It is also because I have something comparable to proverbial daddy issues when it comes to having good mentors for first year teachers. I was so estranged and self-loathing in my first year of teaching. All I wanted in the world was for someone to tell me I was not a horrible person for the pitiful job I knew I was doing. Instead I was told to work harder. Now I've set out to ensure that anyone I meet who needs to be told that it's not their fault hears it from someone.

I am usually paired with people who are teaching early childhood (Pre-K through 2nd grade for those who are wondering), because in my long, rich (read: short, harried) life as an educator, I have spent the majority of my time with 5- and 6-year-olds. And almost always, when I sit down with a first year teacher at a cafe, she will tell me in a very hoarse voice that her class is out of control and she doesn't know why. Oh man. I've been there.

And I have this hypothesis as to why it gets that way. 

But before I get into that (hint: the solution may seem obvious to outsiders), let me briefly tell you something I learned when I was being trained prior to my first year of teaching. I was learning how to teach first graders at the time. I was learning this from a very kind, thoughtful 26-year-old with two years of teaching experience and the best intentions in the world. The subject of this particular lecture was "objective-based activities versus activity-based activities." The crux of the argument was that you should never teach an activity that existed solely for the sake of the activity -- it must always drive home a larger objective. Apparently this is a mistake a lot of people make, and this is why, according to this presenter, test scores are so low in low-income neighborhoods. A simple error! Instead of letting kids make viking ships out of popsicle sticks and tempra paints (activity-based), they should be writing a paper from the perspective of a viking, incorporating use of an exclamation point and a comma at least once, and explaining at least one major turmoil that was faced by vikings (objective-based). Both these projects are ostensibly about vikings! But, common-law teacher training says, the latter activity is preferred. The first just gets paint everywhere.

I totally bought this, by the way. Because on paper, all this standards-based learning stacks up and makes sense. If children were computers and not children, all we would need to do to get them to improve would be to program them differently. But as it is, children are children. And the children of low-income America -- who are, by the way, being taught increasingly by teachers trained to program computers and not to work with children -- hate school.

I'm not talking about rogue fourth-graders who get sour tastes in their mouths from multiplication drills. I'm not talking about the occasional 9-year-old who doesn't want to write in his journal. I'm talking about entire classes of 2nd graders, 1st graders, and kindergartners who will tell you point blank that they hate school -- I mean, really hate it. You can blame the kids all you want; but whatever the cause, it's a full-fledged epidemic.

So back to the cafe table, sitting across from this hoarse first-year first grade teacher. She's got dark circles under her eyes, and you can tell she's had that shirt on for at least three consecutive days (where does one find the time to do laundry with this kind of job?), and she is on the verge of tears before she's even opened her mouth.

"My class is out of control. There's no support. We can't get through any of the learning because I spend so long correcting problem behaviors. Today a boy turned a desk upside down and the whole class laughed and I just sat there because I didn't know what to do." 

When I hear that, I want to tell her that I know how that feels; that it sucks; that it's not her fault and the best thing she could possibly do would be to go home and take a day off to watch ten episodes of Friends re-runs. But I am a teacher, and I work with teachers, and I know how teachers are: teachers are, generally speaking, guilt-riddled self deprecators more likely to develop unhealthy Adderall habits than they are to take proper care of themselves. No offense to teachers. I count myself amongst these ranks. 

So instead I ask, "How often do your kids get recess?"

"Oh, we don't have recess at my school."

"How often do they paint?" I ask.

At this point I generally get a blank stare. There's no time to paint. And even if there was, there's no paint to be had! There is a fancy SmartBoard in the front of the classroom that earns technology points for the overall school score, and there are up-to-date reading curricula that are to be used for at least two hours per day. But no one buys paint anymore. Paint would be insane! THESE KIDS CAN'T HANDLE PAINT ANYWAY! They would just throw the paint at each other! They would smash the paint into the wall. I might as well have said, "How often do you let them play with sharp knives?"

But the thing is, kids need paint. Not paint specifically, of course, but play. They need to make viking ships out of popsicle sticks. They need to run around. They need to talk. As Joan Almon writes in an article for the Waldorf Research Institute:

"The sociodramatic play of [5- and 6-year-olds] is rich and varied, and it is a great tragedy that so few children in the United States have a chance to fully experience it, for their time in kindergarten or first grade is generally fully devoted to academic subjects with little time left over for play. The absence of play in childhood may have long-lasting repercussions on the child’s overall social development."

