schools as prisons and an idea for shortening the school year (for some)

A fun but insightful column from Debbie Harbeson in the Jeff/NA Tribune...

Debbie and her husband home-schooled-- or more precisely, "un-schooled"-- their two children.

There sure is a heightened concern about the number of days kids spend inside school buildings these days. This is due in part to the havoc created by the weather, but the real storm blew in when Indiana’s newly elected Superintendent of Public Instruction, Dr. Tony Bennett, took charge....

Bennett points out that state law requires a minimum of 180 days of instructional time and he will no longer allow waivers because of weather....

In addition, Bennett has placed a big red X on the days that were half-filled with professional development. This does make sense....

Bennett says he wants to make sure taxpayers get what they pay for and make sure kids are prepared, but will this focus on attendance do anything to improve education?

Being a stickler for following the compulsory attendance laws certainly makes it appear that administrators are in control. They can check 180 days on a form and tell us this is actually doing something to help children learn.

If we want to talk about real learning, however, there is nothing particularly magical about spending 180 days inside a school building.

This concern for counting days attended is one of several reasons why it’s often easy to compare schools to prisons. We are sentencing our kids like they were criminals and it doesn’t take them long to learn the underlying lesson that they just need to do their time....

It really doesn’t take much deep thought or observation to understand that learning does not happen on an arbitrarily created schedule. Therefore, if we want to use attendance numbers to guide education, why not work on ways to help kids get out early?

We all know there are students who can master their grade level requirements in less than 180 days, so we should be using attendance as a motivator. Let students out early if they know their stuff. Why force them to sit there just to complete a mandated sentence?...

...unfairly penalize the kids whose learning styles make it very difficult for them to fit inside the institutional school box. But maybe if we started by freeing the first group, then more time could be spent figuring out how to meet the needs of these kids....