"Hot Fun In The Summertime": Not!

It's been a tough week here in A-merry-ca. Many of you Negroes found a new reason to bail on your boy, O. He allowed the FOX right wing propaganda machine to bully him and control the debate, and he looked weak. And, doggone it, us black folks want our man to look like he belongs when he is siting in the most powerful seat on earth. We don't want a weakling who looks like he is afraid of that ghastly conservative, shadow.

But enough about that. Tonight I want to talk about a serious subject: summer vacation. Yes, summer vacation; and why these crumb snatchers out here no longer need it.

I never knew that I would live to see the day, but I actually agree with David Von Drehle writing in Time Magazine, when he says that schools should pretty much do away with the long summer breaks. Now, granted, we both might have come to the same place for two different reasons. I know why I came here. It was his hypothesis and his citing of the Johns Hopkins study:

"..childhood and summertime. We associate the school year with oppression and the summer months with liberty. School is regimen; summer is creativity. School is work and summer is play. But when American students are competing with children around the globe who may be spending four weeks longer in school each year, larking through summer is a luxury we can't afford. What's more, for many children — especially children of low-income families — summer is a season of boredom, inactivity and isolation.

Deprived of healthy stimulation, millions of low-income kids lose a significant amount of what they learn during the school year. Call it "summer learning loss," as the academics do, or "the summer slide," but by any name summer is among the most pernicious — if least acknowledged — causes of achievement gaps in America's schools. Children with access to high-quality experiences can exercise their minds and bodies at sleep-away camp, on family vacations, in museums and libraries and enrichment classes. Meanwhile, children without resources languish on street corners or in front of glowing screens. By the time the bell rings on a new school year, the poorer kids have fallen weeks, if not months, behind. And even well-off American students may be falling behind their peers around the world.
(See pictures of summer programs designed to keep kids' minds sharp.)

And what starts as a hiccup in a 6-year-old's education can be a crisis by the time that child reaches high school. A major study by researchers at Johns Hopkins University concluded that while students made similar progress during the school year, regardless of economic status, the better-off kids held steady or continued to advance during the summer — while disadvantaged students fell back. By the end of grammar school, low-income students had fallen nearly three grade levels behind. By ninth grade, roughly two-thirds of the learning gap separating income groups could be blamed on summer learning loss."

He had me when he started talking about the achievement gap widening for low income children because of summer breaks.

Look, I know that the folks in the travel and amusement park businesses will not like my position on this subject. Not to mention all the teachers who consider the long summer break one of the few perks of their profession. ( I know that they are underpaid, and when they teach an extra month they should earn more money) But sorry, we are in a crisis mode when it comes to education in this country, and if it means that the little crumb snatchers will have to be in a structured environment learning for a few extra weeks, I am all for it. Read the article, there are quite a few programs working right now with this concept in mind.

America is no longer the agrarian society it used to be. We don't have to give kids time off to go out and work in the fields. We should be teaching and preparing them; training their minds. Because a summer is not a terrible thing to waste. A mind, on the other hand, is.