Editor’s note: This commentary is by Peter Berger, an English teacher at Weathersfield School, who writes “Poor Elijah’s Almanack.” The column appears in several publications, including the Times Argus, the Rutland Herald and the Stowe Reporter.
Summer vacation just started, and our pharmacy’s already stocking back-to-school supplies. There’s nothing like a shelf full of mismatched spiral notebooks to take the summer bounce out of Poor Elijah’s step, except maybe the lemonade ad a few years back that declared summer half over on the Fourth of July.
Somebody needs to buy these guys a calendar.
Poor Elijah enjoys summer, and the break helps him return in September refreshed and better prepared for the onslaught of memos, meetings and adolescents. Children are actually the least taxing part of his job. Administrators cause far more mischief, especially when they’ve been left unsupervised for a couple of months.
On the other hand, lots of jobs are more stressful than his. Most workers manage without two months off for refreshment.
If Poor Elijah’s defense of summer recess rested on the benefits for teachers, I wouldn’t read it. If I thought year-round school was in the nation’s best interest, I’d say so. Instead, year-round school promises “drastic changes,” few likely benefits, and many unnecessary complications.
Critics of summer vacation complain it’s a relic of a bygone era when American children were needed on the farm. You can find this idea, among other places, in “Prisoners of Time,” a 1994 report issued by the National Education Commission on Time and Learning.
This argument ignores two facts. First, by the time compulsory public education was the rule for most American children, Jefferson’s republic of farmers had already given way to cities and smokestacks. Second, the modern custom of taking the summer off actually began when turn-of-the-20th-century urban, middle-class Americans attempted to emulate the summer migrations of the Vanderbilts and Rockefellers.
Year-round boosters frequently cite the new millennium’s “explosion of knowledge” to justify extending the school term. Yes, history is two generations longer than it was when I graduated, and we’ve discovered some new science, but having too much information isn’t a recent development. Teachers in the old days never had enough time to cover everything either.
Extended year advocates claim that scrapping summer recess would promote better attendance and higher achievement and cure the “lack of memory retention from June to September.” Unfortunately, most students who forget things between June and September are already currently forgetting things over Christmas vacation. Besides, year-round proposals that cut summer recess typically don’t add any days to the school calendar. They just plug in more interruptions throughout the calendar, which arguably would result in more bouts of student amnesia.
Beginning in the 1980s, California experimented with eliminating summer vacation. San Diego found attendance in its year-round schools “fifteen percent lower” than in its schools with “traditional calendars.” Eighty percent of its year-round schools produced “test scores below the district average.” Oakland similarly reported “lower scores” in schools where students attended through the summer.
Two states away, Albuquerque, New Mexico, found “no significant changes” in achievement as a result of extending the school term. Meanwhile, to the north a Canadian report concurred that “academic achievement is rarely improved by year-round schools,” and that the “problems associated” with year-round schemes have proven “greater than the benefits.”
Boredom is a feature of the human condition. It keeps cropping up, no matter how old you get. Learning to cope with it is a life skill.
A University of California study diplomatically determined that “most year-round schools” have done “less well than expected.” Only one Los Angeles school “remained on a year-round schedule by 2015.”
Studies tracking student achievement yield at best mixed reviews. In a 1999 University of Minnesota compilation of 69 independent analyses, 42 concluded year-round schooling produced “no positive impact.” A 2007 Ohio State University study found “no differences in learning between students who attend school year round, and those who are on a traditional schedule,” though year-round “set-ups” do appear to benefit “at-risk students” for whom “learning may not otherwise be fostered at home.” A Johns Hopkins study confirmed that the summer learning “backslide” primarily afflicts low-income students.
Advocates add that schools should be open during the summer because they’ve become “hubs for healthcare and other services.” However, operating a school-housed clinic all year, assuming we choose to do that, doesn’t require or justify running the school itself all year, especially since “year-round” schools aren’t open any more days than “traditional” schools.
Offering summer services to some children, whether medical or educational, shouldn’t require that every child attend school in the summer.
Fiscal watchdogs suggest schools could save money by staggering sessions and operating year-round. These promised benefits also haven’t materialized. Staggered sessions pose problems for families with more than one child, and if you expect teachers to work more days, you have to pay them more.
Year-round school is more than an academic issue. Some experts argue that we need summer sessions to keep children busy. They say boredom leads to trouble. Even if this were true, it doesn’t mean that schools need to pick up the slack, and the tab.
Besides, I disagree that boredom’s a bad thing. I spent a fair amount of my youth sitting on the curb, complaining that there was nothing to do. Sometimes I made bad choices and wound up in hot water, but mostly we talked or found something benign to pass the time. Through it all I learned the valuable lesson that I was responsible for keeping myself busy and out of trouble.
Boredom is a feature of the human condition. It keeps cropping up, no matter how old you get. Learning to cope with it is a life skill.
Summer was never the season when schools gave children back to their parents. Parents gave their children to schools for a time and a purpose. Yes, there may be an academic cost if students aren’t in class 12 months a year. But what’s the cost of consigning children to a social institution year-round from a toddler’s first steps until the day he leaves home as an adult?
Who will be bringing up baby?
If you’re looking for daycare, consider this. I hope my students respect me, and I like to think I’m pretty good at teaching them English and history, but bringing them up is your job.
Educators talk about teaching the whole child.
The best place for the whole child is home.
If it isn’t, that’s a problem no school can solve.
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