Year Round Schooling

Some school districts are in heated debates over whether year-round education could work for them. Many are strongly in favor of this "new" way of doing school, while others are strongly opposed. What most do not realize is that year-round education is not new--it has existed in America for several hundred years.

In the 1800s, many schools were year-round in America. Children worked at their own pace through their lessons and came to school when they could, usually during the times when their parents did not need their help on the farm. After awhile, it became obvious that most children did not attend school during the summer because they were working on the farms with their families. This cause most schools to decide to close down during the farming months. This led to the traditional school calendar most school districts in America use.

In the 1950s, year-round schooling came back into popularity for a short time because of the baby boom and overcrowded schools. By 1968, almost all attempts at year-round school had been abandoned. Today year-round education is at the heart of a heated debate. Some school are moving in this directions simply to combat overcrowded schools, others are choosing year-round school because they feel it benefits the students, and the rest do not believe that it is right.

The year-round school statistics for the United States may surprise some people. Since 1987 a number of public schools have decided to start using a year-round school system. In 2003 there were five times as many year-round schools than there were in 1987, and the amount is still increasing. More districts are opening up to the idea while others are more passionately against it than ever. The districts themselves are not the only entities concerned with the matter. Changing the school calendar affects students, parents, teachers, and businesses within the community.

An extensive amount of planning is involved within families around the school year of which they are a part. Mixed feelings come from not only experts but also these families that would be affected. Some parents feel like a year-round school year would benefit them a lot due to childcare during the summer, but others families feel that summer is one of the most important times of the year. Teachers also have many concerns and are affected just as much as the students and their families. Some teachers pride themselves on their long summers and others feel like the school year is too condensed and the summer is too long. The main concern for the teachers with changing the school calendar is salary. If there are longer school years will the teachers get paid more? Or since there could be the same number of instructional days, will their salary stay the same?

Summer is a very profitable time for many businesses such as vacation places, water parks, and day-care institutions. Because this issue affects so many people and provokes many new opinions, it is very controversial and should be debated and talked about to find a solution to the problems that we are having the in American school system. These problems have been addressed by many people including very credible people such as the heads of school boards, the president of the United States, Mr. Barack Obama, and people who have studied the education process for multiple years.

Being such a distinguished controversy, there are many viewpoints as to what the United States should or should not do. There are obvious two obvious sides to this issue: one for and one against year-round schooling. Within the 'for' and 'against' sides there are multiple viewpoints and opinions which have strong evidence and reasons for which one side is better. Is there a middle ground on which the opposing sides and meet?

Ruy Teixeira, a Senior Fellow at both The Century Foundation and America Progress, wrote an article explaining his viewpoint on year-round schooling and why is it very important that we try to implement it into the American school system. In Ruy Teixeira's paper, "All-Day, All-Year Schools," he proposes an idea that could fix many things within the school system. He is not necessarily declaring that the standard U.S. school system is extremely faulty but rather that the smaller problems could be fixed by changing the school schedule to an all year school. He strongly emphasizes that "to alleviate overcrowding, provide more effective instruction, raise in performance level, and reduce the pressure on working parents" the former mentioned change to the school schedule is the most reasonable to make (Teixeira 3).

Teixeira addresses the reasons that all-year school years would highly benefit the students, teachers, and parents. He, also, explains the problems behind the implementation process. The main problem is to get teachers and teacher unions to accept the proposed change. The U.S. school system has its "origins [based on] the agricultural calendar" (Teixeira 4). Therefore, students have an extremely long break from school during the summer to help their families. Now that most mothers and fathers typically work outside the home, the long summer break hardly makes any sense according to Teixeira.

Teixeira asserts that there are a lot of problems in the American school system as in all other school systems, but all-year schooling can fix a great number of these problems. Teachers spend almost four weeks at the beginning of the school year teaching students what they forgot during the summer break, and with no summer break, this wouldn't even be a problem. Since most school days end before parents get out of work and there is no school the entire summer while parents still have to go to work, parents need to find and pay for day care and transportation. "Almost half of families have no regular after-school arrangement for their children, so many students end up caring for themselves until their parents get home. Because of this time of no supervision juvenile violent crime "peaks between 2 p.m. and 4 p.m. on school days" (Teixeira 5).

All year schooling is not an increase of days that children go to school but just more, smaller breaks. The 45-15 idea is one that is mostly used which includes 45 days of school and 15 days of break. Within those 15 days, students are much less likely to forget anything. There was an attempt to make school more all year with summer school, but summer school was used more for students that are failing.

The state of California, in many districts, adopted the new system and has found improvement. The improvements haven't been studied too much because it's not state or federally controlled. The new system was implemented in primary and elementary schools at first because students above that age often have jobs after school and during the summer.

The main question