For some time now, I've been reading articles or references to research that indicate the significance of this problem, the possibilities to remedy it, and the barriers to getting that done. From a 2010 Time magazine article:
[W]hen American students are competing with children around the world, who are in many cases spending four weeks longer in school each year, larking through summer is a luxury we can't afford. What's more, for many children--especially children of low-income families--summer is a season of boredom, inactivity and isolation. Kids can't go exploring if their neighborhoods aren''t safe. It's hard to play without toys or playgrounds or open spaces. And Tom Sawyer wasn't expected to care for his siblings while Aunt Polly worked for minimum wage.
Dull summers take a steep toll, as researchers have been documenting for more than a century. Deprived of healthy stimulation, mllions of low-income kids lose a significant amount of what they learn during the school year. Call it "summer learning loss," as the academics do, or "the summer slide," but by any name summer vacation is among the most pernicious--if least acknowledged--causes of achievement gaps in American schools. Children with access to high-quality experiences keep exercising their minds and bodies at sleepaway camp, on family vacations, in museums and libraries and enrichment classes. Meanwhile, children without resources languish on street corners or in front of glowing screens. By the time the bell rings on a new school year, the poorer kids have fallen weeks, if not months, behind. And even well-off American students may be falling behind their peers around the world.
--"The Case Against Summer Vacation," by David Von Drehle, Time (8.2.10)That's the story, and the evidence is pretty strong. But do not take from this that children of better-off families who enjoy more active, interesting or challenging intellectual experiences in the summer, do not suffer from the same effect; it is just less pronounced. And children from better-off families are also more likely to have parents who are college graduates who expect and focus on academic success. They encourage summer reading and learning experiences. Their home environment is more likely to be a source of intellectual stimulation. But that still doesn't compensate for an unavoidable measure of "summer learning loss" for them too, as the months-long summer vacation distances them from last year's studies. And that level of learning loss likely contributes to the performance advantage of students in the year-round education systems of many foreign countries.
But let's consider some of the findings that contribute to the case against summer vacations. More from the Time article:
The problem of summer vacation, first documented in 1906, compounds year after year. What starts as a hiccup in a 6-year-old's education can be a crisis by the time that child reaches high school. After collecting a century's woth of academic studies, summer-learning expert Harris Cooper, now at Duke University, concluded that, on average, all students lose about a month of progress in math skills each summer, while low-income students slip as many as three months in reading comprehension, compared with middle-income students. Another major study, by a team at Johns Hopkins University, examined more than 20 years of data meticulously tracking the progress of students from kindergarten through high school.
The conclusiuon: while students made similar progress during the school year, regardless of economic status, the better-off kids held steady or continued to make progress during the summer--but disadvantages students fell back. By the end of grammar school, low-income students had fallen nearly three grade levels behind, and summer was the biggest culprit. By ninth grade, summer learning loss could be blamed for roughly two-thirds of the achievement gap separating income groups.So, it's a no-brainer, right? We need only balance and extend the school year for all American students; we just take some pages from the school calendars of the most competitive countries, right? Uh, no. There are a number of forces arrayed against a year-round school calendar, including middle- and higher-income families. And then there are teachers, unions, and financial constraints, as well. No, this is not an easy sell, not broadly, not right away it seems. And in most places it is not even possible right now.
But the experience and experiemental research in many private and charter school environments have led more and more public school systems to ask the serious questions, and many to make the commitment to change to a year-round calendar. A recent case in point was Indianapolis IN:
Two days before Thanksgiving, the Indianapolis School Board will make a decision sure to heat up discussion around the turkey in just about every home with young children. That's when board members will vote on whether to adopt year-round classes. If the board approves the measure, Indianapolis pupils would go to school in cycles of eight to 10 weeks, with three to five weeks off after each, throughout the year. That would put them among the growing number of children around the nation who are going to school on so-called balanced schedules.
Indianapolis Superintendent Eugene White said the schedule would add 20 class days every year, giving pupils more time to learn and shorter periods away from the classroom to forget what they've studied. For both teachers and students, the shorter but more frequent breaks will "give them some kind of relief and (allow them to) come back more invigorated," he said. That's important in a district criticized for low standardized-test scores and high dropout rates, said board member Annie Roof, because "what we are doing isn't working."
10 percent by 2012?
If the board approves, Indianapolis will hop on a bandwagon that's quietly rolling across the education landscape. Ten years ago, according to Education Department statistics, about 1.5 million public school children went to class on a "balanced schedule"--usually shorthanded as YRE, for "year-round education." Six years ago, that number was up to 2 million. By 2008, nearly 2.5 million pupils were on a YRE plan. But since then, some of the nation's biggest districts have adopted or expanded YRE in their facilities, notably the Chicago Public Schools, and others--including Houston and Indianapolis--could join them next year. By 2012, education groups estimate, more than 5 million pupils--about 10 percent of all children enrolled in American public schools--could be going to school year-round.
'We don't have them here enough'
"Society can't keep saying to schools 'have every kid perform better' when we don't have them here enough," said Charlie Kyte, president of the Minnesota Association of School Administrators. A few Minnesota districts have adopted balanced calendars, and many others are studying the idea.
