Open letter to B.C. education minister George Abbott on year-round schooling
Burnaby resident Adrianne Merlo, who ran for Burnaby-Douglas MP and Burnaby city council with the Greens in 2011, sent out the following open letter:
As a parent of three children in high school, and a teacher who works in the private system, I would like to express my feelings regarding the proposal to initiate year-round schooling.
Summer holidays allow for activities that are not possible at any other time. Making children attend school during the hot weather when they could be at the beach is an appalling prospect; in light of our terribly short summer season, I would argue that it is cruel. The traditional summer break, one of the main cornerstones of childhood, allow families to enjoy extended time together. This time is as valuable as any unsubstantiated theory about “learning retention.” I also reject the idea that kids are “bored” and need to be corralled back into a building. What about the kids who are bored at school? Is their boredom less deserving of attention than their school-loving counterpart? Whose boredom should take priority?
The current belief that year-round schooling encourages “knowledge retention” is thoroughly baseless: Research indicates that most of us – children and adults alike – forget the vast majority of what is learned in the formal setting of school. The ability of one person to commit to memory various facts or ideas often remains – inexplicably – elusive to someone else. We could detain kids in school twelve months of the year and there is still no guarantee that material presented in the classroom will be remembered beyond any subjective time-frame. If you forget grade 9 socials studies by the beginning of grade 11 as opposed to the middle of grade 10, what ultimate difference does it make? I question the goal – whether it is to remember everything forever, or to postpone the target date-of-forgetting by a month or two.
And how does one determine whether or not information has been retained, or which sort of learning is more valuable than another? If a teenager has an opportunity to work on a farm for two months picking blueberries, it is difficult to judge this to be less educational than reading about Napoleon. It is a highly subjective interpretation at best, and the assumption that children are not learning when outside the classroom should be strongly contested. One could argue that the opposite may be true, given the amount of time that is wasted in classrooms watching pointless videos or filling in repetitive work sheets.
Our children are not cogs in some industrial machine. They are individuals who learn in a myriad of ways: in a classroom, at home, outside in nature; by reading, by doing, by observing; by listening, by talking. The learning styles of any given group of students cannot be confined to simplistic, arbitrary notions of “in the class” or “outside the class.” Such thinking is outdated and limiting.
The question we need to be asking is this: What, exactly, is being taught in the average school setting that is so vital, so crucial to one’s future success, that traditional summer holidays may render it negated?
This entire proposal should warrant a ground-swell of protest.
Adrienne Merlo
Burnaby, BC
Comments
19 Comments
AssHat
May 3, 2012 at 2:32pm
You don't want to lose your time off. The rest of us don't get to see our kids any more or less during the summer.
Nana
May 3, 2012 at 2:53pm
I absolutely cannot imagine year round schooling!! For parents who say that they don't get to see their kids any more during the summer, you are using the school system as a daycare and really that is just unacceptable. It is only the beginning of May and already my daughter is itching to get out of school - and she is a smart, focused, enthusiastic learner. The best days of my life where the ones during summer break and I want my child to experience these as well. And, just for the record, my husband and I work full time.
Jiff
May 3, 2012 at 4:03pm
"Our children are not cogs in some industrial machine."
Merlo may be on to something here what with rumblings from the conservatives down south about education and child labour. And I thought that the school system was enough of a conditioning device as it is. Wow.
123
May 3, 2012 at 6:43pm
Do they really believe kids are going to work just as hard, and attend classes, when the look out the window at a beautiful, sunny day?
And will they get enough sleep when daylight lasts so long into the evening? Also, good luck getting them to do homework on summer evenings.
Adrianne
May 3, 2012 at 7:16pm
I am the author of this letter - I teach privately, not in the regular school system and my hours are sporadic and year-long. This is about my kids, who would be devastated to learn that they have only one month of summer holidays. The year will feel as though it has no end - and our summers often fail to start until mid-July. Do you really want to see your kids sitting in a classroom in August? And who wants a full month off in December - when the days are short and dreary? Why is THAT not a recipe for "boredom"? There are actually people out there who believe that summer holidays lead to obesity; sitting around the house for a whole month in winter is not, I suppose. The whole subject is so insane to me that I wonder how it is even up for discussion.
