I just saw a story about Kathy Cox proposing an idea to push the start of school back even further in August. As I understand this, this is so scores from retesting of our kids could be submitted to federal officials and prove our kids were meeting at least minimum standards. Starting school in mid-August does not allow time for these new scores to collected and submitted.

I have several issues with this so let's start with moving the school year to the end of August.

From my own personal experience, I grew up in a system which started the day after Labor Day and ended right around Memorial Day. Somewhere around the first weeks of August, I started to get bored. We also never had long holiday breaks and that is something I wish we had as just maybe more of my family would have gotten together.

The most obvious - If we move the start of the school year back 2 weeks then we either have to push the end of school back 2 weeks (to mid-June) or those 2 weeks have to be taken from somewhere in the year.

As I understand it (please correct me if I am wrong) but those standardized tests can only given after a number of class days have passed (let us just say for fun, 150 of the 180 class days). If all we do is push back the start of school then all we did was delay those tests for 2 weeks!
I'm sorry, I am just a dumb engineer but are we not in the same boat? The only way for this to work would be to have the tests at the same time and that means taking 10 vacation days away during the year. So, where do you want to lose them?

We should not be relying on new test scores in order to prove to federal officials our kids meet the minimum education standards. Our kids should meet those standards the very first go around. If our state leaders feel this is acceptable, we have a serious problem (& it isn't with our children).