Lesson 48: School's In

I'm an education policy junkie, so when I read the cover story from Time Magazine today on lengthening the school year, I got really excited.

First, some background on myself. I loved school when I was a kid. If I could just go to school for the rest of my life and get paid for it, I would be a billionaire smiling at Oprah on Forbes Magazine (or however that stupid song goes). When kids my age were getting excited about summer vacation, I was getting excited about summer reading lists. And when they enjoyed getting new clothes for the first day of school, I was delighted by the smell of a new box of crayons and would spend hours organizing my new supplies into my bookbag. (Yeah. I was a special kid.) I even pick up school supply lists from the displays in front of Staples now and get a little teary-eyed (I guess I'm a special adult, too) Usually when kids misbehave, parents would take away television privileges or ground their kids. My mom once told me I couldn't go to school when I refused to wear what she wanted me to wear. Some little girls played tea party. I played school. I never napped during naptime because I would have rather been counting blocks or sounding out words. Aside from that, I never understood why my classmates thought school was boring. Sure, it's easy to think that I loved school when I was in elementary school (Who can complain about fingerpainting?) or that I loved being able to play with friends on the playground, but it really was just a pure love for learning that got me excited in the morning when I opened my eyes. I bet you're thinking what the heck?!?

Anyway, this article in Time talks about how kids suffer from something called the "summer slide" in which students had a tendency to forget what they learned the previous year over the summer because they weren't spending any time engaging in educational activities like going to museums, participating in enrichment classes or interacting with other students. The obvious statistics were cited saying that children in low income communities suffered the most because they didn't have access to museums and didn't live in areas that were safe enough to play outside. But what I found to be even more shocking was that American students have long summer breaks, spend more time in the classroom but still get outperformed by students in many other industrialized countries in standardized math tests.

I started to wonder how it could be that American students could spend so much time in the classroom and still not perform better. What are these kids doing in there? Staring at each other and eating bonbons? Then I came to the conclusion that those long idle summers and the summer slide cause teachers to have to review a whole lot of information before moving on to the new material. Rather than going from Algebra to Geometry, students are having to spend the first half of the year re-learning what they had been taught before they can master new skills.

The author, David Von Drehle put it best when  he said, "We associate the school year with oppression and the summer months with liberty-and nothing is more American than liberty...School is regimen; summer is creativity. School is work; summer is play." I wonder what would happen if the American culture valued notebook paper, books and crayons as much as they liked their lazy summer days.