Democratic Conversation

Nearly half of the USA’s children start school in the middle of August. Another 12% begin before Aug. 14. The kids certainly feel this; their summer vacation has been cut short, and right now they often stand in summer mornings’ heat waiting for a bus, or else stand in summer afternoon’s blazing heat and ozone-poisoned air waiting for a bus. High school teens with jobs must either quit or cut back on hours. But they’ve all gotten used to this change, because kids are used to being told parents and government have their best interests in mind. And since they’ve gotten used to this routine, well, “What’s the difference?” some kids have said.

Parents helped create this roll-back start times trend across America several years ago, in conjunction with local school district boardmembers, firstly as a way to lessen the “down time” of learning (a phenomenon, especially for grammar school-aged kids, where several weeks of the new school year was spent on review of last year’s learned lessons before this year’s could be safely assumed it could take hold). Parents also agreed that an earlier start would help teachers prepare for state-mandated tests. Both changes have, by so many accounts, worked tremendously well, despite the ridiculous failure of George W. Bush’s farcical slap against education, No Child Left Behind.

Now, however, in a move that resembles the scatological demands of their children, parents are demanding of state legislatures to pass laws requiring the school year to start later in the summer, such as the week before or the day after Labor Day. And the parents have an ally in this demand: the tourism industry, who complain on two levels: they need teens who have jobs at amusement parks to work as long through the summer as possible, and they need parents (and kids) to attend these places for one last wallet-emptying vacation. Leave it to government to break what doesn’t need fixing because hysterical parents and money-grubbing industries want to dictate what’s important to children instead of allowing the education professionals that sit on school boards to determine well-balanced systems that can assist in maximizing our children’s learning potential.

(If you think these are liberal-minded states wanting this change, against all wishes of conservatives who WANT GOVERNMENT OUT OF OUR LIVES, then think again: laws to push school start dates back to traditional dates have been enacted this year in Florida, Texas, Tennessee, Alabama, and Kentucky … all hardly liberal ground, and all … ahem … possibly leading the list for the worst test scores per annum in the nation. And just to show only I’m biased towards educating our children, two liberal-territory states have also enacted such callous-to-learning laws: Michigan and Pennsylvania.)

Parents in these states have claimed they now do not like their vacation time with the children to be cut short. I have a question for these parents: Did you not think about this outcome when you first bitched to school boards to make this change? If not, then, honestly, this is your problem, not your children’s (who need the extra time), the school board’s (the professionals), or the legislature (always looking out for their paying constituents). Actually, your abject selfishness stems from a typical American problem: you don’t know what the hell you want until you see what you don’t want.

As for these state legislatures cow-towing to the tourism industry lobby/campaign money—let’s make this clear: politicians care only about who pays them off during the election season—the politicians have shown once again that kids don’t matter one Goddamn thought to them because kids don’t have money: they can only be exploited by others who make money.

This leaves a question for the tourism industry: Must everything really be about how much profit you make? No one begrudges a capitalist from making money, but on the backs of kids trying to save for the ever-dwindling potential to pay for college? Maybe more importantly, If you’ve lost your minimum-wage workforce, that’s your problem for starting a business where your sole purpose is to charge outrageous fees, concessions and admission prices on the backs of kids whom you don’t have to pay squat, don’t have to offer health benefits, and whom you use like near-slaves so you can make yourselves rich.

School boards are trying to talk sense into both parents and legislatures. Neither is willing to listen, as shown by this new trend to pass laws that effectively and for the long term handcuff any school board’s ability to administer education policy for the benefit of children and the effective teaching potential of educators. As for the kids, they seem to take these push-you-pull-me activities in stride, bless their hearts: “Just pick a time and stick with it,” one high-schooler told me. “Then let us learn.”