Year round vs traditional schools: Busting the Myths About Year-Round School Calendars

Опубликовано: April 16, 2023 в 6:24 pm

Автор: alexxlab

Категории: Miscellaneous

Busting the Myths About Year-Round School Calendars

After millions of American schoolchildren fell behind during the Covid-19 pandemic, some states and school districts are looking at year-round school calendars as a way to recoup lost learning. Typically, year-round calendars don’t increase learning time but rather spread school days more equally across 12 months, with a shorter summer vacation and longer breaks throughout the year. That’s the approach in South Carolina, where one quarter of districts will use year-round calendars in 2022–23. In Washington State, 45 districts have received state grants to assess the potential and practicality of year-round calendars.

Year-round calendars are often presented as a novel approach to accelerate student learning. But they have been tried and tested for over 50 years, and rigorous research on nearly one thousand public schools in the United States has found that they don’t raise academic achievement. Meanwhile, they needlessly complicate life for working parents and teachers.

To school leaders who hope that changing calendars can undo pandemic learning loss, we offer this advice: Don’t do it. The case for year-round school calendars rests on several myths or misunderstandings, which look plausible when seen from a hazy distance but evaporate when inspected closely through the lens of research. The idea that year-round school calendars are rising like a phoenix from a painful, disruptive pandemic is false. These are zombie reforms, an effort to revive discredited ideas that had been fading for 20 years before the pandemic gave them a reanimating spark.

Myth #1: Year-round schools are open all the time.

Let’s start with the name. While it’s not technically inaccurate, the term “year-round calendar” can give the impression that children are in school all the time. In fact, the vast majority of schools that use year-round calendars offer 175 to 180 days of instruction—the same as a traditional nine-month calendar with standard holiday breaks and a 10- or 11-week summer vacation.

Historically, the National Assoc-iation for Year-Round Education has defined a year-round calendar as one with no break longer than eight weeks. Under that broad umbrella, it’s useful to draw a line between “extended-year” calendars, which typically expand instructional time to 200 school days or more, and “balanced” calendars, which have the usual 175 to 180 school days but rearrange them—shortening the summer vacation and extending fall, winter, and spring breaks.

Extended-year calendars are rare in the United States, where less than one tenth of one percent of elementary schools offer more than 180 school days. Nearly all year-round calendars in the U.S., including those used in South Carolina and under consideration in Washington, are balanced calendars with 180 school days at most.

While there are several options for balanced calendars, the most popular is the 45/15 calendar (see Figure 1). It includes four nine-week quarters of 45 school days followed by 15 school days off in the fall, winter, and spring, as well as a six-week summer break. The 45/15 calendar has 180 school days. Until the mid-2000s, there also was a year-round calendar called Concept 6 that scheduled only 163 school days split across six blocks throughout the year. Each school day was slightly longer to preserve the number of hours in school.

Myth #2: The main goal of year-round calendars is to help students learn.

Most public conversation about balanced calendars assumes that they are designed to help students learn. In fact, over the past 50 years, a major reason districts have adopted balanced calendars is to address overcrowding and save money.

Cost savings are possible when schools use balanced calendars in a “multi-track” fashion, in which students are divided into three or four groups and attend schools on a staggered schedule. Consider the four-track 45/15 calendar used today in more than 50 elementary and middle schools in the Wake County Public School System in North Carolina. For three weeks in July, students in tracks A, B, and C are in school while students in track D are on vacation. Then, for the next three weeks, students in tracks A, B, and D are in school while students in track C are on vacation. The pattern repeats throughout the year. In this way, a school building designed for, say, 750 children can serve 1,000 students without installing classroom trailers in the parking lot.

Multi-track calendars were popular in the 2000s in districts experiencing rapid population growth. Take Nevada’s Clark County, which includes Las Vegas and its surrounding areas. Student enrollment in the Clark County School District doubled between 1994 and 2008, making it the fifth-largest district in the country. The district adopted multi-track calendars to maximize classroom space, which saved half a billion dollars in construction costs. During the Great Recession of 2008–09, Clark County’s population plateaued, and the district switched to a traditional nine-month calendar. It reinstated multi-track calendars after the economy recovered and enrollment growth resumed.

Opponents of year-round calendars often have economic motives, as well. Parent groups who oppose year-round calendars often make common cause with summer camps and amusement parks, whose prosperity depends on teenage workers and children being out of school for months in the summer. We were skeptical that summer camps and amusement parks could exert much influence on education policy—until 2011, when an Ohio state legislator contacted one of us to say that Cedar Point, a massive amusement park outside Cleveland that is often called the “roller coaster capital of the world,” was lobbying for a bill to effectively outlaw year-round calendars by requiring all Ohio public schools to start after Labor Day. The bill did not come to pass, but similar laws restricting school start and end dates have passed in 16 other states.

