Duh, duh, double-duh. But it'll never happen.

So, starting the school day later benefits teens, huh?

You're kidding. Here's the scoop:

A study of teens at a Rhode Island boarding school found that pushing back the school day by 30 minutes improved concentration, mood and even encouraged students to consume healthier breakfasts. It also reduced tardiness.

The results of the study appear in the July edition of Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, which also ran an editorial that said a "growing body of evidence that changing the start time for high schools is good for adolescents."

Researchers believe that teens have trouble falling asleep before 11 p.m., and they are often in their deepest sleep at dawn, when they need to rouse for morning classes.

This is one of those obvious findings- and yet this policy will probably not be implemented. Why? Here's three reasons why:

1. An early start time means more time for practice for athletic teams after school-- and NEVER underestimate the power of high school sports.

2. A change to the high school schedule necessitates a change in the elementary and middle school schedules due to transportation issues. Other research has indicated that the little kids should actually go to school earlier, so some school districts have suggested flipping the high school and elementary schedules. However, many parents resist this because their high schoolers are then not home to watch the little ones, who would also get out in the early afternoon, when mom and dad are still at work.

3. An early school day also means more time for after school jobs. Thus teens, their families, and their employers are therefore going to resist the scheduling consequences.

So I personally plan on seeing groggy, half-comatose students in my classes for the rest of my teaching career. And I'm not being cynical --I've seen these changes proposed about every four years or so, and shot down just as quickly over the reasons listed above. But let's face it-- it's a hallmark of modern culture to choose expediency over what's right.

Update...

You will, I hope, be pleased to learn that the administrators in our school district have realized that, yes, they were on the verge of violating federal law with my student about whom I wrote last week. So she is back in class, and hopefully there will be no more problems. Poop heads. So there's something good that happened this week.

Now THAT'S Good Teachin'!

Wow. Teachers at this school are SO good that they can get a kid to pass even when he's not there:

A public school student in St. Louis got mixed marks in a third-quarter progress report recently, receiving credit for being in class 58 times and getting two B’s and one C to go along with four F’s.

There was just one problem: The entire time, the unidentified student was enrolled in a school in Oklahoma, attending classes hundreds of miles from St. Louis.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported yesterday that teachers at Gateway High School never noticed the student wasn’t in class during the first two months of this year. One teacher marked the student tardy for class on a day the student wasn’t there.

Senior district officials were unaware of the phantom student until the Post-Dispatch provided a copy of an e-mail the school’s vice principal sent to Gateway staff chastising them for failing to notice the student’s absence.

The student withdrew from the St. Louis Public Schools on Dec. 19, 2007. After confirming the authenticity of the e-mail, officials sought to downplay the incident.

"We’re not happy about this, but it’s fixed," district spokeswoman Deborah Sistrunk said.

Sistrunk said she could not explain how a student no longer enrolled at the school could earn grades and be counted as present in classes. "We don’t know how it happened," she said.

The St. Louis public school system has been in disarray in recent years, struggling amid constant turnover in senior leadership. The State Board of Education stripped the district of accreditation in March, citing a long history of poor academic performance, low graduation rates and financial problems.

A special advisory board took control in June. Board President Rick Sullivan said he wants to learn more about the student getting grades when he or she was not at school.

"While I’m confident this is an isolated incident, we are going to look into it with the goal of eliminating something like this happening in the future," Sullivan said.

Former elected School Board President Veronica O’Brien said the Gateway lapse was another example of a city school inflating attendance in a quiet effort to increase state funding. State education allocations are tied to attendance.

"This kind of stuff goes on all the time," O’Brien said.

Attendance at Gateway and other city middle and high schools is recorded on a computer program at the beginning of each class period. Teachers note if a student is present, absent, tardy or absent for a specific reason.

The former board president saying that "this kind of stuff happens all the time," is really rich. This didn't happen just since the state took over. I know there are many dedicated professionals in that school district. But someone has got to get control of that place-- preferably, someone who knows something about education. The district is currently searching for yet another superintendent, and I wonder if they've had any offers-- given that the special advisory board has let it be known that the new superintendent will be a mere cog in their dream machine, which is interesting in that none of the people on the special advisory board seem to have any experience with public education, much less urban public education.

