This blog post discusses President Clinton's view that the U.S. school calendar should be reformed from an agricultural schedule to a year-round schedule. Currently, the long summer break causes students to lose knowledge and skills, as shown in studies. A potential schedule is 45 days of school followed by 15 days off, providing the same number of annual instructional days but without long summer gaps. This year-round approach could benefit students through reduced learning loss and allow for more curriculum, as well as provide flexibility for parents and save on school operating costs. However, it may require changes to sports and extracurricular schedules. The author argues a year-long school year would be better than the current outdated system.
This blog post discusses President Clinton's view that the U.S. school calendar should be reformed from an agricultural schedule to a year-round schedule. Currently, the long summer break causes students to lose knowledge and skills, as shown in studies. A potential schedule is 45 days of school followed by 15 days off, providing the same number of annual instructional days but without long summer gaps. This year-round approach could benefit students through reduced learning loss and allow for more curriculum, as well as provide flexibility for parents and save on school operating costs. However, it may require changes to sports and extracurricular schedules. The author argues a year-long school year would be better than the current outdated system.
This blog post discusses President Clinton's view that the U.S. school calendar should be reformed from an agricultural schedule to a year-round schedule. Currently, the long summer break causes students to lose knowledge and skills, as shown in studies. A potential schedule is 45 days of school followed by 15 days off, providing the same number of annual instructional days but without long summer gaps. This year-round approach could benefit students through reduced learning loss and allow for more curriculum, as well as provide flexibility for parents and save on school operating costs. However, it may require changes to sports and extracurricular schedules. The author argues a year-long school year would be better than the current outdated system.
This blog is going to discuss President Clinton and his interview
in 2008, which brings up a couple of different big ideas to fix education not only domestically but also internationally. My main argument in this blog is about his view on the length of our school year and the rigor of our high school curriculum. In this country our public school year for the great majority of students is based on an agricultural calendar. This was done so students can go back home and help their families on the farm when especially needed. Times have dramatically changed, according to the EPA, There are over 313,000,000 people living in the United States. Of that population, less than 1% claim farming as an occupation (and about 2% actually live on farms)(DEMO. Paragraph 1). Total today their around 2.2 million farms this is down from 6.8 million in 1935(EPA paragraph 6). Much more information about this change at http://www.epa.gov/agriculture/ag101/demographics.html.
The question needs
to asked why should we have an education system designed around
about 1-2 percent of the population?
SomeMany studies have shown that in a traditional year with a
long summer break students lose knowledge and ability because the information gained during the year escapes due to inactivity.
The graph shows dips during the summer months.
A Meta annalist done by Cooper, Charlton, Valentine, Muhlenbruck, and Bormen strongly suggests that information is consistently lost during the summer periods of the traditional school year. They also suggest that summer school is beneficial to students but that is for a different time. So what does a year round school look like and what are theoffer for benefits? There are different styles of year round school terms. The most popular is a 45/15 plan. Which means 45 days on then 15 off. With holidays worked in. This plan has the same amount of days in class 180 but without long breaks where knowledge is forgotten. From an economic standpoint, the traditional system during the hottest time of the year schools are kept cool as not to damage anything inside, but they are empty. If schools went year round the breaks would be more split up and not have to be cooling empty buildings. From the parents perspective it could be very beneficial. Today, pParents are forced to use their vacation time during the busiest and most expensive times of the year, winter holiday and summer break. If breaks were scattered across the year it would allow more flexibility for travel and time off in the corporate world.
Another advantage of the year round school schedule is that less
time is spent catching students up from the long summer break. This means more curriculums are up for grabs during the year. Any entry college professor would tell you a stronger high school education would only be beneficial on the next level. More time means more knowledge. There are drawbacks to the year round system, mainly music and sports would have to dramatically change schedules to fit a new year round system. Breaks every 45 days would interrupt any sports system of training and competing. Also the entire district would have to adopt the system and not only one school because parents could have kids in different schools and on different schedules. I believe that for the majority of schools in this country a yearlong school year would be beneficial. The reasons for success would be updating an outdated program, less knowledge lost over a long break, and more flexibility for schools and parents.
<http://www.epa.gov/agriculture/ag101/demographics.html>. Web. 5 Mar. 2015.
Harris Cooper, Kelly Charlton, Jeff C. Valentine, Laura Muhlenbruck and
Geoffrey D. Borman Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development Vol. 65, No. 1, Making the Most of Summer School: A Meta-Analytic and Narrative Review (2000), pp. i-vi+1-127
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