Myth #3: Year-round calendars are new.

Reporters and advocates often portray year-round calendars as a fresh, untried reform. In fact, various types of extended and staggered calendars were tried throughout the 20th century. A multi-track 45/15 calendar was first adopted in the late 1960s and early 1970s in suburban districts like Hayward, California, and Valley View, Illinois, where enrollments were surging as families left nearby cities and the last cohorts of the baby boom entered elementary school. Meanwhile, educators and representatives from across the U.S. met in 1968 for the first National Seminar on Year-Round Education. By 1972, the National Association for Year-Round Education had been launched, and more than 900 participants attended the 4th National Seminar on Year-Round Education. A 1973 survey conducted before the 5th National Seminar found that 100 districts with more than 374,000 students were using or planning to use year-round calendars. Most were 45/15 calendars adopted to make better use of space.

Multi-track calendars became especially popular in California in the 1990s, when a combination of state laws made it hard to serve growing student enrollments in any other way. School construction had been sharply limited by Proposition 13, which had capped property tax increases at 1 percent annually since 1978, and by state rules requiring local school bonds be approved by a two-thirds supermajority. Then, a 1996 law capped K–3 class sizes at 20, compelling districts to hire 25,000 new teachers.

How could districts shrink class sizes and find classrooms for new teachers without putting up new buildings? Multi-track calendars, including Concept 6 calendars with only 163 school days, seemed to offer a solution. But they weren’t district leaders’ first choice. Administrators described multi-track calendars as “strictly a facilities decision” in media reports quoted in a 2003 paper by the Institute for Democracy, Education, and Access at the University of California, Los Angeles. That review also quoted California’s former state superintendent saying, “schools didn’t move to it because they were trying out some educational innovation. It was out of desperation.”

Myth #4: Year-round calendars are poised for growth.

Often, public discussion of year-round calendars implies that they are a new idea and, by extension, are likely to grow in popularity. In fact, until the pandemic, the prevalence of year-round calendars had been declining for 20 years. Nationwide, the percentage of schools using a year-round calendar fell to 3 percent in 2017–18 from 6 percent in 1999–2000 (see Figure 2). Much of the national trend was driven by California, where the percentage of K–5 schools using a year-round calendar fell to 7 percent in 2018–19 from 26 percent in 1998–99. Virtually all of the decline was in schools using multi-track calendars, especially Concept 6 schools. There were especially sharp declines between 2000–04 and 2011–12.

In California, as with the rise of multi-track calendars in the 1990s, the decline of multi-track calendars followed several changes in state law. In 2000, a state referendum made it easier to pass school bonds. In addition, civil-rights groups filed Williams v. California, which became a class-action suit alleging that inadequate funding, crowded facilities, and Concept 6 calendars concentrated in schools serving low-income, predominately Hispanic communities were depriving children of an adequate and equitable education. In 2004, the state settled the case and abolished Concept 6 calendars. State referenda in 2002 and 2004 authorized more than $21 billion in school construction, which reduced the need for other multi-track calendars.

Around that same time, revenues of the National Association for Year-Round Education declined dramatically. In 1997, the nonprofit organization reported revenues of $734,834 from a conference, seminars, membership fees, and other sources. By 2009, it reported less than $2,000 in revenues, and the executive director described it as “largely dormant” on the organization’s annual tax return. The organization has not reported revenues to the federal government since 2008, and its website lists no employees apart from a part-time executive director. Nevertheless, it is often treated as an authority on year-round calendars and their effects.

Myth #5: Year-round calendars increase learning.

Proponents often claim that balanced calendars increase learning. For example, an FAQ page published on the Washington State Office of Public Instruction’s website claims that “Schools that follow a balanced calendar tend to have higher achievement scores.” But claims like that are hard to reconcile with rigorous research. As is often the case in education, you can cherry-pick a study to support any position you like, but a lot of studies aren’t very good. And for more than 20 years, the most rigorous studies have uniformly found that year-round calendars do not increase learning—and may even, in some cases, reduce it.

