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“Flexible Scheduling” Undermines Parent Engagement, Stymies Social Mobility
When I was an undergraduate trying to make every dollar I could to pay my tuition and cover my living costs I worked part time as a cashier in a grocery store chain and in the stockroom of a retail chain. In both of these jobs I was given my schedule a week in advance. Both employers worked around my class schedule and, in part because I was a reliable employee and, in the case of the grocery store, because of the union, I was able to trade hours with other employees to get time off for family events. While I appreciated the relative flexibility of the employers, I was relieved when my earnings as a newly hired teacher combined with my wires earnings meant I could stop working part time.
Today’s part-time employees live in a different world— one where flexibility works for the employer and one where unions have no say whatsoever in the wages and working conditions of employees. As Michele Chen reported in a recent article in Nation,
Many retail workers are stuck in a segment of the labor force known as “involuntary part-time”: those forced to work fewer than thirty-five hours a week and who would generally otherwise work full-time, but can’t, due to a lack of available jobs.
And these involuntary part-time workers face horrific scheduling for their work. Using scheduling algorithms that optimize the wages paid to employees, corporations employing large numbers of part-time employees– like Walmart, Starbuck, and any number of fast food and retail franchisers– require part-timers to be on call 24/7. The result?
The consequence is not just impoverishment but deepening long-term instability in workers’ family lives and crushing personal stress. As Esther Kaplan points out, low-wage workers face intense pressure to adhere to unstable schedules and to ramp up speed and productivity at the same time—no time to schedule daycare, but always on-call to take a last-minute night-shift.
This plays out in schools in having fewer parents available for scheduled parent conferences, more parents scrambling at the last minute to send their children off to school with proper attire and completed homework assignments, and lots of stress in the homes of children whose parents are often working more than one of these involuntary part-time jobs to make ends meet.
Walmart and Starbucks received lots of relatively favorable coverage when they unilaterally decided to raise wages, but, as Chen notes, more is needed:
An extra dollar-an-hour for impoverished Walmart associates helps, but they want good jobs, equitable schedules and real control over their labor, not just higher wages. Countless workers are still forced to take whatever they can get—which is often simply whatever the boss is willing to give them.
Shareholders want profits which means they want to impose flexible hours on employees more than they want to empower employees to arrange flexible work hours among themselves and to have the flexibility to schedule doctors appointments for their children… let alone volunteer in their child’s school or coach their child’s little league team. Those making decisions about which scheduling algorithm is the most cost effective for the company need to look at what algorithms are most effective for the well being of their employees and see that the two are, in some cases, mutually exclusive. If we want strong communities and a stable work force, increasing the minimum wage only gets us part way there.
Sin Tax Bonanza! Pot Proceeds Provide Colorado Public Schools With Avalanche of Revenue
The moral debates over the legalization of marijuana are quickly disappearing as legislators look at the results of excise taxes in Colorado. As reported in Britain’s Daily Mail tabloid and the US magazine The Week, Colorado’s taxes on marijuana have increased tenfold bringing in $2.3 million in revenues. Most states I’ve worked in dedicate gambling revenues and/or alcohol revenues to schools and when it is necessary to find new revenues the solution invariably is to raise “sin taxes”. Given that there is diminishing evidence that marijuana in and of itself is a “gateway drug” and given the lack of political courage on the part of many legislators as evidenced by their unwillingness to raise broad based taxes to fund schools, it seems likely that more and more states will look at the revenues garnered by Colorado and follow suit.
I am in favor of legalization for four major reasons. First, it will end the real gateway element of marijuana use, which is breaking the law. Marijuana use requires the buyer to break the law in order to make a purchase and, consequently, the widespread use of marijuana makes lawlessness acceptable. Secondly, given the fact that lawless people are dealing the drug, it increases the probability that the “sales personnel” will market higher potency drugs that are for more dangerous and addictive than the lower grade marijuana that a regulated marketplace would make available. It is the sale of drugs by lawless marketeers that makes marijuana into a “gateway drug”, not the drug itself. This leads to the third reason I am in support of legalization: doing so would ensure that the THC dosages are lower and less addictive. Fourth, and of greatest interest to legislators, it would bring new revenues to state coffers while arguably diminishing costs for law enforcement and prisons. The additional revenues could be earmarked for schools, drug treatment, early childhood education, or the general coffers. Legal marijuana will feed legislators’ addictions to quick and painless fixes to revenue gaps… expect to see it spread rapidly in the coming decade.
Trickle Down Testing: NOLA Kindergartners Spend 95+ Hours Taking Computer-Based Standardized Tests
A recent Slate essay, “Welcome to Kindergarten. Take This Test… And This One”, describes the testing gauntlet imposed on NOLA students in the name of accountability. Alexandria Neason writes about the experiences of third year Kindergarten teacher Molly Mansel’s challenges in administering computerized tests to her entering kindergartners. The first challenge was teaching them to use a mouse when most of them were used to swiping screens on phones and pads. Then came the test itself:
Mansel’s students started taking tests just three weeks into the 2014–15 school year. They began with a state-required early childhood exam in August, which covered everything from basic math to letter identification. Mansel estimates that it took between four and five weeks for the teachers to test all 58 kindergarten students—and that was with the help of the prekindergarten team. The test requires an adult to sit individually with each student, reading questions and asking them to perform various tasks. The test is 11 pages long and “it’s very time-consuming,” according to Mansel, who is 24 and in her third year of teaching (her first in kindergarten).
The rest of the demanding testing schedule involves repeated administrations of two different school-mandated tests. The first, Measures of Academic Progress, or MAP, is used to measure how students are doing compared with their peers nationally—and to evaluate teachers’ performance. The students take the test in both reading and math three times a year. They have about an hour to complete the test, and slower test takers are pulled from class to finish.
The second test, called Strategic Teaching and Evaluation of Progress, or STEP, is a literacy assessment that measures and ranks children’s progress as they learn letters, words, sentences, and, eventually, how to read. Mansel gives the test individually to students four times throughout the year. It takes several days to administer as Mansel progresses through a series of tasks: asking the students to write their names, to point to uppercase and lowercase versions of letters, and to identify words that rhyme, for example.
These are pre-tests… and over the course of the year Mansel’s students will spend 95 hours taking these tests… and if Ms. Mansel’s performance rating is based on “growth” you can be certain they will spend many more hours in front of screens instead of playing with blocks or engaging in social play with classmates. All of this is being done in the name of maintaing international competitiveness with other countries. But when do other developed countries introduce reading and what does research tell us about this issue? David Elkind’s EducationNext article in 2012 addressed this question:
Evidence attesting to the importance of developmentally appropriate education in the early years comes from cross-cultural studies. Jerome Bruner reports that in French-speaking parts of Switzerland, where reading instruction is begun at the preschool level, a large percentage of children have reading problems. In German-speaking parts of Switzerland, where reading is not taught until age six or seven, there are few reading problems. In Denmark, where reading is taught late, there is almost no illiteracy. Likewise in Russia, where the literacy rate is quite high, reading is not taught until the age of six or seven.
So if research shows that premature instruction in reading increases the probability of reading difficulties, why are we introducing “academics” early? The short answer is that scientific evidence is immaterial in the politicized environment of American schooling today. The consequences on children are adverse whether or not they learn how to read earlier, for the 95+ hours they spend in front of screens are 95+ hours that could have been spent engaged in activities that would help them develop interpersonal skills and self-regulation.
Vote even if you think it doesn’t matter…. and be grateful you still can!
Network Schools - Wayne Gerseny to https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/04/03/magazine/thomas-piketty-interview u w B l.html?h I’ll smid=url-share the Is for 