Sad. Oh, and it's fraudulent too.

So long! Farewell! Auf Wiedersehen! Good-bye!

My geography class is supposed to have X number of kids. Instead, my class habitually sits at X-1.

This is a real bummer, because our school randomly distributes doughnuts to classes with perfect attendance. There is a sullen smog that has settled over my kids every time one of these days is announced, a brow-lowered, teeth-gritted, bellicosity that I am having ever more trouble holding in check.

See, Casper was enrolled in this class because it's open to all ages, and I was fine with this. Except that Casper showed for exactly half of one day. On this day, he had been here since the beginning of school but had talked the counselor into a bull session, and then he didn't want to draw attention to himself by walking into the middle of a class, so the counselor walked in WHILE WE WERE HAVING A GREAT DISCUSSION on the predictions of Thomas Robert Malthus and she walks right up to me mid-sentence, 'pon my honor, and asks me when we are taking a break. Now, I didn't look at her with my mouth agape, because my students did it for me, and with a face like mine, you don't do mouth agape unless you want someone throwing fishhooks your way. When I said something to the effect of "Maybe never, we're kind of in the middle of something here," she began whispering in my ear that there was a new student but he didn't want to draw attention to himself and so he was hoping to slide into a seat while the other kids were off on a break. Then I replied, "Oh, like you walking into class isn't going to get their attention and they're not going to notice a new body occupying a seat in the class like he's been beamed down from the Starship Enterprise?" but she didn't get the sarcasm. So since she'd broken the flow, and frankly, I actually needed to go see a guy about something, we had our break, Casper shimmered into the room like Jeeves bearing a silver platter of his secret hangover recipe, and we sailed on through the rest of the period.

I don't know; maybe all the talk about carrying capacity and J-curves scared the daylights out of him, because he has not darkened our door since, and it's been over two months. He certainly made sure to reduce the population of our little world by one.

Yes, you heard that right, friends. We're coming up on 42 days of absence, and nothing. Now officially, I am wondering just what it takes to be declared truant around this neck of the woods, because I've seen kids avoid school before, but this case has reached a new low.

Now, I personally am a doughnut agnostic, which you wouldn't believe if you saw the breadth of my beam, but it really bugs the kids when they haven't completely blotted Casper's existence from their minds-- which they do until we hear the doughnut trolley screeching down the hallway. I am more bothered by carrying this kid on the rolls for lo these many weeks with no concern or perhaps consequences whatsoever for whomever is in charge-- kid, mom, dad, grandma, Great Aunt Tessie, I don't really care at this point. Every time I mention this to the counselor, I hear that his mom called in claiming he had scurvy or consumption or an imbalance of the humors and so on. But I've seen him hanging out at the nearby pizza joint three times since his vanishing act.

Let's just leave aside the law for a second, because we all know what that's all about. Let's just forget that, ten years from now, Casper will claim he was "never given a good education" and that he's a victim of public schools and we should all just keep him full of McMuffins and pork rinds and cartons of cigarettes on the public dime. Let's forget that somehow, we're supposed to make him read and do math on grade level, and his absence on test day will be held against us in the court of Spellings. I am sure our class is probably better without an unwilling someone taking up space. But, at the risk of sounding like a Pollyanna, I do care that this kid isn't being educated, and at his age, he really didn't seem to have the judgment to make life-altering decisions for himself and maybe, just maybe, we should send someone over there to make sure he's okay.

I am conflicted. And you know, I think that counselor owes my kids some doughnuts.

Open thread: Should school attendance be mandatory?

From my previous post, a nagging question was raised that I have been struggling with for quite some time:

Should attendance in school be mandatory?

I am torn. On the one hand, we assume that the end of mandatory attendance laws would make schools places more focused on learning. We assume that administrators would then be willing to dismiss students who disrupt the environment, who attend for purely social reasons-- including picking fights with other students. I wonder if that would be the case. Couldn't it be possible that, given the vagaries of attendance numbers that would then ensue, administrators would be MORE deperate to hold on to kids who were willing to show up? That's been one of my concerns, I'll be honest.

On the other hand, we all get absolutely tired of being held accountable for the performance of those who just don't want an education.

So, what do you think? I need some help here.