In a 2003 meta-analysis, Harris Cooper and his colleagues reported that the “quality of evidence available on modified [year-round] calendars leaves much to be desired.” They found that most studies relied on small samples and did not control adequately for confounding differences between year-round and nine-month schools. Further, more than three quarters of available studies were student theses, dissertations, and reports rather than peer-reviewed journal articles. Cooper and his co-authors wrote:

“Perhaps the clearest conclusion is that a truly credible study of modified calendar effects has yet to be conducted. It would be difficult to argue with policymakers who choose to ignore the existent database because they feel that the research designs have been simply too flawed to be trusted.”

A 2019 meta-analysis, which focused on single-track year-round calendars, found similar limitations. Co-authors Dan Fitzpatrick and Jason Burns reported that “few studies used advanced analyses or quasi-experimental designs.” Out of 35 studies, 26 were unpublished doctoral dissertations, three were district reports, two were conference presentations, and one was a master’s thesis. Only three studies were journal articles, and, of those, one article analyzed data from a single school and another, which apparently used data from just three schools, appeared in a journal that does not currently have a working website and whose editor did not respond to our queries about how to find the article or whether the journal was peer reviewed.

Averaging results across studies, both meta-analyses reported that students at year-round schools scored a little higher that students at schools on traditional calendars. But as Cooper and his colleagues pointed out, it is hard to know how seriously to take such an average. Averaging results across studies of poor, mixed, or unknown quality cannot produce a credible estimate of a policy’s effect.

Diamonds in the Rough. In this largely unimpressive litera-ture, though, there are a handful of peer-reviewed studies that stand out for their rigor and size. Those more rigorous studies of year-round calendars found no benefit for student learning—and some evidence of harm.

The earliest credible study we know is a 2001 American Journal of Education article in which Brad McMillen compared 67 year-round and 1,364 nine-month elementary and middle schools in North Carolina. In what would today be described as a value-added analysis, McMillen estimated the effect of year-round calendars on student reading and math scores, adjusting for gender, ethnicity, parents’ education, and scores a year earlier. He found the year-round calendar had no effect.

McMillen then examined 39 “schools-within-a-school,” where some children followed a year-round calendar while others followed a traditional nine-month calendar. This analysis, which also controlled for student characteristics and prior scores, also found no effect—an especially convincing result because it held the school constant while varying only the calendar.

In the 2010s, a few economists started asking what happens when a school switches calendar types. Studies of calendar switching answer exactly the question that school leaders should ask: If I switch a school to a year-round calendar, will children learn more? These studies isolate the effect of school calendars by holding the school and students constant. For example, one year a child attended 3rd grade on a traditional calendar, and the next year the child returned to attend 4th grade at the same school, but the school had switched to a year-round calendar.

Steven McMullen and Kathryn Rouse have published several articles on calendar switching in Wake County, North Carolina, where 22 schools switched to multi-track 45/15 calendars in 2007. They found that year-round calendars had essentially no impact on average test scores.

Similarly, Jennifer Graves (one of the authors of this article) examined the impacts of calendar switching in California, where 934 schools switched between nine-month and various types of balanced calendars 1,208 times between 1998 and 2005. Graves found that test scores declined by 1 to 2 percentile points when schools switched to year-round calendars. Test scores declined on multi-track calendars, which were adopted in a desperate effort to reduce crowding, but test scores also declined on single-track balanced calendars, even though those were adopted for purely academic reasons.

It is often claimed that year-round calendars are better for disadvantaged students, but rigorous studies have found no benefit for Black students, Hispanic students, or students who qualify for free or reduced-price lunch. The Wake County calendar-switching study did find benefits for year-round students in the most crowded schools, but the California study did not.

The California and North Carolina studies are not the last word on the subject, and similar studies should be conducted in other districts that have switched on or off year-round calendars in recent years—such as Chicago, Indianapolis, Oklahoma City, and Clark County, Nevada. But we now have rigorous evidence from more than 1,000 calendar changes over the past 25 years—and none of it suggests that year-round calendars do anything to raise achievement.

Myth #6: Year-round calendars increase summer learning.

The disappointing effects of year-round calendars may seem hard to accept, because there are a couple of commonsense arguments suggesting that year-round calendars really should have academic benefits. But these arguments don’t hold up very well when inspected closely.

One argument rests on popular ideas about summer learning. Because year-round calendars shorten summer vacation, the argument goes, they must reduce summer learning loss, which is most acute among disadvantaged students. Therefore, year-round calendars really should boost test scores, especially for the disadvantaged.

There are two weak points in this argument. The first is that popular ideas about summer learning are not consistently supported by recent research (see “Is Summer Learning Loss Real?” feature, Winter 2019). Some recent studies find that children lose very little skill over the summer; other studies find that summer learning losses are no larger among disadvantaged students than among advantaged students.

