> everyone leaves for school at the same time, so if you move grade 9 forward an hour, you have to do the same with grade 4 to get any benefit; the 9th grader is taking the 4th grader to school. That problem stopped this shift dead recently where I live.
Where?! Around here they don't have enough busses for everyone to go at once. Young kids start late (which sucks, because they've already burnt at least one of their best and most-alert hours of the day by then) and older kids start early (which also sucks, of course). They could flip it—after all, the older kids are the ones best-equipped to get themselves to school after the parents leave for work—but see again the sports-parents' (and, within the schools, coaches and athletic directors') objections.
Everyone concerned would clearly be better off if this little area could be absorbed by another district (it has two better-fit candidates bordering it! Of the three plausible options, it's connected to the silliest one! And, hell, those two are both better ranked, academically than the one it's attached to, by a long shot!) or become its own mini-district—the ones up in the town hate the ones from "down South" (and, yes, there's very explicitly a racist element to this for some of them—which is fucking absurd anyway, the area's majority white and includes some neighborhoods far richer than the average of the town, but having lived in a different but similarly-situated far-removed exurb growing up, I know exactly the kind of messed-up ideas they get about "the city") and resent sending any district money that way, while having to go way North for high school sucks for the ones down South, both due to the sheer distance and because of the, ahem, cultural differences.
Why will they never separate? Losing those kids would drop the district into a less-prestigious sports conference, since they'd be smaller. No way they wouldn't fight any change, tooth and nail, despite plainly thinking the kids from farther south are shit. Plus they, ah, rely on that geographically-nonsensical southern annex for player recruitment. Yes, the whole thing's just as gross, in fact, as that reads. All because of fucking school sports.
It seems there are programs that exist already to help feed kids breakfast and lunch at schools.
That's not what the GP is talking about. They're saying that there is an overhead to people leaving at different times.
Surely high school aged kids can make their own breakfast.
As that workplace wasn't extremely flexible with time, this involved rescheduling any meetings coming up, leaving, driving home (30 min), getting kid to school (15 min), getting back to work (45 min) if everything was good. Taking an hour and a half to two hours out of a person's work day can be very disruptive.
The issue isn't 9:00 rather than 8:00 or 8:30 but rather a refutation of "are teenagers responsible enough to get to school on their own without any parental coaxing."
Consider the chain of comments:
> > > if the family includes one of each (elementary, middle and high school kids) you still have to make breakfast for them, get everyone ready and head out.
> > Surely high school aged kids can make their own breakfast.
> Surely the high school aged kids can make sure to not oversleep and be responsible enough to ensure that their parents won't get a call at 9:15 when they've failed to show up on time.
---
If you're getting all the kids up and ready to go to school at 8:00 am, you've missed the advantage of having a teenager sleep in and get to school at 9:00 am.
If you (the parent) aren't making sure that the teenager is getting to school at 9:00 because you're at work, and aren't getting them up at 8:00 am (with the rest of the kids), then you're going to deal with "teenager slept through all the alarms."
Past a certain age they can do this themselves. A 12 year old is very capable of doing everything besides driving a car
Elementary school parents who have jobs to get to wind up needing preschool care to fill that gap between their departure time and school start - high school age siblings aren’t even available to cover. Late elementary school drop off times impact parents’ options for work and commuting.
High school age kids can (or certainly should be able to) get themselves to school, so later starts don’t interfere with other family routines.
I think forcing all the additional logistical complexity and cost of pre-school-day care is an accidental and unnecessary layer though.
But what if the 4th grader doesn't have a 9th grader sibling? Like what do the family do when the 9th grader was a 4th grader? Do parents literally drive them every day to school? Isn't there some kind of school bus system that transports kids from and to their school?
Sometimes older siblings contribute to childcare. A 9th grader that is home at 3pm, can watch a 4th grader that is home at 4pm until parents arrive home at 5pm.
So if you punt the highschool bus to later, you are either making for a very late school day, or making younger kids wake up earlier.
Or the solution could be to triple the cost of school transportation.
Yes, let's try to kill the one form of public transportation we have in the USA that works decently and is widely available.
Where I grew up it was the opposite. Grade schoolers started first at 8:00, middle-schoolers at 8:30, high-schoolers at 9:00. As a high schooler you finish school at 4PM, hardly a very late school day. Younger kids naturally go to sleep and wake up earlier than teens anyways, it's not unfair or harmful to have them start school earlier.
