How’re You Gonna Keep ‘Em Down on the Farm?

How’re You Gonna Keep ‘Em Down on the Farm?

The School Summer Vacation Mythology

School all year round? Only for those who need remedial help? Allows parents to plan family vacations? Teachers are paid less, because they have so much time off? Hell, if we expand the school year to embrace summer too, are we simply spreading a malfunctioning system across an entire calendar year? What about those summer jobs teens yearn for? Does this apply to colleges too? Will it keep more kids engaged and off the streets? Writing for the July 18th Los Angeles Times, University of Pennsylvania education history professor, Jonathan Zimmerman, challenges the oft-repeated notion that summer breaks are a vestige of an agricultural America that no longer exists… and hasn’t for a very, very long time.

Indeed, when the United States was formed, it was 94% agricultural, and that was a world of mostly family farms. But the bulwark of public education was not born yet. Zimmerman notes: “We’ve heard that [agricultural] argument over and over again from politicians and other critics of summer vacation and all its parental and educational discontents. The COVID-19 pandemic, which spawned dramatic learning losses for America’s students, only heightened concerns about long summer breaks. Our kids need more school, the reasoning goes, and summer is an obvious time to start.

“They might be right about that, but the oft-repeated folk history is wrong. When our common school system began, in the early 19th century, students actually went to school in the summer. And if we want to bring them back today, we’ll need new ways to teach them.

“When most Americans lived and worked on farms, the busy seasons were spring and fall — for planting and harvesting, respectively. So kids attended school in the winter and, yes, in the summer, as historian Kenneth Gold has explained… That changed after the Civil War, during America’s great industrial boom. As more families moved into cities, educators worried that summer school terms would make children susceptible to smallpox, diphtheria and the other epidemic diseases that flared in the hotter months.

“Educators also argued that keeping children inside during the summer would prevent them from enjoying the bounties of free outdoor play. ‘Let Mary run and be as hedonist as she pleases; let Tommy roll in the mud,’ a Massachusetts observer wrote. ‘They will be all the better for it, more hardy, blooming, and vigorous when vacation is over.’

“There was just one problem: America’s cities were filthy. Despite the romantic nods to nature and health, children who lived in urban areas were more likely to encounter grime and disease and, if left unsupervised, get into other kinds of trouble as well… ‘Scores of the children will be seen sitting listlessly on the steps of the tenements or playing half-hearted games on the streets,’ a New Yorker worried of city summers in 1903. ‘Many will be seen pitching pennies, or at games of cards, or playing craps. ... The sight of boys stealing fruit is not infrequent.’”

Yet schools represent a massive investment in physical plants and infrastructure. While there might be partial use for summer school, the underutilization of these facilities is an obvious waste. Many argue that to open or expand school use will require more teacher and administrator pay, mandate that schools be air conditioned putting more pressures from rising electric bills and will bring online support systems that have typically used the offseason to repair and rebuild back before they are ready. The air conditioning excuse seems rather absurd in this era of record-breaking heat, hardly relegated to the summer months these days. As for electricity, school buildings are particularly well-suited to rooftop solar or wind power generation. That may cost more in the short term, but the longer-term savings are obvious.

In the earlier part of the 20th century, many schools were open for students seeking “something to do” and were not used as academic make-goods. Zimmerman responds: “As the 20th century continued, however, vacation schools lost their alternative edge. They evolved into summer school, which provided remedial instruction for kids who fell behind. And they also provided academic credit, subjecting them to all of the bureaucratic rules of regular school. That gave summer school a negative taint that it has never lost.

“If we continue to treat summer school as an extension of regular school, we’ll reinforce the stigma attached to summer school and the kids who attend it… ‘Why should they have to sit in a building and do math all day while their higher-income peers are off in some fancy camp?’ asked Rand Corp. researcher Catherine Augustine, who studies summer education.

“It’s a good question, and there’s only one answer: Summer school has to provide the kind of enrichment activities that well-to-do kids already receive in privately run summer camps and schools. Taking a page from the vacation school example, we should imagine it as a respite from the academic year rather than simply a recapitulation or extension of it… Some of that is already happening . In Orange County, Fla., summer schools are providing music and art enrichment alongside academic instruction; in Texas, they teach canoeing and swimming.

“Much of this activity is funded by federal COVID aid to schools, 20% of which must be used to combat learning loss. That shouldn’t be the only goal, however. The most successful summer schools will be the ones that look the least like regular school… We would also need to bring teachers aboard, which might be the biggest challenge of all. Exhausted and demoralized in the wake of the pandemic, most teachers have been cool to the idea of summer school.

“But maybe, just maybe, a new take on summer schooling could connect more teachers with the passion and idealism that brought them into education in the first place. Our kids went to school in the summer when the nation was young. With the right approach — and the right people to teach them — they can do so again.”

But the most poignant reason to expand the school year has more to do with the nation’s failure to prepare the rising generations for life in a competitive world. Austerity and wasting funds on inane “culture wars” has dropped our global educational standards for public education. We’re not even in the top 20 in international public-school metrics. See my July 9th A Fading American Value: Public Education blog for some of those statistics.

Exactly how do you sustain an economy with plunging educational quality? Is upward mobility as dead as I believe? And why don’t parents want a better future for their children enough to demand a functional public educational system? With about 13,000 school districts across the land, and with state and federal educational funding sliding increasingly lower, why isn’t the public up in arms about this?

I’m Peter Dekom, and it seems between school shootings, cuts to public school budgets and making higher education less affordable every year, our children are not remotely a national priority anymore.