The second problem is that this argument focuses exclusively on the summer months, while ignoring what happens during the rest of the year. Remember that balanced year-round calendars have no more than the usual 175 or 180 school days, so while they do include more school days during the summer, they also have fewer school days and more vacation days during the fall, winter, and spring.

That being the case, one might expect that children on year-round calendars learn more during the summer, but less during the rest of the year. And that’s exactly what we’ve found.

In a 2015 book chapter, Paul von Hippel (one of the authors of this article) compared student learning in reading and math at 30 schools that used year-round calendars and 116 schools in the same counties that used traditional calendars, focusing on students in kindergarten and 1st grade. Students at both types of schools started kindergarten with similar skills. Students at schools with year-round calendars did learn more during the summer months of June, July, and August, but students at schools with traditional nine-month calendars learned more from September through May (see Figure 3). Over a period of 12 months, the amount that students learned was almost exactly the same.

Intuitively, that makes some sense. Year-round calendars don’t increase learning because they don’t increase the time that children spend in school.

Myth #7: Year-round calendars help schools supplement instruction.

Another argument for balanced calendars is that they provide more opportunities for supplementary instruction during the “intersessions,” or mini-vacations that occur more frequently throughout the year. Intersession instruction can help catch up students who are behind or offer enrichment to students who are on track or ahead. Or so the argument goes.

However, multi-track calendars that keep classrooms filled can’t easily support intersession instruction, because when students from one track are on break, students from the other tracks are in school, leaving little space free for supplemental instruction. Single-track calendars offer more chances for supplemental instruction because the school is empty during intersessions. But that is not unique to year-round calendars—schools on traditional nine-month calendars have offered summer-school and after-school instruction since year-round calendars were a gleam in reformers’ eyes.

The question, then, is whether it’s better to offer supplemental instruction during a long summer break or during the shorter, more frequent intersessions of a year-round calendar? We have found no research exploring this question. While there are some well-designed studies of summer learning programs, we are not aware of any research specifically examining how intersession instruction affects student learning. Further, we have not found data on how many year-round schools offer intersession instruction or how many students participate.

The literature on summer school gives some reason for concern. Although summer programs can help children who attend, getting students to attend regularly can be a serious challenge. Summer programs can be difficult for school districts to staff and to fund. Collective-bargaining agreements don’t require that teachers participate, and districts’ operating budgets and most state and federal aid programs are typically designed to cover 175 or 180 days of instruction. In our experience, much of the literature on summer learning programs is about programs that no longer exist or about how effective summer programs would be if only more students showed up for them.

Do intersession programs have the same challenges? Anecdotally, they do. For example, when some Indianapolis schools adopted a single-track year-round calendar in 2010, the district announced that students who were below grade level would be required to attend 20 days of school during intersessions. But the district never funded more than 10 days of intersession instruction, and eventually, individual schools were allowed to decide whether to offer intersession instruction at all. Similarly, in 2019, public schools in Flint, Michigan, adopted a balanced calendar that included funding for four weeks of intersession instruction. Three years later, the superintendent lamented that not enough struggling students were attending the intersessions. He voiced his support for returning to a traditional nine-month calendar with eight weeks of summer school, commenting that “there’s no reason to continue doing something that’s not working.”

Myth #8: Year-round calendars are popular.

Proponents claim that families and kids like year-round calendars (once they realize they still get vacations). And in the latest push, year-round calendars are presented as an intervention that teachers will like because intersessions will help them recover from pandemic burnout.

But the evidence for these positive attitudes is shaky. In their 2003 meta-analysis, Cooper and his colleagues described opinion polling carried out in more than 50 year-round districts, reporting that “in general, survey respondents felt more positive than negative about modified school calendars.” But the data only showed that respondents favored the high end of the rating scale. For example, when asked to rate the year-round calendar on a scale from 1 to 5, the average response in year-round districts was 3.6. That result is uninterpretable without a comparison group asked to rate their experience on traditional calendars.

Do parents and teachers prefer year-round or traditional calendars? That’s a hard question to answer in a survey. But actions speak louder than words. Half of year-round schools nationwide—and nearly three quarters of year-round schools in California—reverted to traditional calendars between 2000 and 2018, a switch that’s hard to explain if the calendars were widely beloved. In Chicago, where some schools used single-track calendars through 2012–13, CBS Chicago reported that “many parents complained that having the two different calendars made it difficult to plan work schedules, daycare, and vacations, if they had some kids in ‘traditional’ schools and others in ‘year-round’ schools. ” Perhaps that’s one reason why the Chicago Teachers Union demanded an end to the year-round calendar as one condition for ending its 2012 strike.

