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Essay on Year Round Schooling: It's Pros & Cons
Year-round schooling has a long history in the United States, dating back to the 1800s, when it was used from time to time in northern industrial cities in order to deal with the English instruction needs of the children of immigrants. By the turn of the century, it was being adopted as an answer for many of the same problems that troubled schools at present viz. overcrowding, funding shortages and improving the education process. (Hermansen et al, 1971). However the year-round school movement also has a long history of failure. Research on the year-round calendar by The Nation Education Association in report released in 1958 found that every school system that had attempted a 12-month calendar up to that point ultimately abandoned it.
Moreover founders of an organization that support year-round school admit in a book that through 1968, every community, which had either tried a year-round calendar or carefully investigated the idea, had rejected it. The reasons communities dumped it back then are the same reasons they dump year-round school now: Year-round schooling is upsetting to family life, provides little or no academic benefit and saves schools little or no money--and can even cost much more.
The revival of the year-round school movement in the late 1960s is a result of several dynamics at work in the post-World War II era. The baby boom that followed the return of American soldiers sparked a demand for more school construction; in the meantime, the space race with Russia provoked yet another discussion about the quality of American education. Around the same time, state, county and local governments were struggling with ways to pay for the infrastructure costs and the new school construction demands of rapidly growing suburban communities. Many postwar families fled the cities to the suburbs looking for a better environment to raise their children............
