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Do We Need a Longer School Year?
Hugh Pickens writes "Jennifer Davis writes that while summer holds a special place in our hearts: lazy afternoons, camping at the lake, warm evenings gazing at the moon, languid summers can be educationally detrimental, with most youth losing about two months of grade-level equivalency in math computational skills over the summer and students from low-income families falling even further behind. A consensus is building that the traditional nine-month school year might be a relic of the 20th century that has no place in an increasingly competitive global work force and an analysis of charter schools in New York reveals that students are most likely to outperform peers if they attend schools that are open at least 10 days more than the conventional year. What of the idea that summer should be a time of respite from the stresses of school? There are two wrong notions wrapped up in this perspective. The first is that somehow summer is automatically a magical time for children but as one fifth-grader, happy to be back at school in August, declared, 'Sometimes summer is really boring. We just sit there and watch TV.' The second mis-perception is that school is automatically bereft of the excitement and joy of learning. On the contrary, as the National Center on Time and Learning describes in its studies of schools that operate with significantly more time, educators use the longer days and years to enhance the content and methods of the classroom. 'We should expect our schools to furnish today's students with the education they will need to excel in our global society,' says Davis. 'But we must also be willing to provide schools the tools they need to ensure this outcome, including the flexibility to turn the lazy days of summer into the season of learning.'"
We don't need a longer school year. What we need is better holiday distribution. RIght now where I live (Ontario, Canada) our kids get two weeks off in December, one in March and about 9 in the summer.
It would make more sense to have August, December and April off so there are three month-long breaks. That way, there's no long summer holiday during which kids can forget what they've learned. It also makes holiday planning a bit easier on parents; we don't have to cram everything into the summer.
That absolutely is a factor, but this is far from the first research I've seen (as an educator myself) that indicates three weeks is the longest break the average student can take before skills start to regress. This is why some schools use the "happy medium" of year round schooling. The number of school days is the same as a ten month school year (standard here in Canada) but no break from school exceeds three weeks. Instead, there are more frequent and longer breaks during the school years. (Three weeks at winter, a week at Easter, four days off instead of three for most long weekends, etc.) Academic results are higher (on average), students usually like it once they've tried it because of the more frequent breaks, and working parents enjoy it more. The true test, however, needs to be comparing two otherwise comparable private schools. As you have correctly pointed out, any private system should be able to outperform the local public system on average because the parents who really don't care and produce students who don't respect the need for education send their kids to the public system.
- W. Blaine Dowler
http://www.bureau42.com
children driving a tractor or whatever is NOT abuse.. While I did not grow up on a farm, I was driving the family 12hp workhorse to mow lawns and haul wood and such.. I was around 6 or 7.
Of course it's not child abuse. Only in the warped mind of some government nanny is it child abuse, and the worst offenders are big city liberals who've never spent a day working on a farm in their lives. I spent my summers working on my uncles farm, either getting into the typical farm type trouble and in turn getting myself out--such as just how do you get a field beater that you just got stuck in 6" of mud out(that's easy, you go get the dozer and hook up some chains and pull it out)--to yeah and now we go off and harvest the corn. Enjoy that there 12hr day kiddo, by the way this is the CB...enjoy talking with your nieces and nephews, and the truckers along the highway(the 401 was nearby).
I've cut myself, sliced my fingers open, gotten more stitches than I can count. Never broken a bone though. Meh I've been spit on by horses, pissed on by cows. Hit and smacked around by sheep and goats. Had a bull charge me, because I was walking by. I've been up at the crack of stupid milking just about every stupid animal you can think of that can make milk, I've sheared things, I've busted my ass and done hard work and learned a major work ethic doing it. And I learned how to make silo-shine as they called it.
And I wouldn't trade that time for anything in the world.
Om, nomnomnom...
My parents were divorced and I came from a family of blue-collar workers and immigrant farmers. I hope that you are not suggesting that they sent me to public school because they didn't care or respect the need for education. My mom held down a job while attending night school and still managed to get me to school on time with my homework done. In the US, in the 80's and early 90's, our school years were constantly shortened to deal with budget cuts. It had nothing at all to do with the quality of education, it was all about screwing over poor kids and the "if you're poor it's because you didn't work hard enough" philosophy that Reagan popularized.
Theoretically all my "wasted" summer months were a big drag on my education, but I contend that the measure of the performance of a kid with respect to schooling is not a measure of future success, nor is it the most important aspect of a child's life. Summer Break offers opportunities to learn other useful life skills. When I was very young, I would spend Summer with my grandparents, who lived in another state (and who weren't poor). They sent me to a great summer camp, where I made friends, performed in skits, played field hockey, swam, etc. One summer I even went to baseball camp. Once I was 12 or so, I would work (under the table) all Summer and when I turned 14, I started working real jobs, with a paycheck. I'm sure I forgot a few proofs from Geometry or some SI units, but I learned so many other skills that are important to success (not the least of which is how much minimum wage sucks).
After many years of state college, I wound up studying at an ivy league university, surrounded by upper-class kids from private schools. Their teachers had PhDs and their schools boasted all kinds of fancy education models. They had all been pushed by their well-educated parents to succeed right from the womb. Many of them actually knew each other from way-back, because they had competed at the same "science competitions" (I still don't know what those are). None of them had jobs--instead they volunteered at soup kitchens, or whatever, because that is the sort of thing fancy-pants universities like on applications. All of them had better educations that I, and all of them retained far more of it. They could talk about literature and sound generally smart and educated. But they were also high-strung and sheltered. Not one of them had ever done a day of real manual labor. Their definition of "hard work" was wildly different from mine and they all expected "hard work" to translate into success automatically. I prefer my rich patchwork of life experience and realistic expectations to their sterile bubble of self-indulgence and I credit my long, budget-induced summers with much of what makes me unique.
Actually, I wrote my thesis on life experience.