefit. Our public servant brothers and sisters in the NEA and AFT are expensive, if nothing else. So, by the prevailing logic, that’s a win, too.
That said, public school teachers in Wisconsin may be a preferred caste, but they are a benefit to us all. And they know that; this is why they rioted last winter. Even brought some of their students to help protest.
I taught for 26 years in a very large school district is suburban virginia. Every year teachers complained about lack of time or a solid block of time in which to teach the 3 Rs. Kids simply get up and leave classesw to go to band, strings, speech, chorus, esl, learning disabilities classes along with the regular physical education and music classes. Special practice for any and all of the above further break up the school day. The school administrators acknowledged the problem and worked on its solution for years. The parents are the ones demanding these classes. Too much is demanded of public schools and they simply cannot do it all. I taught an after-school science ‘club’ and found that some of the children had a pre-school language class as well as that science class. The mother of at least one student used the extra hours of class as a baby sitter for her son. Children need some time to relax. As adults, I don’t think many of us could sit still for that long a day without rebelling.
And then there are the unfunded mandates for school districts receiving federal funds (i.e., recycled local money) issued by the ruling elites in the unconstitutional Dept. of Education. And, much of that interference comes in the form of drugs dispensed, compounds largely authorized under the auspices of The Manual, a long list of drugs, including behavioral drugs, “administered” by the gubmint, including Education. That the Manual is almost a secret left unreported even by serious investigative journalists, who are as rare as hen’s teeth, much less our 24/7 news entertainers, who set the national discourse.
As a retired teacher, I think back to what I taught and what was wrong with it. I started off as a Middle School teacher, teaching science. I had a second credential in K-12 any subject which I kept secret from the administrators. I didn’t want to teacher classes in subjects that I had no interest in. I remember my first evaluation by my principal. He came in unannounced while I had my kids doing a basic lab. They were learning metrics, measuring, weighing and learning the basics of lab safety. Frankly I was embarrassed by the fact that I wasn’t doing any active teaching and I tried to apologize for it. My principle didn’t say a word and just took notes. I was uncomfortable the whole time. Yet, later I received rave reviews from that man. I was using ‘hands on’ teaching and it meant everything. This set the tone for all my science classes to come. Every subject had a lab attached to it.
I switched school districts and my formula worked there as well for many years. That is until district mandated ‘standards’. I was puzzled by all this, my students did well in many standardized tests. The new standards included new textbooks and a new approach. The standards called for little bites of education from different subject matter all disjointed. Teachers were now supposed to be facilitators and not actively teacher the subject matter. The text book was totally dumbed down. We went from a decent Life Science book to a hodge podge of disjointed subjects. I had picked up a secondary credential in math and thought it was time to use it.
I transfered to an inner city school which was desperate for math teachers. Strangely I learned to love it. I started teaching at the front of the book and worked my way through it. It was simple, no problems. For years this formula worked for me and the rest of our staff. District struck again. We had new standards, we could no longer just follow the book. We would be tested. Believe me the tests weren’t in place to see how much the students learned. They were in place to see that we all taught the same subject on the same day, damn the results. All of a sudden we were jumping around a perfectly good text book, teaching this one day, that another day and everything was disjointed.
District administration is not in place to help you as a teacher. It is a place where if you want to get ahead, you create. If there is no problem, you create one. That is your whole job at district. Our new district head of math was an ex-grade school principal with absolutely no background in math. And, she created grandly. All of us were in lock step with the new standards. As a result the ones who suffered the most and were unaware of it were our students. All the State mandated test crashed. I no longer loved what I was doing, I hated every minute of it. Thank you district. It was time to retire. As I left, I had other teachers and administrators begging me for just one more year. District even invited me to teach new teachers how to teach.
If you have a wheel that is turning, has been successful and you want to keep it turning, you grease it. You don’t take a hammer and whack at it. According to knowledgeable authorities the year that we turned out the best class of seniors was 1963. We have to ask what have done wrong since then. Maybe, I think we should ask district.
Ah, the “If it ain’t broke, we’ll fix that” mindset. Familiar to military veterans throughout history.
Mr. Gump, I really identified with your post. I really don’t think most district administrators will be happy until they’ve eliminated every shred of instructional discretion from the teachers under their employ.
And I don’t think most building administrators will be happy until they’ve put more distance between themselves and actual students by becoming district administrators themselves.
Having proudly (with trumpets) shouldered the impossible burden of teaching dumb kids to be smart, the educrats are consumed with flim-flammery to divert our attention from the fact that they are failing.
