“Now, I know longer school days and school years are not wildly popular ideas,” President Barack Obama mentioned earlier this year. “Not with Malia and Sasha, not in my family and probably not in yours. But the challenges of a new century demand more time in the classroom.”
What is our president talking about and suggesting? Year-round school, of course. Why, do you ask? Well, Obama’s Education Secretary Arne Duncan put it this way: “Our school calendar is based upon the agrarian economy and not too many of our kids are working the fields today. Young people in other countries are going to school 25, 30 percent longer than our students here. I want to just level the playing field.”
Currently, most public schools in the United States function on a 180-day system. This system was put into place when the United States was largely a farming nation. So when summer came, children were often needed to work the fields.
Today, we all know the United States is an industrialized nation. Farms are now for the most part extremely mechanized, and not as many people are required to tend large fields. It is for this main reason proponents say the old system should be done away with in favor of year-round education.
But what exactly does year-round school education entail? In general, this means schools continue to operate on the 180-day system, but they will instead spread out the days differently with shorter breaks between each term.
For example, some year-round schools will be in session for nine weeks, or 45 days, followed by three weeks, or 15 days, off. Other year-round schools follow the 60-20 plan, while others follow the 90-30 plan.
Then, there is tracking. Single-track year-round education is defined by the use of the same calendar and getting the same holidays off. Multiple-track year-round education has groups of students at school during different times of the year with different vacations. Multi-tracking can actually be a quite effective way for school districts to save money, especially when problems like overcrowding are evident.
The argument goes then, year-round education could greatly reduce overcrowding, especially if multi-tracking was used. Schools can sometimes go for the most part unused during the summers, and this is quite inefficient.
Year-round education would put public schools, and therefore taxpayers’ money, to a much more efficient use. In general, students forget a lot during long summers, so shorter vacations could increase retention rates. These shorter breaks could also be used to provide time for students to receive enrichment during the school year.
Proponents argue it would be easier to schedule vacations because not everyone would want to travel at the same time. And hey, other countries around the world use this system!
Writing this, I feel like I may be wasting my time and your time; we all know what this is – politics. I doubt something like this will ever be implemented. First of all, which year-round plan would be chosen and why? Single-track or multi-track? Is there significant research showing one to be more beneficial than the other?
Not to mention, schools are paid for by local taxes (with only some federal funds which are distributed by the state). Teachers are usually salaried workers; they would get paid the same whether they taught 9 or 12 months (until the union steps in demanding more pay to compensate for the loss of their summers). So, this plan could probably raise local taxes.
As for students, I think it can be quite fair to say for the most part we are going to forget some information whether we are out of school for three weeks or 10. The only difference with year-round education is teachers would be performing four beginning-of-the-year reviews instead of one.
What would that do to our American culture of summer camps? According the American Camp Association, 10 million children attend camp annually, and there are over 12,000 camps nationwide.
Have we thought about the effect of year-round education to the local economy? Student summer employment would become virtually impossible. And what if you have multiple children at multiple schools who are multi-tracking? Sounds like a problem to me.
Have we forgotten where we live? Summer vacation is engraved in our culture. It has been going on for hundreds of years, partly due to the fact that the types of crops we grow instill these values in us. On the contrary, in the Orient, the main crop is usually rice. Rice is a crop that requires year-round attention, and so for people of that culture, for thousands of years, they have been used to working year-round.
In fact, I always feel like I’m being compared test-wise to students in the Orient. Their scores are much higher, and they do in fact have year-round education. So, they spend much more time in school.
Or do they? Here’s an interesting statistic: Students in the U.S. spend more hours in school (1,146 instructional hours per year) than do students in the Asian countries that persistently outscore the U.S. on math and science tests – Singapore (903), Taiwan (1,050), Japan (1,005) and Hong Kong (1,013). That is despite the fact that Taiwan, Japan and Hong Kong have longer school years (190 to 201 days) than does the U.S. (180 days).
So is year-round education truly the answer? The beauty of relegating power to local and state governments, as should be done in a system of federalism, is aforementioned local governing bodies being more closely involved with the community in question can more effectively and decisively make decisions on issues such as these and have a greater knowledge as to their effects.
I am not saying year-round education is inherently evil or that it will not work. It has been shown to work countless times in varying contexts throughout the United States. All I am saying is year-round education is an extremely complex topic with many variables which must be considered, not the least of which is the motivation behind a school district’s decision to change its current calendar. That is why it should be left to local and state governments.
For every study I found in favor of year-round education, I could find another against it. One of these, done by research sociologist Paul von Hippel at Ohio State University, found over a full year, math and reading test scores improved about the same amount for children in year-round schools as they did for students whose schools followed a traditional nine-month calendar.
“We found that students in year-round schools learn more during the summer, when others are on vacation, but they seem to learn less than other children during the rest of the year,” von Hippel said.
“The problem with year-round schools may be that they don’t actually add more school days to the 180 typically required,” von Hippel said. “Instead of a three-month summer vacation, year-round schools typically have several breaks of three to four weeks spread throughout the year. The total number of school days and vacation days remains unchanged, but they are distributed more evenly over the calendar.”
We’ve all dealt with bond issues. One of the most arduous tasks for local government is keeping schools running without breaking the backs of property owners. Going to year-round classes will mean paying teachers and school staff additionally – they’re not going to work longer hours for the same pay. Not to mention, additional energy costs for running air conditioning, running buses, paying utilities, etc. It all boils down to a dollar-and-cents labor issue pretty quickly, and is a significant hike in school costs worth the risk without the sufficient research?
Like I said above, what works in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Japan – countries with some of the best-prepared high school graduates – may not work in the United States if this issue is seen as merely as a matter of instructional time. Societal differences, parental involvement, respect for teachers and student motivation differ significantly by culture. What if we were to expand the 180-day school year to 220 days and found, 10 years later, there had been no significant change and progress?
How about instead we make some real education reform? Instead of our inflexible focus on thought and application, how about we increase emphasis on math and science and that of imagination, nutrition, physical education, the arts and creativity? We are a product of our environment, and growing up there is an entire generation who is brainwashed via the television among other media to associate intelligence, science, and math with geek and nerd. (Not the Hardy Boys, though. – those books were sick. Thanks, Franklin W. Dixon.)
Have we forgotten school could be fun, not simply a place where you have to show up and prepare for standardized subject area tests and exams? Everything seems to be standardized in American schools these days, even promotion for teachers – regardless of their achievement.
So, you want my tax dollars for an addition to that? Thank, you, Mr. President and honorable Education Secretary, but I must politely decline. But hey, I’m just a Negative Nancy. Don’t consider anything I just said.
Julio Cespedes is a senior majoring in biological engineering. He can be contacted at [email protected].