Year Round Schooling Part 1

This is the first part in a 3 part series that I’m writing on what I believe are the reasons to stay away from year-round schooling in British Columbia. Through various initiatives, such as the BC Education Plan and local interest by school boards, we have the beginnings of a shift from our traditional September to June school calendar to a “year round” calendar. The specifics of how a year round calendar would work are not set, and the BC Ministry of Education has passed legislation that makes it easier for each school district to set their own calendar. The BC Edplan has been quite vocal in its support for new calendars, and there has been a reasonable amount of input from the public on the matter, both in favour and against the idea of changing to year round schooling.

My three part series is intended to address three issues that I feel are important when talking about year round schooling. First, I will critique the academic justifications for year-round schooling. The second and third parts will look at the social costs of year round school and how it will affect my own family. Hey, I’m going to be my own case study. It’s my blog, so I’m entitled!

I have heard several arguments for the case of shortening summer breaks in order to achieve better academic progress. These arguments are usually based on one of two ideas. The first is that students forget a lot during the summer, essentially losing knowledge, and that it takes a few weeks just to get caught up again. The second argument is based on research that indicates that summer breaks give lower social economic status (SES) students a disadvantage when compared to higher SES students. In other words, long summer breaks discriminate against low SES families.

There are typically a few studies quoted when referencing the issues mentioned above. Perhaps the best known research is from Alexander, Entwisle & Olson (2001). Their study is also the research mentioned in Malcolm Gladwell’s book, Outliers. Alexander et al. conclude that almost all students continue to learn (math and language arts) during the summer break. High SES students actually continue to learn at a rate that is the same as during the school year. Medium SES students learn at a slightly lower rate and low SES students learn at a very marginal rate. From this we can see the argument that summer breaks discriminate against low SES families. In the broad sense, it is also very interesting, and perhaps counterintuitive, that the many students continue to learn while on summer breaks.

Alexander et al. hypothesize that learning losses may be attributed to lower domain knowledge retention, and I think this makes sense. For example, during the summer a student may forget an algorithm for cross-multiplying fractions, but deeper and more meaningful conceptual understandings are probably not so susceptible to a loss of knowledge. I would contend that if our students are forgetting too much during the summer, then as educators we should be giving ourselves a hard look in the mirror and asking what the heck it is that we are teaching, or getting the students to learn. I believe that rote memorization and knowledge loss is a symptom of bad pedagogy, regardless of short, long or non-existent summer breaks.

The argument that shorter summer breaks will mitigate problems of knowledge loss or inequality is mostly without merit, in my opinion. To begin with, there is the research to consider. While I don’t wish to be political about this, the BCTF website has a decent annotated bibliography of the research on year round schooling, and for the most part the research does not show significant academic gains by switching to year round schools. In general, schools that switched from summers off to year-round, and vice versa, saw no significant differences in academic achievement. http://bctf.ca/publications/ResearchReports.aspx?id=5608

I think the idea that longer breaks are more harmful does not make much sense from the basic idea that any learning loss (or non-gain) is likely to be close to a linear relationship with time away from school. Of course this is an assumption, but it certainly is no worse of an assumption than any other. So if we know that students will have 90 days off from school every year, and that a loss (or non-gain) is proportional to time off, then the loss or non-gain would be the same regardless of when the time off is taken. For me, there is absolutely no reason to think that two 1 month breaks (for example) will mitigate problems caused by a longer 2 month break.

To conclude, there does not appear to be any research or logical reason why we would expect improved academic gains from year-round schooling. To use academic achievement as a reason for year round schooling is not only a weak position, I think it is actually detrimental to the debate because the argument exposes fallacies to the contrary. While it is easier to argue that long summer breaks discriminate against lower SES, there is not any concrete reason to think that more frequent shorter breaks will alleviate the discrimination.

Alexander K., Entwisle, D, Olson L. (2001) Schools, Achievement, and Inequality: A Seasonal Perspective, Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis , Vol. 23, No. 2, pp. 171-191