Essay Sample: The Importance Of Summer Break

At the end of each May, millions of schoolchildren in the United States look forward to summer vacation. However, summer vacation has come under attack in recent years as education groups such as the National Center on Time and Learning lobby in Congress to extend the school year to encompass the entire year, citing losses in categories such as English and mathematics. However, the reasons to keep summer vacation far outweigh the costs of extending the school year to be all-encompassing.

Firstly, year-round schools fail at their intended purpose: to raise test scores. Many advocates for year-round school, including New York Times contributor LZ Granderson, cite reasoning such as a growing gap between American schools and the rest of the world. In his 2013 New York Times article “Year Round Is What’s Needed, Not Camp.”, Granderson shows dismay for this gap, mentioning that “It’s disturbing to know 15-year-olds in countries like Canada are on average a full year ahead of ours.”He then goes on to propose year-round schooling as a solution to the low performance of American schools. One common metric to measure academic achievement are yearly state tests, and data collected by the Southern California Consortium on Research in Education shows that from 2004 to 2005, the Median Academic Performance Index across the Los Angeles region’s year-round schools was on average marginally lower than the traditional schools in the district. Not only does this put into question arguments made by parents such as Granderson, but it also gives credence to the belief that too much schooling can cause burnout. In his book, “School’s In: The History of Summer Education in American Public Schools”, Ken Gold “debunks the idea that we got summers off only to placate big industry or agriculture.”(“Westnet, Danny. Vacation Just as Important as School Year.”. The Seattle Times, July 9, 2011. seattletimes.com/seattle-news/vacation-just-as-important-as-school-year.), continuing on in his book to state that the reason why school districts unilaterally gave students the summer off was “a belief that “too much schooling impaired a child’s and a teacher’s health”, or to use more modern terminology, that too much school causes burnout. After all, if too many days on the job can cause burnout in adults, then why shouldn’t too many days in school cause burnout? In their haste, Granderson and advocates for year-round schooling have forgotten a key principle of efficient education: Efficiency is at the crossroads of quantity and quality, and while increasing the number of hours students are in school by almost a third like one proposal that made it on the floor of Congress in 2011(Time for Innovation Matters in Education Act of 2011), it comes at the cost of lowered effectiveness and an apparent net loss in efficiency.

Another talking point school advocates make is that the summer allows students to slack off without responsibilities. Granderson in his aforementioned article says that his reasoning to enroll his 16-year old son in a local community college over the summer is that he wants his “son’s brain to remain active, sharp not turned into goo because he’s playing basketball for five hours everyday in a rec center.” What Granderson and others fail to realize however is summer vacation provides the necessary environment for students to pursue internships and enter into the job market. For some students, such as Gabriela Lucy who took part in a city-wide internship program in Chicago during the summer of 2015, these internships are the first steps up the corporate ladder. Gabriela, who originally started in the program to make extra income for her household, told USA Today in 2015 that she gained a new perspective on the job market and her opportunities. “Initially I just wanted to earn extra cash for my household. But(this job) opened up a more vivid pathway for me. I saw I could do more than earn income, I could gain experience and job readiness for the real world.”. Programs like Chicago’s One Summer Chicago Plus employ thousands of high schoolers across the country in high demand internships that give their interns valuable experience, connections inside the job market, and most importantly, soft skills such as communication and problem-solving skills. These skills can’t be learned inside a classroom, however, and as a result potential employers such as JPMorgan Chase have in recent years found increased difficulty in finding skilled workers. Having students in the classroom year-round also severely limits the opportunities available to the low-income students that Matthew Yglesias in his article “Summer Vacation is Evil” states summer vacation disadvantages. A study by the Brookings Institution shows that teen employment is a strong predictor of earnings into a worker’s twenties. And if year-round advocates such as LZ Granderson want to argue that summer vacation has no place in the current economic climate, then they must also concede that extending the school year would have negative effects on teen employment, the number of skilled workers entering the workforce, and opportunities for low-income students.

Another argument to be made for year-round schooling is that summer vacation widens the achievement gap between low-income students and their peers. A 2011 RAND literature review concluded that on average a student loses about a month of schooling during summer vacation, with larger losses among low-income students. However, the solution to this problem is to offer summer school instead of eliminating summer vacation altogether. Even advocates of keeping summer vacation like Danny Westnet agree that the current curriculum should be more rigorous, but their solution to the problem is to expand tutoring programs, allowing students who want or need extra time in the classroom to receive it. Putting all students back in the classroom is an over reactionary and unnecessary solution to a problem we can already solve by expanding our current tutoring programs and summer school infrastructure.

In conclusion, while extending the school year can seem like the obvious solution to the problems ailing the current state of the public school system, extending the school year comes with several drawbacks. Burnout can limit the effectiveness of extra teaching time, and more time in school means less time learning valuable and marketable skills and making connections with potential in internship programs. The school system already has all the tools necessary to combat the achievement gap, and with expanded accessible tutoring and growth in summer school infrastructure struggling students can get the help they need effectively. Expanding the school year may seem like the sensible and sound option, however, the unintended consequences will far outweigh the apparent benefits.