When I see a billed tagged “Education” from Dan Kaiser, Tom Brunner, Isaac Latterell, Phil Jensen, Jeff Monroe, and Jenna Netherton, I smell trouble.
House Bill 1256 would change the age at which you have to send your kids to school from five to seven. It also says every child has to attend kindergarten before age nine.
Why would a bunch of right-wing legislators want fourteen year olds in sixth grade and kids not graduating until age 20?
- They want to get maybe 10,000 kids in next year’s kindergarten and first-grade cohorts to stay home and thus fill the budget shortfall by chopping $33.7 million from state K-12 aid.
- They want to boost homeschool by encouraging more parents to keep their kids at home, get into the groove of teaching them while they wait for the required kindergarten age, and decide they can do a few more grades on their own.
- They want little kids to be free to concentrate on pee-wee wrestling.
- They want bigger starters on the high school football team.
- They are trying to protect our youngest children to the gun hysteria spread by the presence of school-board approved gunslingers in our schools.
- They are reading (chuckle) empirical evidence (snort!) from scientists (HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!) that children who start kindergarten later may get better grades, be more likely to attend college, and be less likely to commit crimes. (Careful: other research found “age-of-entry effects were small… and dwarfed by other aspects of children’s family and child care experiences….“)
HB 1256 has not yet been scheduled for a hearing before House Education. Keep your ears open for the sponsors’ explanations. Absent a good argument, I’d contend there’s no need to change statute: parents who don’t want to send their kids to school are free to homeschool in the current system and send their kids to public school if and when they feel their children are ready.
And when right-wing Republicans say they’re here to reform education, we should be skeptical.
Does the day-care industry employ a lobbyist?
These legislators that introduced this bill are idiots. There is no need for this bill, what a waste of time. No wonder why they struggle to accomplish anything in Pierre.
Amen. And to those who say that a later-start means better college, etc., my mother taught me to read when I was 3 1/2 years old, and I jumped from kindergarten to first grade my first year in school. Did just fine, I might add. Something weird in this one.
Cory, you know that racist Phil Jensen stood up the other day during the Legislative Senate Session and declared that ‘no wonder Native Americans are committing suicides when they are last in the nation on Test scores’.
Some food for thought from across the pond:
https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22029435-000-too-much-too-young-should-schooling-start-at-age-7/
I wonder, PS: this research seems to talk about the effects of starting formal schooling. Eve’s learning to read when she was wee didn’t seem to hurt her any. Getting kids talking and reading and writing and painting and thinking as early as possible seems to be good for them. What is the best timeline and what is the best setting for learning?
I might entertain the idea of allowing parents to delay the start of formal schooling, but only if we adopt the Leon Botstein plan to condense formal schooling down to K-9 and still get kids out the door and into work or college by age 18. Give kids an intense, rigorous, liberal arts elementary and secondary education in ten years instead of thirteen and get them out into the real world to take advantage of their adult energies.
I have a suspicion that their unspoken goal is to keep mothers out of the workforce longer – at home, taking care of their babies like god intended.
(My previous post was sarcasm, in case it wasn’t obvious.)
I’m in no position to complain about sarcasm, given the nature of half of my list of possible reasons for HB 1256. ;-)
CAH,
I 100% agree that if we start kids later we should also get them out earlier and onto tech or college.. have you seen what harrisburg high school is doing? Bringing college to kids if they have enough high school credits to graduate…
http://www.ksfy.com/content/news/Harrisburg-School-District-unveils-Early-College-Pathway-467608723.html
Most advanced nations in the world and forward thinking states are examining and implementing pre-kindergarten programs, but not South Dakota. We are going the other way. Kids are too uppity and big for their britches now adays. We don’t abide that fancy book learnin’ for the young’uns in these parts.
PS– Are the sponsors of this bill just trying to get us mocked by the rest of the world? South Dakota doesn’t have higher education–we just implement lower education at a higher age. What would Alabama do?
PS, Harrisburg seems to be doing a lot of creative, productive things for students. The benefits of being a big, growing district not yet mired in the bureaucracy of the big district next door?
Darin, good point about preschool. Isn’t there a fair amount of research showing that pre-k helps kids do better in school? Wouldn’t such evidence conflict with evidence that we’re starting kids on regular school too early? Or would both sets of evidence simply point to notable individual differences among kids?
