We’ve been arguing for two years that the public schools should have been open during the summer months to compensate for the learning losses during the Covid lockdowns in 2020 and 2021.
On average, kids attending kindergarten to fifth grade have missed out on 20 percent of the reading and 33 percent of the math skills they would have learned normally, according to a McKinsey report.
A RAND study shows that 20 days of summer school is equivalent to 20 percent to 25 percent of a year’s worth of reading and math coursework. Summer school kids routinely score higher on tests than those who take the summer off. Teachers got effectively months of paid vacation during COVID, so this is simply making up for the days they were not in the classrooms.
Yet the unions, no surprise, are raising a big stink. They claim their members are “burned out” and don’t want to teach during the summer even for enhanced salary payments. (This reminds us of the age-old joke: What are the three best reasons to become a teacher? June, July, and August!).
Once again, we ask if our public school system is being run for the benefit of kids or for the benefit of the teacher’s unions.