Break Summer

Let's start by dispelling a common myth. Summer vacation doesnot exist because in the golden days of good old agricultural America parents needed their children to help them with the harvest.

When you stop and think about it, that rumor doesn't make much sense anyway. Summer is not, in most places, the primary harvest season. Spring and fall bear the most fruit (and vegetables), so this idea that American schoolchildren of yore needed to stay at home and cart barrels of hay around in the aching sun is a little ridiculous. Actually, in the decades before the Civil War, American schoolchildren attended school from December to March and from mid-May to August, and that's when they got all that farm work done.

So where did the idea that kids should take a three-month breather in the middle of the calendar year come from? Well, in truth, it sprung from a desire to solve two big problems. The first, as great educational thinkers like Horace Mann put it, was the "overstimulation" of young minds. Too much work, they said, was bad for kids, and led to nervousness and other psychological disorders. The second was that in the days of merciless heat and nary-an-air conditioner, disease and overheating spread like wildfire in public schools, spurring very legitimate health concerns. Summer vacation was the clear solution. It made wonderful logical sense!

It's too bad, then, that an institution that arose to truly benefit children in the public school system has ended up hurting them so badly.

As an article in this week's Time Magazine accurately and necessarily spells out, "summer is among the most pernicious — if least acknowledged — causes of achievement gaps in America's schools." The statistical evidence for this is among the most compelling of any data that seeks to explain the reason why the achievement gap between the wealthiest students and the poorest students stretches so wide by the time kids graduate from high school.

Time created a wonderfully accessible graph based on data from a dense, comprehensive article published in the American Sociological Review about the lasting consequences of what the Review calls "the summer learning gap" (You can download the whole thing here if you want, but do so with the warning that the least complicated sentence in the study is 100 words long and contains the terms "seasonality" and "disaggregating"). The graph itself paints a more stunning picture of the widening achievement gap than any prerequisite writing I could muster here, so here's a reprint.

From Time Magazine, August 2, 2010, "The Case Against Summer Vacation"

The most interesting thing about this data is that it proves that kids from all socioeconomic backgrounds learn at essentially the same rate, but that kids from low socioeconomic backgrounds actually regress during the summer, which does not bode well for that widening achievement gap.

Of course, the achievement gap starts before children are in Kindergarten. A lot of research has been done on the subject, and there's ample knowledge out there explaining the manifold reasons behind the gap. To paraphrase, it all boils down to vocabulary words. The quantity (lots of different words versus a few select ones) and quality (kind and exploratory words versus angry and accusatory ones) used by family members of varying socioeconomic levels tend to be fewer and more negative in poorer households than in richer ones. As a result, an average three-year-old from a welfare family demonstrates an average active vocabulary of around 500 words compared to the 1000-word active vocabulary of a three-year-old from a richer household.[1]

 These studies, however, only explain why children enter the educational system at such different levels. For decades it's been argued that if children from backgrounds of poverty just work twice as hard in classrooms belonging to teachers who work twice as hard with twice the resources and twice the school hours as other, richer children, the gap will close, and everything will be OK. There's no evidence to support this idea. In most communities, such a model is not even possible. And the achievement gap is as wide as ever. By the end of twelfth grade, poor students are at least four years behind their wealthier peers in reading and math, according to Columbia Teacher's College. 

But as the graph in Time illustrates, students from poor backgrounds are working just as hard as their peers, and learning just as much -- during the school year. In the summer, when students and teachers are given three months to do whatever their hearts desire, rich kids get steadily smarter, while poor kids forget a huge chunk of what they learned the year before.

The reason for that is obvious. Rich parents have the opportunity to spend a little extra to send their children to an awesome summer day camp, specializing in exactly what their child is interested in. I remember going to an assortment of camps when I was little. The theatre workshops at the Northwest Children's Theatre, where we got to put on full-scale productions of "Mary Poppins" and "The Three Littl

e Pigs." There was Willowbrook Day Camp, which specialized in the arts, and kids got to pick whether they wanted to learn about the biodiversity of the streams in Tualatin, or discover the chemical make-up of photo development, or create authentic stained glass masterpieces in the barn out back. And OMSI Science Camp was always popular, too, with the obvious learning benefits.

In contrast, the students I worked with last year (all of whom qualify for free and reduced lunch) told me that this summer, they would be playing wrestling video games, watching Spongebob re-runs, or swimming in the inflatable pool at their cousin's house. And most of them were not excited about summer vacation at all.

