The Constant Pupil

By Shannon in News on Jan 31, 2007 9:51PM

Purely for shits and giggles, we at the Chicagoist offices turned on Dubya’s visitation to the New York Stock Exchange today. Before that, we witnessed him talk about how education was so important to our young people in business. We suppressed our churlish grins as we noted the irony of this coming out of the mouth of a C-average student. But maybe Bush wasn’t peddling all balderdash. Mayor Daley seems to agree with him, at least on one score: He’s been pushing year-round schools since he got into office several millennia ago, succeeding 14 times over in the elementary realm. This week marks the first time in his reign a high school will make the transition.

With the coming of the 2008-09 school year, Lindblom Math & Science Academy on the South Side will undergo a “balanced calendar” overhaul. This means students will have three months of school, followed by one month of vacation, then three more months of school, another month of vaykay, etc. The chosen months of relief are November, March and July. Tough crowd. We’d figure December to be a shoo-in. A large part of the push for year-round schools is the fact that American kids lag behind their European and Asian counterparts. To underscore what this costs us as a nation, we inject Daley’s inscrutable logic:

“If we can spend billions of dollars to put a person on the moon, how, in this day and age, can we give kids two months off?” the mayor recently asked thousands of parents at a CPS parent involvement conference.

… Huh?

The thing is, kids are getting the same amount of schooling and time off as before; the scheduling is merely shuffled. No winners or losers there. Some parents are resistant to the idea, saying the strange vacations might interfere in family plans. Proponents of the system remark that students retain information better and teachers don’t get as burned out. But — and we mean this in all seriousness — how will the children go to math and space camp now?

Image via the National Association for Year-Round Education.