Arne Duncan has suggested that year-round
school is the solution to the summer slide.
Thanks to the common core, year-round school will make things worse.
Research tells us that those living in poverty
have the least access to books. Students living in poverty also show the most
summer loss, and those who read more over the summer make better gains in
reading achievement. Providing more
access to interesting reading material by investing in public libraries and
librarians is an excellent way to deal with summer learning loss.
School during the summer means more common core,
and less chance of pleasure reading happening. The common core discourages
pleasure reading, because of its harsh set of standards, nonstop testing, and
restriction to reading at or above "grade level," which for half of
our students means a limitation to difficult reading (by definition, half of
the students read below grade level, because grade level means the 50th
percentile). In addition, there is less funding than ever for school libraries,
thanks the huge amount of money being spent on online testing.
Some sources:
Poverty and access to books: Neuman, S. and Celano, D.
2001. Access to print in low-income and middle-income communities. Reading
Research Quarterly 36(1): 8-26.
Summer loss and poverty, more reading and gains:
Allington, R. and McGill-Franzen, Anne. 2012. Summer
Reading: Closing the Rich/Poor Reading Achievement Gap. New York: Teachers
College Press.
Heyns, Barbara. 1975.
Summer Learning and the Effect of School. New York: Academic Press.
Kim, Jimmy. 2003. Summer reading and the ethnic
achievement gap, Journal of Education for Students Placed at Risk 9, no.
2:169-188.
Shin, Fay. and Krashen, Stephen. 2007. Summer Reading:
Program and Evidence. New York: Allyn and Bacon.
The common core and reading: Krashen,
S. 2013. Access to books and time to read versus the common core standards and
tests. English Journal 103(2): 21-39.
(available at www.sdkrashen.com).
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