Does Summer Break Really Help Children?

There must be an internal alarm inside my body that goes off at the beginning of every June. Coffee — a steaming hot cup at the crack of dawn — must be thrown over ice. I like my apartment to be freezing cold, even on days that aren't especially hot. And school must end. Now.

At dinner last week, when my friend who lives in Greenwich, Conn., told me that her children only had a few days left of school, I felt an overwhelming pang of jealousy. The pang turned into a shooting pain when she told me what she had planned for the next few weeks before camp began.

"Not much," she said. "We're going to visit my parents in California for a few days. I have tickets to see 'The Little Mermaid.' But really, we're just going to hang out."

Even the strict parents who are normally opposed to their children lying around are rooting for some couch potato time. "My kids are fried," a mother of two told me. "Normally, I'm so strict about the television. I won't allow a drop during the week, and then just an hour or two over the weekend. But the second school lets out, I'm going to let them sit there for a few days and rot their brains. I almost think they need it."

My gang is also counting down the minutes until school lets out. This week, the normal struggle to get to school on time was torturous. None of them wanted to participate in their after-school activities — even the ones they love. Homework was completed as quickly as possible without any concern for accuracy. "This has been a long semester," one of my children said to me. Can anyone spell "burn-out"?

Perhaps our school calendar has something to do with this June gloom. When the school calendar in our country was established, it was tailored to fit the needs of our agrarian forefathers, who needed their children's extra hands during the summer months to farm. But it's been a long time since the majority of American children were picking fruit in July and August. And I can't think of any city children who are going to be harvesting this summer.

Instead, most parents I know are forking over thousands of dollars for their children to attend a variety of camps or programs, some that include travel to exotic countries. Some children will spend hours at the community pool. Others will sit in front of the television, often unsupervised, while their parents go to work. Some children will get jobs. Others will attend summer school.

All of them, though, will surely lose some of what they learned in the past school year. The executive director of the Center for Summer Learning at Johns Hopkins University, Ron Fairchild, wrote in a 2002 paper, "Recent studies estimate that summer learning loss for all students equals about one month on a grade-level equivalent scale ... On average, all students lose approximately 2.6 months of grade level equivalency in mathematical computation over the summer months." This step backward means that September will be dedicated to review, not the acquisition of new information.

Our children have a longer summer holiday than most children do around the world (as well as in some parts of this country, which offer year-round schooling). Generally speaking, our school year is about 180 days long, while the world average is somewhere between 200 to 220. Schoolchildren in Japan, believe it or not, spend 243 days a year in school. We also use a two-semester system, while much of the world uses a four-term system, in which approximately four nine-week terms are divided up by roughly two- or three-week holidays, except for the longer six- or seven-week summer vacation.

This is how the school year is divided in South Africa, where my children attend classes for a few months every year. When the term ends in South Africa, the children let out a collective whoopee — not the final breath of academic interest they can possibly muster for the next few months. And when the year begins again after a six-week holiday, there isn't quite the sense of renewal that exists in America. But there also isn't nearly as much summer learning loss.

As a parent of multiple children, I know that as much as I am dying for summer vacation to begin, it'll be only a matter of weeks before I'll wish they were back in school. Actually, it might only be a couple weeks before I begin cursing myself for ever wishing that school had let out. I don't need 14 weeks of summer break — three would be plenty. Okay, I need three, but maybe my children need six or seven weeks.

It's hard to imagine the kind of collective will that would be necessary to change a school calendar that is almost as American as apple pie. But a three-month summer vacation is no longer benefiting anyone. Not the farmers, not the parents, and most important, not the students.

sarasberman@aol.com