by Chris Bodenner
A reader goes in depth on the subject:
I’m all in favor of later start times for high schools so that students who need to sleep in can, but Suderman’s suggestion that vouchers and school choice will help accelerate solution overlooks two intractable reasons why schedules haven’t changed much: transportation and competitive sports.
Private schools could experiment with later starts, but that becomes difficult if they rely on public school buses, which has been true of most of the Catholic schools and most of the evangelical Christian schools I’ve known in the three states where I’ve lived. These days almost all students ride buses, and the bus routes add considerable time to the school day.
Secondly, sports create scheduling problems at the end of the school day, when public and private school teams compete.
Football is a weekend sport, but basketball, soccer, wrestling, field hockey, volleyball and numerous other sports compete one or two weeknights, and teams that travel to compete may have to miss the end of the school day if their school starts later. Game times are not going to change for private schools or for one or two enlightened high schools, as the New York Times story notes. So it’s nice to think school choice could solve the scheduling problem, but high school athletics are separated from education and transportation issues are resolved, school boards will be limited in their choices. High school sports fans and coaches may also oppose school choice if it leads to recruiting competition in public schools, since public schools already suffer from having private schools skim off top athletes in certain districts.
More generally, I have never been particularly enthusiastic about school choice because I think certain public schools will be left with the students who are discipline problems or costly to educate, such as special education students.
The only way out of the current bind that I see is total upheaval: going to year-round school. My preference would be for schools to run in quarters with a week’s vacation or somewhat more between quarters. (Other people with more knowledge of summer camp programs, church activities, and sports and marching band practice can probably come up with more refined schedules.) I’d also like to see state laws changed to mandate a total number of hours of instruction rather than “days in school.” This would also give schools more flexibility, particularly in high school, to adopt more of a college approach to scheduling where each day doesn’t have an identical schedule.
In order to continue with sports schedules after school, going to year-round school would allow athletes to have shorter days before game nights because there would be more time throughout the year to make up classwork that is currently missed when athletes leave early for games. There are some subjects that can be effectively taught through online instruction or with assistance online, so athletes and other students who want to work could manage class loads more flexibly. Sports should be severed from academics so first, there’s no pressure on teachers to pass students so they stay eligible for competition, and second, so sports teams are geographically based and, while they may compete for a specific school, rules would be in place to limit obvious competitive recruitment. This would allow home-schooled students and students at very small high schools to be part of larger community teams without prejudice.
To provide school choice as Suderman wants, I would favor school vouchers if the vouchers came with strings. Any school that accepts vouchers must accept any student who applies to the school, just as a public school does, and must assign open places based on a lottery the first year of voucher use. In subsequent years, siblings of students in the school would be accepted for open places, and then the remaining places would be open to lottery winners. Private schools can continue to stay private if they wish and reject vouchers, but vouchers would not flow to schools where admission criteria screen out certain applicants. Unused vouchers would be repurposed each year by being pooled and divided up to assist, on a per capita basis, schools with the most economically disadvantaged children.
Separate transportation vouchers would also be issued to each student and distributed, no matter which school the student is attending, to the transportation operation providing bus service or be used to purchase public transport where appropriate, with one big exception: public school districts would continue to serve a designated geographic area. A family outside the district who takes their kids and vouchers and moves them elsewhere would not be guaranteed transportation on a particular bus system. This is just a practical solution. In general, schools will not be able to provide transportation to far-flung students on standard transportation vouchers. Transportation vouchers must also be based on mileage and cost of transportation, not block grants that reward small, densely populated districts at the expense of rural schools.
Finally, along with the upheaval in the school system wrought by year-round school, I would favor another major social change in the U.S.: reduce the standard work week from 40 hours to 36 hours. It would give parents more flexibility and help create more jobs.
Update from a reader:
Your reader went on a short tangent:
I have never been particularly enthusiastic about school choice because I think certain public schools will be left with the students who are discipline problems or costly to educate, such as special education students.
The reader doesn’t need to speculate very much. Through the combination of a shaky public school foundation, suburban flight, extreme concentration of wealth, and an explosion in charter schools, Washington, D.C. has, if not de facto school choice, at least a bevy of options that results in most families opting out of their geographically-appropriate schools. The Washington City Paper ran a great cover story recently that highlighted one case that was fairly representative of the city’s problems with turning the system around.
The Dish 