Blame Tom Sawyer: Americans have a skewed view of childhood and summertime. We associate the school year with oppression and the summer months with liberty. School is regimen; summer is creativity. School is work and summer is play. But when American students are competing with children around the globe who may be 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.
Deprived of healthy stimulation, millions 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 is among the most pernicious ”” if least acknowledged ”” causes of achievement gaps in America’s schools….
That is assuming these kids are learning anything in the 9 months they are in school. If they are not, then another 4 to 8 weeks is not going to do anything.
O just great, if nine months is not enough for der weasels how about a whole year. Summer vacation is the only time parents have to more time with the kids, expose them to ideas other that forced feed by the public education establishment, and a time not to be just another brick in the wall. God forbid if like many parents like in my church hold vocation bible schools or send them to summer camp. What next how about we just do way with parenting, just ship the kids to an education facility until 18.
Skewed? I support my local Boy Scout council’s efforts to expand their programs among youth in my city. I think that being able to spend a week or two climbing mountains, swimming or portaging, or just just doing all the things boys and Boy Scouts do won’t hurt their academic education one whit. So, instead of pumping more school into those tired heads why don’t we try to give them something different during the annual fair-weather break?
In Raleigh, NC, one option is year round school – basically 4 periods of instruction followed by a 3 week break. The 2009-10 schedule:
Class July 7 to September 4, Off September 7 to September 25,
Class September 28 to November 25, Off December to Jan 4,
Class January 4 to March 5, Off to March 29,
Class March 29 to June 8, Off to July 6.
The parents I have talked to about the schedule like it and think their children learn more. Some churches and other groups plan learning/fun activities for the breaks to help with enrichment and child care.
Until it struck me just how much the edukators of today long to indoctrinate children rather than teach them year round school made sense to me. But now? No way.
It came as a surprise to me to find out about your very long summer break. We were concerned enough about our six weeker — which also leads to kids losing ground. The idea of a full summer in this day and age is rather beyond belief. It made sense when the US was an agricultural society — but that was well over a century ago.
It is not just the long vacation — it is also the lack of short ones that worried me about your system. Our two week breaks at regular intervals DO help the kids to learn — particularly at the younger ages when school is actually hard work for them.
The NC system sounds very much more like ours — though we do have one long break over the end of the year. Otherwise it is about 10 weeks on, 2 weeks off — with slight variations so that Easter is captured by one of the 2 week breaks.
I know parents of children in the year round schools (K-8) here in Wake County, NC. They love it, and the kids are happy. There is still plenty of time for family vacations as they will schedule all children in the same family on the same “track.” It’s a bit more complicated than the schedule Tom Rightmeyer posted — the school has teachers and children there most weeks of the year, but the “tracks” rotate so not all students are off at the same time. My neighbor is sending his children to a private “year round” whose schedule looks much like the one Tom posted.
When I was still teaching high school, the other Master Teachers and I proposed breaking the academic year into 11 week segments. By trial and error, we concluded that teaching units tended to fall naturally into ten-eleven week packages. The breaks between these units were the equivalent of summer. More important, the break between units (a) gave teachers substantive time top prepare the next unit, something they now lack (and have always lacked) and (b) shrunk the forgettingtime for students substantially. This was especially true if review testing took place as soon as the next unit began.
As to forgetting time, by simple inquiry and testing we discovered that most students forgot almost immediately what had happened in the class they had just left. Since students had little reason to pay real attention, the substance of the class evaporated instantaneously. Only the knowledge that a test was occurring the next day had any real effect on their willingness to recall. Of course, we discovered that the very bright kids remembered a lot more even if they had no interest in doing so. their memories worked involuntarily, so to speak.
The whole concept, carefully worked out, died the death immediately. Parents were fjurious to think we had taken summer away from mere children (who need a whole summer to recover from the miseries of school), had interfered with the parental vacation plans, and destroyed summer employment for the kids. The administration looked upon this plan with the same interest as they would have granted a ponzi scheme. This changed everything, and change was simply more than they could contemplate.
