Year-Round Schools

Background

According to the National Association for Year-Round Education (NAYRE), the movement for year-round schooling is growing. Information provided by NAYRE indicates that nearly 3,000 schools had year-round education programs in 2006, with an enrollment of over 2 million students. This represents only about 4% of all schools, but it is nearly four times the number of students in year-round schools just a decade or so ago.

Many schools are successfully increasing student learning by restructuring the school year and by lengthening the school day and/or school year. It is important to consider restructuring the school day and year as national expectations increase and as academic standards continue to rise. This is particularly true in our lowest performing schools where many students will never catch up unless they spend more time on learning and are given substantial individual support and intervention.

Contrary to widespread belief, year-round school does not inevitably mean less break time. The conventional school-year calendar, with a September start date and a June ending that allows for a 2- to 3- month summer break, was planned when countless American families were earning a living in agriculture or managing a family business. At that time, school calendars were developed around students working in the family, especially so that children could be home to help during the busy summer months. Schools remained in sync with the agrarian calendar even after family farms declined, in part because teaching and learning during the sweltering summer days without air conditioning were practically impossible.

Although year-round schooling exists in many diverse forms, the process, in effect, involves restructuring the conventional school calendar so that the extended summer vacation is replaced by numerous smaller breaks evenly spaced throughout the year. As early as the 1900s, American schools began experimenting with a switch to year-round schedules. But the idea did not begin to catch on until the 1970s and 1980s, when studies began to [Page 950]show that U.S. students were scoring poorly on national and international examinations.

The term year-round schooling can be misleading; it causes students to imagine that they would have to say goodbye forever to summer traditions, such as summer camp or seaside vacations. In reality, students in most American year-round school districts spend a similar amount of days in class as do students in traditional calendar schools—the days are just arranged differently, with smaller, more frequent breaks throughout the year.

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