Well when you realize we treat school as glorified babysitting and not just education, part of the reason becomes more obvious. Parents work 40 hours so we need kids in school roughly that length of time. Especially when both parents have to work to afford to live.
We need to uplift a lot about the entire system for it to work.
It’s a bit depressing to me that we’ve known this for at least twenty years, and possibly more and it’s still a problem.
A major concern has been busing. Even in normal times, districts use the same buses and drivers for students of all ages. They stagger start times to do that, with high schoolers arriving and leaving school earliest in the day. The idea is that they can handle being alone in the dark at a bus stop more readily than smaller children, and it also lets them get home first to help take care of younger siblings after school.
If high schools started as late as middle and elementary schools, that would likely mean strain on transportation resources. O’Connell said Nashville’s limited mass transit compounds the problem.
“That is one of the biggest issues to resolve,” he said.
This is basically it, school systems not wanting to buy the extra buses or hire the extra drivers they’d need.
Unfortunately I don’t see this ever being solved without a major cultural/financial shift in the USA towards properly funding education. Too much financial pressure to have fewer buses and fewer drivers. If my high school and middle school had started at the same time as the elementary, that’d be like 14 new buses alone at $60k-$110k a pop, not including driver wages and the diesel for each one…and we had more than one high school and middle school in our district. So it’d be more like 50 new buses, just to start HS and middle school at the same time as elementary. The cost would eat smaller districts alive. It’d be several million just to procure the buses new.
In the school district that I live in (and where my kids attend school), elementary school starts earliest and middle/high school both start at roughly the same time.
I’ve found that this works really well since my youngest wakes up and is ready to go earliest anyways, I don’t have to adjust my schedule because they’re out of the house before I have to get to work and I would need after school care regardless. My older kids can more or less fend for themselves before school so I don’t need to worry about them while I get to work before they leave.
If elementary school started at 9 like high school and middle school I’d have to organize care for my youngest both before and after school since I’d be working at both times.
And now imagine if instead of making new schools in places where everybody needs to be driven there either by car or by bus we build them so the majority would walk or bike as it is the more convient option. Other countries like Japan can imagine. Turns out it’s actually better to walk/bike to school even who knew!
It’s baffling how many U.S problems can be traced back to car-oriented development.
Here in Sweden, dedicated school buses are uncommon - getting to school is usually a matter of walking when young, and then using the common public transportation when older, or biking, or a mix of those two.
Here’s how I got to school while growing up:
- Years 1 -6: school 0.4 km away, walked or biked
- Years 7-9: school 2 km away, biked or took the bus
- Years 10-12: school 9.1 km away, took the bus to school
Note that this was one of the most car-oriented cities in Sweden of about 100k people, meaning that this experience is probably unusually bad for Sweden.
Thank you for the insight! Love reading comments that really get to the heart of an issue without all the emotional crap.
Your comment for example, I had never thought along those lines. Not an easy problem.
schools are largely daycare facilities for the low/middle income brackets.
Because school is entirely geared towards parents. Nothing about school is actually good for the people going through it, but the system doesn’t actually care about them, and isn’t designed to.
Nothing? I’d argue that learning mathematics is good for people going through school but then again I’m no expert in education.
It’s not the concept, it’s the execution.
There’s nothing fundamentally wrong with having a classroom of students being taught a curriculum. It’s effective even if it’s inefficient. The execution is lacking for sure, but to suggest that none of it is good for students is a little dramatic.
Isn’t that about what I said? Of course the idea of children learning important topics in an organized fashion is decent. The objections I have are the forced social structures, mandatory attendance at risk of school or legal punishment, limited ability to specialize in topics or pick a curriculum, rigid schedules all day enforced with various punishments or humiliation including strict control of access to bathrooms, and in general the prison-like obsession with routines and schedules.
I’d add the fact that not everyone learns the same way, and while some people do well with lectures and note-taking, others would be better reading books alone, and others would be better in a discussion format. My experiences varied wildly. One major issue for me was that the strict scheduling and punitive obsessions didn’t work well with what was going on with my health and family life, but there’s little room for that. Personally I would have done much better to have not attended school at all. Each year was pretty much an excruciating review of things I learned from books 2 years before, combined with extensive peer and administration torture.
My high school had block scheduling, we’d have 2 90 minute classes in the morning, then “I Block” in the middle of the day which was essentially our homeroom, then 2 more classes in the afternoon.
When they first started it, I block was a pretty freeform thing, you had to check in with your homeroom teacher, but could then go pretty much anywhere in the school and do whatever, go see your other teachers to get some help or just hang out in their room, go to the library, etc.
