Friday, October 9, 2009

Summer School, Extended School Year, and Year-Round Schooling

For years the concepts of summer school, extended school year, and year-round schooling have been viewed as potential answers in our quest to raise our students’ achievement whether on the individual, school, or country level. Most of today’s schools are based on an agrarian society; students attend an average of 180 days per year, typically between the hours of 8am and 3pm, having three months in between each school year for a summer break. While this break was historically set as a time where children could farm in peak season, the summer break has evolved into what is now a summer vacation. Students relax from school for three months, spend time on the couch watching television, may go to summer camp for a couple weeks, and usually are forced to squeeze in a few summer reading assignments for the following school year. Only seldom do students need to return to school for the summer months, attending summer school for either remediation or advancement purposes. Our nine-month calendar, however, is not sensitive to our current industrialized society. Many parents are faced with the stress of finding childcare for their children after school or during the summer months, often resorting to leaving their children home alone.

Parents whose children qualify for extended school year under the Rehabilitation Act’s Section 504 (1973) and IDEA (2004), however, have some relief. Students with disabilities under Section 504 and IDEA are eligible for extended school year only if they meet certain criteria, such as being at risk for regression or recoupment during summer vacation, if the school year ends at a critical point of instruction for the student, if the student is developing emerging skills that they could acquire or master during summer instruction, and other criteria specifically related to his or her disability. Many of the criteria that allow students with disabilities to obtain classes outside the nine-month school year are likely to be met, however, by all or most students without disabilities as well.

Recently President Obama and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan have stated that children in the United States are put at a global disadvantage by spending too little time in the classroom, citing other nations’ scholastic success and increased time in the classroom. While it is true that students in many other countries have more school days, it's not true, however, that they all spend more time in school. While students in the United States typically spend 1,146 instructional hours per year in school, those in Singapore and Japan, for example, only spend 903 and 1,005 hours in the classroom, respectively. Researcher Tom Loveless of the Brookings Institution, however, found that math scores in countries that added math instruction time rose significantly, especially in countries that added minutes to the day, rather than days to the year. Adding an extra 10 minutes a day was even found to lead to significant increases in performance.

In examining our nation’s current status as an industrialized society rather than an agrarian one, Secretary Duncan also is trying to promote his vision of not only having schools add instructional time, but also to stay open late in order to let children in on the weekends so they have a safe place to go. There are two ways in which these goals could be realized: (1) by leaving schools in operation 180 days per year, however making the days longer in hours, or (2) by instituting year round schools. In a year round school schools do not have a three-month summer vacation; they instead have several smaller breaks spread throughout the year. Typically, the total number of school days and vacation days remains unchanged in a school running on an year round schedule; the days are simply redistributed more evenly over the calendar. Extending the school day, unlike instituting a year round school, would have the additional benefit of being akin to parent schedules. Today’s typical student may have parents who work long hours and/or multiple jobs. This often leads children to go home afterschool to an unsupervised, empty house. With an extended school day students would be able to stay safely at school with friends in an environment where they can get the extra help, whether it academic or emotional, that they may need.

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