I have great sympathy for those in the trenches trying to do the impossible, none whatsoever for the generals.
No Child Left Behind implies No Child Ahead. They are succeeding much better at the latter.
The three missing ingredients that have emasculated the American public school are: Personal discipline within the students, Institutional discipline within the schools themselves, and Academic rigor rather than the subscription to the fad of the year. I’ve spent 45 years in public education and I’ve watched as these three ingredients have spilled like sand through an hour glass. What we have left is the fad of the year introduced by the administrator building his/her resume, priming for that next job, and the college theorist working on that Phd.
Are planes still flying? Do bridges sway on opening day and collapse after five months? (No picking on Bechtel now…)
Just remember the more “broken” education is, the more of your money somebody wants. Don’t think private schools haven’t caught on to this — they are quite happy to let you believe all public schools are free-range drug dens run by sex-pervert cryptonazis.
You need at least a bachelor’s degree in engineering (civil, mechanical or aerospace) to work on any of that stuff. Colleges of Engineering are good at weeding out people who don’t belong. They have to be, because bad engineers get people killed. If you aren’t up to speed when you graduate high school, you either shape up in college or you drop out and don’t get that job as an engineer.
Florida, my state of residence, has horrible public school stats. While many decry the FCAT or any standardized testing, the fact of the matter is that the majority of kids fail on reading. If they can’t read, how can they learn anything else? My county, Polk, has a billion dollar a year school budget!! Thats a billion with a capital B. However all I hear from the teacher’s unions and the board is that more money is needed to teach our kids better.
When you look at the demographics of the schools, and quite frankly I’m surprised they even exist, a different story appears. Whites and Asians have pretty good to excellent scores but the Hispanics and Blacks across the board score significantly lower. And that is in every single school in the county. EVERY ONE!! Now tell me why is that?
“However all I hear from the teacher’s unions and the board is that more money is needed to teach our kids better.”
But no one ever really seems to analyze that in detail. How exactly is that extra money going to get our kids better teaching?
It’s my understanding that in a typical school, 80% of the school budget is dedicated to salaries. We might think that all this money is going to buy state-of-the-art science labs or computers but it is mostly pay and benefits for the staff. (I’m saying “staff” deliberately, rather than “teachers” because I’ve also heard that only about half of the people on the payroll at most schools are actually teachers. The rest, aside from a few janitors, are administrators – that’s bureaucrats to you and me – not actual classroom teachers. How they actually contribute to a child’s education is a question begging to be asked….)
Even at a high school level there are also throw away days for class parties and don’t forget substitute teachers who allow the class to do whatever they want while the teacher’s away.
Regardless, it’s still possible to get a great education in a public school, but only if you have the type of student who is intellectually curious and parents who follow up at home by discussing subjects and other school related issues.
Decades ago, the US Federal Government released new punctuation rules that forbade placing the terminating comma in a compound list. A sample list of “thing 1, thing 2, thing 3, and thing 4″ was reduced to “thing 1, thing 2, thing 3 and thing 4.”
Did you catch the difference? (Hint: look between “thing 3″ and “thing 4.”)
The statisticians working for the think tank who recommended this style change put it in very similar comparisons as this erudite and largely frightening piece. They said that, taken over a report that spanned more than 100 pages, a full page of paper could be “saved” by counting up the number of commas removed and estimating the total area of typing paper that such a number of commas would occupy.
Of course, no one in government ever thought to compare an entire paper with and without commas. Inspect any of the comments above and count the number of paragraphs that have ample space remaining before a carriage return in which to place a whole bevy of commas.
The minute-by-minute mathematics that subtract cumulative seconds as total days seems to me to be a similar red-herring.
In the case of the government stylistic decree, the only one that could ever have a lasting and positive effect would be the one that said “any useless government report should never be written.”
Wouldn’t that be great?
And in the case of public school, let’s take a look at the academic value of the class and school-day itself, before we start picking nits around the five-minute Pledge of Allegiance (which may very well be the best part of the day).
I am old but still remember the value of the algebra class taught by the coach. Or the history class taught by the band director. Or the physics class taught by the principal’s “hottie” who was the typing teacher just last year.
And things can only have gotten worse. The value of the time remaining for real education, regardless of whether it is 100 percent or five percent is NOTHING! We teach Nothing! We offer Nothing to our children!
Our schools exist solely for the benefit of the teacher’s unions and the administration (and the federal agency created to benefit more federal workers). We would do our children a service by paying these public leeches their current salary for life so long as we never have to send our precious progeny to their keep ever again.
