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How Long is Summer Break?
Summer Break tends to be the longest break from school during the year. While most breaks throughout the year are at most a week or two, Summer break is usually significantly longer. The length of “Summer Break” can range anywhere from two weeks long to up to three months long depending on the country, region, and school district.
In Europe, breaks tend to be very long with Summer break reaching three months in some countries such as Spain, Hungary, and Poland, while others like Germany and the UK have shorter breaks at two months long. The United States also has a wide range of summer breaks with places like Texas and Alabama having long three month breaks while other states such as Massachusetts and New Jersey have more conservative 2 month breaks. New Zealand and Australia have significantly shorter Summer breaks at 6 weeks each.
Asia is a bit of a tricky case as on the surface places like China, Japan, and Korea all have Summer breaks of between one and three months just like the rest of the world. However, the reality on the ground is much different as a large percentage of students continue attending special Summer study courses throughout their supposed break.
Because of increasing competition from Asia, many have begun considering shortening Summer break to keep students competitive and fight against the dreaded “Summer Slump”. Especially in the schools with multi-month Summer breaks, many teachers struggle with what they describe as the Summer Slide or more officially, Summer Learning Loss.
What does research suggest are the dangers behind a long Summer break and what can schools do to ensure their students get the education they deserve, but also have a healthy work life balance? While a long Summer break might have some serious downsides, this does not mean that Children should simply lose this break time. There should be a mindful distribution of break time to ensure freedom isn’t forgotten, but also that learning isn’t lost.
Why is Summer Break So Long?
Many people believe the myth that the long Summer break was put in place by schools to allow children to go back home to their farms in the old days and help with the crops. However, harvest time is generally in Fall with new plants being planted in the Spring.
Instead, the long Summer break was put in place as a way for students to spend time outside of the classroom and with their families while the weather was good. Now it has become ingrained in cultures, seeming to be a backbone of the way one thinks about their year even beyond a school setting .
Research on the Dangers of a Long Summer Break
According to research published last year “Regions with a lengthy summer break can create negative outcomes for learners; this problem is referred to as summer learning loss, summer learning gap, or summer slide.” This shows that this is not just something reported by frustrated teachers comparing last year’s students with this year’s new batch, but a genuine learning loss that could be averted.
However, Summer break being long seems like a no brainer. Kids need to be kids! Summer is the time when families spend time together and often go on memorable trips together. Summers are often filled with tons of activities, sports, clubs, trips, and camps which are often a huge benefit to the children, sometimes even more than a traditional school environment.
However, this is not this is not true for all children. Many children actually spend their Summers unsupervised with few organized activities to keep them occupied. Parents who are working, unless they are teachers, do not get whole Summers off along with their children. While they can schedule their vacation time during this time to maximize family time, this is rarely an option for lower income families where both parents are working.
This leads to a lot of unproductive time and time that children can get into trouble more easily. It also increases the gap between those children whose parents have the money to pay for others to keep them occupied and educated while the government takes a break from those who can not simply stop their jobs for two months to take over childcare for 8 hours a day.
“Research shows that summer slide–the loss of learning over the summer break–is a huge contributor to the achievement gap between low-income students and their higher-income peers. In fact, some researchers have concluded that two-thirds of the 9th-grade reading achievement gap can be explained by unequal access to summer learning opportunities during elementary school.” (Smith)
Reading is such a fundamental skill that underpins a student’s ability to access learning material for literally every single class they take during their formal education. If Summer break is having a major effect on students’ reading ability long term, this should be taken into account when considering how many consecutive months are needed for Summers.
Summer reading programs have been shown to be very effective in reducing literacy gaps and preparing students better for the year ahead. According to one study, “the summer school group had higher word reading scores than the control group. The summer school participants showed improvements in phonological recoding ability, word reading, spelling and passage reading accuracy.” (Nicholson and Tiru)
Long unsupervised Summers can lead to children not only forgetting a lot of what they have learned the previous year, but also instead spending that time getting into trouble with long hours of lack of supervision. Statistics show that youth crime rates spike approximately 35% during the Summer months. (Juvenile Justice Reform)
While not all children are getting into trouble with the law, the lack of supervision and organized beneficial activities generally means children are making less healthy and safe choices. While some independence is vital for students to ever grow any self reliance, months on end can lead to boredom in even the students who hate school the most and cause thrill seekers to consider risky activities.
Other Summer Break Structures
While this article may sound like it is suggesting simply adding more schooling during the Summer months, this would result in nowhere near enough free time for students and have huge negative effects on their mental health. Instead, if multi-month Summer vacations are to go, an equivalent amount of time should be taken from other times throughout the year to compensate.
This could look several different ways. Of course, the multi month break could simply be broken into smaller one or two week breaks throughout the year. This would still leave time for fun vacations and family time, but allow these experiences to be more evenly spread throughout the year.
While Summer weather may be most tempting for a vacation for most, there are many fun trips and experiences to be had all year round all over the world. Perhaps having a more evenly spread out break structure would encourage a wider variety of vacations that would be more suitable for different times of year.
Alternatively, many people are already calling for a 4 day school and work week. Eliminating Summer break could be the push that is needed to make each and every week a more balanced experience rather than spending 9 months of the year stressed out and 3 months trying to recover and dreading going back.
Every single week having a long weekend would do wonders for people’s mental health and allow for so many new opportunities with family and friends to keep in touch instead of being too busy with school and homework unless it is Summer time.
Another commonly suggested move is pushing the start of the school day an hour or more later in the day. Research has shown time and time again that school starting so early is detrimental for learning and how the brains of young people work.
If school started at say 9 or 10 each day, this would allow students to get a much better sleep each night and be less drowsy and irritable early in the morning. While a later start time for school is backed by neuroscience, schools could really add free time wherever it makes sense for their individual communities.
Maybe this means starting at 10am and for others it means having a longer lunch period, a recess block, and leaving an hour early. Different structures will work better and make more sense for different communities and that level of decision making should be left up to those who are directly affected by those times.
No matter which structure a school chooses however, allowing school during the currently unused 3 months of Summer would give teachers so much more flexibility in fitting in everything they want to teach that year.
Rather than having more classroom hours, teachers will be able to use the same number of classroom hours they have currently more efficiently. This is because teachers will no longer have to reteach so much of the previous year’s materials that they currently spend fighting the Summer Slump.
This consistent and mindfully connected learning experience will be better for curriculum vertical alignment. This will lead to less frustration for both teachers and students and a smoother transition between courses.
Conclusions
The longer the Summer break, the more learning loss occurs in children. While there are certainly benefits for some in having a long Summer break, neuroscience research and education statistics suggest that the longer the break, the more pronounced and long term negative learning outcomes are for students.
There is not enough research to be able to decide an exact number of “ideal” Summer break days or weeks, but this question should always be left to the local schools who are going to be most affected by changes rather than being mandated from above by some idealist.
Regardless of how much shorter the school chooses to make their Summer break, it is important that the school also compensate this lost time in some other way throughout the year. If this step is not taken, the loss of Summer break would be absolutely soul crushing and lead to fierce opposition.
Work-life balance is not only a thing for adults, but is important for children going to school as well. The current education structure does not have a very balanced break structure, with students highly stressed through 9-10 months of the year and completely unsupported for 2-3 months afterwards.
Schools should strongly consider balancing out their breaks to create a more consistent experience and more mindfully link their curriculum through vertical alignment. Though nostalgia will certainly pine for the days of long Summer breaks, our future selves will thank us for creating a healthier long term schedule.
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