Every summer, kids are out of school for about 80 days, almost 3 months.
So, what do parents do with their kids during that time? It’s not like their jobs end. It’s not like they can take 3 months off of work to look after their kids.
And yet, the kids get taken care of.
How is that even possible if — as we’re so often told — we need to subsidize all-day, all-week day care in the public school system so that parents can work?
This canard is debunked — proven to be absolutely wrong — every single summer, year after year.
So why do we still give it any credence?
Why cling to it, especially when the result of doing so is that the typical student spends half of each year with access to fewer resources, of lower quality, than he has at home?
Why cling to it, especially when the result of doing so is that we spend approximately the cost of a house to babysit those kids, while well under half of them are reaching even the lowest level of proficiency in reading and math?
Whatever parents are doing in the summer, why can’t they do that all year?
That would let us have schools that focus on instruction in fundamentals (which isn’t very expensive), instead of scattering attention and resources on incidentals (which are bankrupting us).
Their purpose could be, not to warehouse kids, but to prepare kids to take over their own educations.
They could operate for a few hours a day, a few days a week, a few months a year.
And what would the kids do the rest of the time? The same things they do every summer.
Ruth Ward et Rick Ladd removenda sunt
