Last week, the Kansas City School District decided to give staff and students a longer Thanksgiving break. The school approved a plan to cancel classes on Monday and Tuesday to go with the Wednesday through Friday already planned, lengthening the Thanksgiving holiday to an entire week off. The superintendent indicated that he hoped this change will give everyone more time during a season where “many of us look forward to reconnecting and recharging.”
What? This is what drives most standard working and taxpayers crazy about public education. This underperforming institution decides time off is somehow beneficial to the mission. It’s simply a silly, self-serving decision disguised as some type of “lofty” ideals of “reconnecting.” Just to cover themselves, they are offering “free” childcare to those parents that can’t just decide to lengthen their break like the staff of the Kansas City School District did.
“Free” is also a code word to the rest of us who are not in public education, that we are probably paying for the “free” part.
Mental toughness has given way to mental weakness. Less work, less results and more colorful press releases that justify the decision to work less.
I’m sure there are plenty of other districts that have now made this move, or will shortly, so my scorn is directed at education in general, not just the Kansas City district. It’s an epidemic and not getting better.
This seems like a suitable time to tell you that the Kansas City School District ranked 504th out of 516 districts in the State of Missouri based on the rankings at moschoolrankings.org. I was not a math major, but this seems bad. The “GPA” score was a 1.0 on a 4.0 scale. I too, took some days off to earn a 1.00 GPA at times, so I’m not judging, but if you’re in a rut you might want to quit digging.
Foley has never once told me to take an extra day off after a crappy column.
Since I brought it up, this may be one of those crappy columns. Win some, you lose some. Probably take a couple of days off to “reconnect and recharge,” that should help.
Just looked up my high school. Plattsburg High ranked 377th out of 516th. That’s not great, but it seems like a good place to hang my lifetime of mediocracy excuse. Kind of feel like I overcame my position in life as the GPA for my high school is 1.7 and I was a solid 2.0+ student.
Please don’t email me your “teachers work so hard” anecdotal stories. My daughter is a teacher, I have other family that are teachers, many of my friends are teachers, I respect the work most of them do. Trust me, they’re not working any harder than most of the people in the world and the narrative that they outwork their pay is not supported by the facts of the number of people that continue to stay in and seek employment in teacher jobs.
(Guy Speckman can be reached at gspeckman@me.com or taking a few days off to recharge this column)