Research confirms some of the challenges that year-round calendars pose for parents and teachers. Jennifer Graves has found that, in counties where many schools adopted year-round calendars, mothers were less likely to enter the workforce when their children reached school age. In addition, schools struggled to attract and retain experienced teachers, who were often working mothers themselves, after adopting year-round calendars.

Year-round calendars can even depress local property values. Brooks Depro and Kathryn Rouse found that property values declined near schools in Wake County, North Carolina, that switched to multi-track year-round calendars relative to comparable homes near schools that stayed on a traditional calendar. The result suggests that families were willing to pay a premium to avoid sending their children to a year-round school.

Follow Research, not Myths

After unprecedented disruptions in schooling worldwide, year-round calendars once again are being promoted as a fresh approach to stem pandemic learning loss and teacher burnout. And years ago, it was reasonable to think that redistributing instructional time to get rid of the long summer break might help teachers and students regain their footing. In 1971, or 1996, or even 2003, one could say that the evidence on year-round calendars was inadequate and inconclusive, and that school leaders should feel free to do whatever they felt was best.

But today we know better. There is little reason to hope that adopting balanced calendars will help schools in South Carolina, Washington, or anywhere else recover from pandemic learning loss. And as for addressing teacher burnout, consider the demographics of the U.S. teaching force: about half of teachers have school-age children living at home, and three quarters are women. Calendars that families anecdotally describe as being stressful, and that research indicates push women out of the workforce, seem an especially ill-considered approach.

Those who ignore history are condemned to repeat it, but school leaders who know history and research are not. They can rise much more effectively to the challenges posed by the Covid-19 pandemic. Instead of adopting disruptive, distracting, and ineffective school calendars, school leaders can leave calendars alone and focus on interventions that research suggests can work: improving curriculum, bolstering instruction, making effective use of technology, and offering targeted supports, like high-dosage tutoring for the children furthest behind.

Year-round calendars, by contrast, do little to raise achievement and pose a host of logistical problems that are hard for schools and parents to solve.

Why take them on if we don’t have to?

Paul T. von Hippel is professor and associate dean for research in the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin. He is a longtime researcher on summer learning who last summarized the evidence on year-round calendars in a 2015 book chapter. Jennifer Graves is associate professor of economics at Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. She has published eight studies about the effects of year-round calendars.

Top 3 Reasons the US Should Switch to Year-Round Schooling

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The traditional school year, with roughly three months of vacation days every summer, was first implemented when America was an agricultural society. Learning to read, write, and perform basic arithmetic in classrooms was simply not as important as keeping up family farms and building the nation. The summer months were needed exclusively for farm work.

Since then, we have completely changed as a nation—today, the majority of U.S. K-12 students aren’t spending summers off tilling fields or harvesting crops. However, the idea of summers off from school is alive and well. The American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research finds that the average American student receives 13 weeks off of school each calendar year – with 10 or 11 of those coming consecutively during the summer. Barely any other countries have more than seven weeks off in a school calendar. Only around 10 percent of U.S. schools currently use a year-round school calendar with shorter breaks inserted throughout the year.

With the US lagging behind countries such as Korea in terms of academic performance, it may be time to consider drastic changes to our public school system. Year-round schooling might just be a solution—and surprisingly, it could even be one that students will enjoy. Here’s why:

Students will actually remember what they learn.

Year-round schooling means that students do not fall victim to the “summer slide,” or the well-documented phenomenon where students unlearn some of the knowledge they worked so hard to attain when too much consecutive time is taken off from school.

A study released in 2007 by The Ohio State University found that there are really no differences in learning between students who attend school year round and those who are on a traditional schedule. However, the National Summer Learning Association often cites decades of research that shows that it can take anywhere from 8 to 13 weeks at the beginning of every school year for teachers to get their students back up to speed and ready to learn the new grade’s material.

Either way, when it comes to learning and retention, students who attend year-round schools have nothing to lose and much to gain.

It’s an easy way to bridge the achievement gap.

Minority students, students who speak English as a second language, economically disadvantaged students, and students with disabilities are the most affected by the summer fallback. Studies have found that disadvantaged students lose about 27 percent more of their learning gains in the summer months than their peers.

If that is not enough to affirm the need for year-round schooling for minorities, researcher Daniel O’Brien concluded that minority students progress their learning proficiency the fastest during the school year when compared to white and economically advantaged students.

