Poor Elijah: Summer respite

By Peter Berger
By Peter Berger

It’s been a particularly rough couple of years at America’s schools. A diet of pandemic-induced online instruction and Zoom classrooms has left America’s students further behind and in need of more remediation than usual. Some of that catching up may need to happen during the summer, but just as the virus has led to broader but ineffectual use of technology, Poor Elijah is concerned that COVID summer remedial instruction will help reformers normalize the year-round schools they’ve been proposing and promoting for decades.

Here follows his customary defense of summer recess.

When I teach students to evaluate opinions, I tell them to consider whether the fellow with the opinion has anything to gain by convincing people to agree with him. For example, my local Chevy dealer isn’t likely to be free of self-interest when he’s recommending cars. Interested parties don’t always give faulty advice, but you need to be wary.

When it comes to school summer vacation, I’m an interested party. Yes, sometimes I suffer through courses like Brain Compatible Teaching Strategies, but whether I replace clapboards or sip iced coffee under a maple tree, I mostly get to do what I want.

Some educators argue that teachers need a break from classroom stress to recharge their batteries. But if firefighters can survive without two months off every summer, I’m sure teachers could manage, too.

Either way, my summer preferences are irrelevant. Hospitals aren’t open twenty-four hours a day because nurses enjoy working at night. They’re open at three in the morning because that best serves patients. The question is whether year-round classroom instruction would best serve students.

Experts condemn traditional schools with bells and schedules as relics of the “factory model.” They also charge that summer vacation is a relic of a bygone “agrarian model” when children were released to do fieldwork. That’s because education experts, addicted to the next new thing, consider anything past as passé and outmoded, even if it’s how they themselves were successfully educated.

Modern summer recess actually became an institution not because of farmers but because a growing urban middle class demanded a summer vacation. In any case, schools never gave children back to their parents for part of the year. Parents sent their children to school for a time and a purpose.

That purpose was learning school stuff like reading, mathematics, and history. Part of our current achievement problem is that schools spend too much time on other things, from dental hygiene and counseling to classroom disruption and testing. Before we increase children’s school time, we need to address what schools are doing with the time they already have.

Critics have long charged that teachers spend an inordinate amount of time each September reviewing what students forget each July. There’s nothing wrong with September reviews. Learning isn’t a matter of hearing and assimilating information once. Reviewing over and after time is a worthwhile and necessary part of the process. Besides, I might not need a break, but my students do. Many return reinvigorated with a renewed commitment, ready to take advantage of a fresh start. Many have matured behaviorally and intellectually and are therefore better able to grasp ideas and skills that gave them trouble the preceding spring.

The latest calls to end summer vacation come from advocates contending that children from “low socioeconomic status (SES) backgrounds” tend to lose more ground each summer than more affluent children. Some critics attribute “two thirds of the reading achievement gap” to what students “learned or failed to learn over their childhood summers.”

While affluence is no assurance of success, and poverty no guaranty of failure, children from “higher status” homes typically benefit from better healthcare, more books, and better-educated parents. Summer educational home disadvantages simply reflect the disparities that exist year-round. The “gap” isn’t just what happens during the summer.

Critics respond that “affluent youngsters can quench their thirst for knowledge” with “academic camps, household bookshelves, libraries,” and “family interaction,” while “low SES students don’t have access to such resources.” As a result, they argue, poorer children lose more ground each summer.

I don’t know many students who “quench” at academic camp, and while some children undeniably have access to more books, it doesn’t take many books to read one or two. The reason most children don’t read isn’t access. It’s desire. As for the quality of “family interaction,” that’s up to each family.

Even if some children could benefit from summer schooling, it in no way follows that all children should be compelled to attend school all year. Ending summer vacation for all students on the grounds that it might help some is as logically bankrupt as the currently fashionable equity argument against assigning homework on the grounds that it’s unfair to students who won’t do it.

If some students can benefit from summer remedial classes, then offer that opportunity to them and their parents. If that remediation is essential for success the following term, then make it a condition of promotion.

But don’t end summer vacation. There’s more to being a child than going to school. It’s unnatural enough that children already spend nine months a year away from home.

If the problem lies in American homes, those homes, not school, are where we need to find the remedy.

Peter Berger has taught English and history for 30 years. Poor Elijah would be pleased to answer letters addressed to him in care of the editor.