Alexandra Bogren
May 3, 2012 at 10:25pm
I wholeheartedly agree with Ms. Merlo and Sir Ken Robinson who couldn't have put it better:
"Our education system has mined our minds in the way that we've strip-mined the earth, for a particular commodity. And for the future, it won't service."
Sir Robinson suggests that the only way we can ensure a viable future for our children is by "seeing our creative capacities for the richness they are, and seeing our children for the hope that they are. And our task is to educate their whole being so they can face this future." A year-round schooling system does not aim at educating and enriching a child's whole being; it aims at producing a product, an end result that is not, and cannot be complete.
http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html
R2
May 4, 2012 at 6:51am
Year round schooling would add a whole new meaning to the song 'Summertime Blues'....As Rocky Balboa would say, Yo Adrianne!
george abbottt
May 4, 2012 at 8:57am
The elephant in the room is how expensive actual schools are to maintain. One can't just hit power-off on the school on June 30th and then forget about it for the summer.
I wish I was allowed to just come out and say, "Look. Neo-liberal ideology doesn't allow me to put kids' education before the profits of the medium and large corporations that guide my bill-drafting. Keeping the school closed in the summer is like shutting down the Robson Roots Store for the weekend. Sure, there might be ways to use the school in the summer that might help supplement these operational costs, but whatever, it's easier to just rope them in over the summer. Also: I want to be seen as 'ending the gravy train' [thanks Rob Ford for that one, buddy!] for those lazy teachers (that are likely just hitting the beach and NOT painting houses after they worked their 60-hour weeks throughout the school year.)"
p lg
May 4, 2012 at 10:23am
Here's an interesting academic paper that conducted a review of the research of several school initiatives. One of the initiatives reviewed was the year-round calendar in a chapter called:
"Time for School: Its Duration and Allocation"
In summary the reviewer of the research wrote:
"American students are actively engaged in learning for less than 40% of the time they are in school."
"Alternative calendars on which the typical 180 days of schooling are offered (e.g., year-round calendars) show no increased benefits for student learning over the traditional 9-months-on/3-months-off calendar. Summer programs for at-risk students are probably effective, though more research is needed. "
"In terms of pupil achievement, it matters not at all whether those 180 days are interrupted by one long recess or four short ones. "
"Within reason, the productivity of the schools is not a matter of the time allocated to them as much as it is a matter of how they use the time they already have."
"Significantly, the original proposals to operate year-round schools (YRS) came from a consideration of the economics of school construction rather than any consideration of learning gains."
"After one year, student achievement in three year-round schools was compared to achievement in traditional calendar schools. Differences between standardized test scores in the two types of schools were found to be insignificantly small even after matching pupils on IQ. Similar findings are reported for other year-round programs in Colorado and across the country. For example, examination of three years of standardized test scores for Mesa County Valley School District (CO) indicates that the year-round schedule does not in any way enhance learning. "
"They found that although teachers in year-round schools spent less time reviewing pre-vacation material than teachers in schools on the traditional calendar, the actual achievement differences were insignificant on tests designed specifically to measure district objectives."
"Further evidence produced from interviews and a review of evaluation reports from Los Angeles Unified School District confirm that the impact of year-round education on achievement scores at the high school level has been inconclusive.”
And finally, "Not all studies have failed to find achievement advantages for the year-round calendar. Those that do claim advantages, however, stem disproportionately from an advocacy organization that has grown up around this issue: the National Association for Year-Round Education."
This organization does not publish its reports in any peer reviewed educational journal and any "negative" reports from those researchers in university.
Is this the group George Abbott is listening to? It seems Mr. Abbott is following the lead of his former leader, Gordon "Costello" Campbell...'consultation be damned, I know best!'
Who's on first Abbott?
http://epsl.asu.edu/epru/documents/EPRU%202002-101/epru-2002-101.htm
Billy Batson
May 4, 2012 at 10:57am
George, all these school costs are there whether the children attend or not. I would actually say it better for the structure to be closed for those 2 months so any large maintenance items can be dealt with during those months rather than disrupt a class (or classes if the work is large enough).
Also the comparison to a retail outlet is wrong. When the store is closed it cannot generate revenue. A school does not "open" for business. It is there to provide a service to the community that is not required 365 days a year.
As for parents who say they don't get to spend any time with there children during the summer. What makes you think you will have anymore time in December.
Heck why don't we just make the kids go 7 days a week. It would help out those parents who have to work weekends.