In Indianapolis, the difference is clear in the small number of schools that are already year-round, said Margaret Silk, a fourth-grade teacher at one of them, Ernie Pyle Elementary School. There, 70 percent of students from low-income families pass their state assessment tests, higher than the Indiana average for all students and well above the average for lower-income students. Silk said that under the traditional calendar, it took six weeks of reviewing the previous year's lessons just to get her students back up to speed. "In this calendar, oh, my goodness, (it takes) maybe two weeks at most," she said.
---"Year-round school gains ground around U.S.: Shorter but more frequent vacations could slow 'spring slide'," by Alex Johnson, msnbc.com (10.27.2010)If then, so many private initiatives have successfully ventured into summer learning programs for the willing, and some public systems or schools have also successfully embarked on more year-round calendars as well, why wouldn't Indianapolis follow suit? After all, it has worked well, just as the research indicated it would. And more broadly, why isn't year-round education taking root even faster? From the msnbc.com article:
For one thing, it's not just pupils who don't like the idea of sitting in class all day in the middle of summer. Public opinion polling has consistently shown that a majority of American adults oppose mandatory summer classes, too.The most recent poll, by Rasmussen Reports in July, found that adults opposed a year-round calendar by 63 percent to 31 percent--about the same ratio as other surveys taken in recent years. (The Rasmussen poll reported a margin of sampling error of 3 percentage points.)
Specifically, 71 percent of adults — parents and non-parents alike — said in the most recent poll that children learn valuable life lessons during long summer breaks, by going to camp or by taking temporary jobs. And at public hearings recently in Indianapolis, some parents complained that summer classes would complicate their family vacation plans.
But the big objection boils down to this: "Show me the money," Randy J. Greene, superintendent of schools in Paducah, Ky., said when the idea was raised there after Obama's comments last month. Year-round buses and lunches and after-school tutoring programs cost more, Greene said, and parents are already unhappy about a 4 percent increase in property taxes to cover the $300,000 cut in state funding that hit the district this year.Nevertheless, in November 2010, Indianapolis approved implementation of the proposed "balanced," year-round public school calendar. Progress continues. But for the majority of those other places where parents, unions and budgets deny full-scale YRE calendars, why not take a page out of some of the private ventures and at least provide an extended school year--a summer session--for those less well-off students? Well, first, it is unlikely that a school system could or would require attendance by one income group that is not required of all. And then there are still the budget issues.
Even if parents and unions reverse field--and they likely will, eventually--the financial crisis, and the resulting stress on state and municipal budgets, has caused many school systems like Paducah, KY, to delay consideration, and others to delay implementation of plans already approved. Las Vegas provides an example of the latter. From the same msnbc.com article:
The cost concern is playing out differently in Las Vegas, where the Clark County School Board--facing a $30 million shortfall in its budget thanks to reduced state funding and declining property tax revenue--voted in April to abandon a year-round calendar and return to the traditional three-month summer break. The new calendar was projected to save the district about $13.8 million.
Marcie McDonald, principal of Squires Elementary School, said she understood that the board had to try to balance its smaller budget. But she said doing so would come at a real cost. Ninety-two percent of McDonald's pupils are Latino, and for two-thirds of them, English is their second language. "Our little ones are learning language," McDonald said. "They go home and listen to their primary language of their home for three months and come back. And having not used English for three months--that poses another concern or problem."So, if the progress continues, if the positive experience of some schools and school systems is strengthening the case for the rest, extraordinary budgetary constraints are clearly slowing that progress. The question is, when will the financial situation right itself? But also, when will the majority of Americans recognize that the individual, community and national interest in a more effective, more competitive educational system calls for embracing a balanced, year-round school calendar? As we've seen, the realization that well-off students would also benefit, albeit to a lesser extent than the least well-off, often does not appear a compelling consideration to their parents. And issues of discrimination or differential treatment would likely deny any initiative to require an extended school year only for those less well-off students. In some of those cases, might alternatives approaches eventually prove availing?
In those more challenging situations, another strategy might be to approach the challenge one step at a time. A summer session might first be offered on a voluntary basis, but where teachers and counselors are required to make clear to all families and students the educational and competitve advantages of attending--especially in terms of competitive job markets and admissions to colleges (and in appropriate cases, performance against international standards). The advantages would be particularly emphasized to those families and students most in need; but the competitive advantage would also be pointed out to those most aspiring students. As a combination of the most responsible and ambitious students from all income groups increasingly attend the summer session, other middle- and upper-income students will likely be drawn in as well--out of concern for falling behind competitively, if nothing else. Then there would likely result the strongest de facto case for requiring summer session attendance by all students. Where appropriate, it may provide another way to get from here to there.
In closing, let me assure you I understand that year-round education is but one of several issue to be addressed in improving American education. We need more able, well-trained, effective and committed teachers. And yes, self-serving teachers unions will have to be denied a material role in matters of education policy. But a more balanced year-round school calendar is nonetheless an important contributing problem. And if we are to more effectively address the higher-income, lower-income performance gap, while advancing the competitive learning of higher-income students as well, then all school systems will eventually have to find the civic will to require year-round education--and the means to finance it. It should be coming to your town, and mine too. It has to.
Read more:
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,2005654-1,00.html
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39748458/ns/us_news-life/
Copyright Gregory E. Hudson 2011
First written: April 2011
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