Students will retain information longer with year-long schooling

The argument

The case for year-round education here turns on a single well-documented problem: the long summer break does measurable damage to what students already know. Students fall victim to the 'summer slide', the phenomenon in which they unlearn some of the knowledge they worked hard to attain when too much consecutive time is taken off from school. The loss is not a failure of teaching during the year. It happens after the teaching has succeeded, during the months when nothing is being practised. Year-round schooling is presented as a rearrangement rather than an expansion. Students at year-round schools attend the same number of days as students at traditional schools; what changes is the distribution, with the long summer replaced by several shorter breaks spread through the year. Because no break is long enough for substantial forgetting to set in, students stay engaged with the learning process throughout the year, information loss is reduced, and the transitions back into school are easier on students and teachers alike. The advantage is slight in any single instance but it is structural and it recurs every year of a school career. The scale of what is being recovered is given by the time teachers currently spend making up the deficit. The National Summer Learning Association often cites decades of research showing that it can take anywhere from eight to 13 weeks at the beginning of every school year for teachers to bring students back up to speed and ready to learn the new grade's material. That is a substantial share of the school year spent re-teaching rather than teaching, and it is spent because of a scheduling decision rather than because of anything about the students. Since students retain information longer under year-long schooling, and since the alternative wastes weeks of every year recovering ground already covered, the argument concludes that the United States should mandate year-round education.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Research about the academic impact of year-round schooling has not clearly shown it is beneficial. One challenge in proving that year-round schooling is beneficial is that there are numerous factors that impact academic performance, which makes isolating the effects of this one aspect difficult. A study released in 2007 by Ohio State University found that there are really no differences in learning between students who attend school year-round and those who are on a traditional schedule.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] It has not been proven that year-long school is beneficial for memory retention.