Jun 7 2009, 10:14AM
Why We Should Get Rid Of Summer Vacation
This piece gets written every year. (I wrote it for the Guardian two years ago.) But since the case for getting rid of the long summer vacation in American schools is pretty solid, and since the vast majority of American students still have a summer vacation, and since I can take pleasure in being a callous childhood joykill, it's probably worth writing again and again and again. So, from this morning's Washington Post:
Both President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan have called the traditional school day and school year outdated and inadequate for the demands of 21st-century life. Students in countries that routinely outscore the United States on international tests go to school for as many as 230 days each year, 50 more than kids typically attend here. "Go ahead and boo me," Duncan said in April to Denver students. "I think schools should be open six, seven days a week, eleven, twelve months a year."
That's exactly right. Part of the reasoning here, as Duncan suggests, is the need to compete internationally. Most other industrialized nations have longer school years than we do (see the chart to the right), and there is fairly strong evidence that more time in school means higher standardized test scores. The long summer break, moreover, doesn't even pretend to have a rational basis in educational policy. It's a response to (1) inadequate farming schedules; (2) the mid-20th century's lack of air conditioning; (3) the mid-20th century's fear of summertime disease transmission; and (4) the no-doubt timeless desire to mimic the summertime vacation habits of the rich. That last point is worth lingering over. One issue that doesn't come up enough in discussions of extending the school year is that doing so is also, fundamentally, an issue of economic fairness. If you believe in equality of opportunity, then one of the most important things the state can do is provide some baseline level of education that seeks to alleviate vast differences of class. But, small though it may seem, one of the most profound ways in which class differences express themselves is over the summer vacation.
This is because wealthy parents can afford to given their children all sorts of edifying summer experiences that downscale parents cannot. And this, as researchers at Johns Hopkins have found, leads to backsliding: Educational advancement across classes tends to be fairly even during the school year. But downscale students actually decline in educational achievement over the course of the summer, while upscale students remain relatively stable.
I see that the International Association of Amusement Parks and Attractions is gearing up to fight this one. But the answer here, unfortunately for them, really is less summertime fun.
UPDATE: In response to a suggestion from one commenter, I wrote a follow-up post on the history and economics of the summer vacation here.
Picture of small, frolicking child (with no idea what Arne Duncan has in store for her summer) from Flickr user mikebaird.
Don't faint but I'm actually going to agree with you. In fact, I think you've missed a really big problem with that long summer vacation. It's not just that better-off parents provide more edifying summer experiences than their less well off counterparts. It's also that when both parents work or there is only one parent and she works, that long summer vacation means finding day-long child care which is an additional financial burden.
I'd like to see a longer school day although not just for more hours of education. It would be really nice if schools could add some type of PE back into the day (even just a 30 minute walk for every child every day) and provide short run around and burn off some energy breaks between classes especially for younger children. Equally important, the longer school day would mean students would have a chance to do homework in a quiet setting with the kind of help they may not be able to get in a busy home where there are a million chores for parents to get through after their own workday.
I'm not as crazy about schools being open 6 or 7 days a week although I would support making school time on weekends an option for kids who need more help or just need a quiet place to go read or work on projects.
I lived overseas in a US run community when I was young. The school year there was Sept-Nov; off Dec; Jan-Mar; off April; May-July; off August. That was so when parents rotated home for long vacations they didn't all insist on going during the long summer break. Moving to that type of schedule might be an interim step in getting to a longer school year. It would help with the problem of back-sliding for three months although it wouldn't help with the need for daycare for 3 months. If you enforced it strictly, it would also slightly increase the school year anyhow: 180 days is 36 weeks; a true 9 months would be 39 weeks.
Having said all this, however, let me also say that I don't think the Federal government should be making this decision. Let the States that are smart enough to figure out the advantages move to this schedule and once parents elsewhere see how well it goes, they'll demand the same. This revised schedule is tailor-made for Southern states, some of which have the worst educational outcomes. December and April are usually quite nice in the Deep South while June and July can be awfully hot.
