Cleveland Ends Year-Round Schooling Citing No Meaningful Gains After 15 Years
The Cleveland school district is ending its15-year attempt to use year-round classes to improve student learning in some schools, deciding last week to drop what the district and some experts once viewed as the best way for students to avoid the so-called 'summer slide.'
Year-round schooling, which gained popularity in the 1970s, avoids long summer vacations in which students can forget much of what they learned during the school year. Under the plan, students attend classes as part of a normal grading period most of the summer. Their school years aren't much longer than with a traditional schedule, just spread out differently, with their lost summer vacation days added to other breaks during the school year.
Cleveland's move comes as some states like South Carolina and Florida have recently embraced or are trying out the approach, along with districts hoping to address pandemic learning loss. The number of schools using year-round schedules nationally fell from about 6% in the 1970s to under 3% before the pandemic, researchers report.
Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for The 74 Newsletter
In Cleveland, previous district leaders once considered year-round school a promising way to turn around the struggling district. But it caught on in just six of Cleveland's high schools, and new school leaders now want all district schools on the same calendar and curriculum so students aren't lost if they change schools.
Leaders also aren't convinced year-round school is helping. A district study this year with researchers from Cleveland State University and the American Institutes for Research showed the city's year-round schools often have higher math and English scores than other high schools, but mostly because the schools have more gifted students and students who would do well with any schedule. Research nationally is also mixed.
Related
Your Child's Education, Explained: What the Heck Is 'Summer Slide' Anyway?
District CEO Warren Morgan decided gains were not enough to justify the additional $2.6 million in teacher salaries year-round classes cost.
'There was no evidence that there was substantial, meaningful difference in the academic outcomes in our different calendar types,' Morgan said before the school board vote last week. 'We also recognize and value the excellence of our many different schools …but there's also other variables…that make them great.'
David Hornak, executive director of the National Association for Year Round Education, said the pandemic renewed interest in year-round school as a possible way to tackle COVID learning loss, as well as increasing interest in related strategies, like adding summer learning programs or extra school days to the start or end of the school year.
Hornak estimates about 4% of schools now have a year-round schedule, but the association has scaled back over the years and has no staff to track it.
He said students are less likely to forget lessons over a shorter summer vacation. Longer breaks during the year, often about three weeks long, give schools a chance to give struggling students targeted help catching up, rather than waiting until July for a summer school that feels like a punishment.
'I would love school leaders to consider summer as just another academic block of time,' he said.
Paul Von Hippel, a professor of public affairs at the University of Texas and prominent skeptic of year-round school, said he sees no difference in learning from just scheduling the same number of school days in different ways.
'Instead of having one long break where students forget a lot, you have a bunch of short breaks where students forget a little,' Von Hippel said. 'The amount of forgetting adds up to be about the same.'
He added that though the pandemic prompted districts to consider year-round classes, he sees no evidence that they have caught on in a meaningful way.
Teachers, parents and students of Cleveland's six year-round schools, however, fought the district CEO and implored the district school board at two hearings to keep a schedule they say made their schools unique and offered students chances they wouldn't have with a standard school year.
Students from one year-round school even protested the change outside district headquarters last month.
Xavier Avery, a junior at Davis Aerospace and Maritime High School who organized the protest, reminded the school board right before its vote April 29 that his school has received state awards and has better test scores than the district average. He also said that students spend part of school days in warmer months on boats and planes, both learning to operate them and studying Lake Erie as part of the school's specialized focus.
'Our year-round calendar plays a huge role in this success,' he said. 'It's what makes our programs, internships and hands-on learning possible.'
Cleveland also cut other non-traditional schedules as part of its push to put all schools on the same schedule. Morgan and the school board also axed extended school years, which added extra days at 17 other schools, as well as extended days, running 30 minutes longer each day at six schools. Those cuts drew more fire from parents, who said that being able to choose schools that offer extra time keeps them in the district, rather than selling their homes and moving to suburban districts.
