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By tradition, today -- the day after Labor Day -- should be the first day of school, and by the same tradition this term would end on May 24, 2002, the Friday before Memorial Day.
But such traditions are not much honored these days; some schools started more than a fortnight ago, during the torrid days of August, and some will not get out until June is well along.
This tradition -- start after Labor Day, end before Memorial Day, hold 180 days of class in between -- dates back more than a century to an agricultural America, when children were needed on the family farm in the summer.
That doesn't make much sense now, at least for the vast majority of school districts. In 1997, there were only 1.9 million farms in this country. Put a family of 5 people on each farm, and that's still only 3.4 percent of the population.
So there's one argument against the traditional school
year. Another facet of that argument is that this school
year was determined by economic factors,
rather than
the educational needs of the children.
That same argument is often employed here during discussions of the school calendar, although the economic factor is tourism rather than agriculture. If kids are out of school in the summer, then they can function as a labor pool for seasonal tourist enterprises -- they make beds, wait tables, fry burgers, wrangle horses, etc. And since they're living at home, they're less likely to demand a living wage.
Further, the duration of our tourist season is often a result of other schools' calendars. The family trip to Colorado happens when the kids are out of school, and the shorter the summer vacation, the more congested the campgrounds and fishing holes, and the more likely people are to go somewhere else next time.
So it's in our economic interest for every school district in America to follow the traditional calendar with a long summer vacation.
Again, though, the critics will correctly point out that
this desire for a full three months of summer vacation is
based on economic factors,
rather than the
educational needs of the children.
Assuming that a child's educational needs
are the
highest social priority and must come ahead of matters like
spending time with the family
or earning some
college money,
then what school calendar would best
meet these needs?
A frequent criticism of the traditional three-month summer break is that kids forget a lot of stuff during that time, and so the teacher has to spend the better part of September on review, which wastes time.
That sounds sensible, but think about it. How well did you learn anything in the first place if you forget it 100 days later? Assuming that you knew how to parse a sentence, solve a quadratic equation or recover from a Windows blue screen of death in May, don't you still know how to do that now? If you had the skill in the first place, you're not going to lose it in a few months.
So it would appear that this concern that children forget things during the summer is really a way to disguise the fear that they didn't learn the material in the first place -- and perhaps that's where the attention should go, rather than to the school calendar.
By this theory, that retention is better without the long break, students in year-round schools should do better academically than students on the traditional calendar.
But that's not the case, according to a 1998 study by
the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction. It
compared students in year-round schools (still 180 days,
but with short breaks scattered through the year) to those
on a traditional calendar. The conclusion: After
controlling for possible effects due to district, grade
level, gender, ethnicity, parental education level, prior
achievement and average school-level achievement, there
were no significant achievement differences between
year-round and traditional calendar students in either
reading or math.
So the long break really doesn't hinder learning. What about lengthening the calendar to 200 or more days, rather than the usual 180? Perhaps that's a good idea, but we might also consider that of the six hours at school, actual academic instruction occupies typically occupies less than 40 percent of the time. There might be some room for increased efficiency in the existing days before we consider adding days.
There's the deeper question of whether the time spent in school really matters. Abraham Lincoln did pretty well for himself with less than a year of formal education, and Thomas Edison spent less than three months in school.
Of course, Lincoln could then make time for his voracious reading habit, and Edison for his experimenting with chemistry and electricity. That sort of educational adventuring is what a lot of us used to do in the summer, when school was out, and it worries me that if they keep stretching the school year, kids won't have time to learn.
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