I actually think teachers shouldn't have entire summers off. That's a great time to review teaching methods and materials, prepare curriculum, hold teaching conferences, and other things that would free them up during the school year to focus more on class time. Trying to do those things after teaching hundreds of students all day long is really difficult. It's amazing to me that teachers even manage to do as well as they do.

Moving to yearlong schooling with a shorter summer break and a longer winter break, plus longer breaks between each quarter would be better though. Students who aren't exposed to reading and writing English at home wouldn't slowly fall behind year after year due to the long summer vacations.

I have to agree with you though. The policy makers do more harm than good, but the truth is that by setting some bureaucratic benchmark, they feel they can wash their hands of any responsibility on the matter without spending more money on education.

The problem with these standardized benchmarks is that they only punish students and schools for cumulative educational deficiencies instead of allowing them to slow down and address them, so as students go from grade to grade, they're gradually robbed of the education they should have had.

I think the current educational goal of having all students meet some standard benchmark of academic achievement is flawed. Instead, we should simply try teaching students as much as they can learn at the pace at which each student learns best, or better yet, teach them a love of learning and the ability to continue learning on their own. If that means slowing down the curriculum for some students, then so be it. It's better that they master what skills they can in the given time they have in school than to force them into more and more difficult material with an ever poorer and poorer foundation to work off of until they give up.

Honestly, we should only provide standard individual benchmarks to assess where an individual student stands in their development so that teachers can adjust the curriculum to match each student regardless of how well they know that student or where they came from. And then we should also give teachers the freedom, time, and flexibility to adapt to their students' individual needs.

The way it is now, we force teachers to treat students like products in an assembly line. The benchmark-based punishment and reward system we have now even incentivizes this treatment of students. It's sad.