What do you think about year around schooling?

What do you all think about it or have you experienced it?

In short, its 9 weeks of school, then 3 weeks of break. Summer is 1 month off. As I understand it its usually only thru about grade 8.

I think it would have its ups and downs but I dont have the personal experience in it.

I think year around schooling is a good idea; but your proposal gives students an excessive amount of time off.

It has its pluses and minuses. Kids are less likely to forget what they learned if they don’t have a 3 month summer vacation. It’s hard to plan a month long vacation when you only get 3 weeks off at a time. I think parents like it more than kids do since they don’t have to entertain them all summer long like they used to. I don’t see a big advantage to it myself.

In general I like a more rational approach to holidays and school vacations in general. In they US they’re all bunched up and it can make it hard to arrange child care.

I liked how it was when I was in Japan. The year was divided into trimesters interspersed with an approximately 2-3 week break (don’t remember exactly). The long weekends were evenly distributed to about one per month, none of this shit like we have in the US with crazy lumped-up holidays that might not be holidays for everyone.

OK that turned into a rant, point being we could do a better job of arranging the school year around the needs of working parents and the businesses they work for.

Luckily, the 99% aren’t burdened with having to plan month-long vacations.

The general proposals have students going to school for exactly the same amount of time. Here’s a sample calendar. Urbanredneck isn’t too far off in his description.

I think it is pretty good for kids from high-education families, but amazing for kids from low-education families. Kids who don’t get a lot of academic support from college-educated parents often experience significant “summer slide,” falling even further behind in academics over the summer. A shortened summer break reduces this backsliding; I’m pretty sure I’ve seen solid research on this account, although it’s been years since I saw it.

Also, on a less important measure, it keeps buildings from sitting empty for two months of the year, which is a good thing.

Big fan of year-round schooling here.

Academically, it’s hard to argue with.

But otherwise, it more or less torpedoes the opportunities to do stuff that you can’t really do in 2-3 weeks during the school year. Think about how many tales reference spending summers with relatives elsewhere, or about life lessons learned during summer vacation, or for older kids, summer jobs and camps and activities. Or for that matter, having a family vacation in the summer is very complicated if you have a defined two weeks to make it during.

Maybe they could compromise and make the summer shorter, but more than 3 weeks?

I actually proposed exactly such a setup in the (amazing) books I wrote, though I took it a level or two further by proposing dividing the year into eight five-week blocks with an accompanying destigmatization of failing one and falling behind a bit to redo a few weeks. 'Twas highly unrealistic, but fun to design.

As for such a system being implemented in real life, I’m for it at a theoretical level, but don’t have kids so I don’t have a dog in the fight.

The Australian system has four (roughly) ten-week terms, two weeks between each term, six weeks for summer break. That’s not exactly ‘year round school’, but a lot closer to it than a three month holiday block all at once. I think it’s pretty much ideal, and wouldn’t want to change it.

As a child I hated the concept of year round school, because I salivated for my two and a half month break from “prison”. It’s interesting that there’s academic research on it that points to it being beneficial. Maybe I should change my mind on it. But my experience learning things in school was to fill my brain with stuff for a test and forget 90% of it afterwards because it had no immediate applicable use in my life. As an adult, I clearly do remember things from school, but I can tell its very piecemeal by the things I thought was interesting. I find a lot of facts interesting, so there’s quite a bit of random stuff about native american longhouses and chinese isolationism and so on, but I couldn’t tell you much about math now, even if I could get high scores on the tests then. I guess the papers must be right, but I can’t imagine I forgot much over summer break that I wouldn’t naturally forget anyway.

This is standard here in the UK and I love it. There are six half-terms of approximately six-seven weeks each, with breaks separating each one, and a six week break over the summer.

The schedule this year is as follows (varies by council):

Autumn Term
3 September - 19 October
(Half Term break 22 October - 26 October)
29 October - 21 December

Christmas Break
24 December - 4 January

Spring Term
7 January - 15 February
(Half Term break 18 February - 22 February)
25 February - 5 April

Easter Break
8 April - 22 April

Summer Term
23 April - 24 May
(Half term break 27 May to 31 May)
3 June - 24 July

Summer Break
24 July - 1 September

Don’t students already get about 16 weeks off a year? Thats about equal to what the OP said, 9 weeks on and 3 weeks off with 4 weeks off in summer.

I doubt it matters honestly what kind of school year method you use. I’d rather just let the kids enjoy their summers off like we did.

50 years ago my history teacher told us exactly what you recollect, which isn’t much of a cite but it is very plausible.
I know of a set of monthly videos that taught Japanese kids English, and there were 12 of them.
The summer camp operators would scream for sure. But it might balance out resort and vacation spot usage.

As someone who works at an elementary school, I’d be down with it. It would have had less appeal when my kids were in another school system unless it adopted the same schedule.

My ex told me kids went to school year round in Japan and my daughter attended school in the summers she spent there with her grandparents though she seemed to feel it was mostly busy work like arts and crafts and field trips.

But there are some major costs associated with that.

For example, here in Minnesota, most school buildings are not air-conditioned. And often not designed to allow or cross ventilation – assuming that you can even open the windows. (Many are old enough (radiator heat) that adding AC would be a major, expensive task.)

And you can’t expect any effective learning (or teaching) in such really hot, humid temperatures. We recently had some way above-normal temperatures in the Fall. Several of the Minneapolis schools had to shut down, because it was pointless to try to teach kids under those conditions. (And dangerous; they had students facing heat stroke in some cases.)

Another minor effect would be the increased difficulty of doing renovations to school buildings. Major plumbing, electric, or HVAC work is usually schedule during the summer, when the buildings are empty. Some projects could be done during the short breaks, but that tight scheduling is likely to increase costs for repair/renovation work.

The actual dates of the school year in the U.S. vary quite a bit from state to state (and from district to district within a state), but I think that very few get even close to three full months off for summer break now.

My recollection, from when I was in school in the 1970s, was that the school year finished up in the first half of June, and “back to school” was pretty commonly the Tuesday after Labor Day, in early September. Now, from what I see, most school years still end in early June, but it’s increasingly common for schools to start their years in the middle of August (so, the summer break is more like two months and change).

As far as I can tell, it’s not that kids are in school for more days now than they were 40 years ago; it’s more that school districts have more “in-service days” and the like than they used to, which is why the school year itself is longer.

hell, I’m in the top 10% with no kids and a month-long vacation ain’t even worth dreaming about. I’ve used 4 of my allotted 15 vacation days so far this year.

True. But I’d guess it makes a bitch out of joint custody/visitation arrangements.

been there done tha 10 years ago t and its all ready considered a failed theory kids were on different schedules the buildings themselves weren’t prepared ………it costs a fortune

they just re configured the school year for longer traditional breaks like a week for thanksgiving 3 weeks for xmas and end the first week in june and go back the first week in august