Nevertheless, this year round school was sound educationally and financially. It is a program that charter schools should adopt. However, NOTHING will improve the school system until the adolescent culture is altered and a new set of more rational goals established. When there is little at stake – except for the high pressure parents who produce high pressure students for Ivhy League Schools, and there are whole towns like this -students will continue to make a mockery of Race To The Top and all other forms of governmental pompous, expensive, interference. Larry
I would just add a few points to the discussion here. Firstly, the case is often made in favor of more year round schooling that we no longer live in an agrarian society, and therefore do not need summer vacations. This is both true and false. It is true in that a vast majority of Americans live in suburban to urban areas and don’t farm, however, there are still sizable swaths of “flyover country” that are agrarian based. People do live there, and those people do need summer help from their children. (I was one of them back in the 80’s and 90’s).
While it is true that most of America is a service based economy (as opposed to an agrarian or industrial), service economies have just as much need for summer/seasonal labor. Public pools, tourist areas with tourist attractions, summer youth programs through various organizations, etc., all rely on summer help, mostly high school kids just as much as agrarian based economies had need of summer/seasonal help. So, to make the argument that we must change to accommodate the modern economy does not necessarily logically follow.
Secondly, I believe parents are more hostile toward school systems wanting to move to a more year round model because the track record of schools whittling away the summer break is nearly universal. Gone are the days when summer break ran from Memorial Day to Labor Day. Most schools go past Memorial day and inch back the start more and more until some schools start school in nearly the 1st of August. For football players, that makes summer pre-season practice start nearly after the 4th of July. Had schools not set this pattern, I think parents might be a little more accepting of the promises that these “terms” followed by month or longer breaks in between would be honored.
Likewise, getting rid of a long summer break wrecks havoc with recruiting young college kids to become teachers. Certainly teachers for most parts of the country don’t do what they do for the money. The long summer break is the one job perk that attracted many of the people I knew when I was minoring in education into the field. As one bumper sticker I saw on a teacher’s car once read, “Three reasons to teach: June, July, and August!” Perhaps that is not the most healthy attitude, but in a job that has little material benefits and is not thought highly of in most social circles, is taking out the major selling point (i.e. a long summer) a good way of recruiting new teachers into the field? I think not, but I know people would disagree.
Finally, I would, in part, agree with Larry’s comment above. Until something substantive happens to change what I call the “Idiot Culture” of teenagers (i.e. its chic to be stupid, and uncool to appear to be smart), it does not really matter, in my opinion, whether most school systems are on the traditional summer break model or not. If the vast majority of students are too lazy to actually read a book and have no interest in anything but getting out of school so they can either work or go to college, the whole concept of trying to rearrange the school year is a task of rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. If kids view school as incarceration and are bent on not learning anything, then it does not matter whether they have a 2 week break or a 12 week break.
# 9, Well said! I’m 73. What I remember of the wonderful long summers was time to play, read and day-dream. Also it was free time to “play school” with my friends; I was usually designated “teacher” and we very conscientiously replicated the lessons we had learned in school and had wild discussions about what each of us thought had really happened. I spent much of my summer between grades 4 & 5 catching the new kid on the block up to the level that I was in bible & catechism so that he would not be embarassed when school started…I had recruited him for the Lutheran School that I attended.
My own children thoroughly enjoyed the long summers also. They spent a lot of time reading the World Book Encyclopedia and quizzing each other on content. Another game they invented was for one to find a word in the dictionary and read out the most obscure meaning; the other three had to guess the word. They are all well read adults and good teachers, though only one is emplyed as such.
I find no reason to push kids academically; they will learn or not learn based on their interest in the subject matter and their ability to learn. It isn’t all that hard to pique a child’s curiosity and turn them towards being self-learners. Yes, I’m a retired teacher, k – grad school.
Frances Scott