Wow, pajama day didn't bring back students? So strange.
I wonder if they tried less homework, shorter school-days and/or later start of the day? Basically the three reasons I myself was chronically absent from school for as long as I can remember.
Later days is a solid idea, and I believe research shows it improves student performance at the highschool level, although if I understand correctly this is largely a scheduling/budget issue with how busses are staggered today.
If that would be the intent, arcade cabinets, open play fields, parks and other social areas within school grounds would be the way to go.
My understanding is that the current school "format" was developed during the industrial revolution stage, and its meant to instill into kids that schedule and "lifestyle". Which to many extents hasn't kept up with the way society is evolving.
More funding into schools would help (which countries contribute significantly to education anyway?), but also by helping kids develop and learn in what they have an interest. Instead of the currently standardized boring circula. And the sometimes insane hours.
On that note, during highschool I had days where I've had up to 7 different classes a day. At least when you go to work, even if it's 8 hours, I (and maybe you as well) got to slack at least 1 hour a day in the morning, or even in the afternoon after the 1 hour lunch break.
The trick is to look into total funding - beyond federal funding and into state funding.
I strongly agree that education in the internet age needs to evolve. I would love to see an education system centered around critical and entrepreneurial thinking, financial literacy, Cognitive Behavioral thinking tools. If you give kids something worthwhile they'll use it and come back for more.
https://www.pgpf.org/budget-basics/how-is-k-12-education-fun...
It's simply too big and undeveloped for education to work as well as in, say, Switzerland. See also public transportation.
The brutal truth is a subset of parents just don't care too much about education. It doesn't matter if it's an affluent or a working class district - there will always be a subset of parents that are either unable to (fairly common among impoverished parents sadly) or uninterested to (fairly uncommon among more affluent parents sadly) become much more involved parents
Basically, teachers assume parents will intervene in their students lives to give structure. Parents in the other hand assume teachers will intervene to give their children structure in their lives. And neither side will budge.
Some autonomy for kids is critical, but there also needs to be some amount of structure as well. You can't be 100% disciplinarian nor 100% free roaming. A happy balance is needed, and sadly, a handful of bad apples among both teachers and parents have deteriorated that relationship among these critical caregivers.
A lot of Americans and Westerners in general seem to ignore that reality, and will fall behind.
There absolutely is a small subset of parents like that, though being in the Bay Area, access to abortion has been fairly common for decades, especially given the affluence of the district and the relative lack of stigma, so I don't see that as playing a significant factor.
https://datacenter.aecf.org/data/tables/43-children-in-pover...
[2] https://archive.is/dXpQf/fba33991824e68e9b1ecfbde5c773bcbe92... (from [1])
EDIT: This is for Sweden where we are talking about the same issue. But I do not think we have the same numbers here.
This is a valid reason to be absent, and school administrators, teachers, and statistics take that into account.
My comment was aimed specifically at students who don't have valid physical or mental issues.
My mom's school district does not enforce suspensions for chronic absenteeism due to a subset of very affluent and litigious parents.
> This is for Sweden
Makes sense. There is no point comparing the Swedish or "American" system, as there are 13,187 different American systems that all have different norms and rules besides a handful stipulated by the DoE.
Even inter-US comparisons don't make sense for that reason.
As of 2022, Middle schools can start at 8am at the earliest, and number of school districts transitioned to a 8.30-9am start time. Some affluent school districts already did this transition in the late 2000s and early 2010s.
The US has roughy 13k school districts. Each one has it's own different sets of rules, regulations, and local political culture, and aside from limited State and Federal DoE regulation, implement their policies based on local political constraints due to the School Board and PTA.
Some School Boards and PTAs are apolitical in nature. Others are hyper-political and used as a stepping stone to enter local and state level politics (eg. Mayor, City Council, State Assembly, Congress) as donors won't donate without a proven electoral track record. Most younger (< 60yrs) Congressmembers started their political careers this way.
My California public school district had no busses. I still remember miserably making 7AM classes.
No. And if it were don't you think it would be better to teach the children how to improve the state of the world instead of perpetuating its evils?
If your children are so smart they can surely do some reading and research of their own. That's what I did back in prehistoric times (1960s and early 1970s). In the subjects I enjoyed I was consistently ahead of the bulk of the class and occasionally of the teachers simply because I read all the text books and spent time in the library. It was enthusiasm that drove my performance not the imposition of extra homework.
“Although previous research has shown that homework improves students’ academic achievement, the majority of these studies use data on students’ homework time from retrospective questionnaires, which may be less accurate than time-diary data. We use data from the combined Child Development Supplement (CDS) and the Transition to Adulthood Survey (TA) of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics to explore the effects of time spent on homework while attending high school on two measures of academic achievement: high school GPA and college attendance by age 20. We find that homework time has no effect on these measures of academic achievement.”
Rønning, M. (2008). Who benefits from homework assignments? (Discussion Papers No. 566). Oslo, Norway: Statistics Norway, Research Department. Retrieved from https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ908287 Full text available http://www.ssb.no/a/publikasjoner/pdf/DP/dp566.pdf
I know many parents whose kids stayed up until 1-2am at least once a week. We expressed strong opinions to our kids that sleep is way more important than getting an extra grade bump, but many kids still trade sleep for a better grade.
/slight sarcasm.
US schools have changed, a lot, in the last 30 years. Many schools now are pressure cookers on both the teachers and peer levels. So some kids stay up very late and some go on antidepressants. On the other side are schools where no one cares about academics, and the bar for good grades is no mischief. Which is also not a great school for any kid.