As a country, we are not prioritizing play. Almon is right to call this a tragedy. Children who come from low-income families are disproportionately more likely commit homicide (and be victims of it) than their richer peers. Doesn't this imply most immediately that there is a profound defecit in social-emotional health and conflict resolution skills for this demographic? While raising test scores may help children grow up to have more options in life, it will not equip them with the strategies they need to communicate with each other and live more peaceful lives in the world at large. Learning how to play is the very foundation of building relationships with other human beings. Learning how to play, then, is the skill children need the most. And schools today are not teaching it.

The benefits of play-based learning are no secret. CNN reported in 2010 that teaching through play was actually the surest path to college, because it encourages the kind of abstract problem-solving necessary to be successful in higher education. In 2011, Ontario implemented a system for "play-based learning in kindergartens, where kids aged 4 and 5 are now encouraged to follow their own noses to amusement and enlightenment rather than be told what to think or do." The director of the program said that the school district took on a radical approach to playing and learning because worldwide data supports that the lifelong benefits of learning to play are uncontested. 

But that's Ontario. Meanwhile, in New York, Head Start students are taking their first standardized tests at the age of 4. Never mind that 4-year-olds can't always hold pencils properly (and it's not developmentally appropriate to ask them to); they're bubbling answer documents. The only time that should be allowed is when students use literal bubbles, and the answer documents are there to sop up soap residue. But hey, who am I to stand in the way of data?

Data is important. We need it. I personally spent the past hour looking through old studies and scholarly papers I've collected over the years to find positive data about play-based learning, for heaven's sake. We like to see things on paper because it simplifies things for us and allows us to make what we call "informed decisions." Informed decisions are better than emotional ones, we've been taught, because we can translate them from group to group and situation to situation regardless (hypothetically) of circumstances.

Unfortunately, though, human beings are complicated. There are literally hundreds of thousands of factors that make us who we are. We all take to tasks differently, and it's tricky to boil us down by the numbers. So while data is valuable, it is not singular: we need to know more when we make our decisions. And one thing we should take into account when we're gathering data about children is that children are not always ready to hunker down and take a test. How valuable is that piece of test data to you really?

Allow me to get anecdotal. Today I administered an interim assessment for six 6-year-olds. Two are identified as having emotional disturbances; two have specific learning disabilities; and two are on the autism spectrum. These are some of the most amazingly creative, curious, thoughtful, passionate people I know. One of them effortlessly fabricates histories for everything under the sun (in his world, Jesus invented owls so that they could watch over the souls of field mice and destroy all the evil ones). One makes watercolor paintings of trees the breadth of which rival the current exhibition in the New Orleans museum of art. They have lots of questions about the world and true desires to succeed. 

The test I had to give them had 35 questions and took the average first grader two hours to complete. Some of the questions were algebraic. Some of the questions required double-digit subtraction. For my group of students, they were all outside the realms of what they felt personally capable of doing. And administering this thing was MAYHEM. Jay ripped his test to shreds -- twice. Kayla screamed and ran around the garden. Jerome tried to elope six times. Throughout the whole test there was whining and complaining and crying and yelps of, "BUT I DON'T KNOW HOW" and "WHY!??!" I tried gentle words and frequent breaks and straight-up bribery, and nothing worked; the behaviors I witnessed bordered constantly on downright unsafe.

And then after it was over, like a war had ended, everyone sort of collapsed, looking defeated, on their tables. I said, "You guys earned some playground time." Heads perked up. "Just promise you'll be kind and safe and not too loud and we'll spend some time out there." Nods all around. And so for thirty minutes I watched kids who had been labeled "impossible," "defiant," and "uncontrollably combative" play nicely with sand, share sidewalk chalk, and take turns on a see-saw. No one yelled or fought or punched. Granted, there were only six of them, and they've been learning how to safely play all year long. I wouldn't recommend giving a free-for-all to a group of 25 kids who are accustomed to sitting inside, straight up, hands folded, like circus animals on constant call. It takes time and practice and conversation to get kids to play. That's the point. They need to learn it.

Similarly, I have been working with a teaching artist to take a group of kids who have been identified as having emotional disturbances to play theatre games and create feelings-inspired artwork once a week for the past several months. When I list the roster of this class to co-workers, people often say, "WHOA. How's that going for you?" The implication is that this is a tough crew to have all at once. These are 5-, 6-, and 7-year-olds who are regularly carted out of the school building in police cars.

