What I’m about to say comes with a heavy heart. It’s not easy, the idea is vile, it’s disgusting and as a lifelong student, it’s treacherous on a level similar to Benedict Arnold.
- It’s also an idea worth sharing, and one which could potentially improve Idaho’s education in a major way.
Idaho students need to spend more time in school, especially in the summer. School districts across the state are strapped for cash, some even shortening their academic weeks to four days. According to the Idaho Department of Education, 63 schools across the state utilize four day school weeks.
Going to school four days a week isn’t supposed to happen. The idea arose because of economic necessity in rural parts of the country during the energy crisis in of the 1970s. It wasn’t supposed to become a crutch for meagerly funded schools.
These reduced classroom hours negatively impact every student, but the situation gets even more dire for failing students. Many schools in Idaho cut structured summer school programs from their budgets a long time ago. This change forces students to seek alternative methods to make up credit, such as online courses from organizations like Idaho Digital Learning Academy and Brigham Young University Independent Study.
I can’t speak for other Idaho high schools, but from my experience at Grangeville High School these classes were largely unsupervised until the proctored final. This created an unhealthy cycle in which students failed classes during the school year, and paid other students to do their online coursework in the summer months.
Paying others to do your summer coursework is actually a fairly lucrative trade. A friend of mine “helped” a few of our peers with their courses and made over $500. He wasn’t the only tutor working within this morally gray area, and this is just one school out of over 1,700 in Idaho.
It would probably surprise the average Idaho legislator, but when you force failing high school students to be responsible for their own independent online coursework, a lot of them won’t really learn anything, at least, not as much as traditional schooling with a real instructor.
When finishing that class or classes is required for graduation, they’ll find a way to get it done.
Implementing supervised summer school courses kills two birds with one stone. It incentives passing classes a lot more than unsupervised online courses, and it makes cheating the system nearly impossible.
Here is the kicker though, summer school costs money and Idaho spends less of that per student than almost everyone else. Idaho sits at 49th in spending per pupil, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
When it comes to the discussion on education spending in Idaho, the conversation always tends to go toward college readiness and the smaller than average pool of students who choose to pursue higher education. However, things are much worse for students whose academic future is questionable at best.
Lack of summer school and need for increased time in the classroom are just a few of the many problems which Idaho public schools face. As the workplace becomes more competitive, education needs to become better to make up for it.
The state of Idaho’s education is a topic which has been beaten to death, but people need to keep swinging the stick until something changes. That change needs to come from the state government, and so far, Otter and crews’ ideas have been largely ineffective.
I’m not sure what the answer to Idaho’s education problems is, but I doubt it’s another four years of Butch Otter.
Justin Ackerman can be reached at [email protected]