Time suggests that fun, engaging summer programs be built in every city, for every child, so that all children of all socioeconomic backgrounds might grow and learn all summer long. It lists a bevy of summer enrichment programs aimed at low-income kids that are experiencing success all over the country -- including Summer Advantage, Redhound Enrichment Program, and a slew of others. The article suggests that programs like these are the end-all-be-all, touting that "we should embrace the fact that summer is the opposite of school to make it the season of true educational reform."

Maybe so. But in a culture of stifling economic resources, and an increasing amount of Americans believing that the privatization of education is the worst-case scenario road to success, it is wholly unrealistic to believe that the country can build elective educational programs for all the nation's poorest children -- remember, that population continues to grow by the day. Like all the educational initiatives kick-started in the last decade, banking on summer enrichment programs sets the country up to leave a large number of children behind.

On the other hand, forcing children to stay in school for grueling, long days for those extra three months is equally expensive and ludicrous. As Ron Fairchild, CEO of the National Summer Learning Association put it, nobody wants to be "the Grinch that stole summer vacation." Horace Mann was right to criticize the amount of time kids spend at school: everybody deserves a break -- especially kids.

But the National Center for Educational Statistics offers some interesting data that suggests that American students spend too much time in the classroom even with our long summer vacations. While American students spend only 180 calendar days at school, they receive a total of 1,080 instructional hours -- which are wildly disproportionate figures compared to schools in other industrialized countries. South Korea, for example, spends 204 days, but only 545 instructional hours at school. That's practically half the hours that our kids spend at school. And oh yeah, South Korea's math scores are about 100 points higher than ours.

The statistics are similar for other countries. Denmark spends 200 days in school, with 648 total instructional hours; Japan also has a 200-day school year, and they spend just 600 hours in the classroom. All these countries, by the way, have higher math scores than the U.S. And it's not a coincidence.

Kids in American classrooms spend, on average, 6.5 hours in school each day. At Extended School Year College Prep schools aimed at closing the achievement gap in low income communities, the school day can stretch to nine hours long (children at Kipp Believe in New Orleans get on the bus before sunrise and stay in class until 5 p.m. every weekday and every other Saturday).

As a teacher, I can tell you this much anecdotally: that's too much. You see kids start to fade around 2:30, and by 3 they just can't concentrate anymore. At that point, they still have an hour and a half left in the day before they can finally go home -- where they have another hour of homework.

You can't blame them for their exhaustion. It's too much to ask of any human being. In order to maximize productivity, people need a good balance of work and play. We need to get enough sleep at night, to eat good meals throughout the day, to engage in activities that bring us joy, like playing music or cooking. We need regular breaks and chances to sit and sort our thoughts out. In short, we need time to process.

I'm not just talking about kids, either: teachers are exhausted. Of the incoming teachers in education these days, more than half quit within their first five years of teaching. As a former Teach for America teacher, I have seen it first hand. Teachers burn out. They don't have time to plan, they don't have time to prepare, let alone time to sleep or eat healthily, and their lessons suffer, and their students suffer, and their own mental health suffers. It's just not sustainable.

What I propose is not more time in the classroom. I propose less. And it's time we do away with this antediluvian excuse of a break called "summer vacation." The American Education System needs a whole new calendar.

To start, school days should be radically shorter. Teachers need time to plan during the week, and kids need time to play. And instead of one long, regressive, three-month break, the calendar should allow for lots of shorter breaks, scattered all throughout the year. Two weeks for Christmas, one for Thanksgiving, and Spring Break; two weeks for summer, and lots of four- and five-day weekends scattered throughout so the number of instructional days we spend in classrooms actually varies only slightly in the end.

There is no better solution to ending the achievement gap, leveling the playing field, and making everyone better-rested, happier, and smarter overall. The answer is so obvious. I know we have these romanticized ideas about summer vacation (running on the beach, popsicles, soda shops, what have you), but face it: does anyone ever really need three months? The average out-of-town trip is about a week long, and an improved calendar could easily accommodate that. In fact, Americans could travel more, and during every season with a calendar that broke up the breaks.

A simple solution to a decades-old dilemma lies right in front of us. Now. Someone will just have the courage to stand up for the one thing American people claim to love but live to hate: Progressive, logical change.

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[1] This information is shamelessly stolen from the following two unprecedented tomes of knowledge on the subject of children in poverty. I highly recommend both.

Hart, B. & Risley, T.R. (1995). Meaningful differences in the everyday experiences of young American children. Baltimore, MD: Brookes

Payne, R.K. (2005). A framework for understanding poverty (4^th ed.). Highlands, TX: Aha! Process, Inc. 

Comments

[Loretta]

This looks the seed for a great doctoral dissertation.