After millions of American schoolchildren fell behind during the COVID-19 pandemic, some states and school districts are looking at year-round school calendars as a way to recoup lost learning. Typically, year-round calendars don't increase learning time but rather spread school days more equally across 12 months, with a shorter summer vacation…

Reading and literacy skills are essential to fostering a child's development and academic success. Research has consistently highlighted the importance of early literacy proficiency as a strong indicator of later academic achievement, cognitive ability, and social-emotional well-being (Espinosa, 2002; Gottlieb et al., 2022). Unfortunately, reading…

Year-round school is the organization of days within a school calendar year to provide students with regular breaks and instructional blocks. This study surveyed 502 parents to identify factors influencing parental support for, or opposition to, year-round school. Three themes were constructed based on parent responses: children need educational…

Background: Research shows that over summer break, students forget approximately 1 month of learning in math and reading; furthermore, low-income students lose ground relative to peers. Year-round education (YRE) redistributes schooldays to shorten summer. Prior analyses pooled single-track YRE (academic intervention in which all students attend…

Guided by prior research, this meta-analysis examines single-track year-round education (YRE) only. The main objective is to identify, across studies published in the post-No Child Left Behind (NCLB) era, how single-track YRE effects student learning. This meta-analysis is guided by the following research questions: (1) What is the estimated…

In this meta-analysis, I have reviewed published and unpublished research on single-track, year-round education's effect on science and social studies achievement, 2001-2016. Of 30 studies that met inclusion criteria and had data from which an effect size estimate could be calculated, 7 reported science outcomes (18 effect size estimates) or…

Background: Body mass index (BMI) increases when students are away on summer vacation. Evaluation of serial BMI measurements on year-round students allows new insight into the reasons children gain weight seasonally. Methods: The 206 first and second graders of 2-year-round elementary schools with obesity intervention programs were weighed and…

In the face of school crowding and fears about inequality-inducing summer learning loss, many schools have started to adopt multitrack year-round school calendars, which keep the same number of school days, but spread them more evenly across the calendar year. This change allows schools to support a larger student population by rotating which…

For more than 100 years the public school system has been the foundation of our society. Millions of our nation's citizens have moved through the primary, middle and secondary schools which, although they vary slightly from region to region, provided a shared experience and are a part of Americana. History tells us the reasons that school systems…

For administrators, teachers, students and their families in some districts, summer isn't what it used to be. Trying to stem a "summer slide" of learning loss by students and also to avoid having to build more schools to cope with overcrowding, districts are operating on year-round schedules that shorten the traditional summer vacation…

This study found that students in settings with a year-round calendar statistically outperformed students with traditional calendars in a school-within-a-school setting in mathematics. The study included reading and math achievement of fifth graders in three school-within-a-school year-round elementary schools. Overall, the study made 16…

This study exploits a unique policy environment and a large panel dataset to evaluate the impact of school crowding on student achievement in Wake County, NC. We also estimate the effects of two education policy initiatives that are often used to address crowding: multi-track year-round calendars and mobile classrooms. We estimate a multi-level…

Using detailed longitudinal data for the state of California, this paper estimates the effect of year-round school calendars on nationally standardized test performance of traditionally disadvantaged students. The student subgroups studied in this paper are: low socioeconomic status, limited English proficiency, Hispanic and Latino, and African…

This paper examined whether year round schooling (YRS) in California had an effect upon the outcome and growth of schools' Academic Performance Index (API) scores. While many previous studies had examined the connection between YRS and academic achievement, most had lacked the statistical rigour required to provide reliable interpretations. As a…

Presidential commissions, parents, academics, and employers have proposed the same solutions, again and again, for fixing the time students spend in school: (1) Add more days to the annual school calendar; (2) Change to year-round schools; (3) Add instructional time to the daily schedule; and (4) Extend the school day. Three reasons--cost,…