By having secondary start first, you require 50% less buses.
If we were to switch secondary goes second and primary age students go first, your primary age children would leave for school around 7am and arrive home at 3pm. Most parents are not home at 3pm and this causes a large problem for families. In some instances, the older children who are in secondary schools -- watch the younger children until parents get home.
There is affordable and easy to book out of school hours care for anything earlier or later.
Outside of formal lessons, I'd fill gaps with investigative play, extracurricular at-school sport, or casual activities to line up various year levels.
^^gross oversimplification, but I'm standing by it
So there's something to be said for labor where it very easily could be flexible but arbitrarily isn't.
Ive read some speculation that the women's right to work movement was just a ploy to double the workforce. Not only that, thet get double the workers for less money since nearly all women are paid less than their male counterparts.
I want women to be able to work because I want the women in my life to not be caught under the thumb of an abuser. If it harms families somehow, that is a separate problem, with separate solutions that do not have anything to do with restricting the independence of women.
>Especially since women are paid nearly half as much as men across nearly every industry.
This is not true when comparing the price of the same labor offered by a man or woman.
>This is not true when comparing the price of the same labor offered by a man or woman.
Okay, maybe not HALF, but you can't argue with the gender wage gap. Men make ~20% more than women.
This is so disingenuous it really shouldn't be repeated. The pay gap within the same job is miniscule. Men and women make different career choices. There's just no accounting for the lack of women applying for high-paying positions as roughnecks.
Why are you blaming the parents? Most people in the world don't have the benefit of flexible tech jobs that allow them to work 10-6 or to come and go as needed during the work day.
Because when Boston tried this, uproar from parents was sufficient to cause meaningful change, but that uproar was directed at their schools and not their workplaces. They used their collective power to defend their work schedules at the expense of their children.
Why not insist on more flexibility in their work schedules, or for additional transportation solutions to assist in getting teens to/from schools? Is this really an insurmountable problem?
School officials are locally democratically accountable. Employers generally are not, and are often able to play workers in different localities (and even states and countries, in many cases) against each other to create a race-to-the-bottom effect.
Parents directed their force against the movable object, not the immovable one.
But it was the wrong one, while making victims in the process.
For most parents, the ability to maintain the work schedule demanded by their employer is rather central to, not a separate unrelated interest from, the health and well-being of their children.
When we have both the economic structure to support and a government run by a political ideology that will allow a robust UBI that makes this optional (and thereby forces employers to accommodate it if they want to have employees at all), we can discuss the issues as if they were separate. But in the concrete would we live in, they are not.
But: smart and healthy children demand wages as adults that cut into shareholder profits…
It is a tragedy of the commons problem. As soon as the other spouse starts working, the family has more money, but once every family thinks to have both partners working, sellers will catch on and increase their prices, bringing you back to the initial problem but now with one fewer spouse at home. It's not a capitalism problem, it's a general markets problem.
That is, if both parents work, prices can rise because demand rises (remember demand is the desire to buy, but also the ability to pay). When prices rise, this puts an even greater pressure on single income families. ie: their single income has to be stretched father because they are competing with two income demand. This is economics 101.
While two incomes increases the spending abilities of the household relative to single income households, it comes with the additional instability of the household depending on both incomes (perhaps they purchase a larger home that requires both incomes to support) while exposing the household to the increased risk of either one of them being fired or laid off.
This is a well-studied phenomenon beyond the interpretation that "work is fulfilling."
As someone who has been a caregiver for school-aged kids (mine are adults now): just what is it that you'd expect a stay-at-home parent to do once all the kids are in K-12 school? The kids are gone for most of the day.
I'm not arguing that all families make the decision to become dual-income households. I'm arguing that there are major economic incentives that push people toward dual-income. This allows for your experience and the observation of counter-examples to co-exist with broad social shifts in family-work structure. The reason it appears true is because it is.
You don't have to accept my word for it.
The other possibility is reading what economists have to say[1] about the effects of inflationary pressures on household income structures. Sorry, but I'm going to put more trust in an expert than someone with anecdotal evidence.
1. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/088636871990003...
When one parent doesn't work, it's because the marginal wage added wouldn't pay for childcare.
In recessions one-parent households actually increase, because it's not caused by things being too expensive.
Pay for…. That’s your clue. Prices are expensive because the owning class is squeezing every dime they can get.
You know… bog standard capitalism…