Opinion: Unfair to bash schools for educating kids

I have seen the future, and it is bright.

And it began not in some forward-looking think tank or the graduate school of education at Harvard but in Mississinawa Valley (try saying that three times fast) School District in Ohio. The superintendent there, Lisa Wendel (soon to be secular saint among superintendents everywhere), announced that snow days are officially a thing of the past, one more relic of older, badder days — like the Bubonic Plague and unheated outhouses on cold winter mornings. But how will she then handle the vicissitudes of icy roads and snow drifts that have heretofore stopped the glorious enterprise that is education dead in its tracks?

Why, the Internet, of course. When winter winds blow and roads become a place that every bus fears to tread, district teachers will simply teach their classes for the day from home, with students required to log in so that no school is missed. Like all true, hard-core educators, Wendel’s focus borders on obsession and she justifies her plan with the obvious connection between education and the child’s later success in life, including their preparation for college or other postsecondary study.

About all this, of course, Superintendent Wendel is absolutely correct, dead on target. What more and more educators are waking up to is the fact that if we want to get better education for our children, we need more time to do it and anytime lost is irretrievably lost, like money fumbled down a New York City sewer grate, like that opportunity you had but didn’t take to ask out that angelic girl during the Homecoming dance, like the time you were asked to invest in Bill Gates’ company in the ’80’s but couldn’t believe that nerd could tie his own shoes, much less turn a profit.

To some extent, however, I think this move is, at least for now, doing too much for too little. In Mitchell, for example, we miss zero to five days per year due to snow days, averaging three. But typically, we make them all up. Thus, holding school over the Internet, a day I have to believe would be less effective than one spent in a school building, saves a day through a great deal of complicated technological maneuvering but this day would have been made up later regardless. Thus, much ventured but nothing gained. Additionally, it assumes perfect technology connections for thousands of children, some of whom, by the way, don’t have such connections at home and so would be left out of that day’s instruction.

Nevertheless, Wendel deserves a great deal of credit for safeguarding student instructional time. Unfortunately, she isn’t getting it, at least not at the national level. Switched.com, a national news service specializing in educational technology issues, sported the following headline over its article covering Wendel’s move: Ohio School District Crushes Kids’ Dreams with Online Snow-Day Classes. Yes, that is what we in education are all about: crushing the dreams of children. In fact, what Wendel was pursuing was the very opposite, providing children with the education they will need to make their dreams a reality. To this, Lee Bains, the reporter, gives short shrift, preferring instead to discuss the dulling of students’ “young, wistful, smiling eyes” and the snuffing out of student “joys of spontaneous vacation days ...” With his puling narrative, he even includes a photo of the White Witch from C.S. Lewis, an apparent allusion to Wendel.

Whether we like it or not, pursuing higher educational attainment in American is going to mean more time for instruction and less for vacation. Consequently, the misguided laments of adults who wistfully ponder their own spent youth are helping no one when they criticize educators like Wendel who are slugging it out in the ring while they sit in the bleachers and sling cat-calls under the guise of advice. Bains ends his article with the following bit of snideness: “We have not yet definitively heard whether or not Mississinawa Valley’s school lunches will be limited to gruel and boiled cabbage.”

Here’s a fellow who so can’t get past his own excitement over a snow day 20 years ago that he’s willing to bash someone working their tail off to get kids an education. Perhaps Mr. Bains should be taken off the education beat and moved over to something health-related. Then he can spend his time and his ink whining about the time the mean ol’ doctor gave Little Boy Bains a shot for diphtheria or polio or small pox. Goodness knows that it is better to lament that bit of pain rather than exult over the health it now provides him.

Tags: joe graves, opinion