That schedule--December, April, and August off--is what the few American schools that have gone to a "longer" school year use. The same number of days, but without the big sink in the summer. I think it makes a lot of sense: parents can still plan a big vacation of two or more weeks to see Grandma or have enlightening time together, and you can even enjoy different times of the year. (For example, April is a much nicer time to visit the southern grandparents.)
Seven days a week 11 months a year I won't get behind, though. My second grader is already burned out on homework (and he's a good student; the homework issue is more "sigh...again?", not that the work is challenging for him); I can't imagine if we were going two more months after this that his attitude would improve. But the three months on/one month off model would address this, too, so long as schools treated it as a true time off and don't assign homework. Let the parents provide whatever stimulus they think works (whether science camp or four weeks of decompressing). Yes, some parents can't afford science camp. But not all kids react well to being intellectually driven 6 or 8 hours a day, 5 or 7 days a week, and building in some down time that is true down time allows for that.
I'm with Elise on the more gym thing, too: I know one study found that when instruction time was replaced by recess, test scores stayed steady--those extra hours weren't helping learning. And instruction time replaced by gym time actually yielded higher test scores.
sensible comment from an always sensible commenter. thanks, deborah.
Child care would have to change significantly, but I think it would-- it just might take a couple of school years to get worked out. i am not wiling to force my kids into significantly more useless and over worked days, but I certainly could get behind the system you describe.
If longer days are the answer than why do expensive private day schools have shorter school years than public schools and do a better job? Answer is that they use the time they have wisely rather than just warehousing kids in oversized classrooms with undermotivated teachers.
Kids already spend to much time in public schools which: fail to teach in a rigorous fashion, have poor PE programs, limited arts, etc. Forcing kids to spend their summers doing more of the same is not the answer.
But couldn't this support the original proposition? If you accept that (1) the average private school family is wealthier than the average public school family; and (2) the average wealthy family can provide edifying summer experience for children, why would it be surprising that private school days are shorter?
Conor
"private school days" = "private school years" ... when I am less tired
And further, Lake, you don't really answer the proposition of the article - i.e. longer school years v. shorter school years. Instead, you answer the public v. private school debate, which is great, but not really what we're talking about.
If our private schools consistently performed above other private schools internationally, after wages, class level, and other factors had been controlled with, and they STILL had shorter school years, than you'd have a point. But I think you'd find that prep schools in a lot of the nations above, that cater to a similar demographic, produce similarly lopsided results.
You idiot, private school years are shorter then regular school years and have LONGER summers and MORE days off.
The reason private schools in general have better grades and test scores is because their children are usually pressured to have better grades and I have personally seen this affect kids my age. Constantly under stress they aren't kids there miniature forms of their parents which are usually STUPID in child education. Biotch
I cannot point you to the studies because they are behind the university library firewall but you are mistaken. When one compares like students to like students private schools perform no better than public ones. It is only comparisons that ignore factors like parrental income that private schools seem to do better.
The big problem with U.S. education (and elsewhere) is not that kids don't get enough material pounded into them. It's just the opposite -- huge percentages of the kids end up hating school, and determined never to read a book again in their lives!
They will be changing jobs and careers multiple times in their lives, and they will have to study. In many careers, they will be studying all the time. The ones who hate it are at a permanent disadvantage.
NCLB and its increased emphasis on tests are just making the situation worse. Fewer and fewer kids are going to come out with any interest in or ability to learn.
A longer school year won't help that either. It will just be more of the same.
Well, your arguments don't really impress me, esp. your chart. Since the two highest ranked countries on your list are also monocultures who built up their successful economies with an _enormous_ helping hand from Uncle Sam, i'm not sure that using that for your argument is all that relevant.
