Where is the proof?

There's a good column in a local Georgia newspaper that I ran across today, arguing against the state's school schedule, which begins in early August. The columnist asks, where is the proof that an earlier start to the school year improves education? According to him, the folks over at Georgians Need Summers haven't found any evidence to back up the early school start.

Some of the columnist's arguments about the necessity of summer sound quite a bit like homeschooling arguments:

We've lost practically all of August. The traditional months of summer have been truncated. We get less true summer time to spend with Big Momma, see movies, have sleepovers, play basketball, read, and yes — succumb, even, to boredom. Our dog days of summer are spent in class, not poolside.

This year, all of the state's public schools will open up by Aug. 15. Next Monday, Gwinnett's 142,000 or so students join others returning to class in eight other city and county school systems in the Atlanta area. Some school systems, like those in Cherokee and Newton county, are already in school or start Monday.

. . .

I do know this: You can get an education when you spend a week or two sleeping at grandma's house, especially if she lives in the country.

A full summer of employment might teach you something, too.

And who knows what great things can be born out of boredom? Especially if it's not combatted with TV.

"These people who argue that their children get bored during the summer — they need to be bored," Holt said. "They need to be bored so they use their imagination, and do something. Figure out what to do. That's one of the things I like about summer."

Georgians Need Summers has been lobbying the General Assembly to adopt a uniform school calendar, one where school starts no earlier than late August. The Cobb County organization gets a rash of calls and hits to its Web site whenever it's mentioned in stories about calendar protests. And Holt says that for every 10 people she talks to about the issue, nine think early start dates are a bad idea.

I had been thinking along the lines of "where is the proof" earlier today, while reading a Des Moines Register editorial asking that summer school be made mandatory for students who fail a certain standardized test, and that the duration of summer school should be doubled. The editorial laments: "It's hard to understand why parents blow the opportunity for their children to catch up." And: "If students don't master basic skills, they'll risk falling behind all their lives and becoming stuck in low-paying jobs." (God am I tired of the notion that what you are at 5 years or 10 years or 15 years of age determines the entirety of the rest of your life. If that is true there is something seriously wrong with our society.)

What's the evidence that summer school is useful? If you can't teach a kid to pass the standardized test even though you've got them 6 hours a day for 180 days, why should we believe you can do it with yet more hours and hours of schooling? It's like I said in an earlier post: When you're digging yourself into a hole, the first rule is to stop digging.

The gall of the Des Moines paper to say "it's hard to understand" why parents would want to give their kids a full summer vacation! It doesn't even occur to them that we might question the utility and success of schools. The only conceivable problem with schooling, in the minds of too many Americans, is that there isn't enough of it.