Reply #23: I'm truly sorry that you had such an

[SheilaT]

unpleasant experience when you moved.

I moved across the country before the start of my freshman year in high school, and had no trouble adapting. There are plenty of kids who change schools for whom it is not a disaster. It's not realistic that every family stay put the entire time their children are growing up. We moved from one state to another when my children were young, so my oldest experienced two different public schools. Then, several years later, for very personal reasons we moved them to an independent school, rather than stay in the public one. They did just fine.

We do need a better national school system so that there's not such a vast difference between schools, I agree. Unfortunately, there's enormous resistance to that at many levels, including, unfortunately, teachers.

The AP classes are taught to a national standard, but only a relative minority of students get to take them.

I honestly don't see how a long summer break in any way mitigates the sometimes large differences between school systems, so I'm not completely sure exactly why you are defending the long break, when there are other large negatives, mainly how much the kids forget over the long break. And I honestly don't think anyone anywhere is seeing the long break as a really good way of allowing families to move. There are some major differences across the country in the actual start times -- some schools still go with the after Labor Day, some as early as the beginning of August, an entire month earlier. Any family moving who doesn't pay close attention to that could have real problems.