Year-round schools provide numerous benefits
September 29, 2017
Year-round schooling verses summer vacation has been an intriguing educational debate for some time. In many Asian countries, children are taught all throughout the year with smaller, but more frequent breaks to allow for student relaxation. In America, however, children learn for around nine months with sparse breaks, and a long summer vacation. In this case, the Asian countries might have it right. While children are enrolled at school, a common priority is for them to get the best education possible, and to do the best they can.
To ensure success, theoretically schools should be putting forth as much effort as practical to make their students succeed to the best of their abilities. This is where cutting the summer could be useful. In low-income families, summer learning loss preys on students’ success cumulatively, according to Oxford Learning. Additionally, the article notes that two-thirds of the achievement gap is attributed to summer learning loss, something that drastically hurts low-income students. As year-round schooling doesn’t have any opportunity for a summer gap in education, it is likely to reverse this trend. This shows in research, too, though not drastically. So far, year-round schools have proven to be at least equally as good as schools with summer break, and the Educational Research Newsletter reports a small academic increase in ability for minority students.
While the effects are minor academically, the financial impact could be larger. A reason Year-round schools are praised for their cost-effectiveness is that it’s better for the property to be used all year than for it to have a break of being completely useless in the summer. By using it all year, taxpayers are getting more schooling, education, and use for their tax dollars. This also means that if there are problems during the school year that janitors need to take care of, they could respond immediately (depending on how the system is implemented), potentially making environments more safe and comfortable. This cost-effectiveness is something that the Congressional Research Service backs up.
The effectiveness of how much the school can save or how well the school would be able to repair itself during the year would be based on how the system is implemented, however. By using the 45 on-15 off day calendar (one of three common methods), the school would probably be in the best repair. This would also have to assume that the school is not multi-tracking, or that there aren’t enough students to affect anything.
A final interesting benefit to year-round schools is the fact that you can stagger learning periods to serve more students in one school, also known as multi-tracking. The Educational Research Newsletter explains that this is effective in cases to avoid crowding or postpone the building of new schools. Less crowded classrooms can increase the quality of education, allowing for students to potentially ask more questions and expand their understanding of topics. It also may allow for more one-on-one time with teachers and students, allowing for personalized clarification on topics they may be struggling with.
Additionally, the ability to serve more students can help small, growing towns adjust to more children and have time to build better schools, or even just avoid it for awhile until their economies are more stable. Year-Round schools can be cost effective and help with low-income students. Though results in educational advantages aren’t very conclusive or dramatic, these schools can help bridge achievement gaps little by little in the educational system. Year-Round schools can also be implemented in growing towns to allow a staggering of students so that they can serve more kids at once or provide children better education. In short, Year-Round schools seem to have no intense educational problems or disadvantages, and they could be a real cost-saver.
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Willie Tsai • Nov 1, 2019 at 1:23 pm
Students will actually remember what they learn.
R: Year-round schooling means that students do not fall victim to the “summer slide,” or the well-documented phenomenon where students unlearn some of the knowledge they worked so hard to attain when too much consecutive time is taken off from school.
E: the National Summer Learning Association often cites decades of research that shows that it can take anywhere from 8 to 13 weeks at the beginning of every school year for teachers to get their students back up to speed and ready to learn the new grade’s material.
E2: according to the Advocate students lose about 27 percent of learning gains over the summer
E3: according to learning liftoff Studies show that students experience dramatic learning loss in all academic areas over the course of summer break
E4: Eliminating any sort of long break from school can improve a child’s academic achievement. Long summers are known to cause “summer slide,” or the decline of academic skills and knowledge over the course of the extended vacation. Even if you hire a tutor to help your child in subjects like math, it may not be enough to prevent at least a little of this “summer slide” from occurring. This loss in learning varies across grade level, subject matter and family income, according to the National Summer Learning Association, but it affects all children in some way.
E5:according to School Flex Three months might not sound very long, but for a child, it can seem like a lifetime. It’s all about scale. Think of it like this: Three months in the life of a ten-year-old makes up 2.5 percent of their life. For a thirty-year-old adult, 2.5 percent of their life is nine months. Could you just take off from work for nine months, never use your work skill in that time, and expect to work as well as you did beforehand?
E6:In NWEA’s research, summer learning loss was observed in math and reading across third to eighth grade, with students losing a greater proportion of their school year gains each year as they grow older – anywhere from 20 to 50 percent
I: Either way, when it comes to learning and retention, students who attend year-round schools have nothing to lose and much to gain.
A: an interesting benefit to year-round schools is the fact that you can stagger learning periods to serve more students in one school
R:Less crowded classrooms can increase the quality of education, allowing for students to potentially ask more questions and expand their understanding of topics. It also may allow for more one-on-one time with teachers and students, allowing for personalized clarification on topics they may be struggling with.
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A:Students will actually like school.
R:Teachers and students experience a closer relationship in year-round schools than they do in traditional, shorter-calendar-year schools. In the absence of any long-term break from school, students do not feel detached from the school environment.
E: According to the advocate Results from research studies show that students in year-round schools are more self-confident, have a higher self-concept, have fewer inhibitions, and feel positive about their schooling experience.
I:The experience of immersion in learning offered by year-round schools, with more time spent in classrooms, proves to be beneficial to many students
A3:It’s an easy way to bridge the achievement gap.
R:Minority students, students who speak English as a second language, economically disadvantaged students, and students with disabilities are the most affected by the summer fallback.
E:Studies have found that disadvantaged students lose about 27 percent more of their learning gains in the summer months than their peers. If that is not enough to affirm the need for year-round schooling for minorities, researcher Daniel O’Brien concluded that minority students progress their learning proficiency the fastest during the school year when compared to white and economically advantaged students.
E2:Minorities also dropout of high school at rates that are higher than their white counterparts. According to Jessica Washington of Politic365, the solution is year-round schooling. She reports that the national dropout rate is 5 percent, while the dropout rate for year-round school students is just 2 percent. These dropout statistics are not broken down by racial or socioeconomic backgrounds, but if the overall dropout rate is lower for year-round schools, it is likely that the minority dropout rates in this model are also lower. The reasons why dropout rates are lower in year-round setups are easy to deduce: students have less time to adjust to time off from school, and in the case of high schoolers, they have less time to work.
E3:High school graduates earn $11,000 more per year than those with a G.E.D. or less, and that number rises to $36,000 more with a bachelor’s degree. Giving up a few summers of minimum wage work in exchange for the higher lifetime earnings of a high school diploma affords is a small price to pay.
I:While this inability for teenagers to work and make money in the summer has been cited as a pitfall of year-round schooling, the disadvantages of this are short-lived.