Furthermore, Anna Habash of Education Trust, a nonprofit that works with schools to better serve their student populations, says that for minorities, a year-round school schedule does more than help academically. In an interview with Education News, Habash said that schools with high numbers of poverty and minority students benefit greatly from year-round schooling because it keep students “on task” and leads to more “meaningful instruction” when there are not a lot of academically sound options at home.

Minorities also drop out of high school at rates that are higher than their white counterparts. According to Jessica Washington of Politic365, the solution is year-round schooling. She reports that the national dropout rate is 5 percent, while the dropout rate for year-round school students is just 2 percent. These dropout statistics are not broken down by racial or socioeconomic backgrounds, but if the overall dropout rate is lower for year-round schools, it is likely that the minority dropout rates in this model are also lower. The reasons why dropout rates are lower in year-round setups are easy to deduce: students have less time to adjust to time off from school, and in the case of high schoolers, they have less time to work.

While this inability for teenagers to work and make money in the summer has been cited as a pitfall of year-round schooling, the disadvantages of this are short-lived. High school graduates earn $11,000 more per year than those with a G.E.D. or less, and that number rises to $36,000 more with a bachelor’s degree. Giving up a few summers of minimum wage work in exchange for the higher lifetime earnings a high school diploma affords is a small price to pay.

Students will actually like school.

Students will do more than just learn better in a year-round school.

Teachers and students experience a closer relationship in year-round schools than they do in traditional, shorter-calendar-year schools. In the absence of any long-term break from school, students do not feel detached from the school environment.

The experience of immersion in learning offered by year-round schools, with more time spent in classrooms, proves to be beneficial to many students from low socioeconomic backgrounds in particular, including those for whom English is a second language. Many second language learners who have difficulty mastering English benefit from the opportunity to immerse themselves in English during intersession classes. They also develop better relationships with other students.

Results from research studies show that students in year-round schools are more self-confident, have a higher self-concept, have fewer inhibitions, and feel positive about their schooling experience.

But what about down time? Don’t children need time to just “be kids”?

Some childhood development experts believe that for younger students, time off in the summer months is vital to healthy development. They believe that kids are not designed to spend so much of their time inside classroom walls and that the warmer, pleasant weather of the summer provides a perfect opportunity to get outside and experience childhood. The problem with this argument, of course, is that most children are no longer spending their summers frolicking in fields of flowers or running around their neighborhoods, hanging out with other kids.

A recent Harvard University study found that school-age children tend to gain weight at a faster pace during the summer months than during the school year. Children today spend more time in sedentary activities like watching television or using mobile devices instead of playing outside or participating in active pursuits. Not only must K-12 students relearn the academic items, but they must also shift their mentalities from less-active, sedentary ones to sharp, alert learning models.

The American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry reports that by the time children graduate from high school, they will have spent more time watching television than in classrooms. What’s more – children who watch an excessive amount of television generally have lower grades in school, read fewer books and have more health problems. While some children visit summer camps, or attend child care when school is out, others stay at home, inside, with not much else to do than watch TV or play games on electronic devices. This is especially true for kids who are middle-school age or higher and are able to stay home alone when parents work. The “down time” of the summer months is really just empty time, often void of anything academically or developmentally advantageous.

As the US establishes itself as a knowledge and innovation-based economy, the usefulness of a traditional school year diminishes. There are many reasons changing from our traditional school year to year-round schooling makes sense. As with any adjustments, making the switch would not be easy. However, with all its advantages, it is certainly worth considering.

Click here to read all our posts concerning the Achievement Gap.

Why is 中等教育 better than Russian education? – Education in China, universities and schools, Chinese

March 21, 2016

Every year the political interaction between the PRC and the Russian Federation is improving, so more and more Russian students choose Chinese as a second foreign language. Many dream of entering Chinese universities. However, you can get to know and make friends with China much earlier by enrolling in a Chinese school. Few secondary schools in China are given the right to accept foreign students, but if the PRC Ministry of Education allowed the school to teach foreigners, then the school has confirmed its high level in teaching Chinese children. So why not give your child an incomparable opportunity to live and study in China, get an exclusive experience of language practice?

High school education in China has a number of advantages and benefits compared to Russian education. First of all, the student is immersed in the atmosphere of the Chinese language, which sounds both from teachers in the classroom, and from classmates, random passers-by on the street, as well as from TV screens. Secondly, the Chinese diploma of complete secondary education is an excellent tool for admission to the best universities in China.

By sending a child to China, you make a huge contribution to his future.

What, after all, is studying in China?

