Year-Round School: Overview

Introduction

Year-round schools generally operate on a 180-day schedule that includes a reduced summer vacation and frequent short breaks throughout the school year; a small percentage are also considered extended-year schools. Advocates for year-round education believe that the year-round schedule—or “balanced calendar,” as it is also called—helps to minimize the month’s worth of learning loss that students tend to experience during a typical summer break. Disadvantaged and low-income students have commonly been thought to experience particularly severe “summer setbacks” by the time they reach high school under a traditional school year.

Advocates for year-round school emphasize the continuity of learning throughout the year without extended breaks. The shorter breaks throughout the year-round school calendar allow students to take advantage of short-term enrichment programs and remedial courses. Supporters of year-round school believe these shorter vacations allow for greater retention rates and provide struggling students with a greater opportunity to achieve.

Although studies of academic performance among students who attend school under a balanced calendar do not reveal substantial levels of improvement, many studies agree that the mixture of a balanced calendar and a multitrack (or “rotating”) schedule can accomplish other practical goals. These goals include a more efficient use of existing resources (including school buildings and teaching staff), decreased classroom overcrowding, and a schedule that might well be more accommodating to the academic needs of disadvantaged students. Similarly, supporters of year-round school calendars believe that teachers and students experience less stress and burnout during a year-round schedule because of the multiple short breaks available throughout the year.

Many critics of the year-round school model emphasize that older schools may not be capable of offering an air-conditioned environment during the hotter summer months, the use of school buildings during the summer increases expenses, and building maintenance suffers due to increased use.

Opponents of the year-round school model argue that its benefits have not been sufficiently proven. They suggest that students will forget information even during shorter breaks, thereby causing more review work to be done in the classroom throughout the year. Critics also cite year-round school as an obstacle to summer enrichment programs, such as youth camps, and note that the balanced calendar model can hurt students and industries dependent on short-term summer employment.

Understanding the Discussion

Balanced calendar: Another name for the year-round school model.

Curriculum tracking: A system for dividing the student body according to academic abilities or interests.

Extended-year schools: Schools functioning with a school year that exceeds 180 days, often lasting between 200 and 240 days a year.

Multitrack year-round plans: A system for dividing students in a year-round school to regulate the number of students in attendance at a given time. A “rotating” schedule similarly allows for more frequent use of the same classrooms.

Peer groups: Sets of individuals with similar abilities, skills, or interests.

Traditional school-year: A school-year that begins in late summer and lasts until late spring and includes 180 days of education.

Year-round school calendar plans: Plans for year-round school that include multiple breaks throughout the school year.

History

Since the early twentieth century, schools in the United States have traditionally run on a nine- to ten-month calendar, beginning in the late summer or early fall and continuing until late spring or early summer. Conventional wisdom holds that this schedule was rooted historically in the agrarian cycle, leaving children available on weekends and during the summer months to help with planting and harvesting, and that due to urbanization and industrialization, the cycle of the school year ceased to be connected to harvest seasons. In reality, however, the children of farmers historically contributed to their family's planting and harvest efforts, leading many rural schools to hold winter and summer sessions. Meanwhile, many urban schools ran year round, often for more than 250 days, but heat, illness, vacation, and absenteeism encouraged administrators to adopt longer and longer summer breaks. Eventually, efforts to harmonize urban and rural schedules led to a compromise in the form of the nine-month schoolyear.

As overcrowding in schools became an issue in the 1960s, some school districts began reconsidering year-round school to stretch existing resources. In 1968, Schafer Park Elementary School in California’s Hayward Unified School District became the first school in the United States to operate on a year-round calendar since before the 1940s. To date, it is among the longest running year-round schools in the United States.

In 1983, the National Commission on Excellence in Education published a report called “A Nation at Risk.” The commission reported that educational standards in the United States were mediocre and that American students were being easily surpassed in test scores by students in other industrialized nations. The report cited low standardized test scores, declining scores on national collegiate entrance exams, and the rate of illiteracy among Americans as the key issues facing education. In response to this report, educators began considering a longer school day and manipulating school calendars in an attempt to compete globally. The year-round school plan was designed, in part, to address these national, educational concerns.

In year-round educational plans, the school is set on a school plan and track. The plan determines the number of consecutive days students attend school and also dictates the break schedule. The track determines which students are present in the school at a given time. The three most common year-round school calendar plans are the 45-15 plan, the 60-20 plan, and the 90-30 plan. In each plan the students attend school for the first number of the plan and then have a break equal to the second number of the plan. For example, if a year-round school is operating on a 45-15 plan, the students are in school for 45 days and then experience a 15-day break. School is in session for four nine-week terms separated by four three-week vacations.

Typically, year-round schools operate on a single-track system, meaning the entire school uses the same calendar throughout the year. In a multiple-track system, the student body is divided into three or four subsets. The four subsets rotate vacation time, so that only three sets of students attend school during a given term. Advocates for year-round school believe that the multiple-track option maximizes the use of school facilities by reducing the number of students in the building at a given time.

In some year-round schools, the student body is divided according to a curriculum track as well. In these schools, students are grouped according to their abilities or interests and move through the educational process in established peer groups.

