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| Every Labor Day you can walk the Mackinaw Bridge. Photo by A snapshot of our lives |
What is the great educational reasoning for this? Tourism, of course! In 2005 businesses and chambers of commerce lobbied to extend summer vacation through Labor Day to encourage families to travel and take vacations. House Bill 4803 was passed banning schools from starting until after Labor Day.
Now teachers can start before Labor Day so pretty much every teacher in the state had PD days this week to keep the school year from going longer into June. I guess they don't care about teachers' tourism money ;)
It also does not apply to sports as fall teams have been practicing for weeks and most football teams are playing their second game of the season today.
Now I don't really know if this affects students' learning all that much and I personally don't care about the starting date a whole lot.
What it does show to me is how ridiculous politicians are when they meddle in education and that they are flat out liars when they say they care about kids and make decisions based on business motives. (Don't even get me started on how our current governor has cut business taxes and school funding this year!)
So I hope everyone is off to a great start of the year and we teachers in Michigan will join you next week when we have permission from politicians and business leaders to begin.
Do schools in Michigan have the same number of school days during the year as other states? If so, I don't see what the big deal is. Your students are still getting the same amount, the time period is just shifted a few weeks.
ReplyDeleteSchools in Michigan have different numbers of days even amongst themselves. Our state requirements are based on hours (1098) where they used to be based on 180 days. Some districts choose longer days so they actually end before Memorial Day.
ReplyDeleteAs stated in my post, it is not a huge deal to me when we start school. Although I do feel there is a huge loss of concentration by students after Memorial Day as many of them mentally "check out" for summer.
My rant is about the hypocrisy of state politicians basing a law about schools on what is best for the business community instead of letting schools and communities decide what is best for their kids.