Summer break, one of the most anticipated ‘holidays’ of younglings across America. It’s a popular setting in cult classics such as Dirty Dancing, Friday the 13th, and The Sandlot. But imagine if you never had the summer break off from school. When would you have time to make new friends in the neighborhood you just moved to by playing baseball and trying to get your step-dad’s baseball you borrowed back from the formidable ‘beast’ on the other side of the fence or run away from a masked serial killer that had just recently risen from the depths of the local lake. Sadly, this is the reality for some students across the world and even according to the parent resource website Niche, there’s already 3,181 schools in 46 states of the US that have a year-long school schedule. With these different systems, the question arises of which schooling system is better for students. We’ll go over the schedule, academics, and downtime from either to find which system is truly better for students.

Schedule

A modified pie chart representing the days and breaks from the National Association for Year-Round Education (NAYRE)

Both systems of schooling have positives, but one of the main concerns from students whose school year isn’t a year long is that there be summer break, and to that there’s a response from the year-long schedule to have longer spread outbreaks over the course of the year. According to the K12 powered schooling website Learning Liftoff “Schedules are typically 45 days on, 15 days off, 60 days on, 20 days off, 90 days on, 30 days off.” So although there are more days grouped together there are still around the same amount of days spent in schools which are 180 with holidays in comparison to schools with summer break which according to the NCES (National Center for Education Statistics)  range from 142 to 180 days. So although there are no summer break students are still able to have fun with their friends and more times throughout the year as well.

Academic Properties

The academic comparisons between the two systems is another argument between the two. First let’s start off with the grades of students, which according to the CDA (California Department of Education) “Student achievement scores improve when those students are attending year-round schools. The explanation is simple: the loss of retention of information that occurs during the three-month summer vacation is minimized by the shorter, more frequent vacations that characterize year-round calendars.” So when students don’t have summer break they’re able to recite information better and have more time to go on vacations. This point is further proven by education researcher, writer, and educator Grace Chen of Public School Review who says, “Data suggests that year-round school increases retention rates, as students in year-round schools have demonstrated higher scores on some standardized tests.” Further proving year-long school schedules benefits academically.

Student’s Downtime

Although not all things are great about the year-long school schedule like missing out on summer school. Summer School is typically a time for students who are behind to get the necessary help for their class. With the year-long school schedule however they don’t have a specific time to implement this system. Although this could seem like a big issue, there’s a very simple solution that schools with this have come up with a solution. According to the CDE, “year-round calendars replace summer school with intersession (the periods of shorter vacations that punctuate the instructional year). Because intercessions take place more frequently, educational assistance can happen because of this, offering to help students in a timely manner.” Because of this summer school claim that not having it would be a big reason why year-long schooling wouldn’t be a reality it seems it wouldn’t be too big of a problem.

Opposing Views

The final thing that people worry about with a year-long schedule is that students need a break to enjoy the outside but in recent years this reason has stopped being a reality. A popular argument that people would use against year long school is that kids are not designed to spend so much of their time inside classrooms and that the summer weather provides a perfect opportunity to get outside and have fun. But according to Dr. Matthew Lynch of The Advocate is that “the days of kids spending their summers outside, communing with nature and getting plenty of exercises, are long past. A recent Harvard University study found that school-age children tend to gain weight at a faster pace during the summer months than during the school year, a fact attributed to more time spent in sedentary activities like watching television or using mobile devices (Adler, Franckle, and Davidson 2014). Not only must K-12 students relearn the academic material when they return to the classroom, but they must also shift their mentalities from less-active, sedentary ones to sharp, alert learning models—and teachers bear the brunt of this responsibility.” So if students aren’t going outside and enjoying the summer weather like the break is meant for and still have to re-learn the material after they come back then having students just staying in school seems like it would the best option for students’ education.

Conclusion

We covered the reasons of which system is better for a students learning and as we went over them the schedule between them, the academic benefits, and downtime was covered. Through this, we’ve come to the conclusion that the year-long schooling system is better for the students of America. Although there might not be any haunted camps to head to and drooling over local lifeguard, you won’t have to relearn all of the language vocab words you’ve forgotten.

featured image by pxhere