Should Our School Schedule Be Extended?

518 Words2 Pages

The Board of Education wants to add hours to our school schedule. The problem proposed is American students test scores are falling behind in the counties in Europe and Asia. People think that extending the school year into the summer will help American students to compete academically with other countries, but summer is needed for academic respite, the extension would cost millions, and there isn’t enough evidence to back that it would boost academic achievement.
Ideally, extending the school schedule into the summer would equate to more learning. For instance, “Much knowledge is lost while American kids wile away the summer months apart from their lessons,” (qtd. In Smyth). “The only ones who don’t lose are the upper 10 to 15 percent of the student body. Those tend to be gifted, college bound, they’re natural learners who will learn wherever they are,” said Charles Ballinger. (Smyth).Smyth’s research clearly shows that students lose what they learned over the school year and if students went to school over the summer their transition into the next grade would be much easier. Howeve...

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