Each new school year brings fresh reminders of what educators call the summer learning gap. Some call it the summer learning setback. Put simply, it means the longer kids are out of school, the more they forget. The only thing they seem to gain is weight.      Most American schools follow a traditional nine-month calendar with winter and spring breaks and about ten weeks of summer vacation. Some schools follow a year-round calendar. They hold classes for about eight weeks at a time, with a few weeks off in between. The National Association for Year-Round Education says there were fewer than 3,000 such schools at last count. They were spread among forty-six of the fifty states. But many experts point out that the number of class days in a year round school is generally the same as in a traditional school. Brenda McLaughlin is a research director at the National Centre for Summer Learning at Johns Hopkins University. She says studies of year-round schooling have not found strong learning gains. Lead researcher Paul von Hippel said, "Year round schools don't really solve the problem of the summer learning setback. They simply spread it out across the year." Across the country, research shows that students from poor families fall farther behind over the summer than other students. Experts say this can be prevented. They note that many schools and local governments offer programmes that can help. However, calling such programmes "summer school" could be a problem. The director of the summer learning centre at Johns Hopkins, Ikon Fairchild, said research with groups of different parents in Chicago and Baltimore found that almost all strongly disliked the term "summer school". In American culture, the idea of summer vacation is connected to beliefs about freedom and the joys of childhood. The parents preferred other terms like "summer camp, "extra time" and "hands-on learning. Why do almost all parents dislike the term "summer school"?
They cherish the children's rights and freedom. They are worried about the quality of the "summer schools". They want their children to be forced to make up the gap. They can't afford to pay for studies during the vacation.