Year-round schools started gaining national attention in the 1970s, experts say, for two major reasons. In some cases, most notably fast-growing California where schools were too small to handle exploding enrollment, schools spread classes out over the whole year so they could stagger student schedules to accommodate all of them.
The other major draw, the one that appealed to Cleveland, was limiting 'summer learning loss' or 'summer slide,' where students forget much of what they learned during long vacations.
A 2019 summary of year-round schooling studies found mixed results, with Black, Hispanic and low-income students more likely to see gains and the staggered schedules in California more likely to show losses.
California stopped using that strategy after building new schools for all its students.
The total also fell as cities like Salt Lake City and Chicago dropped the approach several years ago after not seeing big academic gains. Post-pandemic data was not readily available.
Educators still see promise in the approach. A quarter of South Carolina schools and three school districts in Florida are now testing year-round classes for several years.
Other school districts in Dallas and Philadelphia are trying a related, though different, approach: simply adding voluntary days to the year to reduce summer slide and to help students who are behind catch up, whether from the pandemic or just needing more class time. Richmond, Virginia, has also added extra mandatory days to the school year at a few struggling schools, though parent complaints squashed attempts to do that for the whole district.
Related
After COVID, a Need for 'Year-Round' School to Catch Kids Up?
Cleveland's experiment with year-round school started in 2009 at a specialized STEM school created as a magnet for the city's top students. Former Cleveland school district CEO Eric Gordon soon after considered moving the entire district to year-round schedules.
In launching a district turnaround plan in 2012, he jokingly dismissed the traditional school year as an 'agrarian calendar we currently use so that all of my students are free to bring in the harvest every summer.'
Gordon said the district could close half the gap between his students and higher-performing suburban students by eliminating the accumulation of 12 years of summer slides before graduation.
But attempts to use a year-round calendar at one large neighborhood high school failed after parents objected to students losing summer breaks and its effect on family vacations, summer jobs and school schedules of siblings on regular schedules.
A lack of air conditioning in some old schools and parent objections to a much-smaller change — starting the school year earlier in August than before — put plans to use the schedule at more schools on hold.
The year-round schedule ended up at no neighborhood schools and just six schools the district created with alternative class styles — a school based in a hospital or one focused on learning through digital art projects — that families could pick, but not be assigned to.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
2 hours ago
- Yahoo
Don't let a vocal minority silence Britain's ancient church bells
There used to be a tradition that ringing church bells would drive out evil spirits. Now it's the bells that are being driven out. The latest set of chimes to fall foul of complainers are in Mytholmroyd. It's a small West Yorkshire village, best known as the birthplace of Ted Hughes. Perhaps it was the bells of St Michael's Church that inspired the late Poet Laureate to write in one of his rhymes for children about a bell's 'clang of mumbling boom'. But that clang was far from mumbling for three residents who said they were being kept awake all night by the chimes, ringing every 15 minutes. A noise abatement order imposed on the bells means they now can't be rung at all, so for the first time in 100 years they have fallen silent. There have been similar ding dongs over church bells elsewhere in the past few years: in both Witheridge and Kenton in Devon, in Helpringham in Lincolnshire, and in Beith in Ayrshire, usually by people saying that chimes through the night in these rural neighbourhoods are ruining their sleep. As someone who lives in a city, used to police helicopters overhead, ice cream vans blaring their tinny tunes, trains rattling past, and crowds of students staggering home at night under the influence of numerous intoxicants, I have to say I do find the noise of the countryside rather disturbing. Here in the city, these noises are part of a constant soundscape. In the country, there is an enveloping silence, but then you will be jolted into wakefulness by a cockerel's piercing crow, or a huge piece of farm machinery rattling past, or a herd of cattle lowing their way to milking. But a church bell chime, surely, is in a minor key compared to these other rural interruptions? For me the sound of bells is, well, music to my ears. Despite the planes flying into Heathrow over my head and the police sirens blaring outside my door, I can still hear the sound of a bell nearby, which