<p>California</a> Considers Shorter School Year | NBC Bay Area</p>
<p>I welcome the idea.
I cannot understand why K-12 students should have longer school year than college students.
For several years, my children did not learn much in classrooms after May 15.</p>
<p>Why do kids need to have such a long summer break, anyway?</p>
<p>I didn’t think the CA school year was any longer than any other state. It certainly wasn’t any longer than my HS in NY as a child or what we have in OH. It’s purely based on when the school year starts and ends. My college children start in July and end in May. CA HSs start in September and ends in June.</p>
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So they can get jobs and start saving for college ;)</p>
<p>They could pretty much shut down school after AP testing/Star testing is complete. They don’t do anything useful after that anyway. Well, unless you consider paper mache useful. In elementary school it was late spring the paper mache projects came out.</p>
<p>The standard length of the school year in California is 180 days. Daughter’s last day of school this year is June 22 or 23. She starts just after labor day and the vacation days seem to be pretty standard, except she gets off the entire week of Thanksgiving.</p>
<p>coolweather, I apologize for being harsh, but that is a ridiculous statement. There are reams and reams of data showing that longer school years produce more education, and the US already has the shortest school year in the developed world, or close to it. Lengthening the school year is a low-hanging-fruit kind of strategy that many of the charters that are actually successful use.</p>
<p>It may not matter for wealthy children with highly educated parents, who have rich educational lives when they are out of school. But the children who are most at risk are also the children who lose the most ground when they are not going to school every day. </p>
<p>Anyway, here is just a little taste, the abstract of a recent article that looked at the effect on test scores of fairly minor changes in the number of school days preceding the test:</p>
<p>School Year Length and Student Performance:Quasi-Experimental Evidence
Benjamin Hansen (2007)</p>
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<p>I would be fine with a shorter school year, I agree not much gets done in June. While we are at it can we get rid of the summer reading?</p>
<p>In the past, this idea has been opposed by low-income working parents because it means that they will need to pay for more child care.</p>
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<p>Kids need to work and have summer activities or schools.
My kids’ schedule always had conflicts with summer programs or college classes that started in early june.</p>
<p>Many other kids only have 8 weeks for HS schools (to repeat failed classes or prepare for next year) and have no summer break.</p>
<p>Furthermore, the kids don’t learn and teachers don’t teach in classes after the third week of May. Why the kids should be tortured?</p>
<p>Some private HS in California starts in late August and ends in the 4th week of May and their students don’t have problem with learning.</p>
<p>UCB Berkerley starts on August 25 and ends in May 16.</p>
<p>If that is what you believe/experience, then understand this. The third week of May will come much earlier.</p>
<p>In GA, there are systems now only open 160 days because of finances. Those teachers and those students still are getting the “fever” for the last day, just getting it at day 145 or so instead of 165.</p>
<p>JHS:
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<p>Unfortunately teachers in the US don’t teach the same way as teachers in foreign countries.</p>
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<p>If you cut off the third week of May from school, you’ll find that the goof-off period magically moves to the second week of May. So now lop off the second week of May. The goof-off period migrates to the first week of May. Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. </p>
<p>If the problem is a misalignment between summer programs that start in early June and a school system that lets out in late June, then the school system can move to an earlier (August) start while keeping the same school year length. </p>
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<p>Excellent idea. K-12 students read far too much nowadays. :rolleyes:</p>
<p>^^That’s pretty cryptic! What do you mean?</p>
<p>Seriously, the vast majority of school reformers are begging for a longer school year, not a shorter one. Our current system is a carryover from the days long ago when the only kids in school were relatively affluent, and they spent the summers on Nantucket with Nana and Granpapa, or at camp. Now their kids go to math camp at Hopkins, or to soccer training camp, or both, when they aren’t doing a Habitat For Humanity project in Laos. All of which is great, but it deepens the educational divide in our society. Most kids only learn when they are in school and someone is teaching them.</p>
<p>What I meant by summer reading was the boring summer reading required by the teachers (English, History, etc…) that interferes with reading for fun.</p>
<p>“coolweather, I apologize for being harsh, but that is a ridiculous statement. There are reams and reams of data showing that longer school years produce more education, and the US already has the shortest school year in the developed world, or close to it. Lengthening the school year is a low-hanging-fruit kind of strategy that many of the charters that are actually successful use.”</p>
<p>It’s not so clear cut in the international data - especially as, when factoring out the 24% of children who live in poverty, students at U.S. schools consistently rank 2nd or 3rd in the world. (Is it because of the SHORTER school year?) But putting that aside - to equate longer school years with “more education” is highly questionable. What is proven is that more test prep time results in higher test scores. </p>
<p>If I wanted to know how much kids were learning, or how much “education” they had, I’d test at times when there was NO test prep. Maybe the second day of the school year. Then I’d have a measure of what they know, and what was retained, and what was not. Otherwise, all that is being measured is efficacy of the test prep.</p>
<p>tx5athome:
That boring summer reading is called - education. Sorry, learning sometimes requires a little work, effort and concentration. And – imagine! – some people even think it’s fun.</p>
<p>A lot of us are high school parents here, but a long break for elementary school children gives them a lot of time to forget basic skills such as reading and addition. Successful charter schools have tried longer school years with longer days and the good ones see good results. It’s too long a break for children to retain knowledge. Also, here on CC, we have a lot of involved parents who are going to make sure their kids are learning, or provide books, but some kids are left to watch TV and video games for months at a time and they don’t keep up with their skills and teachers have to spend the first few months reteaching what was taught the previous year. I remember, even in the gifted school my kids went to, that there was so much review at the beginning of the year because kids go backward, not forward over summer break.</p>
<p>We live in SoCal, and our school district shortened the current school year by two weeks (ten school days). This is just one more measure being taken to try to keep our schools functioning with all of the cuts in state funding.
The last day of school will be June 3rd, a week earlier than usual. Schools were closed for the week at Thanksgiving, and the other two days were added in separately as calendared recess days. I just checked the 2011-2012 school calendar, and the changes appear to be permanent.
My frustration is with how much of the precious time that remains is spent preparing our students for the state standardized testing. But that’s a whole different topic. My youngest is a high school senior, and I have to admit that I am ready to be done with all of this.</p>
<p>Amen, westcoastlatte. We also live in SoCal and I am happy my S is a freshman in college now. As it was, when he was in the last two years in HS, I had to be vigilant that AP classes weren’t getting the ax when budget cuts weren’t so dire. Who knows what it will be like going forward?</p>
<p>As for the summer reading required for AP classes, I think part of that in our school district was because they always seemed to start right after Labor Day, so there wasn’t enough instructional time before the May AP tests, unlike in places that started in August.</p>
<p>I’m going to side with the group that is concerned about the direction a shorter school year will be taking us. I do believe in those studies that show just how much learning is lost for lower income students over the summer months. They don’t have good role models for learning outside the school setting and some of the houses they live in have hardly anything to read in them. And will anyone be taking them to the summer reading program at the library, if these will even exist about the library budget cuts?</p>
<p>Also, give thought to what extra time off in the summer is going to mean for unemployed teenagers? Hmm … It’s not all going to be fun in the sun.</p>
<p>:cool: 
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