In addition, since the US outstrips all of these countries in economic growth, number of Nobel Prizes earned, number of students attending 4 year universities, as well as attracting _huge_ numbers of students each year from the top two on your chart (I don't see foreign students beating down the doors to South Korea's universities), maybe just maybe there's something more here than number of days and hours in school.
I think the article is more focused on the future and less on the past. Yes, what you say is true about Japan and Korea's economies, Nobel prizes, etc - Uncle Sam has been number one for a while. But your contention that "if it ain't broke, then don't try to fix it" seems to miss the point. If America wants to maintain its status as the world leader, most would agree that education is a way to do this. And I think most would also agree that America's education can be much better than it is now. Perhaps adding school days would be a part of the solution.
lebecka - you're confusing two issues. While the US has many of the best universities in the world, our primary and secondary education systems are mediocre at best. The goal is to improve the latter so that our students will be better able to take advantage of the great universities. As we stand, many of the university slots (esp. in the sciences) are being taken by foreign students instead of American students. That won't change unless we improve our primary and secondary schools.
To piggyback off NYC_Charles' point: We have the best university system in the world, but increasingly, we aren't producing high-school students at the level necessary to attend them. What's that old statistic - that the vast majority of Silicon Valley CEO's are foreign born?
That's fine if you have the cultural capacity to attract and keep them, permanently. But if our retrograde immigration laws and the rise of the third-world keeps driving them away, then we're educating and losing a huge mass of talent, without educating American-born students to replace them.
I don't think the issue is that no Americans have the capability to fill those slots; the issue is that 6 years of grad school wages, followed by 6 years of postdoc wages, is not appealing when compared to the wages you could make with a bachelor's or master's degree right now. (And if you marry a fellow grad student, the post docs have to work at two-per-region.)
The recent economic turmoil may have put brakes on it, but for quite a while the top physics and math programs had the problem of people leaving after one year with a masters to work on Wall Street. The pay was just too much better, especially since one no longer gets a PhD and then a tenure-track position.
I too am interested in improving our school system-- I too have kids in the public school system.
However, i do not think it is helpful to conflate longer school years with better academic or lifetime performance. Why does the US have such an outstanding University system? ( and btw, thanks for the kind words-- I teach at one of those excellent universities.) International students say time and again that they are not encouraged to do critical thinking, but are encouraged to learn by rote from the books written by masters in the field. They are not encouraged to ask questions or to wonder "what do you think would happen if....". They are simply told.
If one of the strengths of our education system is encouraging critical thinking (and I do believe that this is the strongest aspect of our school system), then children need time to think and to mull over and then try to apply in various ways. They need time to experiment in their own ways, that are not necessarily what the school system would think of as academic, but which are important for developing the mind.
I can tell you that Americans students are much more independent, and much better at analyzing a problem when they enter schools as undergrads than many international students. Now, of course the international students have a very strong background in math and science, but that is because their societies value intensive learning in math and science. With a bit of a shift in American attitudes, this can change in the US as well. But this is an issue of US adults' attitudes towards math and science, not because we don't have enough days in school.
So, instead of giving a summer vacation, we'll just allow more time for kids to spend in an environment that has proven itself woefully inadequate in preparing them for what they will face in college and beyond. Geez, that's brilliant. It's like feeding a kid junk food for none months out of the year, being shocked when they're overweight and malnourished, and deciding the only way to improve is to feed them junk food twelve months a year.
The issue is quality, not quantity.
I don't understand this objection. Why can't it be both quality and quantity?
Conor
...because it's unrealistic when you can't even get the quality part right yet.
on balance wouldn't you think the quantity part would be easier?
I'm out of reply room so,
"on balance wouldn't you think the quantity part would be easier?"
I also think it's less preferable.
In other words, on balance.
But I don't get this objection. On all empirical evidence, students who attend schools longer, of whatever quality, do better. You can argue all you'd like about the relative competativeness of different schools, but giving a student MORE education, even MORE crappy education, is completely beneficial.