The debate surrounding year-round school also includes a discussion of the educational value of summer vacation. Advocates for year-round school argue that students become lazy during summer months and lose more of their educational foundation than they gain. On the other hand, supporters of the traditional school calendar argue that summer vacation is a valuable learning experience in itself. They maintain that there is educational value in time spent with the family, out-of-school experiences, and employment opportunities available during the longer summer vacation.

Research by Duke University professor of education and psychology Harris Cooper is at the center of the debate over the effectiveness of year-round education. Cooper has spent the majority of his career on the issues of school calendars, the effectiveness of homework, and the usefulness of after-school programs. His findings indicate that students lose more math skills than reading skills over the summer vacation, and students attending year-round school experience only a half-month loss of learning during their reduced summer vacation rather than the full-month loss among students on the traditional school calendar.

Math-related losses are especially pronounced according to numerous studies of this topic, and disadvantaged students in year-round programs tend to experience more reading-related than math-related improvements. A comparison of the very mild improvements in academic performance between disadvantaged and middle-class students in various year-round programs revealed that disadvantaged students experienced twice as much overall improvement as students from middle-class communities. The achievement gap between these two groups when they reach the ninth grade is three times as high as it had been in the earliest years of grade school, and the “summer setback” is considered a primary explanatory factor.

Cooper’s findings are used by both sides of the year-round school debate. Those in favor of year-round school agree with Cooper that students benefit from year-round school and that school calendars should be adjusted to reduce learning loss. Opponents of year-round school cite the narrow margin of learning loss and claim there is insufficient cause to change the system. The disruption caused by a substantial change in scheduling can itself be detrimental to learning.

In “A Statewide Evaluation of Academic Achievement in Year-Round Schools,” Bradley J. McMillen, of the Division of Accountability Services, evaluated the test scores of 345,000 North Carolina students in grades three through eight during the 1997–98 school year. The study found that achievement scores were no greater among students from year-round schools as students from traditional schools. Critics of Cooper’s findings argue that the research methods of this study were more credible, based on the expansive number of test scores and the breadth of schools examined, than Cooper’s case studies. Methodological problems often arise in these sorts of studies due to students operating under different calendars having experienced different levels of instruction at specific times in an academic year when they might take similar exams.

A follow-up to Cooper’s study argued that the change to a year-round school calendar is more justified on grounds of reducing overcrowding or altering the organization of student activities than in an attempt to improve academic performance. Sociologists who study education find that a year-round schedule has minor advantages, but they tend to emphasize that the effect of family and community environment on academic performance far outweighs any effect that educational reorganization can accomplish. Cognitive psychologists, however, confirm that learning and the retention of information are aided by shortening learning periods, but this research largely deals with periods of hours and days rather than weeks and months.

Many of the identified increases in levels of academic achievement among disadvantaged students in nonconventional schooling systems are attributed to extended-year schools or specific remedial and enrichment programs rather than to year-round school calendars specifically.

Year-Round School Today

During the first two decades of the twenty-first century, a number of schools around the United States reverted from year-round schooling to traditional 180-day schooling. According to a 2022 analysis of National Center for Education Statistics data, 3 percent of all US public schools held classes on a year-round school calendar in 2017–18, down from 6 percent in 1999–2000. Among the districts that reverted were Las Vegas, Nevada; Salt Lake City, Utah; and school districts in California. Falling enrollment after periods of overcrowding was a major reason for the return in these districts. Other districts reverted to traditional calendars due to the increased expenses of operating year-round schools. The rotating schedule in Los Angeles, California—where an especially high proportion of students attended school under a balanced calendar—was associated with high levels of student withdrawal from school, low attendance, low grades, and increased de facto racial segregation in classrooms; parents also generally disliked these scheduling changes, and low-income households had difficulty adjusting to students’ prolonged break in the winter.

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic that began in the US in 2020 resulted in widespread school closures and other interruptions in instruction. In response to the learning loss for students during those tumultuous years, the movement toward year-round schooling resurfaced in the US in the early 2020s. For example, using pandemic-recovery funds from the federal government, Washington State launched a Balanced Calendar initiative that provided grants to forty-five schools to study year-round schedules in 2021 and 2022.

Advocates suggested a switch to balanced calendar schedules could help reverse some of the negative academic, psychological, and social effects of the pandemic on students. Some highlighted the limitations of existing programs, such as voluntary summer school, in efforts to reverse losses.

Opponents argued for a “return to normalcy” and cited research showing little improvement in academic outcomes. Some decried the potential repercussions for employment dependent on summer breaks and for extracurricular activities such as organized sports. Its effects on teacher and staff retention were also widely debated—and highly salient in light of postpandemic teacher shortages. Recruitment and retention efforts led school districts to entertain other alternative schedules, such as four-day weeks, as well.

The discourse around the renewed schedule debate also surfaced deeper underlying concerns. Among these were how instructional time is used and how much is truly necessary, how competency is tracked and measured, and whether the proposed solutions could meet the educational and sociological challenges at hand.

These essays and any opinions, information or representations contained therein are the creation of the particular author and do not necessarily reflect the opinion of EBSCO Information Services.

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