Hi, readers. I’m glad the recent political messages seem to be garnering attention. This post is for the grieving, especially those teachers in classrooms that have spun off the rails and entered an outraged political limbo where pain trumps academics.

Every so often this blog addresses the much greater challenges that exist in certain zip codes, the lack of supplies and hope that pull down struggling students, students whose whole experience of education would be much more positive, illuminating and professionally advantageous if they merely lived twenty miles down the road.

Longtime readers will know that I favor eliminating the 180-day school year in favor of whatever school year works. If students in District X are beating the state tests consistently, and easily going on to college after high school, then 180 days may be all those students need. But when District Y keeps “failing” those tests and students from District Y mostly need remedial education to survive community college, I’d scrap that 180-day year in favor of 220 or 240 days, and I’d consider a longer school day. We keep trying to find magic educational bullets, but no substitute exists for learning time. Students who are behind need time to catch up. No secret educational “quality time” makes up for the vocabulary and learning deficits that dog children in our inner cities, for example. Those kids who have fallen behind should be given whatever extra days and hours are required to catch up.

Eduhonesty: Here’s my wincing observation. I have watched the kids marching with their “No Trump!” signs. For the most part, those kids came from larger districts that rank among the academically struggling or fallen. In the prosperous suburbs near me that always beat those state tests, no one left a classroom to my knowledge.

I understand grief and anger. I understand taking a day or two off to process what may seem like a huge betrayal by the system, especially when the school staff and parents have made their political views clear, and students saw an election result that reflected none of the adult views in their daily lives.

But we only have 180 days in many of our school districts. Two days grieving is 1/90th of a school year. Five days grieving is 1/36th of a school year. America’s academically less-fortunate students don’t have 1/36th of a school year to spare. When the political discussion preempts language arts or mathematics, the gap between our strongest and weakest districts only grows wider.