There are other beefier posts that address this tangentially, but it's about a stable environment. Basically, testing and school performance mostly just follow parent wealth/income/education because those factors indicate stable environments. I'm not saying those household situations don't bring other huge benefits to those kids, but stability seems to be the big cliff that poorer students just can't ascend.

So, the year-round set-up gives consistency for the kids, and probably also allows school to serve as childcare year round. Once you have the stability, you can start funding bigger things and maybe seeing some returns. But until then, education is largely a square peg that's never going into the round hole.

> also allows school to serve as childcare year round

And here is the primary purpose of public school. Why else is there such a push to create younger and younger pre-kindergarten programs? It's simple. Public schooling is not about education, it is about warehousing children during working hours, since the economy has shifted to require two full-time incomes.

I don't know if I'm supposed to interpret your user name as denoting a troll account, but you're entirely too cynical. For the early years, I think that's a good explanation for the demand for pre-K. To say that's the whole system is absurd.

Several studies have shown that year round school works, especially for minorities, because the home environment provides insufficient stimulation/reinforcement to consolidate and retain the gains made over the school year.

Several studies have shown that minority students actually show gains very similar to non-minority students over the course of the school year. However, the summer vacation provides a double whammy--non-minority students continue to improve during the summer while minority students actually lose a lot of the gains made.

The easiest way to stabilize this is year-round school.