Using a Balanced School Year to Improve Student Achievement. A White Paper of the Stark Education Partnership

Within the context of this paper, a balanced, or year-round, school year calendar is not one that necessarily increases either the length or number of school days. It is one that provides for "more continuous learning" by dividing up the traditional summer break into shorter intersessions during the year. It might seem to be a common-sense proposition that such a schedule would counter the so-called "summer slide" where students fail to retain much of what they learned during the previous nine months. Many experts like Paul T. von Hipple from the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas Austin note that: Once thought to be positive, these effects now appear to be neutral at best. Although year-round calendars do increase summer learning, they reduce learning at other times of year, so that the total amount learned over a 12-month period is no greater under a year-round calendar than under a nine-month calendar. As is often the case in education (and other fields), a study or two emerges that seems to dominate the research landscape. Everybody starts citing these same studies, giving them a kind of superlegitimacy, and as a result, researchers move on to other subjects. In the case of balanced, or year round school calendars and their impact on student achievement, two such studies have had this kind of impact. The first is a meta-analysis by Cooper and associates that found achievement effects to be minimal at best, and the second is von Hippel's review of Early Childhood Longitudinal Study (ECLS) data that, in essence, supported the same claim. As with many educational strategies, the research on balanced calendars in actuality is very sparse. The instructional stance of teachers, schools, and districts may be fundamentally transformed by a balanced calendar approach. At the very least, the adaptation of a balanced calendar indicates that these districts are serious about reform.