Study: Year Round Schools Do Not Improve Grades

Ohio State University announced last week that students in year-round schools don't learn any more or have better grades than their peers in traditional nine-month schools.

Paul von Hippel, a research statistician in sociology at the university and author of the study, which was partly funded through grants from the Spencer Foundation and the National Institute for Child Health Development, said: "We found that students in year-round schools learn more during the summer, when others are on vacation, but they seem to learn less than other children during the rest of the year." Von Hippel presented his results at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association on Aug. 11 in New York City.

Von Hippel examined reading and math test scores of children in kindergarten and first grade in 27 year-round public schools, which he compared to scores of students in traditional nine-month schools.

Nearly all of the year-round schools were in urban and suburban areas, and most were in the West. The children attending year-round schools were mostly Hispanic and tended to be somewhat poorer than average.

Most of the year-round schools also tended to have problems with overcrowding and, for the most part, had gone to a year-round calendar as a means of coping with overcrowding. What this means is that the schools were able to accommodate more students by staggering students' schedules, a plan not available to schools on a traditional nine-month calendar.

To ensure that the scores were fair when comparing the year-round schools with the nine-month schools, Von Hippel said he was able to take into account the issues of poverty and overcrowding.

What von Hippel found was that over a twelve-month period, average reading and math test score gains were less than 1 percent larger in year-round than in nine-month schools. According to von Hippel, this is "an absolutely trivial difference."

Specifically, disadvantaged children seemed to gain slightly more in reading test scores in year-round schools than they did in nine-month schools. But these same students saw no increase in math scores in year-round schools compared to traditional schools.

In summation, von Hippel said: "There may be a slight advantage for students from the poorest families in attending year-round schools, at least when it comes to improving their reading. On purely academic grounds, I wouldn't advocate a year-round calendar, but I can't recommend against it, either. On the other hand, if a school is considering a year-round calendar in hopes of boosting academic achievement, it seems unlikely that those hopes will be realized."

Von Hippel said that the problem with year-round schools may be that they really don't add more school days to the typical 180-day school year. The year-round schools may not give students a three-month summer break, but they typically give students several much shorter breaks, spread throughout the entire year. In other words, the total number of days a student spends in school in a 12-month period remains about the same, whether the student attends a year-round school or a nine-month school.

Von Hippel said some educators believe that doing away with long summer vacations boosts students' grades. But "the results don't support that claim," he said.

Source:

Press release, Year-round Schools Don't Boost Learning; http://www.newswise.com/articles/view/532316/