You eliminate time spent out of classroom (a significant portion of each year is spent 're-educating' on material forgotten over the summer) reduce impact on lower-wage families (child-care), remove at-risk kids from the street for a further three months a year, and make us more internationally competative.
I'd agree we need to improve the equality of our schools - but quantity has quality benefits all it's own. Screwing the kids further doesn't seem especially nice.
In my first reply I'm stating that it's unreasonable to assume the educational system can expand with any amount of rapidity to accommodate both an increase in quantity and quality.
Clarke then suggests that an increase in quantity would be easier to achieve than quality, in a, 'if you can't have one, why not the other?' kind of way.
I then state that an increase in quality would be more preferable, which it would be. Since it would be an efficient rather than a brute force solution.
I don't see why any of this is controversial.
The question was whether they were mutually exclusive, wasn't it?
Anyway, I wonder if you agree that there's an obvious pareto improvement here: Why not just spread the same number of vacation days out over the course of the year? That would reduce the summer learning loss that comes from a single long break, but wouldn't even touch the quantity question.
Conor
You are either a very succesful "NERD" who thinks highly of their point of view or a retarded mom who follows what others think.
I think we need to ask whether we want to raise human beings or if we simply want a vast next-generation of student-bots. If "competing with the rest of the world" is really so overridingly important that we need to kill off the spirit of discovery and social growth that is often the hallmark of summer vacation, let's do it all the way -- put the little tykes to work in factories and fields when they're not in the classroom. I bet that'll give a huge boost to our productivity vs. the rest of the world.
Or, we could just concentrate on increasing the quality of our education vs. shoveling more quantity at the problem. More of a bad thing is still a bad thing.
There are lots of things to fix about what goes on in the 180 days that are already mandated long before we go exploring ways to expand that number, and that includes asking whether our aim is really to educate all of our children the same way and to have them all 'do better' than foreign students by some particular measure.
My assumption is that the long summer vacation provides many opportunities for learning outside of the classroom. Many children who struggle in school find that they thrive and/or excel in other settings, like day care or summer camp (both of which are actually affordable across the economic spectrum), or learn more through the extended travel or immersion that months of vacation allow. Don't we want our students to be great in ways that aren't necessarily measurable by just filling in bubbles? We want them to be innovators, critical thinkers, and leaders, and we should invest our education dollars in figuring out how to reach more students when they're NOT in school than imposing more of the same on them.
By the way, the idea that summer vacation is based on the agricultural calendar is an absolute canard. If it were true, schools would be closed during the spring and fall for planting and harvesting. The summer allows families that move to have a common start to the academic year.
To your last point, I'll copy paste from the link provided -- the basic point is not that the term is built around farming but is rather a response to the inadequacies of the farming schedule:
"Meanwhile, the school districts outside cities had quite different academic calendars. In the 19th century, rural kids spent just five or six months in school—two to three months in summer and the same in winter—and the rest of the year laboring on farms. So while urban educators worried that children were overtaxed by their busy schedule, officials in rural areas thought their students were mentally undertaxed. By the early 20th century, public-school officials in many farm states had lengthened the academic year and introduced a summer break to bring agrarian districts into line with urban ones."
Malcolm Gladwell makes the point about vacation hurting downscale students in Outliers as well. It's an interesting point.
I think the stress induced by being poor in a poor neighborhood would be much more damaging than anything else.
Both kids and adults need down time so they don't burn-out and can remain productive. Look at the two countries at the top of the list with the most school days -- Japan and South Korea. Now think about their citizens' emotional and psychological lives. The stress is so great to be successful in school and business in these countries that a number of people commit suicide when they cannot succeed according to other's expectations. The stress is unbelievable just to get your kid in the right kindergarten. Do we want more of that kind of stress?
Our kids are already on the go 24/7, drink caffeinated energy drinks to stay up half the night and then fall asleep at school. Oh yes they do!
