10-hour school day?

Democratic Presidential candidate Kamala Harris may not have any children of her own, but that hasn’t kept her from proposing big plans for your children.

According to her Family Friendly Schools Act, Harris wants to extend the school day to 6 p.m. to align it with the work day and better support working families. Her proposal would also offer extracurricular summer programs when school is not in session.

Figuring out what do with your kids once they get out of school around 3 p.m. until your work ends is a challenge for families. But longer school days is not the answer, and we should be worried about Harris’s plan, according to teacher veteran Rebecca Friedrichs during her recent interview on Tucker Carlson Tonight.

“We should look to the past. Let’s take the free lunch program we have in our schools. It started off being pushed by the unions and their friends for poor children. Well, 28 years ago I had two students in my class on free lunch. Today, almost every single child is on free breakfast and free lunch. So, what the unions are trying to do is they are pushing something called community schools. And in these community schools, we are giving children free health care, we are giving them free food, free emotional support, and by the way free political indoctrination. And so, if these unions and their friends, their politicians, get their way, they would like our schools to be open 24/7. They want to replace the family, families raising their own children, with the State through union controlled, government run schools. That’s dangerous. That’s communism when you think about it.

These politicians are not looking out for the best interests of children, or families, or teachers like myself. They are looking out for themselves, for power. And they really want to undermine our republic. And they are doing that through our schools, starting as young as preschool.

Even liberal Whoopi Goldberg is hesitant to accept Harris’s plan, referring to it as “institutionalizing” kids, according to Fox News. Plus, should we be trying to solve the issue of work hours with education policy? If parents are overworked, stressed and exhausted from their day, is the answer really to put our children through a similar long, exhausting day? According to Gracy Olmstead,

Children offer long-term benefits to both society and the economy, but present a lot of short-term, immediate costs for both parents and companies. It is therefore vital that politicians like Ms. Harris reorient their view of economic goods to transcend work productivity and to include human dignity, family and community.

Ms. Harris argues that her proposal would serve to “modernize the school schedule,” but it’s chained to work norms that many Americans already detest. Irregular shift and on-call work often put an excessive strain on family life. Overwork leads to stress and poor health, yet does not actually increase productivity. In contrast, companies that have implemented even small changes in favor of flexibility and choice — the ability to work remotely, or to trade, drop, or add shifts — have enjoyed tangible benefits.

We need solutions to the work-school schedule discrepancy that address both sides of this problem. A solution like Ms. Harris’s, which makes school schedules longer but ignores the role of corporations, will not help.