Write About Now

Kids across the country return to school this week, and it makes me sad. Granted there are tons of kids ready to go back, and just because I hated school for 17 years does not mean I am anti-education.

But what happened to the three-month summer? Today’s kids get out in late May, start pencil and scissor shopping in July and are tucked back behind a desk before August even gets going. When I was younger, June, July AND August were sacred, and were spent riding bikes, climbing trees, attending church camp, reading piles of books from the library, scrounging up quarters to pay the late fines, eating popsicles, cannonballing into the pool, sunburning shoulders, and pestering little brothers. Bliss.

Of course, not every child’s summer was so idyllic, and researchers now believe children without access to camps and libraries suffer “summer learning loss.” As a result, more schools, especially in lower-income areas, are extending semesters and school days and shortening summer breaks.

For instance, according to a recent Time magazine article, Cincinnati offered the 13 lowest-performing schools in the city an optional “fifth quarter,” or extra month of classes, this past June. This seems equivalent to offering Guantanamo prisoners an extra four weeks of waterboarding, but Governor Strickland hopes to eventually add the extension to every school in the state.

Others point out our country’s low achievement scores relative to Europe and Asia, and some believe sociological shifts support the extended day. “Our children are no longer working in the fields,” says US Education Secretary Arne Duncan in the same article. “And Mom isn’t waiting at home at 2:30 with a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich. That just doesn’t happen in American families anymore.”

This seems like a classic mistake of cause and effect. For one, that mom (or dad) who’s not home to greet the children after work may also be too tired to give much help with homework or attend parent-teacher conferences. I’m not trying to open the whole should-women-work topic, because the issue is more complex—both moms and dads (when present) improve their kids’ academic performance by taking an active interest and involvement in the process. Keeping kids in school longer won’t make the parents less stressed or more on-task when the kids finally get home.

Second, many of our schools are already in crisis, with teachers struggling to manage huge classes and dwindling resources. Extending a child’s stay in some of them is about as productive as giving the mouse a bigger wheel to run. Some educators realize this, and are using the extended time as an opportunity to give extra attention to the kids who need it most. “Clearly, focusing on the students that are furthest behind is where it makes the most sense,” says Chris Gabrieli, chairman of Massachusetts 2020, which helped create an experimental extended day program in 26 low-performing schools throughout the state. “Middle-class kids, they get a lot more learning time outside of school—they get tutors, they get arts programs, they get music programs, they get summer camps.”

And so we return to my own memories of summer, three predictably wonderful months ending with predictably pathetic tears on Labor Day. Because I had the benefit of those enrichment activities, plus a good public school and involved parents, I graduated at the top of a big class and earned a 31 on my ACT. Although the meager bragging rights of that sentence are about the total good the ACT did me, neither did the long summers do me any harm.

A few more hours each week might help our students become more competitive, but our parents and schools also have a few things to learn. Let’s use the time we have more effectively before piling more onto little sunburned shoulders.