“But what did you do with us over the summer?” I was pleading with my mom, trying to figure out how she and Dad could afford to keep my sister and me occupied for the months of summer vacation.
Fine, the Worcester, Mass., day camp they sent us to is about half the price of similar camps in the New York City area.
But still: Am I the only person who didn’t factor thousands of dollars per kid per summer into the cost of raising children?
Which prompts the question: Why are we stuck keeping the kids busy for so long in the first place?
“It’s as if these kids are [workers] in the European Union, with 10 weeks’ paid vacation — paid by their parents,” complains Stephanie, a Westchester mom of four.
On top of paying for camp or other activities, she continues, add “the lower productivity of the parents and all the effort we spend to work with the kids to ensure brain drain doesn’t happen over all this time, and basically you’ve taken the stress of the school year and compounded it by a factor of five.”
The long vacation is a historical remnant of the farm economy, where the kids got no break at all: They worked in fields all summer, adding to the family income. Now the summer break is making middle-class families broke and driving parents nuts.
“Once your kids get to be school-age, parenthood seems much more manageable,” says Jonathan, a father of three outside Washington, DC.
Once you’re not supervising death-wish toddlers, “You remember how to be an adult, with independent thoughts, hopes and dreams. And then summer comes and suddenly that version of you — the good version — is locked away in a secure, off-the-books facility for 12 weeks.”
By contrast, Caitlin, the Brooklyn mother of a 9-year-old, says, “I love summer vacation!
I can drag her out to fun events that end late at night all summer long. Starting next week I’ve got us lined up for a Cyclones game, Mid-summer Nights Swing at Lincoln Center, I’m working on Broadway plans. . .”
OK, the vacation is great for kids like Caitlin’s, and maybe even mine. At least in one sense: Our kids don’t suffer much “brain drain.”
That is, they keep learning while out of school.
Jay Greene, a University of Arkansas professor of education, explains, “More advantaged families use summer breaks to supplement for the shortcomings of their schools. . . They travel to Civil War battlefields, visit foreign cities and their art museums, and learn about the geography of the Grand Canyon.”
He says, “I’m convinced that my own kids and those of many other upper-middle-class families learn far more from those summer experiences than they do during the rest of the school year.”
The story for disadvantaged kids is much different. Especially in terms of language development, a lot of learning evaporates in July and August, says Robert Pondiscio, a senior fellow at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute.
“For low-income kids who don’t have access to great opportunities over the summer, the loss of school time is acutely felt.” Middle-class kids may be stuck at home some days, he allows, but they’re “at least watching Animal Planet.”
High-performing charter schools like KIPP, Democracy Prep and Success Academy confront this problem head-on: They not only have significantly longer school days, but also school years.
In terms of math and science knowledge, though, all American kids fall behind over the summer. Columbia economist Howard Steven Friedman found that students in countries with longer school years tend to perform better on standardized tests.
Top-performing South Korea, for instance, requires 220 days of school — 22 percent more than our measly minimum of 180 days.
“When it comes to learning math and science,” Pondiscio explains, “more is more.”
Which makes it particularly disheartening to see that New York City’s new teachers contract may actually reduce the time kids are in school.
Thanks to some convoluted new provisions, at least one Brooklyn elementary school is letting kids out a half-hour earlier, even if it’s not technically shortening instructional time. It gives you a sense of just how stingy the union leaders are with the kids who need classroom time the most.
Of course, the unions are also reason No. 1 why, no matter how much sense a longer school year might make, it’s a distant dream for any public school around here.
Oh, well. Better start planning that trip to Gettysburg. In the meantime, what channel is Animal Planet, again?