rings regularly to mark Divine Office being said in a local monastery as well as the Angelus at noon. On Sundays, a peal of bells sounds out at a nearby church, and on weekday evenings too you can hear the ringing, as the tower captain and his team practise Plain Bob Major or Grandsire Triples or one of those other extraordinary mathematical formulas, known as changes, that make up bell-ringing. But the kind of change we don't want is something so quintessentially English as bell-ringing to disappear because after a few people make a fuss, officialdom steps in. The bells of Mytholmroyd were silenced when just three people objected – but the 1,200 residents who wanted the chimes to continue had their petition ignored. It's a growing pattern: a few complaints put an end to chimes that had been loved by communities for generations. Yet there's more at stake here than bells. It sounds a death-knell for our tradition of going with what the majority want. Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
Yahoo
11 hours ago
- Yahoo
Beloved by K-12 Leaders, The Four-Day School Week Fails to Deliver, Study Finds
In recent years, hundreds of school districts across the United States have responded to labor issues and straitened budgets by switching to a four-day weekly schedule. But new research from Missouri suggests that cutting out a day of instruction doesn't yield the benefits proponents hope to achieve. Circulated as a working paper on Monday, the study offers a statistical analysis of the effects of shifting to a shorter week alongside extensive reflections from educators themselves. Most of those teachers, principals, and superintendents spoke favorably about the change, saying they believed it had helped their schools attract and retain teachers in the midst of a tight job market. Get stories like this delivered straight to your inbox. Sign up for The 74 Newsletter The numbers tell a different story, however: On average, the 178 Missouri districts that adopted a four-day week since 2010 did not improve at either recruiting new teachers or retaining their veterans. Andrew Camp, a scholar at Brown University's Annenberg Institute and one of the paper's authors, said district leaders' enthusiasm for four-day weeks was likely grounded in the sincere belief that they could be the answer to persistent staffing challenges. 'These things spread through word of mouth, they grab hold of people's imaginations, and we end up with this rapid adoption of four-day school weeks,' Camp said. 'But the fact that it was such a small effect — for a lot of these districts, it's one teacher being retained every three years — was really striking.' Related The almost negligible results, and officials' apparent misapprehension about their true magnitude, are particularly salient given both the scale of the four-day phenomenon and the speed with which it has been embraced. Mirroring national trends, the number of districts throughout Missouri operating on a shortened schedule has skyrocketed over the last decade and a half, accounting for one-third of the statewide total last year. Twelve percent of all students, and 13 percent of all teachers, now experience a four-day week (smaller figures proportionally, because they live almost exclusively in rural areas with smaller headcounts). The initial wave of transitions, beginning in the early 2010s, is usually attributed to states' need to contain education costs in the aftermath of the Great Recession. But in the study's 36 interviews with leaders of Missouri schools and districts, along with several teachers, respondents generally agreed the main effect of the scheduling change was to slow turnover and make schools more attractive places to work. This is something that's a potentially risky gamble, and there don't seem to be any benefits as far as teacher retention or recruitment. Andrew Camp, Brown University At least one superintendent credited the four-day week — which requires teachers to work longer days when school is in session, effectively holding instructional hours constant — with a surge in job applications and a sizable drop in workforce churn. Several others claimed that a longer weekend was a vital feature in drawing teachers to far-flung communities that cannot afford to offer top salaries. But after examining state administrative data between the 2008–09 and 2023–24 school years, including figures on teachers' school and district assignments, education levels, and experience, Camp and his co-authors found that four-day districts won only meager advantages. Switching to a truncated schedule resulted in just 0.6 job exits per 100 teachers, an effect that falls below the bar for statistical significance. Camp said the findings were broadly in line with those of prior work on the four-day schedule. While the transition might prove appealing, especially to new teachers, it likely would not address most employees' complaints about salary and working conditions. 'We don't rule out the possibility that there is a short-term, very small bump in teacher retention and recruitment,' he said. 