Their parents are working harder, with longer days -- and more sleep disorders -- and take less vacation time than Americans took 20 years ago.
Teenagers are calling poison control centers and going to hospital emergency rooms with "caffeine intoxication" -- a condition that can kill them -- because they are consuming so much caffeine to stay "wired." Did you know one energy drink we sell, "NOS" has almost 1,200 mg caffeine (compared to 30 to 50 mg caffeine in a regular cup of coffee)? Why are we screaming at the FDA?
Ethic Soup blog has a good article on two recent studies involving teens and caffeine worth reading at:
http://www.ethicsoup.com/2009/06/teens-and-caffeine-dangerously-wired-with-chewing-gum-injuries.html
All good points, but I would suggest that summer camps, outdoor education programs, are an important part of learning and provide a significantly different education experience that compliments the school year and traditional classroom learning. Reducing summer vacation time will result in many of these camps closing and will have a devastating effect on outdoor education programs.
Your argument that summer vacation hurts the poor kids, therefore lets eliminate summer vacation seems like a false choice to me. My argument would be that we need to fund camps and outdoor education programs during summer vacation, so all kids, rich or poor, can experience this different learning experience.
Excellent suggestion.
If more time in school means higher standardized test scores, fine, but that's probably because standardized tests are designed to test the content of what schools teach, and schools teach to the content of standardized tests. I can imagine that more time in school would give a student higher scores on standardized tests and lower facility with the skills that are learned outside of school hours. Until you start measuring that loss along with the gain, you can't know if it's a net positive move or not.
The US has turned its back on the blue-collar life, but there is not enough room in the middle class and the universities for every American child. And since so many schools have abandoned vocational education, blue-collar skills are left to be learned in the after-school hours.
For a good example of what more of this might do to our country, you should take a look at James Fallows recent posts on the Gao Kao, a standardized test to end all tests. One result I know of (from personal report of friends who have been to China) is that there is a very low level of skill in the trades in China. This is a drag on the growth of the country; one source I read said that the pace of building for the Olympics was dictated and strictly limited by the number of skilled welders in the country, almost all of whom were brought to Beijing for the Olympics. That obviously prevents them from working where they came from.
Blue-collar skills relate directly to manufacturing and engineering prowess. It is not just engineers but tinkerers and tailors who innovate- and many engineers gain skill by actually practicing manual skills in adolescence. Even for software engineers- how many of them built their programming abilities in high school classes? Every IT person I know started by playing around, not doing schoolwork.
Knowledge and skill are incredibly valuable things. But "education" doesn't map perfectly onto knowledge and skill. A lot of it is status- getting ahead of the next guy. That having a college degree is an advantage. But when everyone has a degree, there's no advantage anymore.
I think some more time in school might be a good idea, modestly. To reduce the backsliding among the less advantaged, I think it would be more effective to have more, and shorter, breaks, and to provide optional curriculum during some of those breaks that took a different approach than the traditional curriculum- in-depth study, more electives, the sort of thing that happens during January term at many colleges. Rich people coudl send their kids to camp, if they thought it was better.
I think you are correct here-- I would rather have a class full of students who spent their summers messing around on their computers, or who had spent the summer going to work with a parent (like my 6 year old gets to do with his dad, who owns a store), or running around talking to the older folks on the street (like I did in my youth) or swimming in the pool (and learning useful physical skills), than a group that sat in a classroom and filled out more standardized tests. when do kids get to develop what they just learned in the last school year and integrate to real life?
I do think summer vacation is about two weeks too long. I base this on the reactions of both students and parents, all of whom seem slightly sick of it a few weeks before it's over. (Yes, kids too, who may be missing their friends and the structure of the school day.) Adding those two weeks to the school year would put the US at the same level as England and France.
It might make sense to use school buildings for certain kinds of day camp over the summer, but I wouldn't want to mandate that. And it shouldn't be exactly like the school year curriculum either. If it's science day camp, it should be exploratory and fun and not oriented towards tests.