Let us not quibble over seconds in the day, but the years in the life, and decide whether any part of that year is beneficial and what detrimental parts should be removed. Public school represents a deadly cancer on time and wonder our children naturally bring to life. I cannot conceive of a more destructive power over those gifts than our current education system.
If we do not return the whole life, the refund of five minutes of it represents little more than academic recess, followed by the completion of the entire academic sentence against our children, handed down by a court of absentee guardians.
And that’s where people like me can find work, being a tutor. I have volunteered to work with several kids in my neighborhood (a Federal/Military “ghetto” between the District and Baltimore). Most of the kids are “latch-key kids” both parents work miles from home. So after school, the “retired” lady with the dogs, is available to help with homework.
We do things like go over ratios and fractions, while making a snack like cookies or pizza. We watch TV and go over History, Social Studies, or English assignments. (There are lots of really good works available on DVD or tape)
We do “kitchen science” and observation. And when we have nothing else I try to get them into doing statistics and probability.
I am doing things that MY grandparents and parents did, what many of my generation rejected doing. And why so many adults between age 50 and those still in school lack some once common sense and “background” general knowledge.
Oh, and did I tell you that the kids all think they are just “playing” and being nice to an old lady? The first ones are all in college and tell me how much I helped them to learn to learn. All the hours in a hard seat will not educate anyone if there is a rock, not a sponge there.
As a teacher in a cyber charter school, let me put my two cents in…
First, the children who transfer from inner city school are at least two to three years behind the average over our state in EVERYTHING. How can a student learn when they can’t read and comprehend their textbook? Our solution is the following: they take Reading at the appropriate level and cram two years into one. Also included is spelling and basic English grammar (we also have ESL: imagine, gentle reader, our dismay when a Norwegian student showed up). This approach brings these students more or less up to speed so he or she can keep up with the age group.
Second, the most neglected students are at the two extremes of the IQ curve. The techniques mentioned about help the lower ones. I work with the other end in physical sciences, Honors and AP Chemistry and Physics. My method is to work their little butts off.
No laboratories, except for simulations. The more vital experiments in modern science are not convenient to set up and run in a high school lab; simulations work. My colleagues in biology even have simulated dissections, and they report success with their students. AP Biology here, leading into Botany and Anatomy and Physiology. Home work every night – for credit – and penalties for unexcused lateness.
My students actively fear my chapter tests…but report that when they take the AP exams in May, that test is comparatively easy. Results are either 4 or 5 for the whole class: “Train Hard, Fight Easy”.
Same attitude in advanced humanities. High school level teachers MUST have majored in the subject(s) they teach in college…preferably at the master’s level. No education majors allowed in senior high courses.
It works…
Third: we despair of the state Department of Education. They issue standards for subject matter. Lately we have been having loads of thinly disguised propaganda in regard to “Evironmental Standards”, while the hard sciences are neglected. Well, screw them: I teach what’s important.
And So It Goes…
One of the key factors in the ever-diminishing amount of time dedicated to actual teaching is the length of the school day and of the school year.
To my way of thinking, the school day has gotten noticeably shorter since I was in school, 30 odd years ago. Our school day always went to at least 3:30 or 4 PM. Today, it’s very common for me to see kids walking home from school by 2 PM! And those are primary school students. As far as I know, they still start at 9 AM, just as my generation did. So what’s that all about? Why is the day, which was already relatively short, getting ever shorter?
The school year seems to be about the same length it has always been, although the number of “professional development days” has grown exponentially from one a year to one a month or so. But why is the school year the length it is? Am I correct in understanding that the school year got to the length it is back in the 1800s when public education first started becoming really common? And wasn’t the length of the year driven primarily by the need for families to have help from their children in working the family farm? After all, America was primarily rural and agricultural in those days.
Well, that may have made sense in those days but we are living in a different age. The number of children who have to help with the family farm must be more or less negligible by now. Labor laws alone probably limit the right of children to work in any capacity at all until they get to high school.
So what is stopping us from extending school to being a more-or-less year round affair? If we sent kids to school basically year round – they might still get a week off now and then for Christmas or Summer or whatnot – they could potentially learn a lot more in a given year and be finished their educations that much sooner – or be that much more educated when they finish.
I’m sure the teacher unions would fight THAT tooth and claw – the three month vacation isn’t going to go down without a big fight – but wouldn’t it make sense as a national policy?
Sparky:
The school year was set around an agricultural society…harvest time and all that.