The answer is that it's going great for me. We're learning feeling words and we're learning how to take care of fancy art supplies and we're learning how much fun it is to play games when we collaborate and work together. I'm not saying that a box of markers doesn't ever get thrown around the room. I'm just saying that when I watch that group of children creating oil paintings of what they think "frustration" looks like, and they are calm and focused and thoughtful, I feel like I'm seeing the truest, rawest version of them. They are exploring. They are themselves.

We need to give kids ample opportunities to be themselves; to discover -- with their fingers, their mouths, their hearts, their ears, their eyes -- who exactly they are and all the things they love. They ought to love coming to school. There should be gigantic stretches of the day devoted to harboring safe, playful exploration. We are afraid, I suppose, that we will lose control; that we will lose our footing and these kids will grow up and they'll have been spoiled into thinking school is fun and they'll never take it seriously and then it will be too late. Well, I disagree. I think we need to teach kids when they're young that learning is magical and curiosity is wonderful and school is magnificently fun. And if we don't do it now, then it really will be too late.

I'm not implying that we shouldn't teach children with absolute fidelity how to read and write and do math. Those things are important (and BONUS! They're actually kind of fun, too). I am merely saying that if a class of 25 children is refusing to listen to you when you spend twenty minutes teaching them how to spell long vowel sounds, then there's nothing wrong with giving them a little paint. Once they've made that damn viking ship, after all, they may have some very valuable questions about vikings. Then one day, when asked about vikings on a standardized test, they might care about the answer.

You don't have to know a lot about me to know that I would put down my life for the First Amendment. It is the right I care the most about; the one that makes me feel like there will always be hope in America, no matter how bleak the political landscape may seem. Unfortunately, my favorite human freedom has been seeing a lot of press in the past few month -- and not the good kind.

This is mostly because people have been doing stupid things. For the most part, stupidity is the outlying reason that we think about the implications of the First Amendment. Folks at the Wesboro Baptist Church triggered our national gag reflex when they protested outside soldier's funerals alleging, among other ridiculous ideas, that war is God's punishment for all things liberal (i.e.: "sins"). But of course the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the church. Horrified as we were, Nazis set that precedent up in 1977 when they upheld the right to march in Skokie, Illinois -- a town of mostly Holocaust survivors. 

Free speech often makes us feel sick. It makes us angry, uncomfortable, and horrified. And that is exactly the quality which makes it so valuable.

Patricia J. Williams, my personal hero in many ways, wrote a wonderful piece about the Westboro Baptist Church situation in March. She aptly reminds us:

[T]he essence of the First Amendment is not about individual hurt feelings: it is about ensuring public debate. And public debate requires first, a public space that remains orderly, free of violence — hence much jurisprudential grappling with the putative difference between speech and conduct, or between the merely provocative statements and “fighting words.”

I have a difficult time believing change would happen at all if we lacked this basic human freedom. How would we talk about anything? How would we find out what gnawed at our collective hunger for justice and peace?

The NPR podcast On The Media aired a wonderful episode on the implications of the First Amendment this week, detailing some of the more controversial cases of freedom of speech being upheld even in times of war. The first story is about whether freedom of speech should be protected if peoples' lives are at risk because of it. The example given was Florida Pastor Terry Jones having the license to set fire to a Quran last month, igniting rage and attack -- sometimes to the death -- against American forces in Afghanistan. Lindsay Graham reflected, "You know, I wish we could find some way to hold people accountable. Free speech is a great idea, but we're in a war."

Still, though, the slippery slope comes into question quickly. Geoffery Slope explains:

Let's suppose that we were to hold that the reverend could be punished because the speech led to the death of individuals in Afghanistan. And now let's suppose that instead of that, that the City of New York prohibits the construction of a mosque near the site of, of 9/11, and radical Islamicists are furious at the discrimination against Islam and they go out and they kill people, in protest. Does that mean that we have to allow the mosque?

Today's New York Times has a story which I cannot see as anything other than a First Amendment Rights abuse waiting to happen. In Iowa and other states, agriculture industries are looking to ban photographs and videos that depict their facilities in unflattering lights:

A bill before the Iowa legislature would make it a crime to produce, distribute or possess photos and video taken without permission at an agricultural facility. It would also criminalize lying on an application to work at an agriculture facility “with an intent to commit an act not authorized by the owner.”

