Academics, the Year-Round Calendar, and the Color of the School Buses.

by Christopher Newland, Ph.D.

When Year-Round education was proposed in the Auburn, Alabama school system Christopher Newland, a parent and a Professor of Psychology at Auburn University, decided to review the research available on the topic.

Our school administrators said that the Year-Round calendar is better for students who are struggling in school. That sounded plausible to me, and if there was evidence that it did help struggling students, then I would have supported it. But after evaluating about 100 studies of Year-Round Education programs from around the country I found that the evidence that it benefits children is weak and inconsistent; in some cases, the change in calendar appeared was detrimental. Only one firm conclusion emerged from all the research: a "year-round" calendar is an inert intervention, academically.

Where Year-Round education seemed to benefit children there was always a more plausible explanation. For example, some benefits occurred in systems that implemented "multi track" year-round education to alleviate severe overcrowding. In this approach 1/4 of the students would be on vacation in the Fall, 1/4 in the Winter, and so forth. This staggering of calendars permits every seat in a school building to be used all year, and the building's capacity is increased and class size can be reduced by 25%. Even here, evidence for academic benefits is modest and likely due to smaller class sizes rather than the year round calendar.

In many districts, the Year-Round calendar was promoted as offering children the opportunity to receive extra help or participate in special programs during the "intersessions" (usually about three weeks) between year-round school terms. A three week period is insufficient time, however, to ameliorate any child's academic problems. Moreover, intersession classes are usually optional and in many school systems are not well attended even by those students who might benefit. A more important consideration is that schools can implement these types of supplementary programs using the traditional calendar by holding them after school or during the summer when there is sufficient time to do some effective remediation.

One of the most lavish claims made by Pro-Year Round education groups is that a three month summer vacation leads to learning loss. Well, this is a complicated issue. The best way to study this would be to give an exam on the last day of school in the Spring and then again on the first day of school the following term. But none of the studies I looked at did this. Some only tested in the Fall; some did not have a control group, or would compare one year-round school with one other school that only resembled the Year-round school on some indicators. In poorly designed studies such as these, if one group scored badly on the test it is impossible to discern whether the children forgot information over the summer, or whether they never learned it in the first place. This is an insufficient basis on which to effect a highly divisive and disruptive change in policy.

A larger problem is that one doesn't forget everything at the same rate. Things like how to multiply, to conjugate a verb or even how to ride a bike are forgotten very slowly. Some call this "procedural knowledge" or "knowing how." Other types of knowledge are forgotten fairly quickly. This is especially true with isolated facts like the capital of a far-away state, or the definition of an obscure scientific term, sometimes called declarative knowledge of "knowing that". This is an important distinction; to many it is crucial. An effective education is not a collection of quickly forgotten, isolated facts but rather the accumulation of a solid foundation of knowledge and a diverse array of analytic and procedural skills that are not forgotten in a few short weeks.

Yes, declarative knowledge will need to be reviewed at the appropriate time (not necessarily in the Fall), but whether the summer break is four to six weeks as in many year-round calendars or the traditional twelve weeks is of little consequence. The difference in the amount of forgetting after four weeks or twelve is not significant, especially when it is recognized that some of the information had been taught almost a year earlier, in the previous Fall. In fact, one could argue that the year-round calendar, with its multiple three-week breaks, simply offers more opportunities to forget.

From the evidence available it appeared that, at far as academics is concerned, changing the calendar is about as effective as changing the color of the school busses. Personally, with the lack of any evidence supporting academic benefits for a year-round calendar, I was against implementing this type of school year because I want my children to have the opportunity to benefit from other types of learning that are only possible during a long summer break. These included attending summer camps (soccer and academic camps), extended travel, attempting long term projects such as starting a summer business, and working at local business concerns. Athletics was an additional problem since one of my children is a swimmer and many of the swimming tournaments are held during the Summer. Other concerns within our community included the fact that Auburn is a University town where many of the parents have summers free and like to travel with their children.

Broader concerns arose as the issue was discussed further. Parents were concerned about child-care. Many felt that it would be more difficult to arrange for child care for four intersession breaks than for one long summer. Parents who were divorced did not want to be faced with further litigation to establish new, and in many cases very inconvenient, visitation rights. Others were concerned about marching band and other types of athletics such as Little League, which would have been unavailable to children on a year-round calendar. The year-round calendar also put our students on different calendars than other school systems that we played in athletic events.

No single concern above is, or should be, enough to torpedo the proposal of year-round school. Instead, our community described such a large collection of disruptions that the purported benefits of year-round school had to be considered carefully. The fact that there was no evidence for academic gains resulting from a year-round calendar that might offset these disruptions was one of the deciding factors that convinced most parents in our community that this was a bad idea.

Ultimately, after the School Board was besieged by parents, they decided to drop the proposal. For me it came down to this question: What problem would Year-Round education solve? And, after reviewing the literature, I couldn't find one.

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The above article was written by Christopher Newland for the June, 2000 issue of Offspring magazine. Due to space limitations, a list of four points were excerpted for publication.