Oregon to mandate 180 school days per year?
OregonLive.com: NewsFlash - Bill to mandate 180 school days in Oregon gets hearing
It’s just a bill right now, but it is currently before the House to require 180 student contact days in the state of Oregon. According to the Oregonian, this bill would cost schools $180 million. From this article, it is unclear as to whether or not the bill would provide that additional funding. The Republicans are encouraging districts to remove prep time, parent conference time, and professional development. If that isn’t able to make up the difference, they would like an hour to be taken off each day. That last part doesn’t make any sense at all. Let’s require more days in the school year, but we won’t provide any additional money for it, so we’ll make each day a little shorter to make up for it. Am I reading that right? The idea is to improve student contact time, not take away from it. And for the record, I’m all for adding student contact days to the school year.
I didn’t realize that 30 states require at least 180 school days. In fact, the average school year in our state consists of 167 days, among the lowest in the nation. A few years ago, many school districts in our state actually cut a few days off of the school year in order to meet their budgets. Those were not good times in our state.
It’s time for our state legislature to fund schools at an acceptable level. Unfunded mandates are not the way to go about improving education in our state.
Technorati Tags: Oregon education, school funding, politics, education
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March 28th, 2007 at 9:51 pm
Thanks for bringing this to my attention. I don’t get the Oregonian, and my local paper didn’t run this story. Amazing! It seems like an obvious connection to me: more money for your education system = better education system. It’s old logic.
Anyway, thanks to you, I continued the rant on my blog. Thanks again.
By the way, how do you like ScribeFire? I’ve never tried it. Also, what do you do to add technorati tags? Is that a plugin for WordPress?
March 29th, 2007 at 7:37 am
Thanks for the comment, Matt. I don’t get the Oregonian, but this article came through on my Google news alert that I subscribe to. One of those categories is “Oregon school.” I think the EO might have carried that one last night also.
I didn’t realize that ScribeFire was putting the “Powered by” link at the bottom…I’d had that option unchecked, so I’m not sure what happened there. Anyway, it’s a great extension for Firefox. I also use the Microsoft Live Writer desktop software when I’m at home. Both make posting to your blog a breeze, but I happen to prefer the Microsoft one most of the time. And both are a huge improvement over the WordPress “Write” page. Both have an option to let you automatically insert your Technorati tags.