Longer school year would improve Indiana education

With just more than a month left of school, many of us are looking forward to the time away from homework and tests that summer has provided us every year since our education began.

But is the summer recess we have come to love a good idea?

The 19th-century education reformers who were responsible for the break believed so. Former U.S. Commissioner of Education Edward Jarvis published a report in 1871 that documented 1,741 cases of insanity.

Of those cases, he believed “over-study” was to blame for 205 of them, which led him — and many others — to conclude that “Education lays the foundation for a large portion of the causes of mental disorder.”

According to Malcolm Gladwell, author of “Outliers: The Story of Success,” this belief led reformers to advocate for a long summer break and shorter winter break, mimicking the breaks in the agricultural year that follow the fall harvest and spring planting seasons that so many at the time were accustomed to.

The breaks, according to the reformers, would prevent the mind from becoming exhausted and slipping into insanity and have remained ever since.

But in eastern Asia, where people were used to working year round, planting two to three crops a year, according to Gladwell, such a program for mental rest was never adopted.

We can see this contrast in the number of days we in America spend in school each year compared to our eastern counterparts.

In the United States, schools, on average, are in session 180 days a year. That is the minimum number of days required by Indiana.

But in the east, in countries such as Japan, South Korea and China, kids spend a minimum of 243, 220 and 200 days a year in school, respectively.

When you add up the days through the course of a K-12 education, children in South Korea spend close to 800 more days in school — more than two full years of extra classroom time.

But what do fewer days in school mean, you might ask?

Well, it’s hard to know, but the least you could say is that more days don’t hurt performance as reformers once thought.

If you look at the research coming out of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, which reports about student achievement in math, science and reading across the globe, the United States’ scores continue to slide compared to eastern countries with longer school days, suggesting that longer school years actually improve performance.

Of the 34 other developed nations tested, American students rank 25th in math, 17th in science and 14th in reading, far below countries such as South Korea, China, Singapore and Japan in all categories.

Research also suggests that summer breaks might also be a contributing factor to the achievement gap between students in poor and middle/high socio-economic classes.

In a study led by John Hopkins University sociologist Karl Alexander, students from low, middle and high classes in the Baltimore public school system were assessed in math and reading.

In the process, Alexander found that while in school, students from all classes performed about the same, with poor students often out-learning students from wealthier families.

But coming back from summer break, Alexander found something interesting. Scores from students in the lower socio-economic classes fell dramatically compared to their richer peers, whose scores tended not to fall at all, suggesting that summer breaks disproportionately affect poorer students who might suffer from a less involved home life.

And when you aggregate that discrepancy through many years of summer breaks, you can see how poorer students will continue to fall further and further behind where they are supposed to be in their education, thus exacerbating the problem.

Long ago, the United States led the world in academic achievement. But since overseas economies have begun to grow and rise out of third-world nation status, we, like those poor kids in Baltimore, are beginning to fall further and further behind.

In a global economy in which students in Indiana often compete against students in Shanghai for jobs, this slide should be cause for concern.

Often, we hear it argued that we need to spend more money on education to propel ourselves back to the top. But of those 34 nations assessed in the OECD study, only Switzerland spends more than the United States on education per pupil.

Since 1971, the United States has increased its per-pupil, per-year education spending by roughly 125 percent, with almost no change in student performance in math, science and reading during the same period.

In 1961, the United States spent, on average, $2,769 per pupil in 2007-08 inflation-adjusted dollars. In 2006-07, that number had risen to $10,041, while in Newark, New Jersey spending has reached $23,141 per pupil.

So if spending more money on the same failing education structure doesn’t work, and tweaking the structure with programs such as No Child Left Behind doesn’t work, either, why not try changing something more meaningful, such as the school calendar?

Longer school years — and days — aside from their effects in the east, have worked for charter school programs in America such as KIPP, which has 109 schools in 20 states.

At KIPP NYC, 95 percent of students perform at or above their grade levels in math, far above the New York state average of 57 percent for 3-8 graders. If it works for KIPP and eastern countries, why wouldn’t it work elsewhere?

According to OCED, if American students performed 5 percent better on their international assessments, it would translate into a $41 trillion boost to the American economy during the next 20 years.

In these tough economic times, can we afford not to do what is necessary to better educate our children, especially if it means a huge boost to our nation’s economy?

Sure, if we wanted longer school years then we would need to pay teachers more, but the extra revenue the government generates from the boost in economic productivity would pay for that.

And sure, there would probably need to be a conditioning phase where students learn to adapt to longer school years, but if 32,000 KIPP students can do it — many of whom come from some of the most disadvantaged communities in the country — so can the rest of us.

Nevertheless, it is time to change how America does education. Perhaps in a way that means goodbye to summer.

­— nperrino@indiana.edu