Making a Case for Year-Round Schooling

During summer, many students forget what they learned the year before, and teachers must review material done last year. People in year-round schools believe that because of the shorter breaks, teachers have to spend less time reviewing material, and can move forward in their teaching. According to the National Education Association, “one of the main reasons for switching to year-round schools is to improve with student academics.” Although there is no proof, many schools believe a year-round schedule helps improve students academic skills.

Dr. Matthew Lynch from, “Education New” states that, “Students tend to forget a lot during summer break, so a shorter time away from school might increase retention rates” (Watson). Dr.Lynch is saying that having a shorter summer break will tend more to the students, because they will remember and learn more than what a student who has the whole summer off.

This is how the Year-Round School format would work. Students would attend school for a certain amount of days, and then the students would receive a longer break period. This would be repeated all year long. Primarily, the education administration is taking the summer break and splitting it equally throughout the year (nayre.org). The school districts that Year-Round School will help students, yet it may actually hurt them socially. For example, the long summer break provides students with the exciting opportunities such as camps and family vacations. These are learning opportunities that take place outside of the classroom by teaching young children valuable life skills including patience, teamwork, and tolerance (ltisdschools.org ). Also, teenagers may

The reasons behind having a three month summer break are outdated and do not provide any functional advantages to the present day student. The current school year lasting nine months with a three month summer vacation is not necessary in today’s society. It originally served to allow children in rural communities help their families with the harvest (Hemerson and Gove 8). Educators originally saw the nine month school year as a way to maximize attendance in rural areas of the country (O'Sullivan 399). This serves no functioning purpose in today's society. It is estimated today that only 3% of the population is involved in agriculture (Kralovec 32). The nine month school year originally was supposed to allow more working children to attend school, but,with

Another important advantage for many school districts is that year-round school can enable multi-track schedules. A multi-track schedule is one in which teachers and students are divided into equally sized groups called tracks (Gerard 1). Each track attends school and has vacation at the same time, but there is always at least one track on vacation at any time (1). This is somewhat analogous to our P.E. system at Johnston High. Imagine if everyone had P.E. on the same day; we’d never be able to manage students or fit them into the gyms. This is comparable to our

In his article “Go Year-Round: A Push for True Summer School”, Milton Chen, the executive director of Edutopia, urges readers to use the year-round schooling system. He explains in brief words what the summer vacation was for. “…when farm families needed young people home during the summer months to replace the three R's with the two P's -- plantin' and pickin' " (Chen). He carries on discussing that the problem with the school days is not only the amount, but the schedule of the school day. The curriculum is too tight; neither the students nor the teachers have the time to step away from the books and text and learn from the outside. The students do not have the chance to go into the outside world and observe what is going on in the society that they live in. Additionally, the teachers do not have the chance to decide how their time is spent because it is spent on the strict schedule of the classroom.

The third schedule consists of 6 terms each consisting of 43 days. Students attend two terms and then get a term off.

Under a year-round schedule, the students benefit by having smaller breaks, meaning they can quickly snap back to previously learned information. When information is stored, but not used for an extended period of time, anyone can lose that information. Due to the shorter breaks, students may find it difficult to find a summer job, or a job at all, but there are jobs that work with students or maybe just limit their time at the workplace.

The average school period is one hundred and eighty days with small breaks in between and a three-month break during summer to ease students’ minds and let them relax. The Board of Education should make all schools in the United States year-round to increase educational time and decrease the loss of knowledge over the breaks. It gives students the same time to relax and plan family vacations periodically throughout the year, but never creates the stress of changing sleep schedules that summer break changes. Not only is it a good way to enhance education, but it also is better for planning family events, positive effects on budget, academic achievement, and could decrease the absence rate of students.

Should kids have a summer break or have year round schooling? I think that that students should have summer break because of the complications it brings with having a year-round schooling.

Year-round schooling is characterized by its 45-90 day periods of instruction (varying with different multitrack systems) separated by 15-30 day breaks (varying with different multitrack systems) (California Department of Education). There is no current scientific evidence to show that year-round education lessens the amount of material forgotten during the summer (McMillen 68); in fact, this memory loss is maximized as it occurs more frequently as it accompanies the shorter, habitual breaks. Constant breaks can also multiply some of summer’s negative effects. One common issue associated with summer is students’ loss of focus as summer approaches and trouble becoming accustomed to the beginning of the following school year (Worsnop 439). This would be a, though minimized, a recurring difficulty with constant breaks. Furthermore, teachers

According to the National Association for Year-Round Education, students will be able to advance more rapidly if they did year-round schooling. A by-product of summer break is the dividing of classes based on age. If schooling was year-round, there would be less distinction between one year and the next. This only teaches us to work with people from our generation. If we had year-round schooling we could advance quicker and work with people from different generations, just like how it would be in the future with jobs. Also, the constant learning environment takes away the emphasis of when the student started school and instead emphasizes skill

Having a three month summer gives kids a break to spend time with their family, friends, and time to do what they want. I went on an Alaskan Cruise in 2012 for a month of my summer. It was a very interesting experience. Kids that go to a year-round school can’t have this great experience to go and travel around to some places. According to “Year-Round Schooling Explained” by Education

Students would not have to relearn what they forget over the summer since they would

Students often wonder how fun it would be if they had a three-week break every nine weeks, as opposed to one long summer break. Changing summer break into much shorter, but more frequent breaks would be beneficial for many reasons. Just think, most students lose up to one month of knowledge over the summer. Although most students could go to a learning camp over the summer, lower income students cannot afford this as summer break is financially taxing on them. Finally, while lower income and higher income students may have their differences, all students stay up late over summer break. Staying up late causes these students to get out of their school routine. It is a wonder why the US education system hasn’t already turned summer break into