We want your kids all the time

"More school: Obama would curtail summer vacation:"

WASHINGTON – Students beware: The summer vacation you just enjoyed could be sharply curtailed if President Barack Obama gets his way.
Obama says American kids spend too little time in school, putting them at a disadvantage with other students around the globe. ...

"Our school calendar is based upon the agrarian economy and not too many of our kids are working the fields today," Education Secretary Arne Duncan said in a recent interview with The Associated Press.

I was a key player in two grassroots groups in Williamson County, Tenn., that successfully batted down attempts to convert schools to a year-round calendar. The second tiem the advocates pulled a switcheroo by calling it a "balanced" calendar, thinking that was more palatable, but the so-called balanced calendar would have put our kids in class all or part of 11 months of the year.

Eventually our group, which started by two other parents and me, grew to several hundred. One of the advocates' arguments that we continually had to refute was the absolutely false assertion that the traditional calendar, running roughly the first week of September to the end of May, is an "agrarian" calendar, dating from a time when agriculture dominated America's economy.

There is no historical foundation for this claim, yet it even being repeated today by the US Secretary of Education.

Anyone who has lived or worked on a farm, as I have, knows that spring planting and fall harvest are the busiest times on a farm. The agrarian calendars of the past gave children long breaks in the spring and fall so they could help out on the farm. The "balanced" calendar more closely approximates the agrarian school calendars of the past.

After 1950, as the manufacturing and service industries became more important to the U.S. economy than agriculture, the agrarian school calendar was abandoned in favor of the modern traditional calendar. If there is a "throwback" to the agrarian past, it is the balanced/year-round calendar.

The shibboleth that the modern calendar is agrarian was promulgated years ago by the National Association for Year Round Education, intended to make parents think that the present and now-traditional calendar is antiquated and old fashioned, thus obsolete. In fact, the hardest farm work is done during the spring, when planting and calving are done, and the fall, when the harvests are taken in.

Here's more on why the "balanced" calendar is more suited to agrarian America than the modern calendar. Excerpt from The Daily News Journal, Murfreesboro, Tennessee, February 19, 2001, by Scott Broden, Staff writer:

In 1932, students took a vacation lasting three to six weeks to pick cotton. ...

Many call the traditional approach that starts the school year in mid-August an outdated agrarian calendar, yet the Depression-era board policy to start sooner was made for agricultural reasons, according to Nell Blankenship, past president of the Rutherford County Historical Society.

"They went (to school) for six weeks and got out for cotton-picking season," Blankenship explained.

Students picked cotton for three to six weeks, and board members determined how long the break would be for their own districts. After returning from the harvest, students would take more breaks for the holidays but stay in class until the end of the school year in March in time for the planting season.

That was as agrarian calendar," said Blakenship, noting it wasn't until the 1950s when the school year started after Labor Day. "We've just gradually worked back to July. Each year we go a little bit further back to that calendar of the 1930s."

But as the NY Post's article points out, foreign schoolkids are actually spending less time in class than American kids, not more:

Obama and [Education Secretary] Duncan say kids in the United States need more school because kids in other nations have more school.

"Young people in other countries are going to school 25, 30 percent longer than our students here," Duncan told the AP. "I want to just level the playing field."

While it is true that kids in many other countries have more school days, it's not true they all spend more time in school.

Kids in the U.S. spend more hours in school (1,146 instructional hours per year) than do kids in the Asian countries that persistently outscore the U.S. on math and science tests — Singapore (903), Taiwan (1,050), Japan (1,005) and Hong Kong (1,013). That is despite the fact that Taiwan, Japan and Hong Kong have longer school years (190 to 201 days) than does the U.S. (180 days).

The AP report attempts to make a case that longer classroom periods would be helpful, as well they might. But the time and the money for them have to come from somewhere. Today, my daughter arises at 6 a.m. to leave for school well before 7. Classes dismiss at 2:20 p.m., then she has soccer practice to 4:45, sometimes til 5. Then home shower, supper and homework until between 9-10. The to bed to do it all over again the next day.

To lengthen the class day means cutting the amount of time available for:

• extracurricular activities, whether sports or clubs
• family time after school
• homework
• sleep

To paraphrase economist Milton Friedman, "There ain't no such thing as a free hour." And of the above four time payers, which is least likely to be the payer? That's right, homework, when our kids are buried in it now.

Besides, as ABC News explained in 2006, the biggest thing holding American school kids back is not that they spend too few days in school. It's that American public schools are a government-run monopoly.