'But what our results from Missouri show is that, over this lengthy period, there's no lasting effect.' It remains to be seen what effect, if any, the new paper will have on the ongoing debate around the often controversial policy. On one hand, it can only be said to be representative of one state's approach. Around the country, different legislatures and districts have permitted distinct versions of the four-day week. Unlike in Missouri, some states do not specify that overall instructional hours stay the same even in a shortened schedule, resulting in less instruction being delivered to students over the course of the school year. In Oregon, where more than 150 districts adopted a four-day week in the years leading up to the pandemic, one long-running study found that students missed out on 3–4 hours of teaching each week, even with the remaining days of instruction lengthened. Math and English scores fell in those classrooms (particularly among middle schoolers, whose sleep schedules could be disrupted by the earlier start times on days when classes were in session). Related A study published last summer echoed those results, revealing significant declines in standardized test scores in six states where large numbers of districts adopted a four-day week. Another paper, focusing on Oklahoma, found no detectable impact on student achievement — though it observed that school expenditures did fall slightly in four-day districts. It doesn't save a lot of money, it doesn't seem to do good things for students, and we don't have evidence showing that it improves student attendance. Emily Morton, NWEA Notably, the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education released state data indicating that implementation of four-day weeks was associated with only minor drops in test performance during the 2019–20 school year, though they disappeared in later years. Negative findings do not appear to have dimmed the public's enthusiasm for the idea. In 2023, a poll from the education advocacy group EdChoice showed that 60 percent of parents supported the possibility of their children's school moving to a four-day schedule; just 27 percent of respondents were opposed. Emily Morton, a researcher at the assessment group NWEA who has conducted several studies of the effects of the four-day week, said the Missouri paper was yet more evidence that the policy, whatever its attractiveness to parents and schools, did not offer much measurable upside. 'Whether or not the four-day week is a good thing, it doesn't seem to meet this particular need,' Morton said. 'It doesn't save a lot of money, it doesn't seem to do good things for students, and we don't have evidence showing that it improves student attendance. My sense, after studying this for a few years, is that communities just really like it.' Still, with the continuing spread of shortened weeks, more and more states and districts will have to at least give careful thought to their possible impact. Jon Turner is a former district superintendent in Missouri and a professor at Missouri State University. While not an avowed advocate of the four-day schedule, he has traveled to multiple states to advise school districts considering making a switch. Lately his peregrinations have brought him to Indiana and Pennsylvania, where — as in most states east of the Mississippi River — the practice is still comparatively rare. No school district makes this decision lightly, and no one sees the four-day week as a solution. Jon Turner, Missouri State University Turner said that local K–12 leaders he had met with took the question seriously, often weighing the evidence of achievement losses against their falling student enrollments and challenges in hiring new staff. Many feel the lifestyle flexibility offered by the change is one of the few perks they can offer to teachers who can easily move across district or state lines for better pay. Particularly in regions where neighboring communities have already shifted from five- to four-day weeks, he added, holdout districts may find themselves at a competitive disadvantage. 'No school district makes this decision lightly, and no one sees the four-day week as a solution,' Turner said. 'It's a symptom of challenges that schools are facing.' Related The rapid spread of the trend has nevertheless met some resistance — including in Missouri, where the state legislature recently passed a law requiring larger communities to gain the consent of voters before implementing a shorter school week. In neighboring Arkansas, lawmakers are considering legislation that would establish a minimum school year of 178 days of in-person instruction. Camp said the results of his study offer forewarning to the education community. In light of the existing evidence around diminished instruction, he concluded, state and local authorities shouldn't make cavalier decisions with their instructional time. 'This is something that's a potentially risky gamble, and there don't seem to be any benefits as far as teacher retention or recruitment. So I do think this should make everyone very cautious about adopting the four-day school week.'