In other words, folks in Iowa are getting nervous about footage of their animal abuses going public, in case they lose money over it. 

As an animal rights activist, part of me is invigorated that the ethics of factory farming are finally coming into question. If factory owners are worried enough to try to get legislation passed in their favor, there must be some media attention driving the bill.

Mostly, though, I am shocked that the First Amendment isn't a more major part of this conversation. If you take pictures of abused animals while undercover as a meatpacker, it's appropriate for you to lose your job. It is a blatant violation of your First Amendment rights to be sent to jail for it. 

Whistle-blowing is annoying only when you are doing something wrong (or when the whistle-blower deliberately edits the footage of his scandal to prove a dishonest point). But we have to trust the people of the United States enough to figure out for themselves what is truth and what is fiction.

Ultimately, that's what makes this Amendment so exceptional: it gives people the unique ability to think for themselves.

Education reform in America is one of those contentious points on which I disagree with most of the people I vote for, spend time with, and usually relate to. I agree wholeheartedly with Ravitch that the country's penchant for charter schools and programs like Teach for America is terribly dangerous. It has only been in my experience working for Teach for America that I have found myself looking very critically at the educational landscape, and I am afraid about what I see. America is privatizing education. What a drastic step backward.

Before copying my notes, two things: First, I don't hate all charter schools in the universe. The one I work at, for example, is my favorite place in New Orleans and contains my twenty-two favorite people in the world. I would fight tooth and nail to keep that school (and many schools like it ) open for years to come. It's a complicated issue, and I will be the first to admit that. Second, I am afraid I will be doing a disservice to the incomparable Ms. Ravitch if I merely copy my freehand notes on her wonderful speech. I highly, highly recommend taking the time to read her extraordinary review of Waiting for Superman -- a movie which I, for one, am boycotting.

Talking points from Diane Ravitch's "The Sad State of Education Reform"

• The public media has swooned over, as Naomi Klein puts it, "the shock doctrine" of education. Tis is the idea that everything is so completely terrible that nothing about education could possibly be fixed, and everything must be ripped apart and started again from scratch (just as Hurricane Katrina wiped the slate for education in New Orleans, which the country thinks was a godsend for public education). "People just like the idea of blowing things up, and don't ever think about fixing what was there," Ravitch said.
• Charter schools too regularly fall into the hands of big businesses. Three front page articles in the New York Times in the past six months have featured hedge fund moguls giving unprecedented amounts of money to charter schools. Billionaires treat their schools like a portfolio of investments, with the goal of privatization.
• Waiting for Superman contains scads of inacuracies and misconceptions, including distorted numbers (which Ravitch details superbly in her review, so I will not pour too much into them here). The movie claims that the problem with education has nothing to do with poverty, nothing to do with lack of resources, and everything to do with bad teachers never getting fired. Ravitch pointed out that the charters features in the movie have tremendous resources and funding. "Billionaires think that resources don't matter. Funny how resources never matter when you have lots of them," she said.
• No Child Left Behind asks all schools to turn their high-stakes testing scores around by 2014, or they will be shut down and everyone working there will be fired. Ravitch called this a "draconian punishment to meet an impossible task that no nation in the country has ever met in this timetable."
• Race to the Top asks states to compete for federal funding, rather than funding the children in the most high-needs areas. As a result, states will spend more money to fix their standards in order to meet RTT's rigorous expectations than they will ever receive if they win (one school in New York that Ravitch spoke about received only $26,000 -- not even a salary for one teacher -- after spending thousands to get it).
• When scores were finally reported for voucher schools in Milwaulkie, NAEP found that students made absolutely NO gains after being sent to a new school with a voucher.
• Charter schools break up communities and social networks, which are what keep so many schools alive.
• High Stakes tests are a totally inadequate way of judging teachers, because the measures are so completely flawed and the margin of error is so large. Because this is the ONLY way we rate teachers in this country, a fourteen-year teacher in Los Angeles who insistently took the most challenging students in his classroom, committed suicide after being publicly humiliated in the LA Times for his test scores.
• On the whole, charter schools do not outperform public schools. There are excellent charter schools and there are crappy charter schools, just like there are excellent public schools and terrible ones.
• Too often, charters succeed by exclusion. Disproportionate numbers of kids with special needs and disproportionate numbers of English Language Learners are admitted to charter schools, or are allowed to stay there.
• And so still, the lowest achieving kids are being pushed out and scraped away. And we continue to fail our children.