The Chinese education system is divided into 5 levels: kindergarten, elementary school, middle school, high school and higher education. There are two stages of examinations to determine the student’s suitability for continuing education: 中考 (zhōngkǎo) and 高考 (gāokǎo) – High School Transfer Exam and National Chinese National University Entrance Exam, respectively. The total duration of schooling is 12 years: 6 years in elementary school, 3 years in secondary school and 3 years in high school.

For international students, studying in China begins with a one-year Chinese language course. At the end of the first year, the student takes an exam in Chinese (not HSK), English and Mathematics, after which the student enters the class of the general education program declared when submitting documents.

Compared to the Russian education system, Chinese schools may surprise you with the number of classes and homework, but all this is done for a more in-depth preparation of the student. In addition, the teaching method in China differs markedly from the Western model, and is based on memorization of information, as well as focused around mathematics, science and the study of Chinese culture, history and language. Knowledge is tested daily with the help of tests, as a result of which Chinese students have a highly developed logic. In some schools in the areas of international education (teaching is carried out in English), the American discussion-based teaching model is also actively used.

Discipline is above all

Lessons in Chinese schools start early, around 8 am, which may be unusual for a Russian student, but they get used to the regime in a month or two. In the first half of the day there are four or five lessons, in the second – three or four. In addition, there is a break for physical education classes, lunch and a break for “sonchas”. The schedule of students is strictly structured, even a certain time is allotted for doing homework, which is enough in excess. During self-study, teachers carefully monitor homework and repetition of lessons, and only after completing the tasks, the student can start reading fiction or other intellectual activities not related to the program, but he must remain in the classroom until the end of the time allotted for self-study .

In this way, students develop the habit of discipline, which is also facilitated by wearing the same uniform for all and the ban on electronic gadgets during classes and self-study, even during a 15-minute break it is forbidden to take out all tablets and smartphones, it is strongly recommended to leave them in room. In addition, the school strictly monitors the behavior of students and their safety, it is almost impossible for a stranger to enter the school territory, and smoking, the use of alcoholic beverages and drugs are also prohibited. Compliance with discipline is strictly controlled, and for a systematic violation of the rules they can be expelled.

Traditional Chinese food every day

Most schools provide accommodation for their students, thus being more of a boarding school than just a school. For foreign citizens, full accommodation is provided in double rooms, while Chinese students can only live in a boarding house 5 days a week (unless otherwise provided by the school). Meals are also provided by the school, in the school canteen, which are open all year round, including holidays.

Long school holidays twice a year: in winter and summer, from mid-January to mid-February (one to three weeks due to the celebration of 春节 – Chinese New Year) and from June / July (depending on the school) for one month . In general, regular vacations are much shorter than in Russia or America, but this is done to make learning as effective as possible. During the holidays, homework is also given, which does not allow losing the skills acquired during the training. However, this does not interfere with the rest at all. In addition to the main holidays, there are also a number of bank holidays. Since the Chinese are very patriotic people, in order to celebrate the Founding Day of the PRC (October 1 annually from 1949 years) stands out as much as five days at the beginning of the month. Just like in Russia, in early May, the Chinese celebrate Labor Day and, in honor of this holiday, rest from 3 to 5 days.

Time-honored partnership with China’s leading universities

Due to the rigorous selection of schools for admission of international students, the cost of such education is relatively high, ranging from 20,000 to 40,000 yuan per semester, depending on the city. However, for this amount, the student receives many benefits, ranging from fluent Chinese to in-depth study of subjects in Chinese, which eliminates the need to learn vocabulary for a particular specialty when entering a university. Most schools also cooperate with major Chinese universities, as a result of which the chances of entering a partner university after graduation increase significantly.

Every talent is worth its weight in gold

Unlike Russia, all secondary schools in China have their own fenced area (campus), which includes an outdoor sports ground, an indoor stadium for physical education, a gym and a swimming pool, equipped auditoriums for lessons on musical instruments. In addition, there are organizations on campus focused on the development of various abilities in students: from drawing to acting in drama club productions. Time for classes in additional circles is also taken into account in the student’s schedule.

The stage of secondary school is a very important period in a person’s life; it is often at this age that the strongest and most sincere friendships are formed. Coming to study at a secondary school in China, the child makes promising acquaintances, settles in China, and when he enters the university, he is no longer surprised by the peculiarities of Chinese cuisine and the Chinese mentality. In addition, the earlier a person encounters such a phenomenon as “culture shock” from foreign traditions, the easier it is for him to adapt.

