Tag Archives: childcare

year-round school?

Leave a reply

When I first heard ideas for year-round school, my thought was that it might be easier for working parents (the main pitch here in Philadelphia) but worse for student and teacher burnout. According to at least one advocacy organization though, the idea is to spread the year out by taking more short breaks rather than one long one. This kind of makes sense to me, but apparently a number of school districts have tried it and ended up scaling it back.

The National Association of Year Round Education advocates for districts to implement the “balanced calendar,” which shortens summer vacation and adds longer breaks called “intersessions” during the school year. The group’s suggested calendar uses a 30-day summer break and breaks for fall, winter, and spring of 15 days each, plus a three-day break for Thanksgiving…

After a long summer break, according to Hornak, teachers generally spend the first 20 to 40 days in school reteaching students to compensate for summer learning loss. With traditional school calendars, “schools are asked to remediate learning gaps that they are contributing to,” Hornak said. 

philadelphia.chalkbeat.org

For the affluent, and for the middle class willing to make some sacrifices, summer is a great time for enrichment for kids. Kids are susceptible to burnout like other human beings and deserve a break from the pressure of academics once in awhile. They can connect with nature, learn practical skills, or dive deeper into an interest like a sport or fine art, and meet like-minded kids that they might not meet other times. Work experiences and job training can be enriching if done right – but need to be careful with this one.

For working parents of limited means or just other priorities than spending all their money on private school and summer camp, school can be a godsend as a form of childcare, like it or not. School breaks can cause a lot of stress for parents who have to organize childcare and transportation to and from said childcare, without any corresponding change in their work schedules or responsibilities. Organizing childcare for a long summer break is stressful, but at least it can be done once and and then set for a few months, rather than having to do this for many short breaks during the course of the year.

For the most part, kids aren’t allowed to just run around in the woods or on city streets any more. This is probably good for their physical safety overall, and those days are not going to come back any time soon.

In an ideal world, all children would be able to have the types of enrichment experiences that affluent children have today. It could be done. It would take money and organization. Investing in children is the best investment our society can make, even from a purely hard-nosed economic perspective. It has to be the whole of society investing. It can’t be just parents of young children for a few years during what is supposed to also be their peak career years. That just doesn’t work for anyone from a financial or mental health perspective.

But affluent families vacationing in the Catskills, please just watch your teenage daughters around those “dirty dancing” instructors!

fair start

Leave a reply

I’m not sure, I agree on everything in this opinion piece, but it does help make a connection between childcare and family policy and the rest of society.

These family policies (which might be called constitutive or de-constitutive) do nothing to ensure that all children are born into conditions that comply with the United Nations Children’s Rights Convention—the minimum children need to comprise democracies—but instead push children into horrible conditions with no minimum levels of welfare, something done to ensure economic growth and to avoid “baby busts” or declining fertility rates. This puts wealth in the hands of a few, argues Nobel Laureate Steven Chu…

These policies, designed around a system premised on unsustainable growth, aim to prepare children, already suffering from vast inequality, to become consumers and workers for shopping malls rather than preparing them equitably to grow up to become effective citizens in democratic town halls. These inequitable policies have created a fantasy world of self-determination—freedom to take part in markets—while stealing the power each voice should have in true democracies.

Alternet

Logically, if you wanted to create a truly equal opportunity society and level playing field for all people at the moment they are born, you would start with a 100% inheritance tax. Then you would provide some combination of excellent parental leave and childcare benefits and services, so parents have the choice to either take time out from a career to focus on young children, or else have excellent childcare options available to them. You would need excellent health care for all children. Then you would move on to excellent public education, probably extending all the way through four-year college. This would obviously be “expensive”, but the benefits to society would almost certainly outweigh the costs to society. The way to pay for it would be for everybody participating in the economy to pay a little bit for it all the time, rather than the cost falling just on parents just for a few years while their children are young. Society as a whole, and the vast majority of parents, would be best off under this system. A tiny fraction of wealthy individuals and organizations would be worse off, and as long as our system gives these people the vast majority of political power, they will fight like hell against this system and they will prevail.

Inheritance taxes are fair and logical, but I admit they seem distasteful because it seems like you have worked hard your whole life to set your children up for success, and then the government is taking that away and giving it to other children whose parents were not as responsible or hard working. Under this system though, you would know your children are going to be fine, and logically you should be fine with it. I am not claiming logic, human emotions and politics are closely correlated! A value added tax might approximate the same benefit and be more politically palatable. Serious campaign finance reform has to come first before we can even begin to consider this.

jobs, jobs, jobs, families, infrastructure, and more jobs…and Richard Nixon, from the bottom of my heart go fuck yourself!

Leave a reply

Adam Tooze has a nice visualization of Biden’s spending proposals. Is this a tree plot? a cartogram? I’m not sure, experts please weigh in. A few things I noticed:

  • What Biden talks most and least about does not always match the largest and smallest proposed spending amounts. I think this is called “messaging”. For example, more would be spent on electric vehicle subsidies than on community college.
  • There is no clear line between the infrastructure package and the families package. For example, there is spending on public schools in the former and child care facilities in the latter.

That’s just scratching the surface. You could (and should) stare at this graphic for hours, and then there is a long article to go with it. But I have to go make breakfast now because I can hear the children getting grumpy, which means my precious little bit of early morning quiet thinking time as a working-parent-of-small-children-with-no-childcare-or-grandparent-support is now over. If Biden gets this stuff through our dysfunctional Congress, it will be mostly too late to help my family but I hope it helps others. Thanks Obama…Bush, Clinton, other Bush, Reagan, Carter, Ford, and Nixon at least. Especially Nixon, fuck you – a quick skim of the article reminded me of the bipartisan childcare program of the 1970s that you vetoed. Oh and also, fuck you Ralph Nader because maybe Al Gore would have gotten some of this stuff back on track 20 years ago. And last but not least, thank you once again Bernie Sanders for not pulling a Nader.

March 2021 in Review

Leave a reply

Most frightening and/or depressing story: In the U.S. upper Midwest (I don’t know if this region is better or worse than the country as a whole, or why they picked it), electric blackouts average 92 minutes per year, versus 4 minutes per year in Japan.

Most hopeful story: I officially released my infrastructure plan for America, a few weeks before Joe Biden released his. None of the Sunday morning talk shows has called me to discuss so far. Unfortunately, I do not have the resources of the U.S. Treasury or Federal Reserve available to me. Of course, neither does he unless he can convince Congress to go along with at least some portion of his plans. Looking at his proposal, I think he is proposing to direct the fire hoses at the right fires (children, education, research, water, the electric grid and electric vehicles, maintenance of highways and roads, housing, and ecosystems. There is still no real planning involved, because planning needs to be done in between crises and it never is. Still, I think it is a good proposal that will pay off economically while helping real people, and I hope a substantial portion of it survives.

Most interesting story, that was not particularly frightening or hopeful, or perhaps was a mixture of both: One study says 1-2 days per week is a sweet spot for working from home in terms of a positive economic contribution at the national scale. I think it is about right psychologically for many people too. However, this was a very theoretical simulation, and other studies attempting to measure this at the individual or firm scale have come up with a 20-50% loss in productivity. I think the jury is still out on this one, but I know from personal experience that people need to interact and communicate regularly for teams to be productive, and some people require more supervision than others, and I don’t think technology is a perfect substitute for doing these things in person so far.