I support allowing parents to choose the educational setting that they feel best meets their kids’ needs. But I also recognize that, for the vast majority of families that are forced by South Dakota’s low wages to have both parents in the workforce, the practical reality is that they can’t provide a full home-based education with at least one full-time stay-at-home parent. HB 1256 only expands an option that already effectively exists in the status quo but which very few South Dakota families can afford to take advantage of. The far greater policy advantage would come from offering affordable (but not mandatory) preschool education to all kids.
With all the current emphasis on EARLY CHILDHOOD EDUCATION this bill absolutely sucks canal water. Every last bit of research in the last decade shows that the earlier we can expose children to learning opportunities, the better they will do in primary, secondary and post secondary education. The Mayor of Rapid City has presented a hard sell on the concept yet here comes Jensen with the polar opposite. This smells of “anti Common Core” nonsense. This foolishness is right in line with all the other frivolity and irrelevance introduced by these disconnected legislators trying to advance personal agendas inspired by only their own twisted ideology. How does this bill benefit the state or it’s children? I didn’t like the emphasis on post secondary trade school education over collegiate endeavor but this takes the cake. Dumb and dumber trying to create more dumb and dumber. There needs to be a way to screen and limit bills for veracity, purpose and public benefit before they are even assigned a number. What is most irritating about this and all the other bills lacking purpose and relevance is they just waste valuable time, effort and money that could be put to better use working on legislation that doesn’t clutter up law books, cost the state more money, and further confuse a public that is already confused and fed up with big government that stuff like this creates. The utter disrespect and concern for the totality of legislative purpose shown by these bill creators and their sponsors has become intolerable. Right along with the assault and insult to the public referendum and referral process. It’s got to stop.
I’m with you, John. The Legislature should be looking to expand educational opportunities, not reduce or delay them.
How many parents would keep their kids out of kindergarten for two more years? How many parents want their kids to be in high school until age 20? How many kids want to be in high school until age 20?
I don’t understand why most of these political geniuses can’t understand the principle; “IF IT ISN’T BROKEN, DON’T FIX IT.” There is a disease epidemic in the hallowed halls of Pierre that seems to infect these elected officials. It’s called “failure to recognize the obvious” and I’ve watched it for over 40 years. A remedy is long over due.
On a related note, I see where we’re dealing with yet another bill to address the age limit for mentored hunting………..All on the basis of an individual dad’s belief that parents should be the ones to determine when their son or daughter is responsible enough to carry a gun in the field. I started carrying a gun in the pheasant fields when I was 9. It was a bb gun and I carried it until I was 11 when dad decided I demonstrated enough care and caution to shoulder a single shot shotgun and even then, I just about shot the family dog shooting at a rooster on the ground that wouldn’t fly. We go one way with increasing the age for beginning education and the exact opposite way for letting kids carry guns and shoot at things……….. We ignore every bit of research on early childhood development and restrict children’s opportunities on the one hand and heap responsibility on them on the other. Children under the age of 12-14 are not emotionally and mentally prepared to deal with killing something and I’ll go so far as to say that encouraging them to do it can turn as many young people away from hunting as it can increase their commitment to it. I say that not of my own personal experience but from nearly 30 years of teaching hunter education and firearms safety. The supporting testimony on this bill follows the usual economic sell job that passage of the bill will encourage hunter recruitment. Absolutely no thought what so ever that we’ve been on this same bandwagon for better than 20 years and hunter numbers continue to decline……….. Why???? The answer is more than obvious. Youth hunter recruitment strategies have failed but the larger failure is adult hunter retention! If parents quit hunting, (which has been a trend for a very long time) there is nobody to take the kid hunting. We aught to look at the hunter retention rate for programs like SD Youth Hunting Adventures that serves kids whose parent’s (mostly single moms) don’t hunt…….. While it would be a guess, I think it a good one to predict that not very many of those young people continue on on their own simply because we refuse to acknowledge that hunting is a “cultural” activity that involves family and relational bonding. Putting a gun in a kids hands and expecting him to grow up into an adult that buys licenses, supports conservation, and outdoor values without recognizing the history and child development in the outdoors is just plain blind. We’d have just as good a luck encouraging our kids to participate in Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts. They’d get a more well rounded and better education about shooting and the outdoors than one or two outings a year with an adult in a narrow, overly controlled environment that is, in itself, artificial.