Adding hours to the school day makes more sense to me, but only if the additional hours are for participatory activities like art, music, and sports. There's a limit to how long kids can sit at desks before they stop hearing what the teacher says.
I think this would be a tremendous good for U.S. children but it will shakeup a lot of people's lives and might be too drastic for ready acceptance.
First of all, a dramatic shifting of school calendars (extending) will involve bitter fights with teachers, administrators and staff over increased pay for additional days worked. Odds are, people aren't generally interested in paying higher taxes even if their schools would improve dramatically. I'd think a lot of cost increases would be offset by savings on child care costs and disincentives for parents to work less to accomodate children's schedules - of course since most people don't have children but do pay taxes that support schools even if the benefits are significantly greater than the costs you'll have revolts among the childless that would kill the funding and it's doubtful teachers will accept big additions to their workloads without additional compensation.
I'd much prefer first for the school day to be extended such that children's school days are more closely aligned with typical adult workdays first, then cut into long vacations to add days and reduce the excessive Summer downtime by both lengthening the calendar greatly but adding breaks at other points during the calendar to give the vacations needed.
Everybody reads a sentence a different way but over time you come to rationality and UNDERSTAND what your truly saying, take it from a 14 year old, your all going against basic nature. There shouldn't be school, i don't think that technology is so great, all it has brought it war, crime, and suffering. If there truly was a god he wouldn't let us live this way with such ignorant people.
The practical difficulties are a good argument for moving gradually, if at all. As I said, I favor shortening the vacation somewhat. And I think it's a great idea to use the schools as a resource when classes are not in session, keeping in mind that you do have to shut them down sometimes for maintenance and upgrading. Aside from maintenance needs, there's no reason a town couldn't run a music camp, drama camp, science camp, or sports camp using school buildings and facilities.
Actually, having a lot of the cool electives take place in the summer or late afternoon makes a lot of sense in general. You want kids to get all that stuff, but it's sometimes impractical to cram it into 50-minute periods during the main school day. You hardly get the chance to start painting before it's time to clean the brushes. If you give that stuff time of its own, the main school day can take more time for academic subjects.
There is, of course, a way to let all the commenters in this post get what they want: school choice. Let parents use education dollars to send their kids to the schools they prefer. Then parents can pick schools with traditional schedules, year-round schools, boarding schools, schools with more special program, schools with more trade education, whatever their little hearts desire.
Hoorah!
As if they do not have that choice now? I believe parents have always had that option...as long as the dollars they spend are their own.
If, on the other hand, you mean for parents to use taxpayers' education dollars to satisfy their own particular version of educational Nivana, count me out. "School choice" is simply not compatible with the concept of public education, which depends on a unified community that supports a common school system serving all. When you undercut the funding for that common system by allowing families to opt out, you make public education impossible.
Then how do you propose we improve education for the largely poor children in underperforming public schools?
When you undercut the funding for that common system by allowing families to opt out, you make public education impossible.
I have two problems with this. If, say, 50% of families opt out of the public schools and take most of their tax dollars with them, why can't the public schools simply get smaller? And it seems to me that you are damning public schools with your own words: why on earth would families opt out of the public schools if they are, in fact, "serving all"?
I do understand that some families will undoubtedly opt for schools that I would consider less than desirable. I just find it hard to believe 88% of parents with a choice would pick a school where 8th graders aren't proficient in reading or that 93% of parents with a choice would pick a school where 8th graders aren't proficient in math.
I think we need to step back and address a more fundamental problem with lengthening the school year.
Where exactly do people suggest we get the funds to pay for this lengthening of the school year? Lets take California for example. California spent 51.6 billion dollars on K-12 education last year. This year, they are considering several billion dollars in cuts to shorten the school year.
Lets assume we lengthen the school year from 180 to 200 days in school (arguably a reasonable increase). With roughly 70% of school costs in teacher or administrator salaries, equates to roughly needing 5.7 billion dollars to increase the length of the California school year by 20 days.