Unlike my notes here, Ravitch has decades of experience (and a political side-switch) under her belt, as well as oodles of research, to back up her theories. The power of the media (including our favorites) to usher charter schools into the spotlight makes ours a very unpopular position to be in. This makes it all more critical that we talk about it and research it and engage in debate on this topic. Education reform is the single most important issue in America today, and too many of us are blindly following the rhetoric of the richest few -- including, of course, the president. Mr. Obama, why are you so in favor of firing all our teachers? Leaders are not supposed to attack the people they are leading.

When you stop and think about it, that rumor doesn't make much sense anyway. Summer is not, in most places, the primary harvest season. Spring and fall bear the most fruit (and vegetables), so this idea that American schoolchildren of yore needed to stay at home and cart barrels of hay around in the aching sun is a little ridiculous. Actually, in the decades before the Civil War, American schoolchildren attended school from December to March and from mid-May to August, and that's when they got all that farm work done.

So where did the idea that kids should take a three-month breather in the middle of the calendar year come from? Well, in truth, it sprung from a desire to solve two big problems. The first, as great educational thinkers like Horace Mann put it, was the "overstimulation" of young minds. Too much work, they said, was bad for kids, and led to nervousness and other psychological disorders. The second was that in the days of merciless heat and nary-an-air conditioner, disease and overheating spread like wildfire in public schools, spurring very legitimate health concerns. Summer vacation was the clear solution. It made wonderful logical sense!

It's too bad, then, that an institution that arose to truly benefit children in the public school system has ended up hurting them so badly.

As an article in this week's Time Magazine accurately and necessarily spells out, "summer is among the most pernicious — if least acknowledged — causes of achievement gaps in America's schools." The statistical evidence for this is among the most compelling of any data that seeks to explain the reason why the achievement gap between the wealthiest students and the poorest students stretches so wide by the time kids graduate from high school.

Time created a wonderfully accessible graph based on data from a dense, comprehensive article published in the American Sociological Review about the lasting consequences of what the Review calls "the summer learning gap" (You can download the whole thing here if you want, but do so with the warning that the least complicated sentence in the study is 100 words long and contains the terms "seasonality" and "disaggregating"). The graph itself paints a more stunning picture of the widening achievement gap than any prerequisite writing I could muster here, so here's a reprint.

From Time Magazine, August 2, 2010, "The Case Against Summer Vacation"

The most interesting thing about this data is that it proves that kids from all socioeconomic backgrounds learn at essentially the same rate, but that kids from low socioeconomic backgrounds actually regress during the summer, which does not bode well for that widening achievement gap.

Of course, the achievement gap starts before children are in Kindergarten. A lot of research has been done on the subject, and there's ample knowledge out there explaining the manifold reasons behind the gap. To paraphrase, it all boils down to vocabulary words. The quantity (lots of different words versus a few select ones) and quality (kind and exploratory words versus angry and accusatory ones) used by family members of varying socioeconomic levels tend to be fewer and more negative in poorer households than in richer ones. As a result, an average three-year-old from a welfare family demonstrates an average active vocabulary of around 500 words compared to the 1000-word active vocabulary of a three-year-old from a richer household.[1]

 These studies, however, only explain why children enter the educational system at such different levels. For decades it's been argued that if children from backgrounds of poverty just work twice as hard in classrooms belonging to teachers who work twice as hard with twice the resources and twice the school hours as other, richer children, the gap will close, and everything will be OK. There's no evidence to support this idea. In most communities, such a model is not even possible. And the achievement gap is as wide as ever. By the end of twelfth grade, poor students are at least four years behind their wealthier peers in reading and math, according to Columbia Teacher's College. 

But as the graph in Time illustrates, students from poor backgrounds are working just as hard as their peers, and learning just as much -- during the school year. In the summer, when students and teachers are given three months to do whatever their hearts desire, rich kids get steadily smarter, while poor kids forget a huge chunk of what they learned the year before.

