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Kamala Harris Proposes 10-Hour School Day
Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris is introducing a Senate bill to keep kids in school from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. The proposed goal is to align schedules between the average school day and workday. While this might be convenient for working parents, it would trap students in classrooms for 10 hours, five days a week.
The actual goal is something different: strengthening teachers’ unions, federalizing local schools, and further replacing the family with the state.
In a glowing profile, Mother Jones attempts to sell Harris’s plan:
The majority of schools days end around 3 p.m., two hours before the end of 70 percent of parents’ workdays. And most schools don’t have a way to make up the difference. Fewer than half of all elementary schools—and fewer than a third of low-income schools—offer after-school care. Beyond that misalignment, schools shut down, on average, for 29 days during the school year, the majority of which are reserved for professional development, parent-teacher conferences, and myriad vacations and minor holidays the federal government doesn’t recognize. That’s a full two weeks’ worth of days more than what the average American has in holidays, vacation, and paid leave combined. And then, of course, there’s summer vacation, a two- to three-month break that leaves working parents scrambling for day-long care.
The school day and calendar is a bad deal for children: In the absence of a better alternative, 3 percent of elementary-school students and 19 percent of middle-school students look after themselves from 3 to 6 p.m. on school nights. But it’s an equally bad deal for working parents—and the economy as a whole. A family paying out of pocket to cover child care for those two hours between the end of the school and workday costs an average of $6,600 dollars per year, or nearly 10 percent of an average family’s income. Almost 40 percent of all workers lack access to any paid vacation time, which means parents will often have to scale back their workday to accommodate child care duties.
In that case, why not eliminate half the holidays and cut summer vacation to a week? That way, unmotivated parents could be even less involved with their kids and focus on what’s really important: sending more tax dollars to Washington.
Published in Education, Elections
So she has a history with an interest in offloading responsibility for other people’s children for her benefit.
They’re just intent on re-animating the 9th and 10th Amendments I guess.
How the hell is it the business of the federal government?
Mark Steyn pointed out in 2017 a long list of European leaders who were childless, and also had no real stake in the future…
This includes:
How did that ultimately work out for England?
Wouldn’t this get her in hot water with the teacher’s unions? Are teacher’s supposed to work 60 hour weeks now?
Any way you look at it, it’s dumb.
I think the word you are actually looking for is Boarding School for all. And honestly isn’t that actually a good solution of these benighted underachieving school districts either in rural areas or inner cities? One system chronically underfunded and under populated the other over funded and over populated. You take kids from different parts of America send them off to live with each other in a 24/7 supervised environment. They get their three meals (no under fed students) they get diversity (if you care about that), they get away from their distracting and problematic home lives, they can focus on academic achievement, and you can probably identify and assist those students with learning deficiencies better.
The main purpose of schools is to keep kids off the street right? Also to train people to sit still and shut up for at least 8 hours a day while following instructions. All that can be better done in a controlled environment? Plus isn’t sending your kids to boarding school a thing rich people do?
Well, they got an empire out of it, for better or for worse.
Presumably she expects them to hire more teachers and/or teaching assistants rather than expecting teachers to work longer hours, and the teachers’ unions would love this since union dues are a fixed annual fee rather than a percentage of members’ income. If dues were a percentage then unions would have an incentive to get members to work longer hours (thereby earning more income), but since dues are a fixed fee the unions have an incentive to increase the number of members instead.
Isn’t she regarded as one of the more successful monarchs? I mean England’s royals and government have been illegitimate since Henry VIII became a heretic, but in that line I think she ranks in the upper portions. Plus Stalin had kids didn’t make him a better person.
So our educational system (which is a government program) are badly run so we need them to do more?
I had two children go through 12 years in a school district in NJ. Because it’s an affluent area chock full of South and East Asians, it is highly ranked in the state. But to hear the teachers talk you’d think they single-handedly infused the students with knowledge.
My daughters had a tremendous amount of homework every night. My view was they were off-loading a lot of education to the parents. It sure didn’t seem like they were getting much in class.
One June day, I saw this message on the marquee of the middle school: Happy Summer, Students! Parents, it’s your turn!
Their arrogance is amazing.
Since I’m an inveterate contrarian…
< devil’s advocate mode = on >
One might argue that many (most?) European monarchs of that era (the mid 16th century) are “generally considered” some of the “more successful” in history, almost entirely because they were the ones to start exploring and colonizing the New World in earnest, thereby improving the profiles and increasing the power and prosperity of their realms.