One side affect of increasing the school year that no one is discussing: Increasing teacher quality. If the school year is lengthened, teacher pay will increase, thus attracting "higher quality" candidates to the teaching profession.
Conor,
The way I take your argument is that economically disadvantaged kids backslide over the summer and rich kids don't. Therefore lets have school year round.
Are you going to force rich children to take summer vacation? If school is offered year round, then it will not close any gap that appears between rich and poor. There cannot be any relative gains by poor in this situation because the main causal variable is not "3 months out of school", the main causal variable is "family environment/resources" or something like that. At best this a third best solution.
Besides some things in life are worth having. We are not in a competition to see how little free time we can force on our kids. And in the end, having this kind of policy will lead to relatively little improvement in happiness.
According to the Johns Hopkinds analysis Conor mentioned the rich/poor achievement gap does not appear much during the school year - it's that poor kids tend to slide a lot during the long Summer Break and the rich kids not so much . . .
I'm interested in both the relative and the absolute, and yes, here the emphasis is on the relative.
But I'm not sure I follow your objection. I DO think the main causal variable is "three months out of school," though I guess that can be redescribed in a number of different ways. If you're asking "why not just equalize family resources" then I thikn the answer is probably just that I have a moral intuition that equality of opportunity is preferable to equality of outcome.
Your last point is, of course, true. But I there are more important things than happiness!
Conor
Sorry, Conor, but you are absolutely wrong on that last point. Happiness can result from a hard job done well, which I try to inculcate in my kids, but life without joy, and I include joy in accomplishment, is hardly worth living.
More important things than happiness, your a retard.
Like what?
The increased suicide rate in teenagers? The increase of drug use overall?
I sure as hell know if there was more happiness in the world it would be a better place. And that "may" just include the increased interest in schools.
Your a funny man dude.
Re. the idea of a longer school day, most kids today have several hours of homework every night, so their school day is much longer than the official one.
As far as the year goes, my friends and I went to an average public school for 180 days and somehow managed to take calculus in HS, get good degrees and jobs, etc. We didn't even do that much homework. We also had PE, chorus, sports and after school jobs.
Simply adding more of something is a lazy mans way of improving it.
Brian
My kids learn a lot during their summer. They learn about their siblings by spending time with them, they learn the important lessons that play and sports teach, and they learn about whatever their little minds are interested in because they have time and are not swamped by homework. School is a much more a time sink today and so vacation is even more important.
I get that people say many kids don't have this, or that schools don't fulfill their function as childcare, but why should their situation cause a mandatory reduction in my kids' alternative learning & play time? Can’t we just have summer school for families who bank on government child where housing? Is the problem that they don’t choose to use summer school and must be forced by mandatory rules that bind us all? Besides, Camps cost less than a plasma TV, a years supply of cable TV, a new set of rims, the difference between a Ford Fit and huge pick up, or year’s supply of cigarettes, so it should be an option as well.
Before you believe all that this article asserts regarding the alleged failure of American education, see the following quote from the third part of a series written by Peter Baldwin and posted in Der Spiegel Online International,[Trans-Atlantic Comparison(3)]:
PISA scores for American whites (ranking secondary school proficiency, in this case, for combined science literacy in 2006) come above every European nation other than Finland and the Netherlands.
See the entire article for all of the relevant information.
I agree that American secondary education is not nearly as good as it could, or should be, but there are other more pressing issues to deal with in order to redress the balance.