Chinese high school is a profitable alternative to American and European education: the cost of education is much lower, and the quality of education, thanks to strict discipline and proven teaching methods, is much higher.

We provide admission to the best secondary schools in China for students of all ages. More information and school reviews can be found here.

2022 and next year will be the last when the number of first-graders in St. Petersburg schools will grow – August 18, 2022

Special opinion

Denis Lebedev

August 18, 2022, 16:35

23 comments

2022 and the next will be the last year when the number of first-graders in St. Petersburg schools will increase. This growth has been observed over the past ten years and was driven by the cyclical baby boom of the 2010s.

There was no special merit of the authorities in this phenomenon, just representatives of the large generation of the previous baby boom, the 1980s, entered the demographic arena. Who also gave birth to numerous post-war baby boomers 1950s. In short, demographics, statistics, cyclicality – that’s all.

One of the consequences of the recently observed, but now declining growth in the birth rate in St. Petersburg has become a huge problem with the placement of the child in school. Overcrowded classrooms, crush and cunning in the queues for registration in the first class (of course, now the electronic crush and electronic cunning), referrals to a school at the other end of the district … No matter how many new classes you open, next year there will be even more. Next year, officials will again have to increase the number of classes by more than 2,000 additional children by this year. That is, under 100 new classes.

And in 2024, for the first time, there will be a situation where the number of first classes will be less than a year ago. And new problems are looming on the horizon: lack of children in schools, extra classrooms, extra teachers. And it will be for a long time – year by year there will be fewer and fewer children for at least 15 years.

The reduction in the number of children in 2024 will be very significant. Immediately minus 5 thousand – 200 full classes compared to the previous set.

But the problem will not happen in 2024, when children born in 2017 will come to school, of which 67 thousand were born in St. Petersburg alone. After all, they will be taken by primary school teachers who will graduate the fourth grades – children of 2013. Then they were born 65 thousand. That is, the number of teachers, as in previous years, will again be less than children. And we will have to recruit teachers again.

But in 2025, children born in 2018 will come – there will be only 64.5 thousand of them. And they will be met by teachers who graduated the fourth grade born in 2014 – 67.8 thousand. The difference is 3.3 thousand. Conditional 130 extra classes. And yes, conditional 130 extra teachers.

In 2025, it will still be possible not to fire them – just take fewer children to classes. But in 2026, the difference will already be very powerful – 59.7 versus 71.4 – a shortage of 11.5 thousand children. Under 500 teachers may remain without work.

Well, the most infernal trash will be in 2027. Then the children born in 2020 will go to school. There were only 55 thousand of them. A record number of children will graduate from the fourth grade – 73.5 thousand. That is, 18,000 fewer children will come. About 700 “unnecessary” elementary school teachers will be added to last year’s.

And in 2028 the difference will be another 13.7 thousand children. In total, from 2025 to 2028, the city will get under 2.5 thousand primary school teachers, for whom there will not be enough children. About 2500 empty classrooms in schools.

To some extent, the lack of “our own” children will be compensated by the influx of migrants. Not necessarily from among those who speak Russian poorly. Petersburg has always been a magnet for active and active provincials. This will continue to be the case, but over the past couple of years, there has been less and less motivation for migrants, and on the statistical curve we see that, on the contrary, many are just going home. So those who come to our city with children will not be able to improve the situation especially strongly. And in any case, we are waiting for a first-class apocalypse.

The question will arise about the expediency of the heroic construction of recent years at the expense of the builders (read – buyers of apartments) of huge schools. Graduates of the Herzen Russian State Pedagogical University will no longer be guaranteed employment immediately upon graduation. But the process of merging schools that has been going on for the past few years will become clearly meaningful.

Most likely, the effect of the reduction in the number of children in the city will be felt unevenly: in areas of mass new construction, where newlyweds and visitors are now settling, there will still be enough schoolchildren. And in the center everything will be very sad. It may not be far off to close some schools and turn them into representative offices – as happened on Arsenalnaya Embankment before the start of the baby boom.

Of course, no one will kick teachers out into the street. Indeed, in the upper grades there will still be hordes of baby boomers who need to be taught chemistry, algebra, etc. But in order to keep a job, it will be necessary to retrain from a universal primary education teacher to a subject teacher. Education officials can start organizing retraining courses right now.

The previous demographic hole lasted approximately from 1990 to 2006. The current one began in 2017, and there is no reason to believe that the growth in the birth of new Petersburgers will begin before the 2030s.

Denis Lebedev, Fontanka.ru

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Lebedev Denis may not coincide with the opinion of the editors

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