The reason for that is obvious. Rich parents have the opportunity to spend a little extra to send their children to an awesome summer day camp, specializing in exactly what their child is interested in. I remember going to an assortment of camps when I was little. The theatre workshops at the Northwest Children's Theatre, where we got to put on full-scale productions of "Mary Poppins" and "The Three Littl

e Pigs." There was Willowbrook Day Camp, which specialized in the arts, and kids got to pick whether they wanted to learn about the biodiversity of the streams in Tualatin, or discover the chemical make-up of photo development, or create authentic stained glass masterpieces in the barn out back. And OMSI Science Camp was always popular, too, with the obvious learning benefits.

In contrast, the students I worked with last year (all of whom qualify for free and reduced lunch) told me that this summer, they would be playing wrestling video games, watching Spongebob re-runs, or swimming in the inflatable pool at their cousin's house. And most of them were not excited about summer vacation at all.

Time suggests that fun, engaging summer programs be built in every city, for every child, so that all children of all socioeconomic backgrounds might grow and learn all summer long. It lists a bevy of summer enrichment programs aimed at low-income kids that are experiencing success all over the country -- including Summer Advantage, Redhound Enrichment Program, and a slew of others. The article suggests that programs like these are the end-all-be-all, touting that "we should embrace the fact that summer is the opposite of school to make it the season of true educational reform."

Maybe so. But in a culture of stifling economic resources, and an increasing amount of Americans believing that the privatization of education is the worst-case scenario road to success, it is wholly unrealistic to believe that the country can build elective educational programs for all the nation's poorest children -- remember, that population continues to grow by the day. Like all the educational initiatives kick-started in the last decade, banking on summer enrichment programs sets the country up to leave a large number of children behind.

On the other hand, forcing children to stay in school for grueling, long days for those extra three months is equally expensive and ludicrous. As Ron Fairchild, CEO of the National Summer Learning Association put it, nobody wants to be "the Grinch that stole summer vacation." Horace Mann was right to criticize the amount of time kids spend at school: everybody deserves a break -- especially kids.

But the National Center for Educational Statistics offers some interesting data that suggests that American students spend too much time in the classroom even with our long summer vacations. While American students spend only 180 calendar days at school, they receive a total of 1,080 instructional hours -- which are wildly disproportionate figures compared to schools in other industrialized countries. South Korea, for example, spends 204 days, but only 545 instructional hours at school. That's practically half the hours that our kids spend at school. And oh yeah, South Korea's math scores are about 100 points higher than ours.

The statistics are similar for other countries. Denmark spends 200 days in school, with 648 total instructional hours; Japan also has a 200-day school year, and they spend just 600 hours in the classroom. All these countries, by the way, have higher math scores than the U.S. And it's not a coincidence.

Kids in American classrooms spend, on average, 6.5 hours in school each day. At Extended School Year College Prep schools aimed at closing the achievement gap in low income communities, the school day can stretch to nine hours long (children at Kipp Believe in New Orleans get on the bus before sunrise and stay in class until 5 p.m. every weekday and every other Saturday).

As a teacher, I can tell you this much anecdotally: that's too much. You see kids start to fade around 2:30, and by 3 they just can't concentrate anymore. At that point, they still have an hour and a half left in the day before they can finally go home -- where they have another hour of homework.

You can't blame them for their exhaustion. It's too much to ask of any human being. In order to maximize productivity, people need a good balance of work and play. We need to get enough sleep at night, to eat good meals throughout the day, to engage in activities that bring us joy, like playing music or cooking. We need regular breaks and chances to sit and sort our thoughts out. In short, we need time to process.

I'm not just talking about kids, either: teachers are exhausted. Of the incoming teachers in education these days, more than half quit within their first five years of teaching. As a former Teach for America teacher, I have seen it first hand. Teachers burn out. They don't have time to plan, they don't have time to prepare, let alone time to sleep or eat healthily, and their lessons suffer, and their students suffer, and their own mental health suffers. It's just not sustainable.

What I propose is not more time in the classroom. I propose less. And it's time we do away with this antediluvian excuse of a break called "summer vacation." The American Education System needs a whole new calendar.

To start, school days should be radically shorter. Teachers need time to plan during the week, and kids need time to play. And instead of one long, regressive, three-month break, the calendar should allow for lots of shorter breaks, scattered all throughout the year. Two weeks for Christmas, one for Thanksgiving, and Spring Break; two weeks for summer, and lots of four- and five-day weekends scattered throughout so the number of instructional days we spend in classrooms actually varies only slightly in the end.