Once again, Arne Duncan and Obama (and now Conor Clarke) just assume that American schools monolithically act the same way, in this case, slamming their doors shut after the last little tyke leaves for the summer. I do send my children to private camps now that they are teenagers with very specific interests, but when they were in Elementary School, every summer, I arrangeed through my PUBLIC school district for my kids to continue in a variety of programs, some academically oriented and others with more of an enrichment or outdoor focus. There was a modest fee for those classes, and kids who were low income were subsidized. Every year, during the spring parent teacher conference, my child's teacher handed me the summer class brochure and flagged those classes that they thought would be most beneficial for my child. For ESL students, it probably would have been continued English courses, for kids with difficulty in math, math courses, and for highly motivated students, some sort of special interest course.
It irks me that the president, who has never attended public schools, seems to have made up his mind that all public schools are failing. They aren't.
Where are your schools? I think school-associated camps (providing a balance of academic focus and athletics or arts) are a great idea, but few places have them.
As for cost: I was shocked to discover, when I went to look for summer camp for a 6-year old to go with daycare for her 1-year old brother, that summer camp was more expensive than infant daycare in my area. There are some freeish bible schools, but in general summer camp is very expensive.
there are lots of cheap camps available in my area (Pittsburgh and southwestern PA), set up through the cities, school districts and municipalities.
The day camp sponsored by my son's school is $75/week, and the breakfast and lunch are even free, sponsored by a county program. i live in a working class town right outside the City of Pittsburgh (which also has these programs), and we do not have a huge tax base. How does the city afford it? Got me, but they've been doing it for years.
What about your local YMCA or your parks and recreation department? That's also an option that we have used in the past, and might be available.
I live in Arlington, Virginia, which is also where Arne Duncan now lives, mostly because of the schools.
Anyway, I do feel that it would be helpful for public officials to have some sense of successful public schools in the U.S., which might be easier to emulate, instead of just assuming that all the successful models are abroad. I guess I am self-interested because my kids are successful public school students. I would not be opposed to extending the school year by 10-15 days, on the other hand, my schools don't even get out until the third week in June and back to school activities start in the last week in August, so kids get about 8-9 weeks of free time at most, and not even that if they take 2-4 weeks of summer school.
By the way, Fairfax, VA started a year round program for children deemed to be especially at risk -- it's voluntary, and geared to ESL students. My understanding is that it has been very well received, but this is a huge, well-funded district that carefully studies educational needs and is large enough to do targeted programs. It has exemplary programs for disabled students as well.
Sounds very promising.
I live in the western suburbs of Boston, and our schools are excellent, but nothing like the summer programming you're describing. (And in the current budget situation, we definitely won't be adding anything.) Adding to school time with a longer day or longer year is potentially appealing if what's added is not more of the same, but something more like a variety of afterschool offerings--if your parents enroll you in the 3:00-6:00 offering you could be in sports, or study hall, or art, or drama, or ESL, etc. Different kids need different things, especially with a longer day--some just won't get anything out of more hours of classes.
The thing I hate are the math and reading packets. My children are very good at both, and will happily read and do interesting math through the summer--unless it's within the constraints of the school's assignments. They put us backwards. Ergo my suspicions of more of the same school days.
(Because I freelance, we settled on mostly being home with mom, interspersed with a few weeks of camp by interest.)
This nation just needs to make cigarettes illegal, making year round school with lots of long holiday, making marijuana legal, make alcohol harder to obtain, and go green. !!!!!!!!!!!@#
Seems to me that you people who believe that summer should be taken out and make the school weeks 6 to 7 days are pretty damn lazy :).
How about you actually make an effort to help the school system and not do foolish things like abolish summer vacation or make the school days longer.
Its RIDICULOUS if you think this will help. You know how many students will want to KILL themselves because of this idea alone? I sure as hell know if I spent all my days at school every day I would wanna be doing drugs or such.
Forget about the students, what about the teachers who have to do their jobs LITERALLY 24/7(don't forget the long hours of grading papers and homework)
It seems like none of you care about the public school system.
How about looking at it from a student's perspective?
Well, it sucks :P.
Besides, not like this is gunna happen soon anyway. You know how much money it would cost to do all this? Don't you people know that you guys are ALREADY in a financial pickle?
Comon.