ENGL 1711 03

Siegel 1

The Logic of Year round schooling By Thomas Siegal

The Logic of Year Round Schooling

Each year, more schools across the United States are switching from the traditional summer vacation-based school calendar into a newer system called Year-Round Education, which will henceforth be referenced as YRE. The phrase may sound scary, but it does not mean that the school year is lengthened; YRE is a simple rearrangement of the currently existing number of school days in the United States into an alternative calendar with shortened summer vacation and more multi-week breaks throughout the year. Proponents of the switch to YRE usually argue three basic points: Schools on a YRE calendar save money, improve student achievement, and allow more students to attend school in any given building. Studies have shown that these arguments are truer for some schools than others, but sometimes not true at all. There are cases where a switch to YRE has increased costs of operation and/or correlated with lower student performance. Additionally, opponents of YRE say that it places a heavier burden on teachers and administrators, such as school principals. The effectiveness of switching to YRE seems to depend on the circumstances of each individual district or school. The facts will demonstrate that year round schooling is the logical choice for certain schools, particularly those which are overcrowded. One often cited point against YRS is that it threatens teachers and administrators. It is argued that teachers and administrators need the vacation time in order to avoid staff “burn-out,” which is bad for running an effective school. School employees are said to gain many benefits from a summer vacation, and many believe this necessarily translates into more effective student outcomes. For many teachers, summer vacation has become an important time to earn additional income and/or taking college courses to enhance their qualifications. One study published in an article titled “Now Is the Time for Rear Round School” reported that roughly 30 percent of teachers take extra jobs in the summer as a second source of income (Doyle and Finn). If the switch to YRS reduces the ability for teachers to earn supplemental income, a year-round school could be less competitive in attracting good teachers. Staff development, teachers taking college courses, might also become very difficult without a summer vacation, because local colleges have schedules that do not accommodate the schedules of teachers at year-round schools. There do appear to be some reasonable criticisms, on behalf of teachers and administrators, of the YRE switch.

Fortunately, the staff-based objections to YRE haven’t been as scary in reality as they might sound. No survey or study has produced general agreement that year-round schools cannot attract or retain talented teachers, even though many have tried. That more such surveys are done each year without producing an anti-YRE consensus ought to underline the idea that year-round schools can, in fact, hold onto talent. One extensive study of the YRE effect on teacher and Administrative burnout found that, after a switch to YRE, teachers take less sick leave, tensions between teachers and administrators don’t run as high, and all staff members deal with significantly fewer disciplinary problems among students (Wildman 119). In other words, many of the anxieties for staff well-being are unfounded.

The only substantiated fear here is that about staff-development: it is true that year-round teachers have a harder time fitting college classes into their work schedules than teachers working on a traditional calendar. It is possible that this might be a necessary short-term sacrifice for schools who would benefit from a YRE schedule in other ways. Here we see that the choice of calendar for a school may have pros and cons either way. Ultimately, however, there is no reason that colleges can’t adapt to a new schedule of American teachers. It is simply that so far many of them haven’t. Colleges and teachers can adapt to YRS together. There is no good reason why this particular obstacle must be more than a short-term speed bump, if even that, for any given district. Critics of YRS are usually skeptical of the claim that it is truly a money-saving technique. They argue that it is prohibitively expensive to keep a school cool enough for learning from June to August, and that maintenance costs will rise if schools are used more often. The truth here is that YRS is not inherently more or less expensive per school than traditional scheduling. It depends on factors that are different from one school to the next, such as climate. Keeping a learning environmental at a functional temperature during the summer months is much more expensive in Iowa than in Oregon, for example. An individual school might report higher or lower costs after switching to YRE, but the more important question is how much money is being spent per student. Many year-round schools implement a multi-track system with different groups of students being on break at different times. Herein lies the money-saving potential of YRS: more students can be accommodated per school building, and the staggered multi-track results in a lower cost of operation per student because fewer rooms and buildings are needed in the big picture. The cost per student can be less under a year-round calendar. It is up to administrators to make the informed decision. Some say, rightly, that it would create unnecessary burden to have schools adopt new schedules if they don’t ultimately produce a gain in student achievement, and opponents eagerly latch onto any evidence of YRE programs which didn’t improve test scores. While it is true that some schools have shown a lack of improvement after making the switch, those schools have almost all been in relatively high-income districts where, according to journalist Frederick Hess, students aren’t affected as acutely by summer learning-loss (“Summer Vacation Is No Longer Necessary”). Lower-income students are widely found to improve their test scores after switching to YRE. It is theorized that high-income children have more stimulating environments during the summer months because they are lucky enough to have books at home and be sent to summer camp, where they are more likely to do critical activities. Low-income children are statistically much less likely to read during summer, which may be one reason why they suffer so much more from summer learning-loss effect and gain so much more from YRE than their wealthier counterparts. The very dense, highly overcrowded schools of Los Angeles have found remarkable success (in improved test scores) with multi-track year-round calendars because it allows the schools to have fewer of their students in class at any given moment. Other groups shown almost universally to benefit from YRE include English-Second Language learners and special education students. Statistically, switching to Year-Round has conferred sizable benefits for poorer districts, even if it has been shown to be a somewhat frivolous idea for rich districts. The benefits of YRE do not apply equally to all situations, but it has been proven in practice to be a great technique for addressing certain problems. The amount of measurable benefit from switching to YRE correlates directly with how poor any given district is. Low-income students stand the most to gain from YRE, while children of rich parents seem to perform about the same under both types of school calendars. Therefore, all school districts ought to have an honest discussion about what kind of calendar is right for them. A portion of schools who do so will certainly conclude that switching to YRE is a good move.

Works Cited

Doyle, Denis P. and Chester E., Jr. Finn. "Now Is the Time for the Year-Round School." Principal, vol. 65, no. 1, 01 Sept. 1985, pp. 29-31. EBSCOhost, sptproxy.mnpals.net/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=e ric&AN=EJ323701&site=ehost-live&scope=site.

Hess, Frederick M. "Summer Vacation Is No Longer Necessary." Year-Round Schools, edited by Adriane Ruggiero, Greenhaven Press, 2008. At Issue. Opposing Viewpoints in Context, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/EJ3010473208/OVIC?u=saintpaul_edu&xid=576dd7 cc. Accessed 20 Mar. 2018. Originally published as "Summer Vacation of Our Discontent," www.washingtonpost.com, 12 July 2006.

Wildman, Louis, et al. "The Effect of Year-Round Schooling on Administrators." Education, vol. 119, no. 3, Spring99, p. 465. EBSCOhost, sptproxy.mnpals.net/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true &db=aph&AN=1871567&site=ehost-live&scope=site.