Experts say year-round school can bring educational benefits, but the love of summer vacation that became the standard in the late 19th century makes it a hard sell.
Only 3% of public schools in the U.S. currently operate 12 months a year, while most students and teachers eagerly await summer vacation.
While some blame misconceptions surrounding year-round scheduling for its decline in popularity, others say the switch to it could make life more difficult for families and teachers.
How did the summer holidays start?
Standard summer vacations in American schools began in the late 19th century, but there are competing theories about what prompted the development.
“I don’t think anyone has an official answer to that question,” said Paul von Hippel, a professor of public policy, sociology, statistics and data science at the University of Texas at Austin.
One idea held that children had time outside of class to help with the harvest, but von Hippel said that timeline doesn’t match up, as most crops aren’t ready until fall.
Another suggestion is that it has to do with the heat and poor ventilation in schools.
“We started having summer vacation largely because of the heat, and it was harder to cool down 100 years ago especially,” said Jennifer Steele, a professor in the School of Education at American University.
Due to climate change, this problem has returned: during the last academic year, hundreds of schools across the country had to cancel planned school days due to extreme heat.
Schools that currently offer year-round teaching
The prevalence of year-round schooling has fallen further in recent years, from 6% of all public schools in the 1990s to 3% in 2018.
“The popularity of year-round calendars really peaked in the late 1990s in California, and the reason for that was to deal with school overcrowding. It was very difficult under California law to build new schools,” von Hippel said.
“So what they did in about 20% of California elementary schools, at their peak, was adopt a kind of staggered schedule, what’s called a multi-track calendar, year-round, where different groups of kids were at school at different times, and so it was a year-round calendar in the sense that the summer holidays were a little shorter and there were more breaks during the rest of the year,” he added.
“The name year-round education gives the impression that children are in school all the time, and that is not true. There are a very small number of schools that have more than the usual 180 school days in this country,” von Hillpel said.
Instead, in a year-round schedule, students tend to have shorter but more frequent breaks, such as nine weeks of class and three weeks of break.
The schedules avoid some of the pitfalls of summer vacation, such as concerns about food insecurity among some students, and some think they could help combat absenteeism and learning loss.
“When you say you can’t make an annual or balanced calendar, show me your attendance, and those days when there are high rates of absenteeism, why don’t you consider making that day a professional day or a day off? ” asked James Pedersen, superintendent of Essex County Schools of Technology and author of “Summer vs School: The Possibility of the Year Round School.”
While year-round education remains by far the exception rather than the rule, the pandemic has led more people to look for alternative schooling options.
“I think COVID has a renewed interest in this, because everyone has heard about COVID learning loss” combined with summer fall fears, “so now we have this combined summer learning loss and COVID learning loss , which are both real things,” Pedersen said.
The future potential of year-round schooling
Advocates for year-round education say communities will have to decide what works best for them, but that COVID-19 has caused people to look more closely at their options.
“If we’ve learned anything from COVID, it’s that we can experiment with time and we need to look at how we spend it. We realized during COVID that we weren’t even spending the whole day at school anymore, right? […] If you look across the country, everyone has a modified schedule,” Pederson said.
“There’s no research that says kids need two and a half months off,” he added.
But some say the pros don’t outweigh the cons and that selling the public, lawmakers and teachers on year-round schooling is no easy task.
“We have these norms around the summer,” like teenagers getting jobs or families going on vacation, Steele said.
“I think the main trend is to maintain the status quo of the three-month summer vacation because of these studies that have come out over the last 10 years or so showing that moving to a year-round school, to a year-round school , The calendar, unless you change other things, creates logistical challenges without increasing student performance. So I don’t see this as a big trend in the near future,” Steele added.
This story originally appeared on thehill.com read the full story
