Summer Learning Loss?
"America’s lazy schoolchildren," so reads the front-page tease of a recent article in The Economist that claims "(American) children are exceptions to the country’s work ethic." The article goes on to point out that American children have one of the shortest school days in the developed world and that homework averages an hour a day, “a figure that stuns the Japanese and Chinese.” The Economist’s main gripe, however, is that America has one of the shortest school years – a mere 180 days compared with an average of 195 for OECD countri