First bell blues: Where did the summer go?

West Lafayette, Indiana Journal and Courier
8/15/05

Back to school? Today?

The school's slow creep into August has quit being such a novelty and more of a tradition for kids who've known nothing else.

But call us old-fashioned, just the same. We miss the days when late August still meant sleeping in, days at the pool and just the very beginning of reluctant back-to-school shopping. (Awww, Mom, do I have to go buy pants ...?)

Where Aug. 15 once meant the last throes of summer, Aug. 15 now means the first bell.

West Lafayette students, who return to class this morning, helped lobby for today's early first day of school. Going early means West Side students will finish their first semester before the winter break. So West Lafayette schools earn a pass.

But what about the rest, including Tippecanoe School Corp., which opens Tuesday and which was a pioneer in dragging the school year into the thick of the air conditioning season? Too early, we say.

Indiana's education establishment has to take some of the blame. The move to an earlier school start date goes back nearly a decade to Indiana's switch in the ISTEP test time from spring to fall. With so little time to get their charges back up to speed and ready for the state's standardized test -- and for the hammer if scores are poor -- school districts have an incentive to start the year as early as possible.

Gov. Mitch Daniels has been pushing the state legislature to move the ISTEP test back to the spring. The first-year governor has practically ridiculed lawmakers who can't see the sense of testing kids on what they've learned this year rather than on what they were supposed to remember from the previous grade. Daniels has a point, though moving the test remains low on Indiana's real education priorities.

Still, if he wants to make a real case for spring testing, he ought to look at all of those buses headed for schools this week, start calculating the August air conditioning bills in each one and then factoring in the continued loss of the summer vacation. School is open now, in large part, because of ISTEP testing right around the corner. The governor should use that to his advantage.