A new school year is new because it follows a summer recess and has a different annual number than the last school year. That’s all. If we overdo the concept of “new” and the fresh start to a “new experience”, we damage the reality of a child’s continuous progress toward achieving K-12 learning outcomes. The start of the 2018-19 school year was the last day of the 2017-18 school year.
Schooling for children is a thirteen-plus year experience that is segmented into learning to read, write, and compute and then reading, writing, computing and problem-solving to learn. If it weren’t for their new school clothes in September, children would perceive of schooling as a continuous string of months of school with intermittent recesses. School starts at age 4 or 5 and ends around age 18 with graduation.
Adults, on the other hand, impose different conceptions. Each August or September is a “new” school year with “new” expectations and “fresh” opportunities for learning success. Each fall adults administer tests to understand what a child knows, can do and can resolve “now” and with this “new” information set in motion a “new” year of schooling. These impositions are made for adult reasons, not children’s reasons. It is adults who need “new” and “fresh” starts.
Notwithstanding that a child grows and matures and has interesting living experiences in the months of a summer recess, the continuum of academic learning does not change much as a result of summer vacation. A child’s academic skills seldom jump forward during these ten to twelve weeks. Instead, many children suffer academic regression because they do not read, write, compute or resolve academic problems during the recess. Perhaps, the proper look in Spetember is not forward but backward, as in “what learning do we need to refresh before we can instruct new learning.”
Instead of touting “new” and expecting that September’s new assessments will differ greatly from last May’s assessments, children are better served when this September’s teachers confer with last May’s teachers to assure an intentional continuity of instruction of learning for every child. That is, a frank discussion of each child’s academic abilities and needs for successful learning not just a comment about their class as a whole. The learning preferences children display seldom change as a result of the summer recess. Instead of taking weeks to personally identify a child’s learning styles, teachers talking to teachers can catapult instruction forward in the early days of the new school year.
We make a great fuss about the “new” school year. If the fuss does not create a more efficient and effective continuity of learning, the first day of school is the “new” school year. Welcome back! Now, on the second day of the new school year, let’s get on with the continuity of learning.