They slowly cracked down on that, first one day a week you had to be in your homeroom for SSR (Sustained Silent Reading, you weren’t allowed to do homework or anything else, you had to sit there reading silently) and they slowly cut down on reasons you were allowed to be out of your homeroom room during I block without a note or hall pass to the point that when I graduated they were making announcements at the beginning of I block that anyone caught in the halls without a hall pass would be written up for, and I vividly remember this specific wording, “defiance and insubordination”
What the actual fuck was that shit? That feels like wording they would use in an actual prison or in the military or something?
We were a relatively safe, solidly middle class suburban district, we didn’t have rampant gang issues, violence, drug use, anything of the sort, the odd troublemaker or prblem child sure, but overall we pretty much kept ourselves in line, there wasn’t any need to crack the whip on us.
strict control of access to bathrooms, and in general the prison-like obsession with routines and schedules
I’d argue that this is one of the only real life situations that school prepares people for: you’re very likely to be stuck living on someone else’s schedule for the vast majority of your life. Your employer decides what time you have to be there and what time you’re allowed to leave; when you get a break; when you can use the bathroom; when you’re allowed to take a vacation. Sick for more than a day or two? Better burn some cash and get a doctor’s note. Need to go to a funeral? Immediate family only, company policy, sorry buddy.
youre being a bit hyperbolic with the ‘nothing’, no reason to double down
they’re not even the person who said that. Neither of squiblet’s posts even contains the word “nothing”. Drink some coffee
It’s not designed to teach mathematics particularly well
Source?
honestly abolish school. I can’t imagine subjecting my hypothetical child to what I went through.
Because parents have to go to work, and teens with boyfriends/girlfriends don’t know how to use condoms and can’t get abortions in some states. Also, used car prices and insurance make teens driving to school on their own unaffordable.
Actual answer one heard that unfortunately makes sense: school sports after class. If you start classes later everything gets pushed back to obscene times.
Personally my high school started a half hour in grade 12. Just that made a world of difference.
that unfortunately makes sense: school sports after class
I disagree that it makes sense. Get the sports out of the school system entirely and have them be community-based or similar. I think that should apply that to most extracurriculars. I participated in sports, band, theatre, etc. so it’s not like I just hated it (I would argue that art, band, choir, gym, etc. are still good to have in the curricula of schools, just not the traditionally after-school part).
Sports are part of the reason many students even go to school. Taking athletics away from school would have a significant effect on dropout rates.
That’s a pretty shit excuse at least for my schools times.
School starts at 7:20ish and gets out at 2ish and football, baseball, softball, soccer, basketball, and volleyball (maybe more idk) games start at 7. We don’t need 5 hours between. Getting out at 4 would not change that. It would just allow those players to get home late as always but actually get some sleep (footballs on Friday so those aren’t huge issues but the rest of the sports are during weekdays, often multiple in a row, which means those kids are tired as fuck.)
Tennis, Bowling, Swimming/Dive, Cross Country/Track and Golf (and any others idk) are all at about 3 which gives students time to get to said place after school lets out. Pushing those to 5 instead wouldn’t be that bad they’d get out at like 7 or 8 and have time to get home, do homework, and still get to bed before 11.
We talking bout practice. Not the game. Practice.
Your high school started at what time?
755 then 825 iirc
I’m an adult and my day sucks If I gotta be awake at 7
Because kids need to be at school while parents work
Our regular middle schools start late. It can work. The reason they don’t do it for high school where it is needed most is sports.
A major concern has been busing. Even in normal times, districts use the same buses and drivers for students of all ages. They stagger start times to do that, with high schoolers arriving and leaving school earliest in the day. The idea is that they can handle being alone in the dark at a bus stop more readily than smaller children, and it also lets them get home first to help take care of younger siblings after school.
If high schools started as late as middle and elementary schools, that would likely mean strain on transportation resources. O’Connell said Nashville’s limited mass transit compounds the problem.
Are staggered start times common in America?
Very
It all goes back to the farmers. Farmers were up at the crack of dawn to use the light, so industry followed them. Now we’re trapped in a circle, following the same schedule because we follow the same schedule.
How about a nap time and just extend the day. It’s odd to me that school gets out so early anyway.
Then you’re extending the workday for teachers, who are already underpaid. I’d just start later
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Teens brains aren’t wired to go to bed that early. It genuinely physiologically harder for the to fall asleep at the hours they are required to fall asleep to get adequate rest for school. Sure some kids will be perfectly fine going to bed at 10 and they’ll immediately fall asleep, wake up at 6 and be fine but a lot of teens and I mean a lot find that to be a Herculean task.
I speak from experience, to this day I cannot fall asleep before midnight unless I’ve been worked ragged and even then it’s difficult. When I was a teen I’d try and get enough sleep I really would but if I was to fall asleep at 10 I’d have to be in bed and trying to fall asleep by atleast 9 but probably 8 and even then there was no guarantees. On average throughout all of highschool I probably got 4 hrs per night.