Consider her peers. The Spanish Empire reached its geographic apex under Philip II, and he was dubbed “Philip The Prudent”. The French kings during her reign were burdened by the Wars of Religion, sure, but they also reigned over the colonization of New France. The Holy Roman Emperors during her reign did a pretty good job of keeping the Empire united, up until the 30 Years War in early 17th Century.
Basically, so the argument goes, the mid-to-late 16th Century offered pretty good historical conditions for the major European powers, and it would have taken a complete dunce to screw things up completely during that time, so maybe Elizabeth I was just lucky.
< devil’s advocate mode = off >
But really, I dunno. I’m pretty ambivalent about the strengths and weaknesses of the Tudor monarchs. There’s too much evidence for both sides of the argument to draw upon.
2. More hours for teachers= more teachers= more union members and dues (if we get mandated PreK, that also means union scale for nursery school teachers as well, more, more, more)
3. More time away from parents= more time for indoctrination.
That’s a powerful political nexus, especially given that the one sure way to defeat such a proposal is for more parents to stand up and take full responsibility for raising and educating their kids. Ain’t gonna happen.
Not terribly well. No heirs, led to the Stuarts, led to the Civil War, led to James II and VII and the Glorious Revolution. Eighty-five years of hell to recover.
FTFY.
So I take it the Dems are no longer pursuing the idea of lowering the voter age to 15?
Sure they are. The buses will go from school and back afterwards.
My opinion is that a major portion of the historical British boarding school was to teach children of British aristocracy how to be part of the aristocratic system. More important to British continuance than being part of a family. Same thing here. The objective is to turn children away from families toward The State.
Man, conservatives know how to hold a grudge.
They could put supervised voting booths in the schools for ease of use.
You have no idea.
As long as my taxes are being confiscated and spent to educate/indoctrinate children, I reserve the right to voice opinions about how they are spent.
In fact, since people with children are rewarded for it with tax breaks, people without children, or people who have children who have finished school and are no longer part of the household, are likely to be paying more than their fair share of the local education budget.
As for childless citizens not caring about the future, please make an effort to meet some bachelors or childless couples and ask them why they keep striving to live and to make the world better for other people’s offspring. You obviously have a lot to learn about human nature.
first school busing.
now this???
her campaign is imploding.
hail mary time
What makes me sad about the proposal for keeping kids more hours in school is that it wouldn’t be as tempting if family members chose to live closer together as they once more often did.
We often go from Connecticut to Florida when the kids (daughter and son in law) need people on hand for their kids, 2 of my grandkids, so they can meet work obligations. But it’s a haul that leaves us stuck at the house or having to rent a car during the time of our visit that they don’t need childcare. (Say, for instance, they need us Monday. Not Tuesday or Wednesday. Again on Thursday and Friday.)
My husband’s mother went back to work when he was in the third grade. Because his grandmother and two aunts lived a short walk away, they had no difficulty being on hand when help was needed with childcare.
It’s frightening that people don’t even think of planning to get childcare worked out without making a Federal case of it.
This reminds me of a quote (attributed to Mark Twain, I think): “I never let school interfere with my education.”
Hey now, I’m a bachelor! And I wouldn’t take issue with someone not voting for me for that reason if I ever ran for office. Stakes. Collateral. There can be exceptions but that’s my general rule. It’s the same reason I won’t vote for someone who is gay (generally) or someone who is pushing 80 (because they probably won’t live to see the consequences of their actions).
People generally make better decisions when they have something to lose. Stakes in the game. Harris’ proposals here are insane and would not come from someone who has children. Young boys have enough problems paying attention in a six hour school day. Boys on average have more energy than girls and public schools are often completely incapable of accommodating this. As a result of this, bureaucrats and agents of the state diagnose “disorders” and over-medicate boys for being boys. How on Earth would a ten hour school day affect what is already an enormous problem? We would be living in a Pink Floyd music video. A mother of boys, regardless of political affiliation, would hopefully see some serious problems with proposals like this.
I’ll take your advice though and work on being a better person.
It’s been tried. The results were … uneven.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Indian_residential_school_system
Yes as one of the ones being chastised for my remark on adults sans progeny, I think there are a lot of fine single people who care about children and the future – they’re just not at Mother Jones!