There is no better solution to ending the achievement gap, leveling the playing field, and making everyone better-rested, happier, and smarter overall. The answer is so obvious. I know we have these romanticized ideas about summer vacation (running on the beach, popsicles, soda shops, what have you), but face it: does anyone ever really need three months? The average out-of-town trip is about a week long, and an improved calendar could easily accommodate that. In fact, Americans could travel more, and during every season with a calendar that broke up the breaks.

A simple solution to a decades-old dilemma lies right in front of us. Now. Someone will just have the courage to stand up for the one thing American people claim to love but live to hate: Progressive, logical change.

[1] This information is shamelessly stolen from the following two unprecedented tomes of knowledge on the subject of children in poverty. I highly recommend both.

Hart, B. & Risley, T.R. (1995). Meaningful differences in the everyday experiences of young American children. Baltimore, MD: Brookes

Payne, R.K. (2005). A framework for understanding poverty (4^th ed.). Highlands, TX: Aha! Process, Inc. 

And Louisiana is, for the most part, united in its support of Mr. Feldman's ruling. The Picayune published an assortment of excerpts of reactions from various elected officials and representatives, which read a little like a page of raving reviews for Toy Story 3. Governor Bobby Jindal was perhaps the most outspoken in his enthusiasm:

"We absolutely agree with the judge's conclusion that the administration's six-month, or longer, shut down of deepwater drilling was 'arbitrary and capricious.' Not only does the moratorium threaten thousands of direct jobs in our state, it also jeopardizes many other industries that supply our oil and gas industry and the entire communities that depend on them."

Supportive cheers were heard throughout Louisiana. Democrat Mary Landrieu urged the President not to appeal the ruling. David Vitter said that Obama's moratorium was "wreaking havoc" on jobs in Louisiana. The Picayune itself has repeatedly declared the moratorium reckless, and published an unsigned editorial applauding Judge Feldman for cutting "straight to the heart of the administration's flawed reasoning." And Representative Steve Scalise went as far as to say that "(T)oday's ruling confirms that the ban was a knee-jerk reaction that ignored facts and science."

I am confused. What facts and science were being ignored in the ban of offshore drilling? The fact that 60,000 barrels of oil are flowing every day into the Gulf of Mexico, threatening to obliterate some of the most beautiful and delicate ecosystems in the United States? Or that the CEOs of other oil companies across the globe use the same practices as BP did, and will continue to use them until more regulations are put in place to ensure safety?

Or are the people of Louisiana the ones ignoring the most glaring, impossible-to-ignore fact out there? The fact is, the people want change.

The latest New York Times/ CBS News poll found staggering statistics on Americans' curbing appetite for oil:

Overwhelmingly, Americans think the nation needs a fundamental overhaul of its energy policies, and most expect alternative forms to replace oil as a major source within 25 years.

While Gulf Coast residents -- who benefit from oil industry jobs -- largely favor increased offshore drilling, the majority of Americans think the risk of offshore drilling is just too great, and the country should pursue other energy options. And more overwhelmingly, 65 percent of all respondents to the poll said that they felt the temporary shut-down of offshore drilling was a good idea.

Now, understandably, when it's not your job or family or home or livelihood at stake, it is much easier to bow in favor of a full overhaul of the way we fundamentally live our lives. Which is why Gulf Coast residents should not be bemoaning the six-month ban on unsafe offshore drilling -- they should be shouting out that the President has not gone far enough.

The same poll found that 54 percent of respondents do not think that President Obama has a clear vision of job creation in America. Stopping something is not enough. It is time for us to start something, too.

Bob Herbert's editorial yesterday brutally but aptly reminded Americans that "We've blown so many enormous opportunities over the past several years." He reminded us of failures in Iraq, of failures during Hurricane Katrina, and of the multiple failures that resulted in the Great Recession that continues to plague our economy. And on the oil spill in the Gulf, Herbert has this to say:

The oil catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico, as horrible as it has been, was yet another opportunity. In his address to the nation from the Oval Office last week, President Barack Obama could have laid out a dramatic new energy policy for the U.S., calling on every American to do his or her part to help us escape the insidious, nonstop destruction that is the result of our obsessive reliance on fossil fuels.

He chose not to.

As a nation, we are becoming more and more accustomed to a sense of helplessness. We no longer rise to the great challenges before us. It's not just that we can't plug the oil leak, which is the perfect metaphor for what we've become. We can't seem to do much of anything.

