{"id":17762,"date":"2011-02-01T05:20:50","date_gmt":"2011-02-01T11:20:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=17762"},"modified":"2011-01-31T16:33:16","modified_gmt":"2011-01-31T22:33:16","slug":"butts-in-chairs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=17762","title":{"rendered":"Butts In Chairs"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Twin Cities’ grievance-based community is clutching its pearls and howling over the proposal by the Sleepy Eye superintendent’s proposal to\u00a0cut budgets by going to a four-day school week<\/a>:<\/p>\n

A school superintendent in Sleepy Eye says the district needs to seriously consider converting to a four-day school week.<\/p>\n

Superintendent John Cselovszki says the move would mean longer school days with more breaks. He says the shift would cut costs associated with busing, teacher substitutes, heating and cooling.<\/p>\n

The Journal of New Ulm says Cselovszki made his comments Thursday at a Board of Education meeting.<\/p>\n

Board member Ron Geiger acknowledged that a shorter school week could help the district avoid other budget cuts.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This, of course, is heresy to the educational-industrial complex – the teachers’ unions, the educational academy and so on. \u00a0Leaving aside the logistics issues – teachers seem to have come to enjoy having their days end by 3PM sharp – there are good financial reasons to cut the school week.<\/p>\n

And Sleepy Eye being a small town, there’s a certain common-sense nature to their approach to solving those logistics issues:<\/p>\n

Fellow board member Darla Remus worried that the change would create daycare issues for elementary students on Mondays when there was no school. Her colleague, Sheila Schmid, suggested that high school students could fill the daycare need.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The problem, of course, is that it’s accepted as a matter of faith by the current educational-industrial complex – along the lines of “smaller classes improve achievement” – that keeping kids’ butts in chairs longer is a key part of a good education<\/em>. \u00a0By their logic, more hours equal better education.<\/p>\n

Of course, like the “smaller classes” canard, it really just isn’t necessarily so<\/a>:<\/p>\n

As the four-day week unfolded in Hawaii members and institutions of the community stepped in the fill the vacuum. Parents sought activities, and students were flexible. New spaces opened up for young people to learn on Fridays. Museums and Rec Clubs offered Friday learning opportunities, some at little or no cost; others parent-run (parents rotated days off of work to manage supervision of student activities). Parents, wary of potential new costs for child care, welcomed the innovations.<\/p>\n

New online learning options could be done during this time, from home, or a coffee shop, or a library, or a friend\u2019s house. What different kinds of combinations can be found when inspired young people, parents seeking new options, and communities come together to pick up the slack? Imagine the potential to capture and accredit the value-added by these types of activities. What if post-secondary institutions began accepting the validation, by a reputable organization or company, for this type of out-of-school learning?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I believe there’s a strong case to be made that kids – some more than others, to be sure, because kids are more unique than most people – learn as much out <\/em>of class as they do in, provided a decent support system at home (and let’s be honest, the kids without support at home are the ones that largely won’t be helped by cranking up the hours in chairs either).<\/p>\n

And cutting the school week to four days, at its best, taps the ingenuity of parents and, best of all, kids to engage in the best kind of education there is – self-education.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Twin Cities’ grievance-based community is clutching its pearls and howling over the proposal by the Sleepy Eye superintendent’s proposal to\u00a0cut budgets by going to a four-day school week: A school superintendent in Sleepy Eye says the district needs to seriously consider converting to a four-day school week. Superintendent John Cselovszki says the move would […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17762","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17762","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=17762"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17762\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17773,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17762\/revisions\/17773"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=17762"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=17762"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=17762"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}