If I want to see my daughter clench her fist and crinkle her nose, I only have to bark, “If I had my way, you’d be in school year-round. The Chinese are breathing down our necks and you’re watching Hannah Montana!”
Summer vacation, in her mind, is a constitutional right. To me, it’s a brain drain and it’s about twice as long as it needs to be. Besides, it’s not like there are kids working in the fields to keep up this agrarian school calendar charade.
But it was Education Secretary Arne Duncan who made kids across the country crinkle their noses and choke on their popsicles last week when he said, jokingly, that he’d like to have kids in school 13 months a year.
“In all seriousness,” he followed, “I think schools should be open 12, 13, 14 hours a day, seven days a week, 11-12 months a year.”
“This is not just more of the same. There would be a whole variety of after-school programs. Obviously academics would be at the heart of that. But you top it off with dancing, art, drama, music, yearbook, robotics, activities for older siblings and parents, ELS classes.”
He might as well have added unicorn-riding lessons.
Since he is education secretary, I will assume he knows that education funding is being slashed in states across the nation. Class sizes are going up as budgets go down. Schools are being shuttered. Jobs have been shed. In some districts, parents now pay to put their kids in schools they’ve already paid for. School fees have almost tripled.
I favor year-round schooling both for competitive reasons (our academic standing in the global marketplace is slipping) and for practical reasons (how many parents can stay at home with junior all summer?). Critics, however, ask two important questions:
Who is going to pay for it?
And if our nation’s schools are struggling — and many of them are — why force kids to stay in them even longer?
Touche! Yet umpteen studies suggest that kids suffer from the “summer slide” when they take three months off. Even if they’re not in stellar schools, part of what they’ve learned evaporates in the hot summer air. Before they start in the fall, they’re already behind.
Most students fall more than two months behind in math over the summer break, according to a story in The Post in May. And poor children fall behind two to three months in reading while their better-off peers make slight gains, according to the National Summer Learning Association.
Summer vacation actually aggravates the nagging achievement gap between white students and their ethnic minority peers, according to Frederick M. Hess of the American Enterprise Institute. As he wrote in The Washington Post, “[R]esearchers . . . have reported that these students lose significant academic ground in the summertime, while their more advantaged peers — those more likely to read and attend pricey summer camps — do not.”
Denver and other metro area districts have been ramping up summer programs to fight summer brain drain, especially for low-income kids, but wouldn’t it be simpler to reduce the typical 10 or 11 weeks of vacation to eight, then spread them out over the entire year? Two weeks off in the summer, fall, winter and spring.
Districts already at capacity would be challenged, and some families and teachers would balk. But it would still allow time for vacations while giving teachers and students some well-deserved breaks. Money, of course, remains an issue, but when hasn’t it been a problem in K-12?
At the very least, isn’t it time to admit the old agrarian calendar no longer makes sense?
My daughter told me last week that she’s ready to go back to school. Of course, she’ll never buy the idea of year-round school.
It’s one of those issues where we’ll have to agree to disagree — just as we do on Hannah Montana.
Editorial page editor Dan Haley can be reached at dhaley@denverpost.com. Follow him on Twitter at .