However: my fabulous vacation is more like two months. I’m freed this year on the 16 June, Graduation Day. I go back to full time on 20 August, giving me a week or so of paperwork, forms, etc. until First Day comes 28 August. I make that to be (1/2 June + July + 1/2 August) = 2 Months. My wife and I go back to Maine for two weeks beginning of August.
So My Fabulous Vacation is still around two weeks…the rest of the summer I’m re-writing material that I didn’t think up to my standards from this year. And devise and program some new materials for the Virtual Chemistry Labs.
Like any other working stiff I have effectively two or three weeks of lazy.
Let me know where these three month vacations live…I just might move.
Then you’re clueless, because the kids getting out of school by 2:30 start school before 7:30. Public school districts tend to stagger the start times so that they can use the same buses for high school, middle school and elementary school. Yes, I started elementary school at 9:05 AM and got dismissed at 3:35 PM. When I was in middle school, it was 8:10-2:50, and in high school it was 7:20-2:10.
Perhaps before denouncing someone as “clueless”, you would be well served to realize that your unique experiences are not shared by everyone.
As a teacher and a coach by and large I agree with your assessments. However your speculations on how much class the average athlete misses is grossly overstated. By and large when an athlete or team have to miss school for athletic competitions they usually only do so an hour or so early. Most schools anticipate this and so schedule the athletic period at the end of the day to minimize time spent in the classroom is missed. Indeed the state has rules and regulations about what time athletic competitions can start to also minimize time missed out of the classroom.
The bigger time waster are Federal mandates to teach a HUGE portion of the student body in a different way based on things such as leaplrning disabilities, discipline issues, native tongue spoken, and a plethora of other differrentiating factors. In a classroom of twenty five students it is not uncommon to have over half of the class supposed to be taught in a manner that places more emphasis on individuals needs rather than what is best for the majority. Example: When teaching the Bill of Rights I had one student in my class who could not write his own name or a complete sentence without someone to do it for him. When asked by his his Special Education Teacher how he was doing I confessed that his ability to learn the material was nonexistant she wondered if I had any “pictures of the Bill Of Rights that he could color?”
Dear Y. Sanchez:
In my state, and many with which I am acquainted, it is as I’ve written. Kids, including athletes, are often gone for entire days, and sometimes, two or three in a row when there are regional and state meets or tournaments. Ah, I remember the 1400′s when I was in high school. All athletics were after school or not at all. Anyone wanting to leave a class for any period of time for any reason had the very great burden of proving it was so important it justified losing that class time.
I do not oppose athletics, music and other things. I’ve always been an athlete and I’m a classically trained professional musician. I recognize the value of these things.
It’s a matter of deciding what is truly important and keeping that important. If it’s not actual learning of different disciplines with the goal of giving kids the opportunity to build bigger, better brains, then let’s decide what is important and quit the pretense that having 50 uninterrupted minutes once a day to learn English or math matters.
I know it’s fashionable to bash public schools. The ones my children attend, however, are fantastic. They each have had a better education than I received, and a better education than my husband received, even though our schools were in better districts. The teachers make all the difference in the world.
The teachers my children have studied under have been amazing- they take their work as their calling from God, since they are also usually Sunday school teachers. I’m in Texas, so they aren’t making six figures, either.
My kids left first grade reading- one at above elementary, one at post-collegiate levels. I didn’t read to them during the school year, I didn’t really volunteer. I’m not even sure I got them to bed ontime. I’m willing to feed them sugary cereal for breakfast, and they might have done, maybe 90% of their homework. That’s always a weak spot. The youngest is reading at about two years above grade level.
I didn’t do flashcards, enrichment programs, nothing. That was all teacher and student effort. I prepped them by letting them watch videos about going to school. That’s it. And school uniforms. Not required at their school, but I thought it showed them and the teacher that they were reading and willing to work to learn.
The music teacher is a professional musician who is great with kids. My kids know music detail on a level that has them comfortable talking to their grandfather- a music major in college. I don’t know half the stuff they are comfortable and familiar with. They know music my grandfather doesn’t know.
So- it can work. It does work, at some schools. It can work spectacularly, amazingly, wonderfully well. I’m grateful to have a ring-side seat, to watch these amazingly skilled educators at work.
and, yes, some places aren’t. But some places: WOW!
“My kids left first grade reading- one at above elementary, one at post-collegiate levels.” Post collegiate??? Is that what you intended?
