Is it Time to Shorten Summer Vacation?

This is the second week of 9 ½ weeks of summer vacation in South Pasadena.  Summer vacation is a time for kids to unwind and enjoy carefree unstructured activities. However, for parents, the length of the vacation could require a lot of effort and money to find engaging and meaningful activities to keep the kids occupied. I hear from many parents that they don’t want their kids to stay home and play video games all day. 

According to  Superintendent Joel Shapiro, our school district schedule is negotiated: “A calendar committee, including representatives of all stakeholders, recommend the school-year calendar. Employees then vote to ratify the calendar, and the official calendar is approved by the Board of Education,” he said. 

The burden is on the parents to organize their calendar, find camps that suit their children’s interest—and pocket books—and figure out means of transportation. For families where both parents have full-time work, camps that are only offered a few hours during the day aren’t an option unless parents can find someone to transport the kids and fill the other hours. I also know families who sign up for so many camps during the summer that they rack up expenses of $4,000-plus per child.

Summer vacation hasn’t always been a given. According to a recent (and interesting) Time Magazine article, schools operated on two separate calendars in the decades before the Civil War, and neither one included a summer break. Rural kids would go to either the summer or winter terms and spend the spring planting or the fall harvesting. Schools were open to urban kids for as many as 48 weeks a year, but education was not compulsory so at the time, attendance was intermittent. 

In the 1840s, education reformers felt rural schooling was insufficient and year-round schooling could overstimulate young minds, leading to “nervous disorders or insanity.” Summer was deemed the best time for a break coinciding with agrarian schedule and alleviating physician concerns with under-ventilated classrooms causing spread of disease. Clearly all these issues no longer apply.

In addition to the effort and cost involved in enrolling kids in summer camps, there’s also the issue of summer learning loss. The loss in learning varies across grades, subject and family income. One common finding across numerous studies: On average, students score lower on standardized tests at the end of the summer than they do at the beginning of summer on that same test. Summer loss for all students is estimated to be equal to about one month, but this differs by subject matter:

• Mathematics—2.6 months of grade-level equivalency loss.
• Reading—Varies across socioeconomic status. Low income students generally lose about two months of reading achievement. Middle income students experience slight gains in reading performances.

These results are not surprising to me as I see my own kids spend about two months at the beginning of every school year reviewing materials they had learned the previous academic year. These two months of review, in addition to another two months of vacation, mean a total of four months of meaningful instruction lost.  Also since socioeconomic status impacts reading achievement, having a long summer break widens the achievement gap. Two-thirds of the academic achievement gap in reading and language found among high school students has been explained through the learning loss that occurs during the summer months of the primary school years. 

Furthermore, some experts say that the long summer months away from school is one of the reasons math skills and graduation rates of U.S. high school students rank well below average compared to other industrialized nations.

I am not proposing that we do away with summer vacation altogether and extend the school year—even though its proponents often compare the 175 to 180 days of school each year in the U.S. to 240 days in Japan. However, I think a modified school calendar that doesn’t call for more days in school but rather replaces the long summer vacation with, for example, a six-week summer vacation, a four-week winter break and perhaps a few other one-week breaks has merit. 

Minimized learning loss clearly is one benefit. Another is arranging childcare or camps; this may be easier if duration is shortened. Also student learning interruption is greatly reduced if each break is no longer than a handful of weeks.

Research has shown that modified calendars improve achievement for the economically disadvantaged or under-achieving students. In addition, students, parents and staff who participated in a modified calendar program were found to be happy with it.

If we were to ever adopt a modified school calendar, it would clearly need to involve many stakeholder groups, but it may be worthwhile to plant the seed and in the meantime hope for more research to be done on the subject. Kids seem to enjoy long summer breaks, but I think a rejiggered break schedule—including more breaks of shorter duration—could be better for parents, kids and teachers.