Debate
Is summer school worthwhile?

YES
Pam Galus teaches science and runs the planetarium at Burke High School in Omaha, Nebraska. She has taught for 11 years and has published two books and more than 100 articles on science education. She is National Board certified.

When a school budget needs to be trimmed, summer school is often the first to go. That shouldn't be. Summer school can be valuable both for students who need extra help and for those who want to explore.

In my city, two school districts have vastly different approaches to summer school. One generally requires that a student has failed a class during the regular school year before registering for the same class in the summer. Students who excel cannot go.

But in the district my two daughters attend, enrichment classes are offered that students can take just because they are interested or because they want to finish high school early and start working on college credits. My daughters went to summer school every year. Sometimes they took classes that were not academically rigorous but allowed them to explore new subjects. They had more credits than they needed in senior year, allowing them either to take additional classes or to work part-time to help pay their future education costs.

Summer school allowed my daughters to continue to learn, grow, and be intellectually challenged--a class or two in the morning and the rest of the day was relatively free for swimming, sports, and sunning.

Education research shows that children lose a great deal of what they have learned during the idle summer months. My children lost less than many of their peers, learned valuable new material, had less free time to get into trouble, and still had time for extra activities like sports.

Here is another benefit of including high achievers: Summer school should meet national education standards, and that can be difficult to accomplish if all the students in a summer school class have failed previously.

If we are going to turn out top scholars in science and other fields important for our advancement as a society and for national defense, we must provide opportunities for young people who love to learn. We must make education a priority and fund it appropriately for the benefit of all children--then maybe our children will take it more seriously.

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NO
Michael Ross has taught mathematics at Berkley High School in Berkley, Michigan for two years. Prior to that, he taught for four years in the Detroit Public Schools. He taught mathematics in summer school for two summers.

Generally, summer school lasts four to five weeks and the assumption is that students will learn all the material that they didn't learn in 20 weeks. Now let's be realistic: If a student was unable to learn the material in 20 weeks, it isn't likely he or she will learn the equivalent material in four or five.

For some reason, summer school programs seem to lack expectations and accountability. I've heard comments from students that summer school was "so easy and such a blow off...we didn't do anything but play games and watch movies." One student told me that he never took a test in his summer school math class. His grade was based on attendance and assignments. If we had those expectations during the regular school year, most of us would be fired.

If summer school is a means for giving someone a second chance, why should that mean making it easier or less challenging? On the flip side, there are some students who wish to get ahead, yet we don't really offer them anything worthwhile or academically challenging for a summer school program.

Part of the problem is that we offer too many choices as an alternative to being successful during the regular school year. Summer school programs generally are watered down mini- course versions of what we offer during the regular school year. Many times, the people teaching summer school classes are either uncertified or teaching out of their content area.

Summer school could be successful if two things were to happen. First, summer school must have the same expectations that we hold during the regular school year. All classes must be taught by certified teachers and summer school must be long enough to allow teachers to cover the material. Second, students who are failing because of inability, not apathy, can benefit from a summer program that teaches them some of the basic skills that they lack. If a student cannot add, subtract, multiply, or divide in high school, retaking algebra doesn't solve the real problem. If we're going to offer summer school, let's offer it to those students who really need and deserve it.

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