There’s one teacher, a regular second-grade teacher, who has 22 students, with 22 separate IEPs- Individual Education Plans- the sort of thing you do for special ed kids or g/t, only. She’s a regular teacher. She sits down with family after the first round of testing, and works out a plan for the year. Everyone signs on. At the end of the year, she pulls it out, and checks off how they did. Every kid has a different math progress, every kid has a different reading plan, every kid has a different spelling list. At the end of the year, each kid has fulfilled the plan to the letter. I literally have no idea how she does this.
For my kid- she went and got a textbook from a different school, for reading. For other kids, she has files of spanish books. She does every sentence in English and Spanish- yeah, mixed language class- and she succeeds.
We’ve gotten calls at home and at work if the teacher disagrees with the school nurse, for instance. We’ve gotten notes when a kid has a B, instead of the A the teacher thinks they ought have worked for- they want my kid to do better, to do more work- so character building. They’ve had religious stories sent home for reading. My daughter called one teacher at school, at six at night, to see what her homework was, since she’d forgotten it. The teacher picked up on the second ring.
Amazing, dedicated, caring, unbelievably great teachers. I literally do not even know how to start saying thank you to these people. Oh- one guy is an Iraq war veteran. He makes sure they read up on George Washington, and the constitution, and all that. They host a veteran’s salute that is really patriotic. With veterans of every war honored.
this is a poor neighborhood, too. so it’s not like bright, shiny kids with tennis courts in their backyard attend this school. It’s majority minority- 80% free or reduced school lunch fees.
yep. I live with sheldon cooper, jr. It’s not as fun as it sounds.
Ari, You are going to have to get with the program. The coin of the realm around PJM is to bash the public schools, and the general state of the state in 2012. Since I have been retired from teaching in them since 2003, I may begin some old fart bashing as well. Back in my day, we made sure that every kid could blah, blah, blah.
My question, though, had to do with your statement, which implied that one of your children, upon leaving the first grade tested at post COLLEGIATE levels. Possibly you are announcing the presence of a “Childhood’s End” genius in your family; if so, praise the Lord, but somehow that did not seem to be your overall thrust.
So much of the commentary around here consists of b*tching and moaning about the state of the world in 2012, whereas, life has never been better for me. Again. praise the Lord! Apparently things would be better if they were more like the times of 1620, 1635, 1776, 1782, 1812, 1861, 1916, 1939, 1968, 1977, 1987, 1997, 2007, etc. Let us grant that all is vexation and vanity of spirit, but apart from that, how are we doin”?
What about all of the wasted hours spent on mandated courses like the joys of perverted sex, diversity training and Marxists indoctrination?
He did not mention CNN Student News, which is in most middle and high schools. It last 10 minutes and then there are discussion questioln for the class. this is every morning.
I think it boils down to incentives, to values and rewards, and perceived possibilities.
If the improvement in academic performance is seen as likely to make the golden ring accessible, people will work more on academic performance. If parents see academic achievement as assured means to making the golden ring within reach, they will become tiger dads to make it happen; if the negatives don’t out-shine the positives we won’t push so hard.
If all of the rewards are not seen as so good, or the likelihood of definitely receiving the rewards for the specific activity is less than impressive, people do other things, we budget our time differently.
If the activity itself is rewarding (for some people e.g. video-gaming, computer programming, flying), people will learn and engage in that activity if they see engaging in it as within reach.
Most of solution is at hand. The Administration has provided it in connection with other things.
Labor Department wants to say farm kids should not do most or almost all farm work below age 16. Aha! The reason the school year vacates summer is for kids to do agricultural work. If the number of kids helping on the family farm is so low, shrink summer vacation. Go for a 3-week vacation and let Collective Bargainers shoot for 4. What the additional time can be used for will provide a tsunami of Masters and PhDs from Colleges of Education for decades. Surely there would be enough additional time for it to be actually useful. What to do about scheduling vacations and class makeup is a valid task for the non-teaching teachers in the school administration apparat. Pull those PhDs off of fiddling with the school bus schedule as they await golden retirement.
Truth is, many teachers give one assignment a period. After students finish, they are welcome to BS the rest of the period away. If you are teaching “at-risk” kids, it is common for administrators to not only accept this, but to insist upon it and call you in if you run your classroom bell-to-bell. Students are used to it, and are resistant when you hand them something else to do if after the direct instruction and their practice/lesson concerning it, you hand them something else to do. “The other teachers let us sit and talk!” they’ll say. People who haven’t been in schools for the past couple of decades would be shocked.
All you mentioned is a problem. But this “don’t be too hard on the kids” attitude is a worse one.