True. Dire, and true. Really, yesterday's poll suggests that Americans are just tired. They are tired of baby steps. They are tired of centrist politics. They are tired of the sluggish trudging towards a distant idea called "change."

In a letter published in the Picayune today, a frustrated woman from Hartford, Connecticut named Pam Bergren wrote, "I am going on record right now: If another tragedy occurs, I do not want to see one single person in the Gulf of Mexico area crying and moaning on TV about how they have lost their water for the next 30 years, their wildlife, and their livelihood. Gulf Coast leaders are begging for more trouble, so don't cry to us for donations or volunteers." Her frustration is not unfounded. A problem this vast exists as a catalyst for radical change.

Reversing the moratorium would be a back step toward the kind of change that Americans -- and even Gulf Coast Residents -- are aching for. No, we cannot afford to leave tens of thousands of oil workers jobless. So job creation must come in the form of new energy jobs and initiatives that will finally, finally move this country forward.

Certainly, those who have lost their jobs and livelihoods as fishermen and shrimpers, probably for the rest of their lives, will be counted among them.

And we might as well also extend that arm to embrace the roughly 20,000 oil service workers who are (momentarily) unemployed or relocated as Obama figures out this whole off-shore drilling thing.

We can probably count as victims the coastal residents whose scenic backyard wetland landscapes will be desolate and black by August.

But consider the following. I took a class of seven-year-olds to see a collection of Joan Mitchell paintings at the Newcomb Art Center at Tulane. Her work is abstract and chaotic, depicting mostly environmental images in splashes of color and wild, uncontrolled lines. They're enormous paintings, taking up entire walls and multiple canvases per image. The curator of the exhibit asked my class what they thought about when they saw the largest piece in the museum. Only one girl raised her hand, and she said, "I see lots and lots of water, and an alligator who is dying, and there's black oil underneath the water, and it's coming to the top." Does BP pay that seven-year-old girl, who will never know another version of the wetlands she grew up loving?

And maybe it's just me, but it seems the most immediately tragic thing about the newspapers these days is the unending collection of photographs, from every press in the country, of the collapsed bodies of birds, crushed and suffocated by clumpy black crude. Now. How do you pay reparations to a pelican?

However, $20 billion is something. Twenty billion dollars suggests that great beasts take great falls, and we must keep that in mind whenever we allow uncontrolled power to go unchecked. In a very well-written editorial this morning, the New York Times commented,

Given the size of the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, we suspect that $20 billion may not be enough to compensate all of the people whose lives and futures have been derailed by the spill. But it’s a good start.

Yes. A good start. BP has begun to address the needs of the "small people" (in what is sure to become an infamous comment, BP Chairman Cal-Henric Svanberg said yesterday, "People say that large oil companies don't care about the small people. But we care. We care about the small people."). Now it is time for BP to start addressing the environmental implications of this spill with far more profound aggression.

The $20 billion they have promised to the (assumed) human victims of the spill should be matched to combat with renewed zeal the impending environmental catastrophe that has only just begun to wreak its havoc. More workers, more boom, more blockades, more research, more land to protect more relocated animals -- all are needed in the upcoming days of much, much more surfacing oil. BP's pockets aren't empty yet, after all.

On a separate, but related note, the New York Times should be congratulated for finally running a front page story on similar spills in other parts of the world. The article spells out horror stories from the Niger Delta, Gio Creek, and Akwa Ibom (among other third-world worlds), about spills far worse than this that continue to gush and poison the lives of native people decades after they took place:

Perhaps no place on earth has been as battered by oil [than Nigeria], experts say, leaving residents here astonished at the nonstop attention paid to the gusher half a world away in the Gulf of Mexico. It was only a few weeks ago, they say, that a burst pipe belonging to Royal Dutch Shell in the mangroves was finally shut after flowing for two months: now nothing living moves in a black-and-brown world once teeming with shrimp and crab.

None of this will come as a surprise to the oil-savvy few who have long controlled these parts of the globe. And it makes sense to them that the Gulf Coast oil spill is such a tremendous snafu. It's simple: American lives are simply worth more, and so more attention should be paid to them. But for the rest of us, who have existed in relative ignorance (or at least intermitted passivity) of the enormous impact our hunger for oil has on the earth we love, a veil has been lifted. As we watch our own lives crumble, it grows impossible not to think of those whose lives have been crumbling for decades, just to keep the fat cats comfortable.