Yahoo
11 hours ago
- Yahoo
Discovery of 300-Year-Old Coins May Prove $17 Billion ‘Richest Wreck in History' Has Been Found
Centuries-old coins have been found by researchers looking into the San José shipwreck, thought to be located in the Colombian Caribbean Sea The wreckage is reportedly worth approximately $17 billion The 150-foot-long Spanish galleon ship was sunk by British warships in 1708Researchers believe they have uncovered coins from a 317-year-old shipwreck, which sank in 1708, containing treasure thought to be valued at approximately $17 billion. On Tuesday, June 10, a study was published in the journal Antiquity, stating that "hand-struck, irregularly shaped coins — known as cobs in English and macuquinas in Spanish — that served as the primary currency in the Americas for more than two centuries," were among the key finds amid the ongoing research into the sinking of the Spanish galleon ship, San José. British warships sank the vessel off the coast near the port city of Cartagena. As previously reported by PEOPLE in March 2024, Colombian authorities had decided to move forward with the recovery of the ship, which had a cargo full of treasure. The Times stated that the Colombian navy had identified a wreck that "appeared to be a good candidate" for the sunken ship in 2015, but noted that "its identity has not been conclusively proven." The 150-foot-long, 64-gun, three-masted ship sank with 600 men aboard while carrying 200 tons of silver and emeralds, 11 million gold coins, and porcelain pottery, Colombian Navy divers said in June 2022, according to ABC News. Only 11 individuals survived the incident. Per The Times, the sunken ship is "the richest wreck in history." The latest study, which included photos of some of the coins that had been found, stated that the wreck was situated "at a depth of 600m in the Colombian Caribbean Sea, a location that requires specialized underwater equipment for research." "The exact number of coins visible on the seabed is difficult to determine due to the dynamic nature of the site, but the cobs identified via high-resolution in situ photography conducted by a remotely operated vehicle have an average diameter of 32.5mm and probably weigh around 27g," according to the study. The results added that markings on the coins helped to identify their authenticity. An "L" indicated that they had been mined in Lima, Peru, while the presence of the number 8 represented the denomination in escudos, the highest value at the time. The coins were also marked with the letter "H', which was the mark of Francisco de Hurtado, the Chief Assayer in 1707. The study said that one coin displayed "a small pellet next to the '8', which is a mark of distinction of the cobs of this assayer." While on another, "three letters 'P. V. A.' can be seen marking the motto expression 'Plus Ultra', or 'Further Beyond' in Latin." "This motto was used on the coins as a reference to the expansion of the Spanish monarchy in the Atlantic. Finally, the year of minting is represented by three digits, 707, meaning 1707," the study tated. "The be clearly made out from the images, but on other coins from the same year and mint these bear a reference to King Philip V, the first Bourbon head of the Spanish monarchy," the study continued. "Most of the gold coins from this period come from shipwrecks." Daniela Vargas Ariza, lead researcher from Colombia's Naval Cadet School and the National Institute of Anthropology and History, said of the findings, 'This body of evidence substantiates the identification of the wreck as the San José Galleon,' per The Times. The recent study said that over the past decade, "four non-invasive campaigns" had surveyed the wreckage, "providing valuable insights into the age and provenance of artefacts found on the seabed." The study's conclusion added, "This case study highlights the value of coins as key chronological markers in the identification of shipwrecks, particularly those from the Tierra Firme Fleet. The finding of cobs created in 1707 at the Lima Mint points to a vessel navigating the Tierra Firme route in the early eighteenth century. The San José Galleon is the only ship that matches these characteristics." Spain, the United States, Bolivian indigenous groups and Colombia have all claimed rights to the shipwreck in past years. But in 2011, a U.S. court determined that the ship was the property of the Colombian state, per ABC News. The Times noted that an American salvage company, Sea Search Armada, had also claimed a share, claiming that it had located the wreck. Never miss a story — sign up for to stay up-to-date on the best of what PEOPLE has to offer, from celebrity news to compelling human interest stories. In 2015, then-Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos spoke at a news conference regarding the shipwreck's initial rediscovery, telling attendees, "This is the most valuable treasure that has been found in the history of humanity," ABC News reported. Since it was sunk by British warships some 317 years ago, the vessel has been remarkably untouched, officials previously said. The Colombian government didn't immediately respond when contacted by PEOPLE for additional information. Read the original article on People
